Discussing God is not the best use of our energy. If we touch the Holy Spirit, we touch God not as a concept but as a living reality. In Buddhism, we never talk about nirvana, because nirvana means the extinction of all notions, concepts, and speech. We practice by touching mindfulness in ourselves through sitting meditation, walking meditation, mindful eating, and so on.

Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas — joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties.

When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering.

The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva - the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world.

Nirvana is a state of pure blissful knowledge... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two "I"'s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents — their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further... when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.

"But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything — -including "my" thoughts and actions — -were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites."

Nibbana of the Buddhists is neither a mere nothingness nor a state of annihilation, but what it is no words can adequately express. Nibbana is a Dhamma which is "unborn, unoriginated, uncreated and unformed." Hence, it is eternal (Dhuva), desirable (Subha), and happy (Sukha). In Nibbana nothing is "eternalized," nor is anything "annihilated," besides suffering. According to the Books references are made to Nibbana as Sopadisesa and Anupadisesa. These, in fact, are not two kinds of Nibbana, but the one single Nibbana, receiving its name according to the way it is experienced before and after death. Nibbana is not situated in any place nor is it a sort of heaven where a transcendental ego resides. It is a state which is dependent upon this body itself. It is an attainment (Dhamma) which is within the reach of all. Nibbana is a supramundane state attainable even in this present life. Buddhism does not state that this ultimate goal could be reached only in a life beyond. Here lies the chief difference between the Buddhist conception of Nibbana and the non-Buddhist conception of an eternal heaven attainable only after death or a union with a God or Divine Essence in an after-life.

According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realise that there is no meaning, and thus be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena.

We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. The basic teaching of Buddhism is the teaching of transiency, change. That everything changes is the basic truth of each existence. When we realize the everlasting truth of “everything changes” and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.

Nirvana is the overcoming of attachment.

The Dhammapada, a collection of sayings of the Buddha, begins: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts.” This is, in effect, the same statement that opens St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things were made by him (the Word), and without him was not anything made that was made.” By thoughts, or mental words, we distinguish or “make” things. Without thoughts, there are no “things”; there is just undefined reality.

The Vedanta teaches that Nirvana can be attained here and now, that we do not have to wait for death to reach it. Nirvana is the realization of the Self; and after having once known that, if only for an instant, never again can one be deluded by the mirage of personality.

But if we were to realize that we are, as it were, all action, all deed — the doer vanishes, and with it vanishes this sense of man as something separate, something cut off, walled away from the rest of the world by his skin. When that realization comes about; when, in other words, our own separateness disappears, we have what the Buddha called nirvana

Nirvana is the way of life which ensues when clutching at life has come to an end.

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.