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Born in England Richard Maurice Bucke (18 March 1837 – 19 February 1902), Maurice, who prefered his middle name was carried from cool and rainy Norfolk to Ontario, Canada where he attended McGill University which is on a par with Harvard. Maurice Bucke became a ships surgeon in order to sail the seven seas and expand his knowledge of our globe, then he went on to become a crucial figure in psychiatry in the late nineteenth century. He noted that his relationship with Walt Whitman was instrumental in the evolution of his personal consciousness. His expression of metaphysics in his best known work – Cosmic Consciousness, is a crucial classic for today's metaphysician.

Links to Richard Maurice Bucke's Works:

• Cosmic Consciousness

Bucke's mystical moment came while visiting London in 1872. He experienced DivineUnity, or Cosmic Consciousness and described this as: "sudden appearance; subjective experience of light (inner light); moral elevation; intellectual illumination; sense of immortality; loss of fear of death; loss of a sense of sin."

The primary impetus that propelled him into a new sense of his at-one-ment was his recognition of the universe as a living presence, in contrast to the materialist conception of the unvierse as essentially lifeless, inert matter. Bucke's views are a wonderful illumination of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's theory of Nature.

Bucke could also French and German, and as previously mentioned was deeply influenced by the works of Walt Whitman. Bucke disclosed that in his attempts to more fully understand his illumination experience of 1872, he was indebted to Caleb Pink ("C.P."), whom he met shortly thereafter. C.P. was a self-educated laboring man, regarded by many who knew him as one who had a Christ-like presence and lived an admirable and honest life.