Cosmic consiousness

Cosmic consciousness is a spiritual experience of very progressed Yogis and Arhats with selfrealisation of higher samadhis.

Yogananda

We are all part of the One Spirit. When you experience the true meaning of religion, which is to know God, you will realize that He is your Self, and that He exists equally and impartially in all beings.(Paramahansa Yogananda)

* Paramahansa Yoganandas description of his experience of cosmic consciousness :

"My body became immovably rooted; breath was drawn out of my lungs as if by some huge magnet. Soul and mind instantly lost their physcial bondage and streamed out like a fluid-piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead; yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive. My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body but embraced the circumambient atoms. People on distant streets seemed to be moving gently over my own remote periphery. The roots of plants and trees appeared through a dim transparency of the soil; I discerned the inward flow of their sap.

"The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive. Through the back of my head I saw men strolling far down Rai Ghat Lane, and noticed also a white cow leisurely approaching. When she reached the open ashram gate, I observed her as though with my two physical eyes. After she had passed behind the brick wall of the courtyard, I saw her clearly still.

"All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master's, the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation.

"An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The dazzling light beyond the sharply etched global outlines faded slightly at the farthest edges; there I saw a mellow radiance, ever undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light.

"The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras. Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster, then fire became firmament.

"I cognized the center of the empyrean as a point of intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splender issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful AMRITA, nectar of immortality, pulsated through me with a quicksilverlike fluidity. The creative voice of God I heard resounding as AUM, the vibration of the Cosmic Motor.

"Suddenly, the breath returned to my lungs. With a disappointment almost unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost. Once more I was limited to the humiliating cage of a body, not easily accommodative to the Spirit. Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and had imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm."

Source : Internet

Yogananda describing his first experience of Cosmic Consciousness in his classic book " Autobiography of a Yogi". ( Yoganada says in his teaching - letters that his teachings are based on the knowledge of Pantanjali and the Apocalypse of John .)

Sri Aurobindo describes similar cosmic experiences of very progressed disciples in his work "The Life Divine", (Book II-26,27 ) and further :

I have wrapped the wide world in my wider self
And Time and Space my spirit's seeing are.
I am the god and demon, ghost and elf,
I am the wind's speed and the blazing star.
All Nature is the nursling of my care,
I am its struggle and the eternal rest ;
The world's joy thrilling runs through me, I bear
The sorrow of millions in my lonely breast.
I have learned a close identity with all,
Yet am by nothing bound that I become ;
Carrying in me the universe's call
I mount to my imperishable home.
I pass beyond Time and life on measureless wings,
Yet still am one with born and unborn things.
(Sri Aurobindo in Last Poems)

"To the enlightened man whose consciousness embraces the universe, to him the universe becomes his "body", while the physical body becomes a manifestation of the Universal Mind, his inner vision an expression of the highest reality, and his speech an expression of eternal truth and mantric power"
Lama Anagarika Govinda; Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism 3 ; (Capra 1975, 305)

In the Vedas we read of it as Soma Ras, which grants Cosmic Awareness or Universal Consciousness to the Rishis and the Munis who partook of it in ages long ago.

Kirpal Sing in " NAAM or the Word" on Amrita, and further on page 167 :
"This return of the soul to the realization of its true nature, and the ascend into the universal or cosmic consciousness behind limits of limitidness, is the true resurrection or the experience of a new birth and of a new life."

A part of infinite Consciousness becomes our own finite consciousness, with powers of discrimination and definition and with false conceptions. He is in truth, Prajapati and Vishva, the Source of Creation and the Universal in us all. This Spirit is consciousness and gives consciousness to the body. He is the driver of the chariot.
Krishna Yajur Veda, Maitri Upanishad 2.5. UPM, 99

"...the body, the earth, the stars, the galaxies melted into a big unity - and i was a part of this unity. Unlimited and timeless my consciousness hovered in a pulsating eternity", wrote the french mystician Frédéric Lionel, who 1999 died at the age of 92 years.

It should be recalled that the special characteristic of the disciple on the 'variable Cross' is the self-confidence, and that most of the disciples at the 'fixed cross' become quickly groupconscious, if the lived experiences are properly assimilated, and that the master at the 'Cardinal Cross' differs by a universal consciousness, which finally passes into the cosmic consciousness, a state of of being, which is unknown even in the wildest flights of your imagination. (A.A. Bailey : Seven Rays 5, pg. 692)