To proceed with the statement of the doctrine of transmigration.  The climax of the transmigrations is Nirvana or extinction of the individual soul, according to the Buddhist, and union with or absorption into Deity, according to the Hindu.[111] Buddhism has gone from the land of its birth, as Christianity and even Judaism from Palestine, and I pass from the Buddhist doctrine.  The Hindu climax, of absorption into Deity, is reached when by self-mastery personal desire is gone, and by profound contemplation upon Deity a pure-bred soul has lost the consciousness of separation from Deity.  The distinction between I and the great Thou has vanished; the One is present in the mind not as an objective thought, but by a transformation of the consciousness itself.  The words of Hindus themselves in the Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion are:  The human soul (the Jivatmic seed) “grows into self-conscious Deity.”  Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa’s growing into self-conscious Deity:  “Every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness came upon him....  He then spoke of himself as being able to do and know everything....  He would speak of himself as the same soul that had been born before as Rama, as Krishna, as Jesus, or as Buddha, born again as Ramkrishna....  He would say he was ... an incarnation of God Himself.”  Again Swami Vivekananda tells us:  “From time to time Ramkrishna would entirely lose his own identity, so much so as to appropriate to himself the offerings brought for the goddess” (to the temple in which he officiated).  “Sometimes forgetting to adorn the image, he would adorn himself with the flowers."[112] Transmigration is not necessarily bound up with the pantheistic view of the world, but in Hinduism, transmigration is only a ladder towards the realisation of the One.

[Sidenote:  Contrasts—­“Born again” and a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent.]

[Sidenote:  Heaven and Hell not necessary ideas in Transmigration.]

Radical differences from Christian thought emerge.  In the Hindu conception, the acme is reached only by a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent; for the common multitude there is no gospel of being born again in Christ, no guiding hand like that of Our Lord towards the Father’s presence.  The upward path, according to the Hindu idea, is the path of philosophical knowledge and of meditation, not the power of union with Jesus Christ to make us sons of God.  Most striking difference perhaps of all—­in the Hindu philosophical system there is no place for even the conceptions of heaven and hell except as temporary halting-places between two incarnations of the soul, which practical necessity requires.  For the soul, this world is the plane of existence; union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the ground no longer conscious of his self.  “The beatific vision of Hinduism,” says a recent pro-Hindu writer, “is to be relegated to no distant future."[113] Heaven and Hell are mocked at as absurdities by the new sect of the [=A]ryas in the United Provinces and the Punjab, who retain the doctrine of transmigration.[114]