| Of all the hard facts of science,
I know of none more solid and fundamental than the fact that if you inhibit thought (and
persevere) you come at length to a region of consciousness below or behind thought, and
different from ordinary thought in its nature and character — a consciousness of
quasi-universal quality, and a realization of an altogether vaster self than that to which
we are accustomed. And since the ordinary consciousness, with which we are concerned in
ordinary life, is before all things founded on the little local self, and is in fact
self-conscious in the little local sense, it follows that to pass out of that is to die to
the ordinary self and the ordinary world.
It is to die in the ordinary sense, but in another sense, it is to wake up and find that
the "I," one's real, most intimate self, pervades the universe and all other
beings — that the mountains and the sea and the stars are a part of one's body and
that one's soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures.....
So great, so splendid is this experience, that it may be said that all minor questions and
doubts fall away in face of it; and certain it is that in thousands and thousands of cases
the fact of its having come even once to a man has completely revolutionized his
subsequent life and outlook on the world.
– Edward Carpenter (The Drama of Love and Death, 1912)
|
