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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
ourselves up to pure will-less knowing, we pass into a world from which everything is absent that influenced our will and moved us so violently through it. This freeing of knowledge lifts us wholly and entirely away from all that, as do sleep and dreams; happiness and unhappiness have disappeared; we are no longer individual; the individual is forgotten; we are only pure subject of knowledge; we are only that eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of will in man alone. Thus all difference of individuality so entirely disappears, that it is all the same whether the perceiving eye belongs to a mighty king or to a wretched beggar; for neither joy nor complaining can pass that boundary with us."
We need mention only one more instance, though any number can be cited on the point. It is furnished by the famous English poet, Lord Tennyson, who, in a letter which he wrote to Mr. B. P. Blood, reports of himself as follows (see "The Varieties of Religious Experience,' by William James) :
"I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, 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 ?”
Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition :
"By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolate clearness of mind."
Such are the expressions of opinion of those who were not perfect Yogis and whose contemplative labours
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