Since returning from my ten-day retreat, I have started writing an essay under the title Fascination and Liberation. It looks as though this essay will be book-length. I am dividing it into chapters, and today started on the third chapter. So far, the chapters are:
I: Fascination and Liberation
II: East and West
III: Beauty and Tranquility
This essay will, it seems, require a great deal of reading. One of the volumes I have started reading for the sake of the essay is Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke. I found the following passage from this book – the passage is autobiography in the third person – quite moving:
While stil a young boy he read with keen appreciation Marryat's novels, Scott's poems and novels, and other similar books dealing with outdoor nature and human life. He never, even as a child, accepted the doctrines of the Christian church; but, as soon as old enough to dwell at all on such themes, conceived that Jesus was a man — great and good, no doubt, but a man. That no one would ever be condemned to everlasting pain. That if a conscious God existed he was the supreme master and meant well in the end to all; but that, this visible life here being ended, it was doubtful, or more than doubtful, whether conscious identity would be preserved. The boy (even the child) dwelt on these and similar topics far more than anyone would suppose; but probably not more than many other introspective small fellow mortals. He was subject at times to a sort of ecstasy of curiosity and hope. As on one special occasion when about ten years old he earnestly longed to die that the secrets of the beyond, if there was any beyond, might be revealed to him; also to agonies of anxiety and terror, as for instance, at about the same age he read Reynold's "Faust," and, being near its end one sunny afternoon, he laid it down utterly unable to continue its perusal, and went out into the sunshine to recover from the horror (after more than fifty years he distinctly recalls it) which had seized him.
