Emily Dickinson's Mystic Poetry...

The sense of paradox so fundamental to Zen is also ever present in Dickinson. The similarities to Dickinson’s insights despite the fact that she had direct access to Eastern wisdom is testimony to the universality of the experience of self realisation. To the Indian Yogi self realisation is the gift of an inner energy known as Kundalini which manifests itself as a cool wind. During yogic states the heat of sympathetic nervous activity subsides and the parasympathetic nervous system comes into play relaxing and refreshing the body, with a breeze or fountain like energy, so that the attention can transcend physical needs and merge with the Atman or Self. According to Dickinson the moments of At–One–ment with Nature/Self happen “when the wind is within” (Thoreau wrote of ” ecstasies begotten of the breezes”) For the yogi or realised soul the sensation of this cool energy becomes his means of being sensitive to manifestations of Truth–Beauty–Love (Keats’ tripartite Unity). Dickinson stated that she had no other means to discriminate these qualities in art.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know of.”

and in one of her poems:

“Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool
Deals one
imperial thunder bolt
that scalps your
naked soul”

Interestingly the yogi also experiences concentration of the Kundalini, or cool breeze at the top of the head, during union with the Self (the unity behind Truth–Beauty–Love). The yogic experience of self realisation is a simultaneous reception of grace, poured down from celestial realms, and an upsurging, or erupting, of energy from the unconscious depths within. Dickinson referred to herself as a “volcano at home”. “On my volcano grows the grass”; there is a sense of a vast underlying power of unconscious creativity waiting to be brought forth.
A final point of comparison with the yogis of the East is Dickinson’s spiritual detachment from a world that was unready to share her vision. She spent the second half of her life as a virtual hermit, just as Indian yogis and the Desert Fathers of early Christianity (some of whom went to the extreme of meditating for years on the tops of columns) isolated themselves from the materialism they saw in human society, in order to achieve yoga.
“I dwell in possibility”, she wrote. She had little time for the gossips and church people of 19th century Amherst with its restrictive Calvinist beliefs. “The soul selects her own society and then shuts the door”, perhaps things would have been different if she had been born 100 years later. Not everyone was turned away, however, the local children were especially welcome since they were relatively uncalcified by dogma and selfishness. She wrote of her “Columnar Self”, referring to her strength in standing alone, connected perhaps to other columns by celestial vaults in the great palace of the Self.

Emily Dickinson’s Mystic Poetry
— by Graham Brown