Cosmic Consciousness, by Richard Maurice Bucke, [1901], at sacred-texts.com

CHAPTER 26.

T. S. R.

Born 1840. Entered Cosmic Consciousness in 1872, at the age of thirty-two years. Was a member of a Presbyterian Church in good standing. Upon illumination left the church and has had no connection with any similar organization since. Was always an earnest, thoughtful man. "In 1872 [an informant says] his friends thought for a time that he was becoming insane. He passed through a grave spiritual crisis, the exact nature of which is not known to me. * Whatever it was, it, to all appearance,

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passed over, and he has been ever since not only sane but exceptionally intelligent and rightminded. He is the best read Emerson scholar that I know. In all his home relations—by wife, children and friends—he is greatly beloved. He has a positive certainty of individual immortality. He is a very modest man, but has a certain air or manner which impresses those who meet him that he (being a mere clerk) is a richer man than his millionaire employers, and that he knows it."

Footnotes

317:* Louis Lambert—that is, Balzac—was supposed by his friends to be insane at the time of illumination [5: 126 et seq.]. Mohammed feared be was becoming insane. In the case of M. C. L. (infra) the same question came up. This question has undoubtedly presented itself to the mind of almost every person who has experienced illumination.