What Devachan is to each earth-life, Nirvâna is to the finished cycle
of Re-incarnation, but any effective discussion of that glorious
state would here be out of place. It is mentioned only to round off
the "After" of Death, for no word of man, strictly limited within the
narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what
Nirvâna is, can do aught save disfigure it in striving to describe.
What it is not may be roughly, baldly stated--it is not
"annihilation", it is not destruction of consciousness. Mr. A.P.
Sinnett has put effectively and briefly the absurdity of many of the
ideas current in the West about Nirvâna. He has been speaking of
absolute consciousness, and proceeds:
We may use such phrases as intellectual counters, but for no
ordinary mind--dominated by its physical brain and brain-born
intellect--can they have a living signification. All that
words can convey is that Nirvâna is a sublime state of
conscious rest in omniscience. It would be ludicrous, after
all that has gone before, to turn to the various discussions
which have been carried on by students of exoteric Buddhism
as to whether Nirvâna does or does not mean annihilation.
Worldly similes fall short of indicating the feeling with
which the graduates of Esoteric Science regard such a
question. Does the last penalty of the law mean the highest
honour of the peerage? Is a wooden spoon the emblem of the
most illustrious pre-eminence in learning? Such questions as
these but faintly symbolise the extravagance of the question
whether Nirvâna is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
annihilation.[41]
So we learn from the _Secret Doctrine_ that the Nirvânî returns to
cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that
_The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves
only in Nirvâna, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the
day when the Great Law calls all things back into
action._[42]