A Day Dream of Tennyson

1901

In the "Life of Tennyson" occurs the following:

"A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, 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 the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not in 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. This might be the state which St. Paul describes, 'whether in the body I cannot tell, or whether out of the body cannot tell.' I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words? But in a moment when I come back to my normal state of 'sanity' I am ready to fight for mein liebes ich and hold that it will last for aeons and aeons."

In Madras With the Yogi, A Venerable Mystic

1901

Hocus Pocus and That Sort of Thing

I saw a Hindoo out in the open street take three good sized balls, larger and heavier than hens' eggs, and commence tossing them up in the air, catching them as they returned. Soon his hands were motionless, but the balls kept ascending and, so far as I know, are ascending still. They did not return. Were they dematerialized by some invisible psychic power? Such is my opinion.

During my stay in Madras there came down from a mountain a genuine psychic and seer. He was truly a venerable mystic. In a bungalow on a bright sunshiny day, 8 o'clock p.m., a dozen present, this old yogi burned incense, repeated some mantras and said in substance, "Now I can move any object in this room by my will." Reflecting a few moments, I said, "Command those peacock plumes up there to come to you." Focusing his thought, his will, upon them, they leaped at his bidding from the case and, sailing around the room, fell at his feet. Other objects were moved in a similar manner. This was genuine white magic. — Humanitarian.

—The Portsmouth Herald, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, January 31, 1901, page 2.