Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Prev NEXT. Science Vs. Extrasensory Perceptions. Life is suffering. This suffering is caused by ignorance of the true nature of the universe. You can only end this suffering by overcoming ignorance and attachment to earthly things. You can overcome ignorance and attachment by following the Noble Eightfold Path.
He scrutinized me, looking for a reaction. I just gave you a pretty tricky answer. Because I define this stuff pretty narrowly. Mike hastened to disabuse me of various myths about enlightenment. Instead, it is a state that incorporates all human emotions and qualities: love and hate, desire and fear, wisdom and ignorance.
Enlightenment is profoundly satisfying and transformative, but the mind remains in many respects unchanged. It's the same stuff; it doesn't shift that. Far from fostering humility and ego-death, Mike added, mystical experiences can lead to narcissism. He's God! Have you struggled with that problem yourself? When he first began having mystical experiences in , he was on top of the world.
You just have different insights. Been in it ever since. Contrary to what some gurus claim, enlightenment does not give you answers to scientific riddles such as the origin of the universe, or of conscious life, Mike said.
When I asked if he intuits a divine intelligence underlying reality, he shook his head. He sees ultimate reality as timeless, featureless, Godless, and yet he occasionally feels that he and all of us are part of a larger plan. Evidently dissatisfied with his defense of enlightenment—or sensing that I was dissatisfied with it--Mike tried again. He has an increased ability to concentrate since he became enlightened, he assured me, and a greater intuitive sense about people.
A few days later, I went running in the woods behind my house. After I arrived huffing and puffing at the top of a hill, I flopped down on a patch of moss to catch my breath. Looking up through entangled branches at the sky, I ruminated over my lunch with Mike. What impressed me most about him was that he somehow managed to be likably unpretentious, even humble, while claiming to be enlightened. But if enlightenment transforms us so little, why work so hard to attain it? I also brooded over the suggestion of Mike and other mystics that when you see things clearly, you discover a void at the heart of reality.
Does seeing life as an illusion make accepting death easier? I must be missing something. I was still flat on my back when a shadow intruded on my field of vision. A vulture, wingtips splayed, glided noiselessly toward me. As it passed over me, just above the treetops, it cocked its wizened head and eyed me.
Can Buddhism Save Us? Why I Don't Dig Buddhism. Cybertherapy, placebos and the dodo effect: Why psychotherapies never get better. Meta-Post: Horgan Posts on Psychedelics. Tripping on Peyote in Navajo Nation. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. But nirvana is also a profound psychological goal.
The concept of nirvana occupies a unique place in Buddhist thought — not just because it represents the culmination of the Buddhist path, and not just because it represents the nicest imaginable place to be, but also because of the way it straddles the two sides of Buddhism. There is, on the one hand, the naturalistic side of Buddhism, featuring ideas that would fit easily into a college psychology or philosophy course: ideas about the nature of the mind, about the causes of human suffering, and about how we should live our lives in light of these realities.
And then there is the more exotic side of Buddhism, which features supernatural, or at least mindbendingly metaphysical, ideas. These ideas include various cosmic realms and deities, but the most famous such idea is reincarnation — or, as Buddhists more commonly call it, rebirth. Nirvana certainly has its exotic aspects. Attaining it, according to traditional Buddhist belief, means being liberated from an otherwise endless cycle of rebirth.
But this story about nirvana — the story about how exactly you find the escape hatch from recurring life cycles — leads seamlessly to a more naturalistic story about nirvana, a claim about the mechanics of suffering and of contentment. And in the process of following one story to the other, you can see mindfulness meditation in a new light, a light that emphasises how much more than casually therapeutic it can be; a light that shows it to be one of the most radical undertakings imaginable, a rebellion against the very laws that govern human existence.
For years I heard this strange-sounding term and wondered what it meant, but I figured that understanding it without actually reaching nirvana was probably hopeless and, for my purposes, not all that important. It turns out that I was wrong on both counts. Which makes sense. And you would be right!
But what does that mean? The answer to that question involves one of the most important terms in Buddhism: paticca-samuppada. It is a term that has numerous applications and numerous translations. In its most generic sense, conditioned arising refers to the basic idea of causality: out of certain conditions some things arise; out of other conditions other things arise. But the term is also used to refer to a specific sequence of causal links — a series of 12 conditions, one giving rise to the next — that are said to enslave human beings in the cycle of endless rebirth.
It is this chain of causal links that nirvana is said to break. But the part of the sequence that concerns us, the part that puts a finer point on nirvana in both the exotic and the naturalistic senses of the term, is reasonably clear. Or, as it is put more formally in ancient texts that spell out the 12 causal links: through the condition of the sensory faculties, contact arises.
And here is the next link: through the condition of contact, feelings arise — which makes sense, because, in the Buddhist view and in the view of many modern psychologists , the things we perceive through our sense organs tend to come with feelings attached, however subtle the feelings. Here is how Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist monk who has translated reams of ancient Buddhist texts into English, put it in a series of lectures he recorded in This is where we start to segue from the exotic to the naturalistic.
The liberation that Bhikkhu Bodhi is talking about is, in the first instance, a liberation from perpetual rebirth, a liberation that will fully kick in at the end of this life cycle. But it is also liberation in the here and now, liberation from the suffering that tanha brings — liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and to escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.
These two senses of liberation — liberation from rebirth, and liberation from suffering — are reflected in the Buddhist idea that there are two kinds of nirvana. As soon as you are liberated in the here and now, you enter a nirvana you can enjoy for the rest of your life. If you observe your feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can escape the control. Mindfulness involves, among other things, cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them.
So, regardless of how exotic or how practical your aspirations — whether you believe in a cycle of rebirth and want to escape it, or just want to attain complete liberation in the here and now, or for that matter just hope to find partial liberation in the here and now — a key tool in the quest for liberation, mindfulness, remains the same.
And, accordingly, some of the basic terminology remains the same. The things in your environment — the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos — are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behaviour, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. All of this points to the sense in which the ancient Buddhist appraisal of the human condition is very modern in spirit. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it.
It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control are the feelings that arise in response to the input.
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