Richard M. Bucke

Image from: zerosummer.org

Bucke is one of the first Bridges that I came across that leads into a different perspective about reality.

Cosmic Consciousness, written in 1901, is one of a handful of classic texts that helped give rise to the global consciousness movement now occurring. (William James, 1902 Varieties of Religions Experience was another.) In 1872, at age 36, a Canadian psychiatrist named Richard M. Bucke expereinced an extraordinary moment of illumination and therafter devoted himself to the study of the phenomenon that so profoundly affected altered his life for the better. Surveying human history, he found and described more than a dozen instances of people who displyed wht he called cosmic consciousness , a new faculty entering the human race through evolution. He also found several dozen "lesser, imperfect, and doubtful" instabces which he likewise catalogued. Among those in full cosmic consciousness, according to Bucke: Buddha, Krishna, jesus, St.PPaul, Plotinus, Mohammed, Dante, St. John of the Cross, William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Madam Guyon.