For over thirty years the author of these pages has been endeavouring to develop a "clear, logical, penetrating understanding" of why meditation works (as recommended in the last few lines of the Surangama Sutra - page 72 of D T Suzuki's "Manual of Zen Buddhism"). These pages are a synopsis of the result of those struggles. I have been motivated in this by the conviction that every manifestation of matter in our world has developed, mutated and/or evolved from the hydrogen of the interstellar void . For that reason every such manifestation must necessarily yield the secrets of its history to the enquiring mind - eventually - right back (in theory) to the swirling cloud of hydrogen and helium from which it originated. Everything in our world today is the result of changes such development, mutation and evolution imply. (To exist an object need only be consistently and repeatably detectable.) This category includes things like our central nervous system, the mind of man and its dependant Nirvana (perfect happiness).
While developing this theory to account for mystical experience the author became increasingly convinced that it was not so much a matter of discovering something new but of correcting misunderstandings which have arisen in the original expression over the last couple of millennia . When the Buddha Gautama reintroduced this understanding two and a half thousand years ago, he changed his world:
this could only have been possible if he had presented
a "clear, logical, penetrating understanding" of his subject.
What is more, when the earliest pronouncements of the Buddha Gautama are analysed and retranslated, I'll bet they turn out to be pretty much the same as what is written here. You may question how I can be so sure.
There can only be one truth.
Gautama could not have had the effect he did have without presenting his explanation in a logical form which made sense to laymen, perhaps even with the same nuances and emphases that I have employed in these pages.
The knowledge embodied in these pages is as old as man himself. Over four thousand years ago a sage exhorted men to think no thing, limit will and, consequently, free the "self" (I/1). Once you understand exactly what he meant, those rather terse instructions will become recognisable as a perfectly adequate exposition of the basic understanding which has come down to us over the millennia from many sources. The documents which follow will explain precisely what mystics mean when they deliver such terse messages.
The understanding will be comprehensively expressed in modern terminology. The only foreign term used will be the word "Nirvana" which will be used as a synonym for "Perfect Happiness". The rest of the exposition will be in plain English. This theory proposes a logical explanation of the basic mystical experience which has founded and empowered many religions. That kind of experience has been able to do such a thing because it deals with gaining access to the Common Human Goal -HAPPINESS. It deals with establishing a condition in the human brain which is quintessentially GOOD.