Christina, Jake, and John warmly welcome you to Demystifying Nirvana and explain how this journey will unfold.

Welcome to Demystifying Nirvana

Throughout this course, you'll find the text of each video beneath the talk. You don't need to read these, but they may pull out key ideas and exercises for reference. These materials will be collected for download in the unit's workbook.

Nirvana is to be realized

Nirvāna (or nibbāna in the language of the early Buddhist texts) is at the heart of the Buddha's teaching. It's about waking up. It's about profound understanding. It's about cultivating an unshakable deliverance of the heart. It is the third of the ennobling truths. Yet this possibility of awakening, of nirvāna, so central to the Buddha's teaching, is rarely spoken about. It's curious why this might be so. Do people feel that it's an impossible goal? Do we feel that it's inaccessible? That we're not worthy? That this is something reserved for an elite few? 

In this program, we would like to unpack this word, this understanding. What did the Buddha mean, and is it merely on some distant horizon, or is it something possible for each of us?

This was the Buddha's message: that every human being, every human heart—if infused with sincerity, with dedication, with commitment—can come to the same liberating understandings that the Buddha came to. 

Perspectives on nibbana

Over the arc of this course, we'll explore many different aspects of this teaching on nirvāna.

• We'll look at the idea of cooling: the cooling of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion; and what that coolness reveals. 
  
• We'll also look at the conditions for realizing nibbāna, exploring teachings like the awakening factors and the importance of wholesome desire in our practice. 
  
• We'll consider the age-old debate of gradual and sudden paths of awakening. Is awakening something that happens in an instant, or is it a training that we cultivate over time? And is there a way that we can at times bring these perspectives together?
  
• We'll explore the famous model of the four stages of awakening. What is progressively released or let go of as the path deepens? We'll look at the stages of stream entry, once returning, non-returning, and the arahant. 
  
• We'll also consider how nibbāna involves an unbinding of processes that create extra suffering, struggle, and distress in our lives. We'll look at the teaching on dependent origination as a description of how that binding happens, and see within that description a teaching on how it can be released: how there can be an unbinding, an untangling. Seeing nirvāna in that context.
  
• Finally we'll reflect on how we can practice nibbāna. This moves us a long way from the idea that nirvāna is some top-of-the-mountain experience for somebody else, at some other time. We'll bring it right into the midst of our lives and see this as a teaching of freedom. 
  

Putting nirvana at the center of our lives

Demystifying Nirvāna. This is obviously the title of the course, and I think the the title says everything. Normally nirvāna is seen as something distant, esoteric, something that people can't aspire to, and that's not relevant to their lives. Perhaps all they want to do is lead slightly easier lives.

What this course attempts to do is place nirvāna at the very center of life as something that we can do, something that not only is an aspiration but something that we might even experience, if we understand it correctly. 

What we are attempting to do in the various talks and discussions is make this very, very clear: that this is something that isn't in some distant land. This is right in the heart of your life at this moment, and is accessible. The talks, meditations, and discussions are all directed at giving us a sense of that nirvāna process happening now. We're taking it out of that sense of a noun that is far, far distant—that we can't really aspire to—and seeing something that is part of the process of life.

I think all of us are very passionate about the idea that this something that usually is not spoken about either in the tradition or even in contemporary Buddhist circles, and is of such vital importance that it needs to be highlighted. We practice for some aim and that aim is often very limited. And yet the Buddhist tradition lays this out as being the goal, the very pinnacle of what we're aiming at. It seems so distant, and yet it's near. And one of the themes that we'll be looking at is that interpenetration of where we are with nirvāna. This is the intention behind all of the material that we're offering to you, hopefully in a very clear and accessible way. 

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A practical, hands-on program

This program is not just about offering teachings and reflections on nibbāna. It's a true invitation for you—through the meditations, through the daily life practices, through the questions we raise—to take this teaching to heart and to explore it in your own experience.