The Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness in 1901, after an experience of his own. He argued that a few people in history, among them the Buddha, Paul and Walt Whitman, had reached a higher form of consciousness marked by illumination, moral elevation and a sense of immortality.
Cosmic Consciousness
R. M. Bucke’s term for a sudden awareness of the life and order of the universe, beyond self-consciousness.