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of a huge variety. From St. Paul's “suddenly there shined around him a light from heaven”, to Dr. Bucke's own remarkable experiences, the essence is the same.
There must be a background providing an emotional or mental tension. Then comes the flash, or it may be an hour's experience of varying intensity; then when the vision fades there is the eager but useless attempt to explain it to others. St. Paul's was a light which shined around. Dr. Bucke, in his hansom cab, "found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-coloured cloud, which was followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe."I The late Sir James CrichtonBrowne could induce it by a well-known method of selfhypnosis. He would repeat his own name to himself, silently, until "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 it were so) seeming no extinction, but the only true life".2 Is this delusion? Tennyson, who had the same experience, did not think so. "By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind.” Had he at this time written The Mystic, that superb and much-neglected poem? Another poet, Rupert Brooke, has described the experience in his Dining-Room Tea. Time stood still.
1 Cosmic Consciousness, p. 8. 2 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 384. 3 Ibid, p. 384.
