The Inner Life, v. I/Fourth Section/I
NIRVANA
IT has often been said that in the final consummation all individual souls merge into the Great Soul, and our students sometimes find it difficult to reconcile this with other statements which seem to imply that the individuality is maintained, in some form or other, even up to the very greatest heights. The fact is that no experience which we can have, and no ideas which we can formulate down here in our physical brain, will at all express the glorious realities of nirvana and the planes beyond it. We know so little of that transcendent glory, and what little we do know can never be put into adequate words. Perhaps, however, it is in a certain sense somewhat misleading to speak of individual souls as merging into the Great Soul. Every monad is fundamentally a spark of the divine triad; he cannot merge into that of which he is already a part. Surely a better explanation of what happens would be to say that as he evolves the spark develops into flame; he becomes more and more conscious of his unity with the divine, and so the LOGOS is able more and more to manifest Himself through him.
This much at least I can say, that up to the highest level of consciousness which any of our students have yet attained — up even to what is commonly called nirvana itself, there is no loss of individuality, of the power to think, to plan and to act. Long before that there is an entire loss of the sense of separateness, but that is a very different thing. Sir Edwin Arnold wrote of that beatific condition “the dewdrop slips into the shinning sea.” Those who have passed through that most marvelous of experiences know that, paradoxical as it may seem, the sensation is exactly the reverse, and that a far closer description would be that the ocean had somehow been poured into the drop!
That consciousness, wide as the sea, with “its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere,” is a great and glorious fact; but when a man attains it, it seems to him that his consciousness has widened to take in all that, not that he is merged into something else. And he is right, for that which he had ignorantly supposed to be his consciousness was never his at all, but only the shining of the divine power and wisdom and love through him, and he is now at last beginning to realize that stupendous fact. The truth is that what is commonly understood by individuality is a delusion and has never existed, but all that is best and noblest in that conception is maintained up to adeptship and far beyond, even into the realm of the great Planetary Spirits, for They are assuredly individuals, though mighty beyond our feeble powers of conception.
Even though the attempt be foredoomed to failure, let me endeavour to give some slight idea of an experience which some of us once had in connection with this lofty plane. Before we ourselves by our own efforts were able to touch it, a Master, for certain purposes of His own, enfolded us in His higher aura, and enabled us through Him to know something of glories of nirvana.
Try to imagine the whole universe filled with and consisting of an immense torrent of living light, and in it a vividness of life and an intensity of bliss altogether beyond all description, a hundred thousand times beyond the greatest bliss of heaven. At first we feel nothing but the bliss; we see nothing but the intensity of the light; but gradually we begin to realize that even in this dazzling brightness there are brighter spots — nuclei, as it were — which are built of the light because there is nothing but the light, and yet through them somehow the light gleams out more brightly, and obtains a new quality which enables it to be perceptible upon other and lower planes, which without this would be altogether beneath the possibility of sensing its effulgence. And by degrees we begin to realize that these subsidiary suns are the great Ones, that these are Planetary Spirits, Great Angels, Karmic Deities, Buddhas, Christs and Masters, and that through Them the light and the life are flowing down to the lower planes. Gradually, little by little, as we become more accustomed to the stupendous reality, we begin to see that, in a far lower sense, even we ourselves are a focus in that cosmic scheme, and that through us also, at our much lower level, the light and the life are flowing to those who are still further away — not from it, for we are all part of it and there is nothing else anywhere — but further from the realization of it, the comprehension of it, the experience of it.
If we can see and grasp even a little of the glory, we can to some extent reflect it to others who are less fortunate. That light shines for every one, and it is the only reality; yet men by their ignorance and by their foolish actions may so shut themselves away that they cannot see it, just as the sun floods the whole world with light and life, and yet men may hide themselves in caves and cellars where that light cannot be seen. Just as a mirror properly placed at the mouth of such a cave or cellar may enable those within to participate, at least to some extent, in the benefits of the light, so may we, when we see the light, reflect it to others who have so placed themselves that they cannot perceive it directly.
No words that we can use can really give even 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 at that level a sheath of some sort for the spirit, but it is impossible to describe it in any words. In one sense it seems as though it were an atom, and yet in another it seems to be the whole plane. Each man is a centre of consciousness and therefore must have some position; that focus in the stream of the life of the LOGOS must, one would say, be in one place or another. Yet he feels as if he were the whole plane and could focus anywhere, and wherever for the moment the outpouring of this force stops, that is for him a sheath. The man still feels absolutely himself, even though he is so much more; and he is able to distinguish others. He is able to recognize with perfect certainty the Great Ones whom he knows, yet it is rather by instinctive feeling than by any resemblance to anything that he has seen before; but if he focusses his consciousness upon one of These he gets the effect of the form of the man he knows it in the Augoeides, two planes below.