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Hello Lal,

I have read many articles on this site trying to see what you believe nibbana to be. Of course, as you mention, there are different levels of nibbana described in the suttas, and different ways of talking about it. You often talk about it as a calming or cooling down of the passions, which is certainly accurate, but also certainly incomplete. In some of your writings you say that we can’t really say much about what nibbana is like, because it is so far beyond any worldly experience. And in one place you even say that one arrives at nibbana at the 8th jhana.

In my experience, the most unique and characteristic feature of “reality as it is” (nibbana) is the unbinding of the sounds, sights, and other sensory flows. In fact, as you know, nibbana is defined as unbinding in many suttas. The confusion is that some people seem to think it is the mind which unbinds *from* sense streams, whereas in fact what Buddha tries to explain in Ud. 1.10 (Bahiya sutta) is that the sounds, the sights, and so forth, are actually discrete, self-known flows which do not form one united experience. When there is no binding up of these sensory flows, then of course there can be no sense of self either. If we look at neuroscience, this understanding already exists–there are infinite sensations which the thalamus mostly ignores and then it binds up the few which it deems important and sends them on for further processing and ultimately for identification and story-making.

This is the most amazing characteristic of nibbana because it is something that an ordinary wordling simply cannot imagine. In fact, it may be the only thing they cannot imagine, even with ego death experiences from meditation or high doses of psychedelic drugs like ayahuasca.

I have had success getting people to dissolve into nibbana by explaining just these basic teachings:

1: Everything happens automatically due to conditions
2: The unification of senses is a fabrication

A simple way to experience nibbana is just to focus on sensations in your body, for example, your hands. Let the fingers sense themselves without making it into One sensory experience. If you are ripe for this, you should start feeling a little bit of unbinding pretty quickly, which can be scary if you aren’t ready for it. It does take some practice to allow it to complete, but when the unbinding completes, the true perfection of nibbana (which is indeed, the actual reality right here, right now, and always has been) is self-known without a knower.

With metta,
nobody (AKA Joel Shipowo-Rosenblum per government records)

[Lal]

Hello,

You wrote, ” In some of your writings you say that we can’t really say much about what nibbana is like, because it is so far beyond any worldly experience. And in one place you even say that one arrives at nibbana at the 8th jhana.”

That is not true. Please provide the link to my post and quote from it.

One attains Nibbana when all defilements (lobha, dosa, moha) are removed from one’s mind. That is Arahanthood.
– But Nibbana becomes complete when that Arahant dies and is not reborn in any of the 31 realms in this world. That is “Parinibbana” or “full Nibbana” for an Arahant.

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