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Experiences during the Transcendental Meditation Technique gave the professor an insight into the deep meaning of Emily Dickinson's poem, which refers to the profound privacy of a 'soul admitted to itself—Finite infinity'.
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by Global Good News staff writer
11 May 2010
Emily Dickinson, an American poet who lived from 1830 to 1886, wrote a short poem, which says:
There's a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death,
but these
Society shall be
Compared to that
profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity.
Speaking on a video on the Video Café page of the website of Maharishi University of Management, Nynke Passi, Professor of Writing and Literature at the university, said that she would have not connected to this poem if she hadn’t been practising Transcendental Meditation, because, she said, the poem is ‘so abstract in a way’.
Ms Passi commented that Emily Dickinson talks about a solitude that is even deeper than sea or space or death—a ‘polar privacy’—like a privacy so removed from everything else.
‘It's like the opposite of everything else,’ Ms Passi said, ‘beyond any other kind of privacy you can imagine—“a soul admitted to itself—finite infinity”.
‘But I can understand that, because I have felt exactly that when I was transcending [during her practice of Transcendental Meditation]. I was myself, my individual self—but I was also infinity. I was something so large.’
Ms Passi said that Emily Dickinson felt this was an experience that only a few had; ‘it was a disclosure of infinity,’ Ms Passi said, ‘and it's that big and that vast. Many of her poems have references like that.
‘Many other great poets and writers write directly about things that, when you've had that experience of transcending—of going deep within yourself in consciousness—you know exactly what they're saying, however abstract it may sound, because it's just about that connection of yourself within yourself.’
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