Buddhist philosophy of mind denies that the self is the agent of actions, including thinking. In the 5th-century thinker Buddhaghosa's account, attention replaces self in explaining how cognition is grounded in perception and action. Attention performs two simultaneous functions: placing and focusing. A comparison with Brian O'Shaughnessy's thought clarifies what is at stake when the concept of self is used as a derived rather than a primitive notion.
The phrase "cosmic consciousness" was coined by the English socialist, philosopher, and gay rights activist Edward Carpenter in the 1890s. Carpenter invented the term to paraphrase the teachings of an Indian sage, Ramaswami, who described a universal, all-encompassing consciousness possible for humans, a concept common among Advaita-inspired sages. Later, William James and others repurposed the phrase to argue that the cosmos itself might possess consciousness, an early formulation of cosmopsychism.