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In 1930, Freud engaged in a correspondence with the French poet and author, Romain Rolland, about the latter's experiences with the Hindu teachers Vivekananda and Ramakrishna.
“I shall now try with your guidance,” Freud wrote in 1930, “to penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now an uncertain blending of Hellenic love of proportion, Jewish sobriety, and philistine timidity have kept me away. I really ought to have tackled it earlier, for the plants of this soil shouldn't be alien to me; I have dug to certain depths for their roots. But it isn't easy to pass beyond the limits of one's nature.” (Freud, 1960)
As one who shares all of these qualities with Freud, I can testify that none of them need make meditative experiences unintelligible to the Western mind. Under Rolland's influence, Freud described the “oceanic feeling” as a sense of limitless and unbounded oneness with the universe that seeks the “restoration of limitless narcissism” and the “resurrection of infantile helplessness.” This was Freud's only attempt at explaining meditation practice and it set the stage for a fundamental misunderstanding in the West of what the mystical experience actually is from the Buddhist perspective.
Although the Buddha was familiar with experiences of the type that Freud called oceanic, resulting from one-pointed absorption with a single object of concentration, he rejected these experiences as