Discriminating the Innate Capacity: Salvation Mysticism of Classical Sāmkya-Yoga
The Innate Capacity December 4, 1997 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780195116977.003.0002
Summary
The author describes a personal experience of a waking trance that occurs when silently repeating their own name, leading to a profound sense of individuality dissolving into a feeling of boundless existence. This state is characterized as clear and certain, where the idea of death seems trivial, and losing one's personality is perceived not as extinction but as a transition to true life.
Abstract
Abstract I have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance-this for lack of a better wordI 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 possibility-the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description.