What is Nirvana—
by Donna Quesada: Nirvana is one of those words that has been taken out of its original context so often and used in so many ways, that it’s not always clear what it really means.
Literally, Nirvana means to extinguish, or to “blow out,” as in blowing out a flame. But… to extinguish what? The flame of discontent within us. Nirvana is the third part of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: to let go… because as Buddha shows us in the first two parts, it is the grasping and continual reaching for more, that causes our self-inflicted misery.
Since Nirvana represents the cessation of suffering, many people think of it as pleasure… but it would be better and more accurate to see it as going beyond the duality of pleasure and pain, altogether.
Because as long as we try to have pleasure at the expense of pain, we will keep ourselves trapped, as we now have an agenda. But it’s not a realistic one, since life includes both pleasure and pain. We laugh and we cry. We fall in love, but we will also experience break-ups. We make friends. But at some point, those we love will die. We hope to feel good. But we won’t feel good all the time. And so, our only reasonable hope is to accept painful times as a normal part of life. That’s what I mean by going beyond the duality of pleasure and pain.
Buddha’s teachings have a logic to them: Since clinging and grasping is the cause of our suffering, then logically, accepting what we have, here and now, is where our solace lies. As I show in my stories called The 12 Houses of Suffering, our inner agendas and insistence that things be different, is what gets extinguished, the moment we replace those desires with acceptance.
How About When Resistance is Necessary?—
But I understand… it’s one thing to accept aging, or to accept that your spouse will forget to do something, but it’s quite another to accept things that are truly unacceptable, like injustice on a global level, for example.
To that I say, fight the injustices. But there’s a but. What does your inner state look like while you’re fighting? As I quoted George Harrison saying, in our recent dream interview… The world is a reflection of our own consciousness. So, the first step in any successful protest, or resistance movement of any kind, is the assurance that we, ourselves, are practicing conscious listening, conscious communication, and making sure that our actions and reactions are equally conscious.
It’s like preparing for a sports competition… it takes personal commitment to habitually check in with ourselves… to be aware of our state of mind… to ask ourselves “Are my words coming from anger and ego, or from compassion?” If we orient our words and actions around compassion, we’ll be more effective anyway, since people are more likely to hear what we have to say. When we scream and thrash about, people tend to shut us out and dismiss our message.
To be more specific, when a political injustice is affecting the well-being of people, animals, and/or the environment, there is reason to join together and make our voices heard, but even the best that the human race had to offer, like Gandhi and King, insisted on organized non-violent, conscious resistance.
