Blavatsky
Original sense
Nirvana is the extinction of the separate, personal self in the unconditioned — not a holiday, not a bliss-state you visit in meditation, and not annihilation of spirit. She argued with scholars who translated it as nothingness, and with devotees who wanted it to be a heaven. The Voice of the Silence also teaches a further choice: the Bodhisattva who refuses Nirvana for the sake of the world.
Nirvâna is the blowing out of the flame of personal life… not annihilation, but absolute existence.
The ‘Great Renunciation’ — rejecting personal Nirvana to remain a helper of humanity — is one of her most influential ethical ideas, later echoed in Mahayana-inflected New Age without the name.