Nirvanoception is my own word for space consciousness, the underlying awareness that allows us to glimpse the Nirvanic realm beyond ordinary consciousness.

Here’s a short extract from my book, The Nirvaneans:

You are all Buddhas,
but you don’t know it.
Bankei

Nirvanoception is the third, usually latent, mode of knowledge. I say “usually latent” because we’re mostly unaware of it. We freely use body-mind modes of “perception” (senses) and “conception” (mind) to navigate around our world, while remaining completely in the dark about “space consciousness”, which is working in the background.

Normal consciousness is narrowly focused in our heads. Nirvanoception is wide, space consciousness, which takes no heed of trivial daily concerns. It clarifies during nirvanic experiences because perception and conception are “left behind” with the body-mind.

The aim of any spiritual path is to clean up the doors of perception and conception so that Nirvanoception shines brightly in our consciousness. To be precise, it’s how Nirvana experiences itself.

That is the Enlightened state. It’s what Tibetans call the Clear Light. It allows a higher mode of being to possess us, effecting a complete transformation of personality.

As Evelyn Underhill put it: “Mysticism is seen to be a highly specialized form of that search for reality, for heightened and completed life, which we have found to be a constant characteristic of human consciousness. It is largely prosecuted by that ‘spiritual spark’, that transcendental faculty which, though the life of our life, remains below the threshold in ordinary men. Emerging from its hiddenness in the mystic, it gradually becomes the dominant factor in his life…Under [its spur] the whole personality rises in the acts of contemplation … to a level of consciousness at which it becomes aware of a new field of perception.”

So what is the Path of Nirvanoception? How does it differ from other paths?

It is essentially the path of the Jnani (as Vedantists would say); the path of analytical meditation, or the wisdom stream (as the Dalai Lama puts it); the path of Discrimination (Merrell-Wolff); the path of Knowledge (Gnosis), and the path of Direct Seeing. All these “names” could apply equally as well.
Put bluntly, if you want twenty years of psychotherapy, see a Freudian analyst. If you want arthritic knees, try the usual paths of meditation. If you want nice feelings, try charismatic Christianity.

The Path of Nirvanoception is a direct assault on the summit of Nirvana by attempting to break through to a higher mode of being. The aim is to allow the “Suprapersonal” to clean up the conditioned, karmic entity we normally are, thus releasing the clear light of Nirvanoception.

The Nirvaneans by John M Evans will be published in early 2007 by Humdrumming.