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All religions promise that the end of mankind will come suddenly, like the thief in the night. Some refer to this event as the Second Coming, the reappearance of Chirst, the Harvest The Hopis call it the Purification. To take the sting out of this threat - and the destruction of all humanity must be regarded as a threat - religious, interpreters have presented it as a step upwards towards the immortality of the individual soul. But if science is on the right track, if the soul is merely an extension of some giant energy field in the sky, then the process is more in line with the moon food concept of the Oriental philosophers. Withdrawal of these extensions or controls of the supermind of the cosmos would mean that the individual would be absorbed into it and cease to exist as a separate physical unit. Ego, personality, and memory, being properties of the physical body, would be left behind. There are two fundamental forms of religion: (1) the worship of elemental's and supernatural manifestations, already discussed; and (2) the awareness of and submission to the supermind of the cosmos. The Cosmic Consciousness. Buddhism is the best example of the latter. The former concentrates on worshipping manifestations, while the latter is devoted to understanding the an oe whole. We are witnessing a worldwide phenomenon today: mass illumination of millions of people, particularly young (under thirty) men and women in all walks of life. This process is quite well understood but never openly discussed in the mass media. In 1900 a Canadian psychiatrist, Dr Maurice Bucke, published the first Important study of the subject, Cosmic Consciousness. Illumination is basically a sudden, overwhelming insight into the whole structure of the cosmos and man's relationship to it. Suddenly, for a few brief seconds the percipient understands everything with incredible clarity. In some cases the process occurs over a long period in the form of short flashes of insight which gradually add up. In others it takes place instantaneously with the percipient seemingly bathed in a reddish glow or caught in a beam of brilliant white light cast down from the skies (thus we have the ancient phrase, 'He has seen the light"). No one is ever exactly the same after an illuminating experience. Mediocre men become great leaders, preachers, statesmen, scientists, poets, and writers overnight! Others divorce their wives, quit their jobs, and embark on new careers which catapult them into unexpected prominence. Some fear for their sanity at first because the experience is so overwhelming. Some are unable to cope with it and disintegrate into various kinds of fanatics. Illumination often accompanies UFO sightings, particularly when the witnesses are caught in a beam of light from the objects. Their IQ later skyrockets, and their lives change appreciably. But as in all aspects of the general phenomenon, there seem to be other forces Imitating this process and producing false iUuminism. Young people experimenting with LSD and other hallucinogens sometimes have experiences which they believe are contacts with the Cosmic Consciousness but which ultimately prove to be destructive. Charles Hanson is a good example of this. Some LSD users do, however, appear to undergo a pure form of iUuminism, but it is likely that they were already illumination prone and would have had the experience eventually anyway.