Cosmic Consciousness

Those who have read Paramahansa Yogananda's Cosmic Consciousness and Ray Kurzweil's' famous theory of the "Singularity" (that is, the moment in the future that computers gain sentience, and thus usher in a new blazingly fast era for humanity where the mechanical and the biological blur into unrecognizable forms), these authors believe that Cosmic Consciousness is a natural faculty of man, and that a future race of men on this earth will be born with this faculty well developed, and not merely latent as it is now. Richard Bucke's theory is that, just as man advanced from the state of simple consciousness, which he shared with the animal kingdom, into a state of self-consciousness, peculiar to man alone, and marked by the development of language, so he must inevitably come into a higher state of consciousness, distinguished by a cosmic or universal understanding.

Richard Maurice Bucke maintains that the increasing number of people who have attained some degree of Cosmic Consciousness in the past few centuries is proof that these persons constitute the vanguard or forerunners of the new race. Among those whom Bucke believes to have had the cosmic sense more or less well developed (in recent centuries) are St. John of the Cross, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behrman, Blaise Pascal, Spinoza, Swendenborg, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Alexander Pushkin, Honore de Balzac, Emerson, Tennyson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Ramakrishna. The experience I had during the filming of Alien has caused me to believe I have stumbled into this lofty group, it's the reason I wrote this book. Yaphet Kotto’s Alien Diairies.