Ethics: why we must widen the circle of compassion by Tom Harpur

(The Toronto Star Sunday, November 27, 1994

The story rated three inches in a column headed: 'Briefly.' Given the horror of what it described, its almost throwaway play in the paper was a stark symbol of how far we have sunk as a species in our tolerance of the unspeakable. An aid agency had issued a report saying wars have killed 1.5 million children since 1984 and injured 4 million. It said millions of children have been raped, seen their parents butchered, and been forced to become soldiers themselves. 'More than 4 million children have been disabled, maimed, blinded and brain-damaged. More than 12 million have lost their homes,' Save the Children said.

I don't cite this to depress. Today is about hope for the way ahead. But we have to face terrible truths as we approach the year 2000 and a new millenium. One could list a hundred of them. But the grim facts about children suffice to make the point that humans must change radically if war and atrocities are ever to cease.

How, given our addiction to violence against our fellows, against other life forms and our planetary home itself, can such a key transformation come about? The noted ecologian, Fr. Thomas Berry, says humanity must 'reinvent itself' in order to relate differently to the Earth. Yes, but that deals only with the environmental problem. To eliminate war and the savagery of humans to one another requires something more.

A partial clue can be discerned in Albert Einstein's words about the way each of us is an integral part of a whole called the Universe, yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as separate from all the rest. This amounts to a kind of optical delusion of consciousness: 'The delusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves'by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.' Einstein went on to note that nobody can wholly achieve this but that the striving for such a goal is in itself, a part of the liberation needed and 'a foundation for inner security.'

Even before Einstein, a remarkable book by a Canadian doctor, R.M. Bucke of London, Ont., went even further in pointing the way to the kind of 'conversion' or quantum leap needed if we are to survive and become truly human to one another. The book, published in 1900 and still in print, is Cosmic Consciousness.

Bucke (1837-1902) had an extraordinary career, including a hazardous stint on the American frontier and a close friendship later with the American poet, Walt Whitman, who made him his chief literary executor. A psychiatrist and an eager scholar, Bucke was superintendent for 25 years of what was then the London Insane Asylum and became widely known for his advanced ideas on mental disorders. But the pivotal point in his life came one spring night when he was 36.

Bucke was in London, England, and had spent the evening with friends reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning and, especially, Whitman. He left at midnight and had a long drive in a horse-drawn cab ahead. He was in 'a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment,' his mind under the influence of the emotions and ideas he had just shared. Quite suddenly he found himself wrapped by what seemed like 'a flame-colored cloud.' His first thought was that London was on fire. The next moment he realized the light was within himself.

At once, there came upon him a 'sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied'by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe.' Into his brain 'streamed one momentary lightning-flash of Brahmic (divine) Splendor which has ever since enlightened my life.'

With bliss came knowledge. He says he did not come to believe but actually '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 built and ordered that'all things work together for the good of each, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain.' He saw much more as well.

This 'enlightenment' lasted briefly, but it wholly changed him. He felt his spiritual eyes had been opened, that he had been 'born again.' In Cosmic Consciousness he gives the results of years spent digesting this experience and studying all those who, like Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Paul, Muhammad – and right down to lesser lights such as Dante, Blake and Whitman – had had in his opinion a much more intense and lasting sense of this same consciousness.

Bucke believed that cosmic consciousness, this sense of the deep unity of all parts of the universe and of the amazing love binding it all together, is the next step in the development of humans. What the forerunners have known, every person must eventually come to know. Just as we each have self-reflective consciousness now, he argued that one day all humans will have cosmic consciousness as their birthright.

Until that day comes, we must act as if it had arrived already. Only a growing awareness of our profound unity with ALL other humans, the rest of the cosmos and the Ultimate Love beneath it, can save us from finally destroying everything.

Tom Harpur is a Toronto author and broadcaster.