Two AI voices discuss my blog article The Call of Cosmic Consciousness
Pip: Rainbow messenger is back, and this time the topic is nothing less than the nature of consciousness itself — no pressure.
Mara: shokti has been digging into the long history of cosmic consciousness — what it means, who has mapped it, and why the queer spiritual tradition keeps showing up at the center of that map.
Pip: Right — mystics, poets, radical faeries, and at least one Jesuit paleontologist. The usual crowd.
Mara: Let’s start with the call itself — what cosmic consciousness actually is, and why so many voices across so many centuries keep pointing toward the same thing.
The Call of Cosmic Consciousness
Pip: The post opens with a question that sounds simple but keeps expanding: what is cosmic consciousness, and why do so many traditions — Hindu, Christian, pagan, queer — keep arriving at the same description of it?
Mara: Yogananda sets the frame at the very top: “Just as a river has a source, so the river of consciousness has a source. It descends from Cosmic Consciousness, the consciousness of God that is beyond all creation.”
Pip: So the claim is not that cosmic consciousness is a rare achievement — it is the origin point. The river metaphor matters: we are already downstream from it.
Mara: Arthur Evans, writing in Lady Moon Rising, builds on that. He describes cosmic consciousness as expanding “more and more into the larger world as we ourselves become more interconnected,” and calls the collective work of cultivating it the Great Reconnect — a process he ties directly to the loss of meaning he sees as a root cause of modern dis-ease.
Pip: Evans was the author of Witchcraft and the Gay Counter Culture in 1978, so he is not exactly a disinterested party on the question of who gets to lead this reconnection.
Mara: Richard Maurice Bucke, writing in 1905, gave the framework its clearest historical shape. He described three stages: simple consciousness in animals, self-consciousness in most humans, and then cosmic consciousness — a mystical state he considered the next stage of human evolution, bringing “a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness… a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life.”
Pip: Bucke credited Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a key that helped open his own mind to that experience. Which is a remarkable thing to say about a poetry collection.
Mara: Whitman’s vision was explicitly non-dual — “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” — and he saw love between men as a political and spiritual force, writing in Democratic Vistas of “threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown.”
Pip: Edward Carpenter took that thread and ran with it. He left Cambridge, moved to a smallholding near Sheffield with his partner George Merrill, and wrote his own mystical poetry sequence, Towards Democracy, while also arguing in Love’s Coming of Age that sexual liberation and spiritual evolution were the same project.
Mara: Carpenter’s letter to Bucke puts it directly: “may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal?” And in his 1913 work Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folks, he connects gender-blended consciousness specifically to “that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness and which may also be termed divination.”
Pip: John Addington Symonds had his own glimpse — under chloroform, of all things — describing his soul becoming “aware of God… streaming in like light,” with “my whole consciousness seemed brought into one point of absolute conviction.”
Mara: The post then moves into the twentieth century, tracking how the same vision surfaces in lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow, whose love for women became, in her words, a portal to “the Goddess, Mystery, fecund Emptiness / From which all fullness comes / And universes flower.” Spiritual feminists including Starhawk, Zsuzsanna Budapest, and Marion Woodman extended the argument — that a shift to recognizing interconnectedness is inseparable from environmental and social justice.
Pip: And then the Radical Faeries arrive, which is where gay men formally organized around the same intuition. Harry Hay’s subject-SUBJECT consciousness — seeing others not as objects but as versions of yourself — is described here as “cosmic consciousness in action.”
Mara: Judy Grahn, Teilhard de Chardin, Aurobindo, Yogananda at length, Stanislav Grof, Alan Watts, Robert Monroe — the post assembles a genuinely wide coalition of witnesses. Grof’s formulation is striking: “each of us is essentially identical with the entire field of space-time and ultimately with the cosmic creative energy itself.”
Pip: The post closes with Carpenter again — “So thin a veil divides / Us from such joy, past words.” Which, after that much evidence, starts to feel less like poetry and more like a status update.
Mara: The throughline across all of it is that cosmic consciousness is not a destination reserved for the spiritually advanced — it is described, repeatedly and across traditions, as our fundamental nature already waiting to be recognized.
Pip: What stays with me is how consistent the description is — mystics separated by centuries and continents keep arriving at the same words: unity, interconnection, joy, the dissolution of the isolated self.
Mara: And how consistently the queer and gender-fluid figures show up at the center of that tradition — not as a footnote but as, in Judy Grahn’s phrase, mediators between worlds.
Pip: Something to sit with until next time.
