Recently, I've read Israel Regardie's "Garden of Pomegranates," and there was a particular set of paragraphs that caught my attention.. (p. 144-145) Regardie describes the magickal principal of Buddhist Nirvana. Most interestingly, he produces a psychological theory for how this happens, then curtails the act of being in a state of nirvana, and says that similar psychological and spiritual mechanisms can be used to reach a state of exctacy in any givin occult art; be it ceremonial, shamanic, pagan, whatever.
Regardie describes the phenominon of acheiving Nirvana as such:
"...the contents of the mind at any moment consisted of two things: the Object or Non-Ego, which is variable, and the Subject or Ego, which is non-variable. Success in meditation produces the result of making the object as invariable as the subject, this coming as a terrific shock, for a union takes place and the two become one."
Nirvana is the shock of your mind when both consciousness and subconsciousness mold.
"... A pure termlessness where the subject no longer speaks of anything; where both subject and object are transcended, and there remains only a sublime spiritual realizations--- an experience without a name."
he then goes on to say that such a method has the same method, but a different goal when it comes to Ceremonial Magick.
"By each act, word, and thought, the one object of the ceremony--the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel--is being constantly indicated... Everything in the operation is so arranged that it will remind the magician of his one aim, his one true object."
Israel Regardie's take on Buddhism and Ceremonial Trance
Re: Israel Regardie's take on Buddhism and Ceremonial Trance
Regardie was a brilliant Theurgist, I've always enjoyed his books. Here is some additional information concerning Nirvana.
Form is Samsara, the world of the ego. It is Maya, the pleasing illusion of permanence, our erroneous notion that matter's form and constitution are fixed, that our own egos are as stable. Maya is the conditional world. In Samsara, all things are in flux.Samsara is the ego's world of conditional relationships.
Emptiness is Nirvana... and what Nirvana is empty of is ego. Without the seductions of a fickle ego, reality lacks the incentive to transform itself into illusion. Nirvana may be entered when we are in elevated states of spiritual consciousness or in any true state of meditation during which, by definition, the ego has been transcended. In the sense that we are still physically present whenever we enter the egoless state, Nirvana and Samsara may be said to occupy the same place. But Nirvana consists in another "meta" physical dimension, a dimension which contains Plato's Ideal Forms, and the Tushita Heaven's Bodhisattvas and Buddhas, and the empyrean Void.
We gain Nirvana through purging ourselves of self interest. Pride, lust and greed have to be sacrificed in the interests of ecstasy. Prideful passions must be replaced by compassionate humility. In Nirvana, we become emotionally independent of those persons, places, and things of the world to which we previously affixed the adjective "my". We no longer identify ourselves in terms of our relationship to them. This independence does not mean that we do not care, it means that we do not possessively care. Instead of having friends, we are merely friendly.
Form is Samsara, the world of the ego. It is Maya, the pleasing illusion of permanence, our erroneous notion that matter's form and constitution are fixed, that our own egos are as stable. Maya is the conditional world. In Samsara, all things are in flux.Samsara is the ego's world of conditional relationships.
Emptiness is Nirvana... and what Nirvana is empty of is ego. Without the seductions of a fickle ego, reality lacks the incentive to transform itself into illusion. Nirvana may be entered when we are in elevated states of spiritual consciousness or in any true state of meditation during which, by definition, the ego has been transcended. In the sense that we are still physically present whenever we enter the egoless state, Nirvana and Samsara may be said to occupy the same place. But Nirvana consists in another "meta" physical dimension, a dimension which contains Plato's Ideal Forms, and the Tushita Heaven's Bodhisattvas and Buddhas, and the empyrean Void.
We gain Nirvana through purging ourselves of self interest. Pride, lust and greed have to be sacrificed in the interests of ecstasy. Prideful passions must be replaced by compassionate humility. In Nirvana, we become emotionally independent of those persons, places, and things of the world to which we previously affixed the adjective "my". We no longer identify ourselves in terms of our relationship to them. This independence does not mean that we do not care, it means that we do not possessively care. Instead of having friends, we are merely friendly.