Saint Teresa was a great contemplative?  Yes, and Saint Teresa is the only woman ever to have reformed an entire Catholic monastic tradition (think about it).  Gautama Buddha shook India to its foundations.  Rumi, Plotinus, Bodhidharma, Lady Tsogyal, Lau Tzu, Plato, the Baal Shem Tov--these men and women started revolutions in the gross realm that lasted hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, something neither Marx nor Lenin nor Locke nor Jefferson can yet claim.  And they did not do so because they were dead from the neck down.  No, they were monumentally, gloriously, divinely big egos, plugged into a deeper psychic, which was plugged straight into God.