Theos-Talk Archives (August 2006 Message tt00694)

[ http://www.AnandGholap.net - Online Books on Theosophy ]

" IT has often been said that in the final consummation all individual souls merge into the Great Soul, and our students sometimes find it difficult to reconcile this with other statements which seem to imply that the individuality is maintained, in some form or other, even up to the very greatest heights. The fact is that no experience which we can have, and no ideas which we can formulate down here in our physical brain, will at all express the glorious realities of nirvana and the planes beyond it. We know so little of that transcendent glory, and what little we do know can never be put into adequate words. Perhaps, however, it is in a certain sense somewhat misleading to speak of individual souls as merging into the Great Soul. Every monad is fundamentally a spark of the divine triad; he cannot merge into that of which he is already a part. Surely a better explanation of what happens would be to say that as he evolves the spark develops into flame; he becomes more and more conscious of his unity with the divine, and so the LOGOS is able more and more to manifest Himself through him. 

        This much at least I can say, that up to the highest level of consciousness which any of our students have yet attained-- up even to what is commonly called nirvana itself, there is no loss of individuality, of the power to think, to plan and to act. Long before that there is an entire loss of the sense of separateness , but that is a very different thing. Sir Edwin Arnold wrote of that beatific condition “the dewdrop slips into the shinning sea.” Those who have passed through that most marvelous of experiences know that, paradoxical as it may seem, the sensation is exactly the reverse, and that a far closer description would be that the ocean had somehow been poured into the drop! "

Complete book can be read at
http://www.anandgholap.net/Inner_Life_Vol_I-CWL.htm

Best regards.
Anand Gholap