seth tapper:
I kind of disagree with this way of looking at Nirvana. It is always nirvana, no matter whether I think things are becoming or not. I cannot create meaning with my mind and so whatever spasms it may go through are irrelevant to the nature of reality/This.
It is pretty fucking hard to accept that my life story, my mind and all the things that I know are nonsense. Once I do, even for a little while, everything that arises just makes me laugh. It is all and has always been a self delusion fiesta in this skull.
Being as "nirvana" is just a word, one which we can't define in any case, perhaps we disagree, perhaps we don't. I don't know; you may be right.
If we want to advance the discussion, however, let us take a look at the word. If nirvana refers to a state where attachment to desires is "extinguished," then if you still have attachments, you do not have the state of nirvana. This is the sense in which dogen uses the term. Nirvana as the result of enlightenment. Continuous enlightenment, moment by moment by moment results in the constant bliss of nirvana ("the cessation of perception" and thus of the perceiver). There is no permanence to this, of course. You must make the effort every moment, you need to be mindful, awake. When you find yourself attached, you make the effort, and return to Insight; the intervals of attachment grow smaller, nirvana comes more often. Even great insight has difficulty wth this extremely materialistic culture. It is really hard to be at peace among the shouting and confusion, and if we don't change our ways, we don't stay in nirvana much.
Psychologists and cognitive scientists have long theorized that the mind is "blissful" in its basal state. Sages have said this for millennia. Arising instincts cause us to want to resolve the pain of the pressure of survival and reproductive instincts. We try to arrange our world to satisfy our instincts, and when this doesn't work, we get frustrated and unhappy. We keep trying though, being conditioned to do so.
We find that we can change ourselves, our attitudes toward life and others, and relieve these pressures a great deal, if not completely. Like any animal, we are creatures of habit; it is painful to change our habits, but once changed, they stay changed with the same avidity. Training the mind in the buddha way is often likened to training an animal, which of course it is. The training is in "mindfulness," in being awake, the assumption being that the organism will self-organize correctly and harmoniously if the understanding is good. (Garbage in, garbage out.)
There are a couple of important things to keep in mind, regardless of your view or practice. One is the pragmatic value of having a way of life which involves making efforts. The dhamma frowns on "sloth and torpor." The buddha insists on keeping the intention at all times of making energetic progress. The other is the emphasis on doing the right thing, being good, loving, kind, and so forth. No compromises with evil.
Since it is a given that "right" understanding leads to right behavior and action, no action as such is required. We don't have to "do good" or perform actions, as long as we understand and do the best we can. These means that the method in the dhamma is to simply observe, "the body as body, the mind as mind," and so on. Careful observation and the energetic intention to bring into practice our insights is sufficent.
We "do the best we can" by nature, so it is possible to adopt the view that we need make no effort. Unfortunately, our culture will make a determined effort to get us to care again, to take it seriously, to doubt, feel guilt, and submit to the unworthy. To get us to accept the delusion that it is ok to indulge oursleves, that it will make us happy this time, though it never has before. To attach us to the values and ideas of the pacified herd - dope, "religion, sex and tv" - (lennon), which promote and maintain the status quo, so desperately important to those who think they have it made. Mass media inflame desire until it is all we can think about and we are constantly dissatisfied; and all their remedies only inflame further, like drinking seawater when you are thirsty. With all this negativity, it takes great effort to maintain a nirvana-like detachment from the delusion that any of our thoughts and concepts "matter." We're all making this effort, as best we can - quite creditably, in my view.
There is no doubt you are enlightened, brother, letting go the question of whether this is nirvana or not. I have no concern about telling you how it is. The concern is with the backsliding you complain about. I honor you for admitting it; along with the arrow in the chest, it is a universal problem, no matter how enlightened we make ourselves sound. (We simply don't have the cultural background and long years of study and meditation to be otherwise; yet.) If we can help others with it, it is because we have been there so often ourselves. If we can help others, it helps us.
There are 80,000 dharma doors. Probably more: one for each dharma seeker. No one can tell you how to go, but we can help by sharing and understanding. Most people really don't want to wake up, so it can be painful and troublesome to point out what seems alarming to them at first. That's why sangha is so important. We can talk to each other without offense, I hope.
This in mind, while you are enlightened, you are still striving for "every minute zen" - there is a story in the reps collection by that name, about a zen master who couldn't remember where he had left his umbrella and realized he needed more work on being present all the time. Many of us are there, working on constancy of insight. It is not something to achieve "someday," the effort at constancy takes place right now, this moment, every moment. The thought that "the cessation of becoming is nirvana" arises; it passes away; it arises, it passes away; arises, passes away.
It is not that such constancy is not effortless in itself. It is that we are conditioned otherwise, and breaking those habits, learned at mother's knee and cemented in, takes wakefulness, concentration and effort, all the time. It may be different for other cultures and in their scriptures, but we are lazy, entitled, overfed and kept constantly inflamed with desire. It takes a lot of real effort to try to dig out of such a deep hole. The lazy ego tells us to relax, no worries, everything takes care of itself: go back to sleep. Rule of thumb, if it wakes us up, it is good for us - if you think about it, this includes sufferings and irritations; especially them. Satisfaction puts us to sleep. If we achieve happiness, we want to stop right there, but of course we cannot, everything is impermanent. And waking up is always a bit of a shock, like a bucket of cold water.
Even if we are doing our best, we can do better in the future, after growing in understanding by what we are learning now; or, in taoist terms, growing through unlearning our false conditioning and pointless knowledge. Moment to moment - I keep emphasizing this because of your resistance to "change." Perhaps I don't understand your view, which perhaps only appears to deny change. I would be happy to have you explain it to me once more, in more detail.
terry
from anthony demello's "awareness: the perils and opportunities of reality":
The first thing we need is clarity of perception. One reason we don’t perceive people clearly is evident—our emotions get in the way, our conditioning, our likes and dislikes. We’ve got to grapple with that fact. But we’ve got to grapple with something much more fundamental—with our ideas, with our conclusions, with our concepts. Believe it or not, every concept that was meant to help us get in touch with reality ends up by being a barrier to getting in touch with reality, because sooner or later we forget that the words are not the thing. The concept is not the same as the reality. They’re different. That’s why I said to you earlier that the final barrier to finding God is the word “God” itself and the concept of God. It gets in the way if you’re not careful. It was meant to be a help; it can be a help but it can also be a barrier.
