Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t3.22

c7.s1.t3.22

The succeeding age turned, with a special predilection, to the description of conditions of the deepest self-contained abstraction, in which perception and feeling, space and all objectivity, vanished from the mind, and it hangs, as it were, in the middle, between the transient world and the Nirvâna. Disquisitions on these ecstasies of contemplation are among the pet themes of the discourses which the Buddhist Church have put in their master’s mouth. We shall not be wrong if we here recognize the preliminary traces of these ideas. When man seeks for an earthly prefiguration of the return to the universal One, he must, before he lights upon those sickly conditions of semi- or complete unconsciousness, picture to himself the rest of deep, dreamless sleep as the most natural and readiest image.