Abstract
On responding to a query as to whether he had ecstatic experiences through anesthetics (ether, etc.), the celebrated poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) responded:
I have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?1
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Notes
Quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, An Electronic Classics Series Publication (originally published 1902), 369–370. Emphasis added.
R. C. Zaehner, Mysticsm Sacred and Profane, in Richard Woods, ed., Understanding Mysticism (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980), 72–73.
For a more expansive description and analysis of the mystic experience, see Jordan Paper, The Mystic Experience: A Descriptive and Comparative Analysis (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004).
Archbishop Basil Krivocheine, In the Light of Christ: Saint Symeon the New Theologian (942–1022), trans. by Anthony P. Gythiel (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986), 122.
Agehananda Bharati, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (Santa Barbara, CA: Ross Erickson, 1976), 65, 175.
Archimandrite Lev Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, rev. Bishop Kallistos Ware (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimire’s Seminary Press, 1995).
Niffari, The Book of Mystical Standings in Michael A. Sells, “Bewildered Tongue: The Semantics of Mystical Union in Islam,” in Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 111–112.
Raymond Bernard Blakney, trans., Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 159—“unmixed” is the literal translation.
Katha Upanishad 5.14. All translations from the Upanishads are from Robert Ernest Hume, trans., The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, [1877]1931).
Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958), 101–102.
Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent of God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 72.
Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 65.
Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman, Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 279–280.
Shankara, Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (Viveka Chudamani), trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (Los Angeles, CA: Vedanta Society, 1947), 115.
Conze, Buddhist Texts through the Ages (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1954), 127.
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© 2015 Thomas Cattoi and Christopher M. Moreman
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Paper, J. (2015). The Experience of Death as Non-Death. In: Cattoi, T., Moreman, C.M. (eds) Death, Dying, and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137472083_11
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