trictly limited within the
narrow bounds of his lower consciousness, may avail to explain what
Nirvana 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 Nirvana. 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 Nirvana 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 Nirvana 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 Nirvana is held by Buddhism to be equivalent to
annihilation.[41]

So we learn from the _Secret Doctrine_ that the Nirvani returns to
cosmic activity in a new cycle of manifestation, and that

_The thread of radiance which is imperishable and dissolves
only in Nirvana, re-emerges from it in its integrity on the
day when the Great Law calls all things back into
action._[42]

COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN THE EARTH AND OTHER SPHERES.

We are now in position to discriminate between the various kinds of
communication possible between those whom we foolishly divide into
"dead" and "living," as though the body were the man, or the man could
die. "Communications between the embodied and the disembodied" would
be a more satisfactory phrase.

First, let us put aside as unsuitable the word Spirit: Spirit does not
communicate with Spirit in any way conceivable by us. That highest
principle is not yet manifest in the flesh; it remains the hidden
fount of all, the eternal Energy, one of the poles of Being in
manifestation. The word is loosely used to denote lofty Intelligences,
wh