The Six Steps to Cosmic Consciousness: A Pioneering Theory of Transcendence by the 19th-Century Psychiatrist and Adventurer Maurice Bucke

There can be no conventional “scientific” theory of consciousness because science can only describe and predict how nature behaves, not what nature is . The latter investigation belongs to the realm of philosophy, or more precisely, metaphysics. Bertrand Russell came to this observation already a century ago (Russell 2009).

This change cannot possibly be brought about without knowing oneself, self-knowledge. This is not knowledge of the “higher self” or knowledge of some “supreme consciousness,” for they are still within the field of thought. Unless one understands one’s self, the self of every day—what it thinks, what it does, its devotions, its deceptions, its ambit

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