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.

Aunachala, the Hill of the Holy Beacon.

In a second extract from my forthcoming book, The Nirvaneans, Ramana is seen as a youngster discovering that Arunachala Hill, the site of his future ashram, is a real place.

Arunachala, the Hill of the Holy Beacon, in the North Arcot district of Tamil Nadu, has always had a powerful reputation among devout Hindus. Regarded as one of the five (some say eight) forms of Siva, and older than the Himalayas, it is said that just by thinking of Arunachala one can attain enlightenment.

The numinous presence of the place is further enhanced by a remarkable multi-towered temple spreading over more than twenty-five acres at the foot of the hill. This monumental structure, dedicated to Arunachaleswara, is one of the oldest in Southern India.

Although the young Ramana spent his first years at Tiruvannamalai in various parts of the temple precincts, its intricate complexity and formal grandeur seem almost set against the spirit of the later Maharshi, who was renowned for his tolerant, unstructured, even Taoist, picture of the world.

The serenity of Ramana’s subsequent life and ministry belies the dramatic suddenness and shock of his early enlightenment. His was a road to Damascus experience, devastatingly complete in turning round his consciousness from a dull life in a quiet Indian backwater, to a continuous inner absorption in the Self thereafter.

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Socrates is my favourite philosopher because he believed philosophy should be lived, not just spoken about. I’ve often thought that he must have been a Nirvanean, my preferred word for “Enlightened”. In this short excerpt from my book, The Nirvaneans, the arguments for this notion are discussed:

The love of wisdom (Sophia), or philosophia in Greek, began in Ionian Greece in Homeric times. It was a deliberate increase of consciousness on the part of a small number of people who lived close to the land but who recognized that the mind of man had a structuring and ordering facility which seemed to be above the processes of nature. Their often puzzled cogitations gave birth to philosophy which, in turn, spawned science, metaphysics, mathematics and all the other systems of pure thought that bedevil students to this day.

Philosophers were known to be otherworldly and lost in thought. They dressed in simple robes and lived frugally — rich living, they thought, degraded the mind. Such a life would inevitably produce more than its share of Nirvaneans — Plotinus and Plato are two other examples.

The Greek philosopher Socrates is almost the perfect exemplar of the Nirvanean qualities of simplicity and ethics. I believe him to have been a Nirvanean, for a number of reasons. He spent his entire lifetime, as far as we know, engaging others in conversations about the need to be good. That was the sum total of his life. Moreover, he was completely unworldly, careless of his appearance, and had no visible means of financial support. In Plato’s Georgias, one listener complains that, if Socrates is right, life would need to be turned upside down! — we have observed elsewhere that the Nirvanic viewpoint literally turns our normal conceptions of reality upside down.

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