Nirvana is difficult to write about because it is only ever experienced by individuals. It is not a public performance, or a moment that can be shared socially. It doesn’t make news. No one understands someone else’s Nirvanic experience. At the same time, Nirvana is the field of gold we all share — the very ground and basis of our existence.

As if that weren’t enough, many people think of Nirvana as a rock band. Even those who have some inkling that it has vaguely to do with spirituality believe it to be a kind of spaced-out condominium in the sky, an Eldorado or Pure Land for the mystical. Few understand its central position in the lives of all of us.

It is certainly true that Nirvana has not been explained with any precision in the West: the terms “extinction” and “blown out” do little justice to the reality. It has also been regarded as a protected realm by a small clique of initiates, and by the high priests of the ancient mystery religions who regarded it as a proof of life after death.

Despite too the dismissive attitudes of orthodox science, “Nirvanic” experience is part of our empirical knowledge. It is not, however, observed by the five familiar physical senses, or by the mind, but by another means of knowing which I once called Nirvanoception.

Currently, this is a dark region for science, though near-death experiences and the theory of morphogenic fields are opening up this whole area to fresh inquiry.

The notion of a single “substance”, or ground, underlying all things is not new. The presocratic Greek philosopher, Thales, thought that all matter was composed of water. His later colleague, Anaximenes, suggested that air was a more likely candidate. In a purely material reality this seems absurd. But if we were able to see the world in the manner of extended still-frame photography, one picture every ten years, say, over a period of several million, even the most solid mountain range would appear to move and flow. In fact it would be indistinguishable from the sea.

Any being living at that frequency of thought would see rocks as water. It is a sobering idea that such beings would drink mountains. Water itself would be too volatile to register in such a slow-coach consciousness.

Next : The three modes of knowing.

Physicists claim that the cosmos behaves as if it were much heavier than it appears to be. They describe the bits they can’t see as “Dark Matter”.

There’s an ancient text by the Buddha in which he says that only one-quarter of the universe is made known to us, the rest is hidden. Science seems to be catching up.

Quantum physicists say that if you have twin particles and you change one of them, the other changes too, even if it’s on the other side of the universe. It makes them sound almost like magicians, or shamans. Their latest theory is called “M Theory”, the “M” standing for Magic and Mystery.

The Buddha, of course, assumed Dark Matter to be a kind of software or its mystical equivalent. Every time you wish for something, the “software” responds in an organic way and even tries to convert it into reality. His Enlightenment comprises gaining access to the “Dark Matter” of the universe.

Einstein mentioned the fact in his Relativity Theory that human observers affect the processes they’re observing. In other words they often see what they want to see. Take the human genome. These genes can only be seen by an electron microscope, which only shows what it’s been programmed to show. So, if we are set on finding “genes” we’ll find genes — and they might look like some fantasy picture by a splendid artist — a double helix, let’s say.

Physicists always look for complexity, that’s the way they’re made. So we have one dizzying set of particles after another, like the quark, which used to be soft cheese and is now a fundamental building block of the universe.

Once — like Einstein and the Quantum physicists — you start breaking down matter, the whole of science reveals itself as a game, or even the ancient quest for magic. The Buddha would have recognized the motivations behind these pursuits, proto-scientist that he was.

Andrew Cohen’s latest weekly email quote gives food for thought about the future in its relation to the present.

Most traditional spiritual practices tend to emphasize the present moment, since the spiritual dimension is said to be “outside time” and hence space.

However, time — which is inseparable from space — is a mind-creation within eternity. From the human point of view, time is a valid dimension of our limited experience. In that sense, we can surmise that the past and future are all contained within the present moment, albeit unseen by us.

Andrew gives his own take on this conundrum in his email:

In evolutionary spirituality, we are more interested in the future than we are in the present moment. Why? Because the present moment has already happened, so there is not much that we can do about it. We’ve already arrived there. But the future, which always exists in the next moment, is something we can actually impact.

Much of postmodern East-meets-West spirituality is focused on the present: “Be here now”; “Be in the moment,” we are told. And while that may bring some release and relief in the short term, in an evolutionary context, we discover that the present isn’t really where the action is. The action is in the future, because the future is something that we can actually get involved in creating. The future is something that we can take responsibility for in the most exciting way possible. When we begin to care about evolution, we feel a passion for the future that is all-consuming.

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Andrew Cohen

From the English Victorian novelist George Eliot :

We walk about “well-wadded with stupidity. … If we had but keen vision and feeling … it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

A very happy New Year to all our readers.