1 Cosmic Awareness in Laxmi Prasad Devkota Hem Raj Kafle Most of Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s works reflect his close observation and understanding of human actions and experiences. One area that deserves study is his perceptions above the ordinary and mundane, his cosmic awareness. This essay presents a brief sketch of Devkota’s orientation to cosmic perception of the human world. I have tried to examine some of Devkota’s works along with Albert Einstein’s concept of cosmic religion. The cosmic awareness On the surface the cosmic sense is what Rabindranath Tagore wrote in “Where the Mind is Without Fear”: “Where the world is not broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls” (339). The cosmic is the unified, the absence of fragments and divisions. Tagore must have thought of the drawbacks of divisions in terms of castes, creeds, cultures, languages and national strengths. It was about the same time, the early twentieth century, that Albert Einstein, then a member of the League of Nations, advocated the need of a world government, which would work to disarm the warring countries towards ensuring peace and harmony among the human race. It was also the same time when Mahatma Gandhi had already emerged with the message of non-violence. In fact, the first four decades of the twentieth century saw a significant rise in the advocacy of universal brotherhood as the agendas of leading writers, philosophers and humanists. Devkota was writing about universal godhood, selfless service and non-violence when the aforesaid thinkers had already become vociferous in their stance for peace and harmony. However, it is not to claim here that he was influenced by Tagore, Gandhi and Einstein. My assumption here is that some of his works reflect his cosmic realization, and this realization comes independently of his own observation of the world. His insights on god, religion and humanity resemble those of Einstein to a large extent. It could be so because both of these geniuses were writing in the backdrop of the restless decades of the twentieth century, when humanity in general craved for a secure and prosperous world sans “fear,” “fragments” and “narrow domestic walls.” In his seminal essay “Religion and Science” Einstein defines cosmic religion as “a third stage of religious experience,” which belongs to or represents all other religions, “even though it is rarely found in a pure form…” (38). For him the first and second stages are “religion of fear” and “moral religion,” in which the images of diverse individual Gods are inherent. This diversity results from the generally perceived plurality of races, locations, rituals and beliefs. Cosmic religion transcends the Devkota Studies 3.2 (2008): 27-31.