Aloka wrote:Shaswata_Panja wrote:You go into Nibbana every night and you donot get afraid then--in fact you enjoy it the most--then why will you be afraid when the real deal comes?
Deep dream less sleep is like Nibbana
No, Nibanna isn't like going to sleep or being in a coma. In my opinion its a peaceful and aware mind which is free of attachment and delusion.
This article "Nirvana Now" by Ajahn Sumedho might help....
http://www.thebuddhadharma.com/web-arch ... a-now.html
So Buddha is a peaceful and aware mind feee of attachment and delusion now? If I meditate on the Buddha for the next 60 years of my life, is there ven the fainitest chance of making contact with Him? Thervada says no as afar as I know ---Buddha has "crossed over"..He is not accessible to the normal minds in all the realms
Is there awareness in the final Paranibbana? (I am not talking the years of the last life spent in the Nibbana state)
If so who is experiencing this "awareness"? There is no self......and all the five skandhas that produced the "apparent" self are destroyed...So who exactly is aware of paranibbana?
The article is so so way off in the perspective of traditional Theravada Buddhism as taught by most diligent western Monks where to start?
Nirvana, says Ajahn Sumedho, is not some far off goal that can only be attained through years of effort. It is a state of being you can realize at any moment once you let go of grasping.
Whom are we kidding? Wow so why did Buddha leave home? Why did he meditate on and on? Why did he enforce strict celibacy for anybody who wanted to be in the Sangha? Why one needed his karma over millions of birth to ripen at the conducive moment to reach Nibbana? As much as this article has been dumbed down for Western Consensus Buddhists, the notion has always been there in all almost all Indian spiritual traditions that if you want to achieve the ultimate attainment of the said religious path, you need to have a hero like bravery..(Virya)
Another difficulty is that many Buddhists see nibbana (Sanskrit: nirvana) as something unobtainable—as so high and so remote that we’re not worthy enough to try for it.
no its not unobtainable, but to attain it you have to forsake everything else---everything--money,cars, above all sex, good and sumptous food all the time, attachment to comfort as well as security...you can find yourself on the streets one day at the level of a beggar (which is what actually the word bhikkhu,bhikshuk,bhikshu mean) ...may be you have to run off to the foothills of the Himalayas and subsist on fruits ...but you donot despair over that, in fact you are either detached towards or rejoice at adversity and go forward in your meditation practices or dhutanga practices.....There has been dhutanga practitioner arahants or forest arahants like Ajahn Chah,Ajhan Bua,Ajahn Mun,Mahashi Sayadaw and Buddhadasa Bhikkhu..has there really ever been a householder frequent sexing arahant since the time of the Buddha?
So nibbana is looked at as something that if you work hard, keep the sila (moral precepts), meditate diligently, become a monastic, devote your life to practice, then your reward might be that eventually you attain nibbana—even though you’re not sure what it is.
So moral precepts are not required?? Meditation is not required? You enter Nibbana by sexing,drugging,killing,lying all the way while listening to heavy rock music? You can be a wordly CEO of Playboy Magazine and have the Huge Heffner life and still enter Nibbana? you donot need to be a partially withdrawn from society, heavily self-restraing monk?
Wow I must have been reading the wrong Tipitaka then!!!
In meditation classes, people often start with a basic delusion that they never challenge: the idea that “I’m someone who grasps and has a lot of desires, and I have to practice in order to get rid of these desires and stop grasping and clinging to things. I shouldn’t cling to anything.” That’s often the position we start from. So we start our practice from this basis and, many times, the result is disillusionment and disappointment, because our practice is based on the grasping of an idea.
Eventually, we realize that no matter how much we try to get rid of desire and not grasp anything, no matter what we do—become a monk, an ascetic, sit for hours and hours, attend retreats over and over again, do all the things we believe will get rid of these grasping tendencies—we end up feeling disappointed because the basic delusion has never been recognized.
Isn't meditation the killer app of Buddhism?? Don't you go into meditation specifically to realize that you have no self eventhough you might have believed in an eternal/non-eternal self even just two minutes before the meditation practice?
So the problem of self/non-self that could not have been rectified by years and decades of meditation can be by just an "attitude" change?? We just have to chant there is no permanent non-changing self 20 times before each meditation session?
Awareness is not about making value judgments about our thoughts or emotions or actions or speech. Awareness is about knowing these things fully—that they are what they are, at this moment
knowing can only be done by the knower....and as long as there is the knower , there is the self and hence no Nibbana