Nirvana Book:

Editorial Review:

from the AUTHOR-S PREFACE:

I THINK I may say I have been a rather strenuous person for many years, for over twenty-five years now, under the inspiring guidance of my revered Chief, Dr. Annie Besant; and my strenuousness has been very much on the physical plane. I confess to having thought little of what people call -higher things,- of causes and of origins, of theories of life, of planes of nature, of hierar-chies of beings, and so forth. I have had work to do in the outer world, and I have tried to do it, and have not concerned myself with whys and wherefores. Whenever I have studied, I have studied specifically to the immediate ends of a particular piece of work. I have never studied for study-s sake. I have never cared for wisdom for what wisdom is, but for what wisdom can do. My universe is full of the things I need. If I could not relate a thing to my work, then that thing has been out of my perspective, at all events for the time being. I have been one-pointed, even though I may have turned my eyes from much upon which they might usefully have rested.

But during the last year or so I have been making a discovery. I have discovered that however much I may have been strenuous on the physical plane, this physical plane strenuousness has been almost as nothing compared with my strenuousness on other planes. This is probably the case with everybody, but it came as a great surprise to me on the physical plane. I began at once to realize that I must cease to live in these plane-tight compartments. I must begin to live on many planes simultane-ously. I began to realize that the one life unites all planes and all things; and that in reality there is nothing which should be indifferent to me. Everything is related to everything else, and everything modifies everything else. Why, the far-distant Sun Himself presses physically upon every part of the world, as science itself teaches us.

So I brooded much upon this unity, both in and out of the body, and tried to live more from the universal than from the particular. The result has been, I hope, bigger living, more effective living. But I had no clear perception of unity, only a sense of it, a vague idea of it just sufficient to make life strangely and intriguingly different.

Many years ago, it was in 1912 at Taormina, Sicily, I had my first glimpse of the funda-mental unities. I remember sitting at the window of my room in the hotel in which a party of us were staying, and I was listlessly dreaming. All of a sudden my half non-seeing eyes rested on the orange grove in the little valley beneath, and I found myself peculiarly, wonderfully, identified with the orange trees, with their very life and being. I was at my window, yet was I also in the orange grove - -indeed, I was the orange grove. It was almost as if my consciousness flickered between George Arundale as George Arundale and George Arundale as the orange grove. I was two entities, yet one. And as I lived as the orange grove a gardener entered and began to pluck some of the oranges and to cut off some of the branches. All these things the gardener was doing to me. I rebelled-- not as George Arundale might rebel, not with my mind and my will, but as orange groves apparently do rebel. I was conscious of discomfort, of loss, not exactly of pain but of something next door to it. I was the more discomforted because the gardener did not treat me reverently or affectionately, but as if I were inanimate with no feelings, with no capacity for sensation. Why could he not realise that the same life was in us both? If he had only had the attitude of asking my permission, of begging my pardon, for his actions, of conveying to me that I could make others happy by sharing myself with them, I should not have minded so much....