Here is an extract from the Preface to my book, The Nirvaneans, which is being published by Humdrumming some months hence:

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even just a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it built in an infinite number of dimensions to its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by misreading texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

In trying to make these pages accessible to readers of all religions and none, I have risked a sprinkling of revised terms, mainly to avoid some of the coinage of religious discourse. Words like Cosmosity, nirvanean, and nirvanoception appear from time to time. The context should explain their meaning: for example, a Nirvanean is someone who has achieved the nirvanic viewpoint, while Cosmosity is “supreme spiritual enlightenment”—“divinization” to Christians and others. Similarly, just as we exercise perception (of the bodily senses) and conception (of the mind) in our everyday affairs, so we utilize nirvanoception when we experience Nirvana. The difference between it and our physical knowing, is that body-mind uses a “point consciousness” while nirvanoception is “space consciousness”.

I believe these states are equally valid from all religious points of view. Differences appear, as always, because of competing terminologies.

This subject has received sustained psychological analysis and research over three millennia in the East. If we are to understand our Western traditions better—and Christianity is in dire need of that, I believe—we should not hesitate to study the proto-scientific techniques of Gautama Buddha and others, and freely import their ideas, especially if they cast useful light on our own tangled mystical insights.

The method I have used throughout is to investigate the lives of nirvaneans, in addition to their words. Actions speak more compellingly than language ever does, and Nirvana shapes its children in special ways for specific endeavours.

Part One looks at Nirvana in all its aspects. The first chapter seeks a comprehensive definition of the word. Readers shy of long definitions may skip all but the first page or two. Chapter 2 probes the state of Nirvana and nirvanic experiences, citing actual descriptions of them.

Part Two gets to grips with the lives, works and words of the nirvaneans themselves. The selection covers Japan and China, 20th-century India and modern Europe.

The objective of this volume is to demystify Nirvana, not in any reductive sense, but simply to cast a fresh light and, dare one hope, ease our progress towards it.