Also, meditative practices may be found outside of a religious or philosophical context, and a rich source of descriptions of transcendent experiences is secular literature. For many poets and writers these feelings were revelations of ecstasy. Carolyn Spurgeon in her book Mysticism in English Literature traces the influence of mysticism on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets.

Of particular interest are Bronte, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Spurgeon describes Emily Bronte’s poems as strong and free, isolated from any dogma and containing the simplest language, portraying the record of the experience and the vision of the soul. In “The Prisoner” the element of a passive attitude is rapturously recounted as the loss of outward senses.

He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs.
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
But, first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends;
Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.
Oh! dreadful is the check—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

Wordsworth believed that every man could attain the vision of joy and harmony of life in nature, which for him transformed the whole of existence. Spurgeon calls his poetry a series of notes and investigations devoted to the practical and detailed explanation of how this state of vision might be reached. Wordsworth's description of the method of realizing this condition emphasizes the practice of a passive attitude. If freed from distracting objects, petty cares, “little enmities and low desires,” he could reach an equilibrium of “wise passiveness” or a “happy stillness of the mind.” A cessation of the intellect and desires and a relaxation of the will could be used deliberately to induce this condition. With habitual training one could experience the “central peace subsisting for ever at the heart of endless agitation.” He describes this experience in the following lines from “Tintern Abbey.”

. . . that serene and blessed mood,
In which . . . the breath of this corporeal frame,
And even the motion of our human blood,
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Tennyson had peculiar experiences of a vision of ecstasy which was the foundation of his deepest beliefs of the “unity of all things, the reality of the unseen, and the persistence of life.” This condition came about often with the silent repetition of his own name! He wrote several accounts of this experience:

. . . till all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, 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.

In sum, there appear to be certain common elements in almost all cultures which enable individuals to periodically change their everyday mode of thinking. We believe this mental process is accompanied by the previously described physiologic changes of the Relaxation Response. Our usual thinking is concerned with events outside our selves. Through our emotional attachments, our social feelings, our ideological beliefs, our sensory contacts, we are constantly diverting our thinking toward external factors. Any attempt to redirect this outwardly directed consciousness requires a different mental process. We believe that people have been describing the type of thinking which elicits the Relaxation Response throughout many cultures and religions. Until recently most observers were concerned only with the philosophical and subjective aspects of the Relaxation Response. The accompanying physiologic changes were probably not of interest. If they were, they could not have been measured until modern technology was available.