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If the body is an object then what feels good during nirvana?
Jeffrey
Veteran
The self is not the body. Thus one might say that the body is an object, dependently originated. But then what body is it that feels nirvana? Nirvana probably feels good, thus there must be a body that feels the bliss.
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Nibbana is like being under heavy sedation but completely alert, aware and awake.
Nibbana transcends all feeling.
Nibbana just... is.
I think that's right!
Ok, we tend to think that bliss is a phenomenon, but what if bliss is the absence of phenomena? This doesn't mean nothingness.
When there's no sense of 'there', there's no 'here', and nothing that can be pointed to as feeling. Yet life goes on exquisitely.
But an enlightened Mind feels a unique, rarified and absolutely perfect, impenetrable and equillibrated bliss.
It's indescribable - yet perfect in its balance.
I think I am just labeling my experience differently from you @Federica. For example I just sighed and it felt good in my body. A lot of people feel emotions in the body and I am one of them. I think of the Meijer-Briggs system as I am a sensing rather than intuitive person.
I think it would be a lot easier to answer the question what nirvana is not, and not what nirvana is. For example we know that nirvana is not nothingness or annihilation of self, since Dharma teaches us that a self does not exist in the first place and hence cannot be annihilated.
The Buddha's words even talk of how hard it is to see, realize and understand nirvana.
“It occurred to me, monks, that this dhamma I have realized is deep, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful and sublime, beyond mere reasoning, subtle and intelligible to the wise. . . Hard, too, is it to see this calming of all conditioned things, the giving up of all substance of becoming, the extinction of craving, dispassion, cessation, nibbana. And if I were to teach the dhamma and others were not to understand me that would be weariness, a vexation for me.”
But just to look right now at what you're experiencing, your sensation, - can you call it a thing? If sensation is a thing, where is it?
In one sense, we sense, but in another sense, experience doesn't fit in the world of objects.
And it's understanding this on a deep level that is bliss, i.e. no clinging because nothing to cling to, hence no sensation.
But that doesn't mean no life; the previous sentence is for the logical mind, this sentence is for the heart.
A part of me believes that nobody except one that has transcended time will see nirvana until we all see it. If there is no true seperation, how can nirvana be fully realised before all aspects realise nirvana?
This body you speak of in absolute terms could be all bodies. The water which is also the waves.
This may sound silly to some but when the conditions are just right and I'm in the mind of it, it seems like I can feel the wind flowing through the trees from a perspective of neither an observer or the observed.
I feel there must be such a thing as "all" because there is no such thing as "nothing", nor could there ever have been.
Is it that we only find how bliss is felt perplexing because we're thinking about it - if we were as interested in any other felt phenomena, might we find it equally difficult to define?
exclaims: "Nibbana is happiness, friend; Nibbana is happiness,
indeed!" The monk Udayi then asked: "How can there be
happiness when there is no feeling?" The venerable Sariputta
replied: "Just this is happiness, friend, that therein there is
no feeling."
P.s. Buddha describes nirvana (cessation) as the cessation of craving, aggresion, and delusion. Someone who achieves the nirvana with remainder has ceased the three poisons but as he is still alive, he is capable of perceiving pleasant, unpleasant or neutral sensations. Such a liberated being when going post-mortem enters into nirvana without remainder where even body and mind ceases. Also when a practitioner attains to sublime states like the cessation of perception and feeling (nirodha samapatti) which is also a kind of nirvana, there is no feelings, thoughts or sensations at all. Such a state however is temporary.
At no time however is nirvana (cessation) considered to be a feeling.
Nirvana is the cessation of all conditions, so the definition of Nirvana is - 'Nirvana is.'.
Why must it fit? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
It is important to let go of the need to find philosophical truths about the world of objects. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.072.than.html No one 'has' it. It's the way things are for all beings. Conventionally, I could say the thinking mind is aware of its nature and reacts accordingly. And that being so it's so beautiful you might weep for joy, or thank God, except there's no need, nor a need not to. Just breathing, seeing, walking, talking, even typing, are worship, communion, affirmation, life.
Realising this is a shift in perception, not something which can be precisely explained, because the moment you use words, you are talking about objects which can be compared through analysis of qualities. There is no quality here, no object, because there is nothing to compare it with. Even the sense of 'it' is a mistake. No inside, no outside. No Thing.
The mistake is in using objective, physical conventions to describe experience, which is not physical, it is in another category, or rather it transcends notions of category.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously
Saying that an idea 'is green' is no more ridiculous than saying a perception of sound 'lasts a long time'. The latter is simply more useful in the conventional world, but it is still a fiction. http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.it/2008/01/ajahn-amaro-on-non-duality-and.html
It is all mind-wrought. Sighing is felt in the body, but sighing begins in the mind.
The only reason your body feels good, is because your mind has decided that it feels good.
that is where you appraise good or bad. In the mind.
Your body has reacted n a specific way to an action generated by your mind.
Felling in the body is as a result of a mind-sent reaction.
Are you saying that you can't answer these questions? Again, that's cool if you can't or don't want to. I don't see how this is relevant to the questions I'm asking. In any case, you're the one putting experience into one category, or rather no category, and objects in another.
I'll add a Buddhist clue for you though, which is that emptiness is form, and vice versa. This example shows the distinction between syntax and semantics, PrairieGhost. The latter can simply be more meaningful, just like calling it a fiction is meaningful to you.
Experience is not an object, that is why it does not fit into the world of objects. There is no other world for it to fit into, thus it is meaningless to try to define it. The aim in attempts to talk about experience is soteriological, not ontological. I prefer 'useful', or 'skillful'. Yes. If this exchange is not useful to you, then it's quite possible for you to pick at my logic. But the idea was never to make perfectly airtight statements, it was to point to suchness. Proving myself correct to you/winning debates is not the reason I'm writing, so I answer your questions at the same time as including what I hope will be useful to readers. I was helped greatly in my practice by studying forums like this one.
Anyway, to me it's meaningless to say that experience doesn't fit in the world of objects or anywhere else. It seems to only reify it as a separate something or other. In truth you're offering an odd mixture of both. I suggest that you put some effort into studying the difference between meaning and logic, or just study both subjects further. And you point to suchness by offering claims like "experience is not an object" and it "doesn't fit in the world of objects," etc. Okay, good luck with that.
Doesn't this presuppose that nirvana is a feeling of the body?
i.e. there are a lot of assumptions within this opening entry.
Is that not speculation, in Buddhist terms?
Best wishes,
Abu
Just pointing out the other option here.
Abu
If the voices are right I am the worst emotional vampire, er something like that? Yet even so this turmoil is just a feeling in my body which if I touch into feels quite good because the energy of being diablo energizes one.
(the voices are a different discussion but my point is in the next paragraph)
My point is that feeling the body can help us feel better. It's the mind that says the body is the self. The body doesn't say anything. It is just the good earth.
But this isn't really a view and it isn't really explainable in words. It causes these words, they express but do not define.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Sermon
I definitely feel the bliss of nirvana is unsurpassable. I just wondered how there could be a hierarchy of feelings. I think in nirvana there is no comparison of one state to another?
I guess it would have to be when we are with feelings in and of themselves. So what you feel are just "feelings" in a sense, and you are not attached to those feelings. There would only be a hierarchy if you latch on. I'm not sure what nirvana is, I just know I'd like to get there one of these days.