Edward Carpenter (August 29, 1844 – June 28, 1929) on the left with his life partner George Miller on the right, was an English socialist poet, philosopher, anthologist, and early LGBT activist. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore, and a friend of Walt Whitman. Wikipedia

“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 thoughts…. 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-consciousness in the little, local sense and the ordinary world, 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…..  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.”

–Edwin Carpenter from his book The Drama of Love and Death