"If you inhibit thought (and persevere) you come at length to a region of consciousness below or behind thought... 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 . . . it follows that to pass out of that is to die to the ordinary self and the ordinary world. It is not to die in the ordinary sense, but in another, 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 the face of it; and certain it is that in thousands and thousands of cases, the fact of its having come even once to an individual has completely revolutionized his subsequent life and outlook on the world."