Tennyson's Experience of the Self

The following extract from a letter of the poet Tennyson to B. P. Blood was read out in Bhagavan’s presence: ‘… a kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to myself, silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, 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’.


Bhagavan said, ‘That state is called abidance in the Self.’