He says:
"A kind of walking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood,
when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating
my own name to myself silently until all at once, as it were, out of the
intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade into boundless being."
It is a fact that children of a peculiarly sensitive or psychic temperament
seem to have strange ideas regarding the name by which they are called, and
not infrequently become confused and filled with an inexplicable wonderment
at the sound of their own name. This phenomenon is much less rare than is
generally known.
In Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" this experience of entering into cosmic
consciousness is thus described:
"More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself,
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touched my limbs; the limbs
Were strange, not mine; and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words.
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