“One way not to get into the state of nirvana is to become absorbed in the culture. The cycle of births and deaths that describes samsara, what nirvana saves you from, is the meaningless, thoughtless, standard life: unconscious consumption of material things, assumption of thoughtless values, diminished appreciation of intelligence and wisdom, the pursuit of mere entertainment instead of pleasure, disregard of meaning and purpose, the avoidance of fate and community. Nirvana is withdrawal from this mindless and immature escape from honest living.
Related Quotes
Countless spiritual leaders make this clear in their writing and in the process agree with modern science. Swami Muktananda says:
Man goes to great trouble to acquire knowledge of the material world. He learns all branches of mundane science. He explores the earth, and even travels to the moon. But he never tries to find out what exists within himself. Because he is unaware of the enormous power hidden within him, he looks for support in the outer world. Because he does not know the boundless happiness that lies inside his heart, he looks for satisfaction in mundane activities and pleasures. Because he does not experience the inner love, he looks for love from others.
The truth is that the inner Self of every human being is supremely great and supremely loveable. Everything is contained in the Self. The creative power of this entire universe lies inside every one of us. The divine principle that creates and sustains this world pulsates within us as our own Self. it scintillates in the heart and shines through all our senses. If, instead of pursuing knowledge of the outer world, we were to pursue inner knowledge, we would discover that effulgence very soon.
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and only if comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.
Tarrant paints a vivid picture of how challenging this can be. In one of my favorite
passages, he puts it like this:
If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.
Winnicott, and here the parallels to the Buddha are difficult to ignore, believed that “being” precedes “doing,” and that its recovery is the route back to our original nature. He felt that “being” is everyone’s birthright, but that it is something of a lost art, that compliance often robs people of it, that creativity depends on it, and that therapy can serve as a means of rediscovering it if a therapist is sensitive to the need and does not let their male element, in the form of intrusive interpretations, however erudite they may be, interfere. The Buddha, to my mind, thought along the same lines. He said that our original nature is obscured by our cravings and our frustrations, that the ego that emerges in healthy emotional development, while necessary for some things, also blocks us from our underlying and inherent freedom. “Be here now,” my old friend Ram Dass used to proclaim, making it sound as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
If you can’t think, reflect, and actively imagine your life into existence, you are condemned to a half-life of unconsciousness. You are mired in facts and information and opinions and slogans. In effect, you are imprisoned in the stale notions of a dead society.