Here is an extract from my forthcoming book, Nirvaneans, to be published Q1 2006 :

Awakening to Nirvana is like visiting the Common Room at college. The isolation of our private quarters is left behind and nothing we experience is “ours” in any rational sense. We are just one of the crowd here. And yet, everything is available to us without question; we are already enrolled in the club. When we leave, as we must, we should not imagine we now possess the Common Room. It exists outside our sphere of influence. Our relationship with it can never be personal. The same is true of Nirvana. As the poet Rumi wrote: “Inside the Great Mystery that is, we don’t really own anything.”

All mystics speak the same language and come from the same country. That surprisingly modern sentiment was the product of the French thinker Saint-Martin (1743–1803) the “unknown philosopher”. It is certainly true that Nirvaneans have two traits in common: they rarely write about anything else, and, whatever the age of a text, the same ideas and experiences recur.

What then is a Nirvanic experience? It is a realization of the “ground of being” from which all life and supporting matter is a florescence. Curiously, it is a profoundly reassuring event, setting one’s mind at rest about all manner of existential hang-ups the flesh is heir to. It can come as a “showing” ~ or foretaste ~ or as a settled and established mode of being: Cosmosity.