Nirvana — An Occult Experience by George Arundale


   


I. APPENDIX A


A NOTE BY DR. BESANT ON NIRVANA


      From an addresss to the Brahmavidha Ashrama on “Philosophy: or God Manifesting as Understanding”

      And this leads me to say one word which, I think, you will have to keep as a steady thought right through, in all the questions that you meet in the various philosophies as to the meaning of “absorption,” the Nirvana of the Buddhist, and the various ideas of Moksha, the true Nirvana of the Hindu. In all of these, if you wish to have the nearest approach to the truth that human limited intelligence and consciousness can gain, you must not think of what is called the drop merging in the ocean, that is, of the drop disappearing, which is the idea that the western student of eastern Philosophy usually adopts. What you have to think of (though it seems a contradiction) is the drop expanding into the ocean, and still keeping its own center. It would not be much use building up individuality if, at the end, all was to be thrown away, and the individual was to be the same on returning to “the bosom of the Father,” as when he came from it. That is not the view which ...


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comes from an increasing knowledge of the expansions of consciousness, which is, after all, all that we have to guide us in our own experience. If you take the consciousness of the Higher Ego, you have a very strongly marked Individuality, a very distinct separating body — using that word for a kind of permanent enclosure of matter in which resides a certain stage of consciousness, which is essentially the I developing its I-ness, intensifying that sense of the I, by contrast with the universe around, in which the I does not find that its own consciousness is working. He is looking at it from outside, not from within it; and so he feels intensely the sharp separation between the I and the Not-I. But when the I-ness drops his causal body, his material from the higher mental plane, and passes on into the Buddhic, there is an immense expansion of consciousness, but there is no loss of that center; he expands so as to include any of the conscious-nesses which are acting on that plane. In a sense, he becomes all of them, and yet he never loses the sense of his own center. He identifies himself with another with a closeness of identity that we know nothing of below that plane. But still there is the subtle memory of past experiences which gives it a little different hue, or color, or fragrance, or whatever delicate word you can use to symbolise an existence which is almost impalpable and yet that remains, coloring, as it were, the Buddhic consciousness. There is that tremendous expansion; and if, when you are studying the various philosophies, you keep that in mind, you will find every now and then a phrase which becomes intelligible when you have that thought in your mind. In Plotinus, you will find a wonderful ...


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description of Buddhic consciousness, in which he speaks of the Star which is itself and all the other Stars, as the striking fact of what we should now call the Buddhic body — or rather, the Buddhic sheath, to make a distinction between the enclosure and the appropriation of matter which does not separate. The Buddhic sheath is a radiating Star, not an enclosure. If you see a person in the Buddhic body on the Buddhic plane, you do not see an enclosure; you see a Star radiating out in all directions, whose rays pierce your consciousness so that you feel it to be a part of yourself, and yet not quite. It is almost impossible, except by a series of contradictions, to describe states of consciousness to which our language does not adapt itself. Of course, in Samskrit, you get an enormously more developed form of language, from the philosophical standpoint, than in English; yet in trying to make people understand, you must use a language that they will understand, the Samskrit is known by comparatively few people in the West. We are rather trying to eliminate the Samskrit terms without loss of accuracy. The experience of the Buddhic plane is not translatable into words down here but you do get indications of it, and they are generally called (when people read of them with no realisation of what they mean) “obscure,” “vague,” “indeterminate,” etc. But it is quite clear, and not vague to anyone who touches it. It is one of the great facts of consciousness that you can never understand a stage which you have not reached. You cannot understand consciousness by looking at it from outside. I was answering a letter yesterday in which there was the question: “Why did God make the universe?” I ...


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suggested that there were many possible reasons, but that a kitten cannot understand why a man spends his time reading a book instead of running after a leaf on the ground, because the consciousness of the kitten is not developed enough to read a book; and we are all nearer to the kitten than to Ishvara in one sense, in our comprehension of His nature. It is quite true that
Closer is He than breathing Nearer-than hands and feet;
but you have to stretch your consciousness to accept contradictions.

      On the other hand, when the consciousness begins to dawn, as it has to dawn, through the help of some one greater than yourself (otherwise it would shatter you), when, enveloped in the consciousness of another, you may touch the next plane, then the sense of absolute unity comes upon you, and you may say that the difference does disappear, but it disappears by expansion and not by extinguishment. That is why I said that, if you would think of the drop expanding into the ocean and sharing the consciousness of the ocean, you would have a truer idea of Nirvana, which so many western writers call annihilation, though it is the fulness of Life.

      I said the consciousness would be shattered. If you think for a moment of films of matter, however fine they may be, you will find that they have a certain limit of vibration, and that they can answer to and reproduce certain other limits of vibration. You also find that, if you take a very much more rapid rate of vibration, you break the enclosure, shatter it to pieces. That is true of all aggregations of matter, so far as we know them. There is a limit beyond which they cannot ...


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respond, and then they are simply shattered. That would be the effect if you were suddenly to find yourselves on the Nirvanic plane, if not prepared for it. You would simply have to burst, like a bubble vanishing. It is a very long job to build it again, the film of the bubble. Therefore people are prevented from going into it, unless it may happen that persons may be taken into it, to show them certain occurrences, certain truths, and then they are shielded, just as a diving-dress is given to the man who goes into water. Protective sheaths are possible all the way up.

      There is, in the Buddhist Philosophy, a wonderful sentence of the Lord Gautama Buddha, where He is striving to indicate in human language something that would be intelligible about the condition of Nirvana. You find it in the Chinese translation of the Dhammapada, and the Chinese edition has been translated into English in the series of books known as “Trubner’s Series”. He puts it there that, unless there was Nirvana, there could be nothing; and He uses various phrases in order to indicate what He means, taking the uncreated and then connecting with it the created; taking the real and then connecting with it the unreal. He sums it up by saying that Nirvana is; and that if it were not, naught else could be. That is an attempt (if one may call it so with all reverence) to say what cannot be said. It implies that unless there existed the Uncreated, the Invisible and the Real, we could not have a universe at all. You have there, then, the indication that Nirvana is a plenum, not a void. That idea should be fundamentally fixed in your mind, in your study of every great system of Philosophy.


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      So often the expressions used may seem to indicate a void. Hence the western idea of annihilation. If you think of it as fulness, you will realise that the consciousness expands more and more, without losing utterly the sense of identity; if you could think of a center of a circle without a circumference, you would glimpse the truth.




II. FROM THE MASTERS AND THE PATH

BY THE RIGHT REV. C. W. LEADBEATER


      For the Arhat henceforth the consciousness of the buddhic plane is his while still in the physical body, and when he leaves that body in sleep or trance, he passes at once into the unutterable glory of the nirvanic plane. At his Initiation he must have at least one glimpse of that nirvanic consciousness, just as at the First Initiation there must be a momentary experience of the buddhic, and now his daily effort will be to reach further and further up into the nirvanic plane. It is a task of prodigious difficulty, but gradually he will find himself able to work upwards into that ineffable splendor.

      The entry into it is utterly bewildering, and it brings as its first sensation an intense vividness of life, surprising even to him who is familiar with the buddhic plane. This surprise has been his before, though in a lesser measure, whenever he mounted for the first time from one plane to another. Even when we rise first ...


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in full and clear consciousness from the physical plane to the astral, we find the new life to be so much wider than any that we have hitherto known that we exclaim: “I thought I knew what life was, but I have never known before!” When we pass into the mental plane, we find the same feeling redoubled; the astral was wonderful, but it was nothing to the mental world. When we pass into the higher mental plane, again we have the same experience. At every step the same surprise comes over again, and no thought beforehand can prepare one for it, because it is always far more stupendous than anything that we can imagine, and life on all those higher planes is an intensity of bliss for which no words exist.

      European Orientalists have translated nirvana as annihilation, because the word means “blown out,” as the light of a candle is extinguished by a breath. Nothing could be a more complete antithesis of the truth. Certainly it is the annihilation of all that down here we know as man, because there he is no longer man, but God in man, a (sod among other Gods, though less than They.

      Try to imagine the whole universe filled with and consisting of an immense torrent of living light, the whole moving, moving onward, without relativity, a restless onward sweep of a vast sea of light, light with a purpose, if that is comprehen­sible, tremendously concentrated, but absolutely without strain or effort — words fail. At first we feel nothing but the bliss of it, and see nothing but the intensity of the light; but gradually we begin to realise that even in this dazzling brightness there are brighter spots (nuclei, as it were) through ...


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which the light obtains a new quality that enables it to become perceptible on lower planes, whose inhabitants without this aid would be altogether beneath the possibility of sensing its effulgence. Then by degrees we begin to realise that these subsidiary suns are the Great Ones, the Planetary Spirits, Great Angels, Karmic Deities, Dhyan Chohans, Buddhas, Christs and Masters, and many others who are to us not even names, and that through Them the light and life are flowing down to the lower planes.

      Little by little, as we become more accustomed to this marvellous reality, we begin to see that we are one with Them, though far below the summit of Their splendor, part of the One that dwells somehow in Them all, and also in every point of space between; and that we ourselves are also a focus, and through us at our much lower level the light and life are flowing to those who are still further away (not from it, for all are part of it and there is nothing else anywhere, but) from the realisation of it, the comprehension and experience of it.

      Madame Blavatsky often spoke of that consciousness as having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere; a profoundly suggestive sentence, attributed variously to Pascal, Cardinal de Cusa and the Zohar, but belonging by right to the Books of Hermes. Far indeed from annihilation is such consciousness; the Initiate reaching it has not in the least lost the sense that he is himself; his memory is perfectly continuous; he is the same man, yet all this as well, and now indeed he can say: “I am I,” knowing what “I” really means. It may sound strange, but it is true. No ...


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words that we can use can give even the least idea of such an experience as that, for all with which our minds are acquainted has long ago disappeared before that level is attained. There is, of course, even at that level, a sheath of some sort for the Spirit, impossible to describe for in one sense it seems as though it were an atom and yet in another it seems to be the whole plane. The man feels as if he were everywhere, but could focus anywhere within himself, and wherever for a moment the outpouring of force diminishes, that is for him a body.

      The man who has once realised that marvellous unity can never forget it, can never be quite as he was before; for however deeply he may veil him­self in lower vehicles in order to help and save others, however closely he may be bound to the cross of matter, cribbed, cabined and confined, he can never forget that his eyes have seen the King in His Beauty, that he has beheld the land which is very far off — very far off, yet very near, within us all the time if we could only see it, because to reach nirvana we need not go away to some far-distant heaven, but only open our consciousness to its glory. As the Lord Buddha said long ago: “Do not complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see; for the light is all about you, and it is so wonderful, so beautiful, so far beyond anything that men have ever dreamed of or prayed for, and it is for ever and for ever.”


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APPENDIX B


AN EXTRACT FROM
THE ANCIENT WISDOM
BY ANNIE BESANT


      The fifth plane, the Nirvanic, is the plane of the highest human aspect of the God within us, and this aspect is named by Theosophists, Atma or the Self. It is the plane of pure existence, of divine powers in their fullest manifestation in our fivefold universe - what lies beyond on the sixth and seventh planes is hidden in the unimaginable light of God. This Atmic, or Nirvanic, consciousness, the consciousness belonging to life on the fifth plane, is the consciousness attained by those lofty Ones, the first fruits of humanity, who have already completed the cycle of human evolution, and who are called Masters. They have solved in Themselves the problem of uniting the essence of individuality with non-separateness, and live, immortal In­telligences, perfect in wisdom, in bliss, in power.

      When the human Monad comes forth from the Logos, it is as though from the luminous ocean of Atma a tiny thread of light was separated off from the rest by a film of Buddhic matter, and from this hung a spark which becomes enclosed in an egg-like casing of matter belonging to the formless levels of the mental plane. “The spark hangs from the flame by the finest thread of Fohat.” As evolution proceeds, ...


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this luminous egg grows larger and more opalescent, and the tiny thread becomes a wider and wider channel through which more and more of the Atmic life pours down. Finally, they merge — the third with the second, and the twain with the first, as flame merges with flame and no separation can be seen.

      The evolution on the fourth and fifth planes belongs to a future period of our race, but those who choose the harder path of swifter progress may tread it even now, as will be explained later. On that path the bliss-body is quickly evolved, and a man begins to enjoy the consciousness of that loftier region, and knows the bliss which comes from the absence of separative barriers, the wisdom which flows in when the limits of the intellect are transcended. Then is the wheel escaped from, which binds the soul in the lower worlds, and then is the first foretaste of the liberty which is found perfected on the Nirvanic plane.

      The Nirvanic consciousness is the antithesis of annihilation; it is existence raised to a vividness and intensity inconceivable to those who know only the life of the senses and the mind. As the farthing rushlight to the splendor of the sun at noon, so is the earth-bound consciousness to the Nirvanic, and to regard it as annihilation because the limits of the earthly consciousness have vanished, is as though a man, knowing only the rushlight, should say that light could not exist without a wick immersed in tallow. That Nirvana is has been borne witness to in the past in the Scriptures of the world by Those who enjoy it and live its glorious life, and is still borne witness to by others of our race who have climbed that lofty ladder of perfected humanity, and who remain ...


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in touch with earth that the feet of our ascending race may mount its rungs unfalteringly.

      In Nirvana dwell the mighty Beings who accomplished Their own human evolution in past universes, and who came forth with the Logos when He manifested Himself to bring this universe into existence. They are His ministers in the administration of the worlds, the perfect agents of His will. The Lords of all the Hierarchies of the Gods and lower ministrants that we have seen working on the lower planes have here Their abiding-place, for Nirvana is the heart of the universe, whence all its life-currents proceed. Hence the Great Breath comes forth, the life of all, and thither it is indrawn when the universe has reached its term. There is the Beatific Vision for which mystics long, there the unveiled Glory, the Supreme Goal.


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