I’ve never read much of any Walt Whitman, but for a smattering here and there. Which may be kind of odd, seeing as I grew up a mere five minutes drive from the house where he was born on Long Island. Even our local mall was (hilariously and incongruously) named after this classic American poet: The Walt Whitman Mall. As a kid of course, the Mall was always more interesting than the house.

I recently found out that the Good Grey Poet, as he is sometimes refered to, was really into mystical hooha. But information on the subject has been notoriously hard to track down. The only substantial meat I have gotten so far, I had to pick off the bones of the horribly decayed corpse of an article titled, “Walt Whitman: when science and mysticism collide“. The article is a mishmash of shallow sloppy thinking and mystical misunderstandings, but I was able to carve off a few edible morsels:

… Whitman believed the sensory world is but the shadow of reality “Real reality” as he called it, was an immaterial mind, soul, or spirit (the terms were interchangeable) that filters, interprets, and even creates the data of sensation. The objects of thought had more reality than the objects of sense. Unlike sullied and corruptible matter, mind was eternal, unfettered by time or space, its own constructions.

… Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, his proximate mentor, Whitman considered material phenomena cryptic symbols for spiritual truths: “The kernel of every object that can be seen, felt, or thought of has its relations to the soul, and is significant of something there.” Everywhere he turned, he found “letters from God” waiting to be deciphered:

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

Decoded by the Intuition, the letters revealed a suprasensible world infused with forces, purposes, designs, and patterns emancipated from mundane causality coherence, logic, consistency, and probability. This ethereal wonderland obeyed a motto enunciated by the mystic poet William Blake: “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” Truth needn’t be verifiable or amenable to falsification. It was circumscribed only by the limits of imagination. Afoot with vision, Whitman saw much that mystics before him had seen.

I’ve also read a brief item about how a friend of Whitman’s, Dr. Richard M. Bucke, believed that Whitman had achieved a mystical state of “cosmic consciousness,” along with other such luminaries as Gautama, Jesus, Paul, Platinus, Mohammed, Dante, Las Casas, John Ypes, Francis Bacon, Jacob Behmen, William Blake, and Balzac.

The experience comes suddenly without warning with a sensation of being immersed in a flame or rose-colored cloud and is accompanied by a feeling of ecstasy, moral and intellectual illumination in which, like a flash, a clear conception in outline is presented to the mind of the meaning and drift of the universe.

The man or woman going through this experience knows that the universe is a living presence, that life is eternal, the soul of man is immortal, the foundation principle of life is love, and the happiness of every individual in the long run is absolutely certain. All fear of death, all sense of sin is lost, and the personality gains added charm and is transfigured. In a few moments of the experience the individual will learn more than in years or months of study and will learn much that no study will teach.