Notes on Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1902)
  1. Richard Maurice Bucke, born, March 18, 1837, Methwold, Norfolk, England.
    1. He was the son of Rev. Horatio Walpole Bucke (Church of England) and his wife Clarissa Andrews. He was a direct descendent of Sir Robert Walpole.

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  2. Came to Canada at the age of one.
    1. His father gave up the ministry and raised the family on a farm near Hamilton Ont.
    2. He was educated at the London Grammar School.

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  3. Took a hair-raising journey through the United States including a near-fatal expedition through the mountains to discover the Comstock Lode in Nevada.
    1. He was nearly frozen to death.
    2. Had one foot and part of the other amputated.

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  4. Studied medicine at McGill University (M.D. 1862)
    1. Studied abroad for 2 years in London and Paris.
    2. Visited California a second time.
  1. Began his practice in Sarnia.
    1. Married Miss Jessie Maria Gurd of Moore Ont. in 1865

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  2. At the age of 35 ("at the beginning of his 36th year" - spring of 1872) he had an illuminating, mystical experience.
    1. For Bucke, illumination is the catalyst which triggers the eventual dominant form of consciousness. A single revelation is all that is necessary and the change which ensues during that few seconds, is permanent.
  1. Read here what Bucke said, in the third person:
    1. It was in the early spring at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom. ...His mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-coloured cloud...he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exaltation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe... he saw and knew that the cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one in the long run is absolutely certain.

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  1. Bucke defined Cosmic Consciousness to be a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man and a consciousness of the cosmos...of the life and order in the universe.

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  2. For Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness arose only after revelation.
  1. He listed 11 characteristics that indicate a "genuine experience. Among these were:
    1. The person loses his fear of death and his sense of sin.
    2. The illumination is instantaneous, as a flash of lightning.
    3. The moral character figures in the illumination, i.e. only someone of high moral character may experience illumination.
    4. The age of the person is important, i.e. one should be about thirty or older.
    5. The illumination adds "charm" to the personality.
    6. One is somehow physically "transfigured", or what Dante calls "transhumanized".
  1. He investigated the development of the human mind and analyzed 14 major and 36 minor cases of what he believed to be cosmic consciousness. Among these were Buddha, Jesus, St. Paul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, William Blake, Balzac, and Walt Whitman.

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  2. He described cosmic consciousness in these words:
    1. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment of illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence... With these come, what may be called, a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.
  1. In 1876 was appointed Medical Superintendent of the Asylum for the Insane at Hamilton, Ont.
  2. In Feb of 1877, was transferred to London Ont. as Medical Supt. of the Lunatic Asylum in that city.
  3. Was a founder of the University of Western Ontario Medical school. (His papers are at U. of W.O. library).
  4. Was considered an authority in America on the subject of mental diseases. Advocated "moral restraint."
  5. Wrote "Man's Moral Nature" in 1879.
  6. Became friend of Walt Whitman and his personal physician. Wrote his biography in 1882 and later became his literary executor.
  7. Wrote a large number of papers on mental evolution.
    1. Maintained that the human mind has been slowly evolving by a species of unfolding or growth over millions of years.
    2. Read paper on "Cosmic Consciousness" before American Medico-Psychological Association at Philadelphia, May 18, 1894.

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  8. In 1897 was elected President of the Psychological Branch of the British Medical Association which met in Montreal on August 31.
  9. He became president of the American Medico-Psychological Association in 1898.

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  10. Wrote Cosmic Consciousness: A Study of the Evolution of the Human Mind in 1901.
    1. The book was praised highly by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience and a full account of cosmic consciousness was given by R.C. Zaehner in the Gifford Lectures of 1967-69, most of it dealing with Bucke's book.

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  11. He died in  London Ont., Feb 19, 1902.