Beneath the absorbing influence of the universe that envelops us, beneath the personalizing activity of successful human achievement and the centrifugal effect of sorrow—something that is unique in essence can be distinguished, and we feel an urge to transport ourselves into it.
There develops in souls that have an unusual capacity for this special intuition a specifically characteristic psychic state—‘cosmic consciousness’.
For a mind that is in this state of cosmic consciousness, the basis of things tends to predominate over the detail and to obliterate the plurality of beings. It appears to such a mind that concrete Being itself becomes individualized and takes on consistence, beneath the experiential Multiple. The shimmer of a sort of precious fabric can be distinguished beneath the accidental determinations of existence.
Cosmic consciousness is often born, and periodically comes to life again, in crises when the mind is gripped by an extremely vivid feeling of presence.
Cosmic consciousness is a psychological fact much more ancient and surely established than any philosophical system.
What I wanted was to see that I was in some way, in virtue of my religious faith, an element of God—and so see all things share that quality with me.
We have become accustomed to considering persons (monads) as the natural, complete, units into which the world can be broken down. When we speak of ‘a soul’, we believe that we are thinking of an independent reality, co-terminous with itself, separable in its identity from other souls and even from the universe. This pluralist concept may well be most inaccurate.
There is in the universe only one single individuality (one single monad), that of the whole (conceived in its organized plurality). The unity or measure of the world, is the world itself.
A certain human spiritual unity, of which our present society is no more than an adumbration.
The whole function, and task, and drama of the universe—the whole economy of human progress, of grace, of the sacraments (the Eucharist) take on their ultimate significance in this individualization of the Universal Element in which the Incarnation consists.