Victorian poet Tennyson seems to have stumbled upon TM before MMY took out the copyright on the name. Take this quote of his:
"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 till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the 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." I love that line: "where death was an almost laughable impossibility". Here's a (clearly autobiographical) passage from Ancient Sage . . . And more, my son! for 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 past into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into heaven. I touch'd 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 match'd with ours Were Sun to spark--unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world. And here's another quote to show how vitally important the experience was to him: "Yes, it is true there are moments when the flesh is nothing to me, when I feel and know the flesh to be the vision, God and the spiritual—the only real and true. Depend upon it, the spiritual is the real; it belongs to one more than the hand and the foot. You may tell me that my hand and my foot are only imaginary symbols of my existence. I could believe you, but you never, never can convince me that the I is not an eternal reality, and that the spiritual is not the true and real part of me." I wonder what his "mantra" was: "The word that is the symbol of myself" and "Repeating my own name to myself silently". Did he repeat "Alf" or "Alfie" or what? "AaaaaaalPheeeeeeee" sounds like it would make an acceptable mantra! We need some clever chap to create a universal mantra program on the Web. You type in the syllables and the program lets you know what effect the vibrations would have on your nervous system.
