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 sure , 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 ? ( letter to J . P . Blood ). 20
Another example of interest is that of J . A . Symonds , who reported a frequent experience which he actively disliked , up to about the age of 28 .
I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible . It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space , time , sensation , and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self . In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted , the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity . At last nothing remained but a pure , absolute , abstract Self . […] At last I felt myself once more a human being ; and though the riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved , I was thankful for this return from the abyss — this deliverance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of scepticism [ sic ]. 21
Neither testimony has overt links to religious upbringing or background , but both demonstrate some of the recognisable features of mystical experience identified by Stace : unity , eradication of multiplicity , a sense of ultimate reality , paradoxicality , and ineffability . The one difference
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