Responding to Rebecca’s Comment on Nirvana with some quotes from T Lobsang Rampa and Dr. Nurbakhsh

Hey Friends,

Rebecca left me a cool comment that got me thinking, and if you talk to my wife that doesnt happen too often. lol Here is what I came up with after a week of contemplating these followign words

Hmmmm I thought peace meant clarity of mind, nirvana being enlightenment, I imagine a hue around a person that has energy that transforms your spirit, with love. I know nothing really, but I was listening to ( obviously) just the beginng of the cd Path to Tranquility, and the concepts of attachments somehow being the root cause of all suffering, therefore being comfortable in uncertainty and impermanence is a goal in meditation?

What do you guys think ? There is something not only potent but pertinent there.  I have heard many definitions of nirvana, but in my own mind I have come to think of it as a prerequisite to starting down the path to attainment. Only when we reach a point of balance, were we are totally sincere with ourselves and gotten over ourselves does the path start. In other words when we dont avoid and face head all all the conflicts, resentments,  we have carried for so long in a way that we can see then for what they are and subsequently free ourselves from them, then we can procede to the extinguish our will in the Grander will. Check out these words from T Lobsang Rampa’s The Chapters of Life

Nirvana is a word or concept which is usually quite beyond Western comprehension.  Probably Nirvana is the most misunderstood of Eastern terms.  People in the West think that the good Easterner just wants to sit and smell the flowers—in this case the lotus—and make himself into nothingness.  It is often thought that Nirvana is total extinction of life leading to a state where nothing exists, where nothing is, where there is no memory, no action, nothing.  Nirvana is too frequently regarded by the Westerners as an example of the perfect vacuum, and they shun Eastern religions which they think, in their ignorance, lead to a state of complete and utter nothingness.

This is absolutely incorrect, Nirvana does not mean a Heaven or the opposite, it does not mean a place where there is nothing whatever-not even a place!  It is not possible to exist in a state of nothingness, and yet again, the average Westerner thinks that the Adept, or Master, or Guru, or Enlightened One, strives to attain to a state where he forgets everything which he has striven to learn and in which he no longer knows anything, no longer feels anything, no longer exists.  This is ridiculous!  This is fantastically absurd, and one would have thought that ordinary commonsense would have indicated that there is no possibility of existing where nothing can exist.

The Adepts, the Guru, the Master or Enlightened One, or whatever you like to call him, seeks Nirvana.  Nirvana is not the negation of everything as is usually supposed, it is instead the elimination of those desires which are wrong, it is the elimination of scandal, the elimination of perjury, greed, lust, and other faults.  The Enlightened Ones strive so that they are empty of evil emotion, and thus their soul can rise within them and leave the body at will.

I really think that nirvana ia point of departure, its is a harmonious  point or moment of unified being from which we can start to lose ourselves, our lesser selves, in the greater. Dr Nurbakhsh the late Master of the Nimatullahi order has said

From what has been said it is clear that the program of the spiritual Path begins with the liquidating of the psychic ‘knots’, complexes and passional tendencies of the disciple, so that he attains after a certain period psychic equilibrium and moral health. The second stage of the Tariqa is the disciple’s assumption of the spiritual virtues or becoming embellished with the Divine Qualities and Attributes.

I am really curious what you all think, and having a dialogue with anyone interested.

Dave