The Devachanic Plane/Conclusion

CONCLUSION

In glancing over what has been written, the prominent idea is not unnaturally a humiliating sense of the utter inadequacy of all the attempts at description — of the hopelessness of any effort to put into human words the ineffable glories of the heaven-world. Still, lamentably imperfect as such an essay as this must be, it is yet better than nothing, and it may serve to put into the mind of the reader some faint conception of what awaits him on the other side of the grave; and though when he reaches this bright realm of bliss he will certainly find infinitely more than he has been led to expect, he will not, it is hoped, have to unlearn any of the information that he has here acquired.

Man, as at present constituted, has within him principles belonging to two planes even higher than the mental, for his Buddhi represents him upon what from that very fact we call the buddhic plane, and his Atmâ (the divine spark within him) upon that third plane of the solar system which has usually been spoken of as the nirvanic. In the average man these highest principles are as yet almost entirely undeveloped, and in any case the planes to which they belong are still more beyond the reach of all description than is the mental. It must suffice to say that on the buddhic plane all limitations begin to fall away, and the consciousness of man expands until he realizes, no longer in theory only, but by absolute experience, that the consciousness of his fellows is included within his own, and he feels and knows and experiences with an absolute perfection of sympathy all that is in them, because it is in reality a part of himself; while on the nirvânic plane he moves a step further, and realizes that his consciousness and theirs are one in a yet higher sense, because they are all in reality facets of the infinitely greater consciousness of the logos, in Whom they all live and move and have their being; so that when "the dewdrop slips into the-shining sea" the effect produced is rather as though the process had been reversed and the ocean poured into the drop, which now for the first time realizes that it is the ocean — not a part of it, but the whole. Paradoxical, utterly incomprehensible, apparently impossible; yet absolutely true.

But this much at least we may grasp — that the blessed state of Nirvâna is not, as some have ignorantly supposed, a condition of blank nothingness, but of far more intense and beneficent activity; and that ever as we rise higher in the scale of nature our possibilities become greater, our work for others ever grander and more far-reaching, and that infinite wisdom and infinite power means only infinite capacity for service, because they are directed by infinite love.