Russell accepted Richard Maurice Bucke's premise that not only the human body,
but also human consciousness, had evolved in stages,
that human consciousness periodically made iterative leaps,
such as that from animal awareness to rational self-awareness, many millennia ago.
Russell believed that humankind was on the brink of making another key, evolutionary leap in consciousness.
The next cycle of human evolution, said Bucke, would be
from rational self-consciousness
to spiritual super-consciousness
on the order of that experienced by sages, artists and illuminates of the past 2,500 years,
such as The Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Mohammed, the unknown author of the Bhagavad-Gita, Moses, Jesus, Zoroaster, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Emerson, Whitman etc.
He wrote: "Without these few illuminati, the world of man would still be primate."
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