In making reference to Balzac in a recent post to my Staying Healthy blog, I was reminded of Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind" published in 1901 and recommended to me by my mother sometime in the 1960's. She must have come across it thanks to the Theosophical Society whose meetings she often attended in the late fifties and early sixties. The book can be downloaded from PDFDRIVE as well as many other sources probably.
Here is an excerpt from his chapter on Balzac:
While still very young Balzac decided to be a writer. It seems that he felt, even as a boy, that he was destined to do something great in that line, and he composed at school, among other things, a treatise on the will and an epic poem. Later he wrote at Paris, in the course of ten years, mostly over the pseudonymn of "Horace de Saint Aubin," some forty volumes, said to be almost entirely valueless. A good authority sums up this episode in Balzac's history as follows: "Before he was thirty years old he had published, under a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long novels, veritable Grub Street productions, written in sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in perfect obscurity. Several of these 'œuvres de jeunesse' have lately been republished, but the best of them are unreadable. No writer ever served harder apprenticeship to his art, or lingered more hopelessly at the base of the ladder of fame." Then, at the age of thirty, his genius began to dawn in "Les Chouans" and "Physiologie du Marriage." He must have entered Cosmic Consciousness about the early part of 1831, when thirty-two years of age, since "Louis Lambert" (which was undoubtedly conceived immediately after illumination) was written in 1832. By 1833, when he was thirty-four years of age, he had entered into full possession of his true life, a presentiment of which had dominated him from early boyhood.
It's an interesting book and Bucke does a good job of trying to make sense of such disparate characters as Jesus, Mohammed, Shakespeare, Ramakrishna, Balzac and others. His mistake is to lump them all together under the umbrella of having attained "Cosmic Consciousness". Perhaps he wasn't aware of the seven planes of consciousness. This would have helped him differentiate between the levels of consciousness that each had reached. It was only in 1993, after finally grasping what Meher Baba was writing about in his book "God Speaks", that I understood about these various levels.
Balzac obviously gained access to the higher planes or was a conduit for entities resident on those planes but he was far from the ultimate reality that is realised by beings who attain to the seventh plane of consciousness. This state could justifiably be described as Cosmic Consciousness but not the lower states and it is attained by very few. Once attained it can never be lost. Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Gautama Siddharta, Ramakrisha and of course Meher Baba himself all attained this state. Baba was only seven years at the time the book was written and He himself did not know the future that awaited Him.
