"It is impossible to define nibbana through concepts, because words discriminate while the nature of nibbana transcends dualities.

Many Buddhist teachers agree that nibbana refers to a latent element within human experience that can be discovered and experienced. It is unconditioned in the sense that it is not subject to arising and passing based on other, prior conditions. The direct realization of this unconditioned element has the power to end craving and suffering. This is the goal of the Buddha's teaching and of our practice. We will take nibbana to mean both this latent unconditioned element and the end of suffering, which is the goal of the path.

The six senses cease to manifest anything, so there is no sense of a body or even of mind states.

What is being realized in this moment is only the unconditioned element, nibbana, which is not of the six senses and cannot be known by the six sense consciousnesses. This is a moment of enlightenment. The great Zen master Dogen referred to this experience as 'dropping off body and mind'.

Enlightenment experiences are described as having no awareness present at all or having the presence of an awareness that is not based in the six senses."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"The true fruition of spiritual life is to end the cycle of becoming.

The awakened being comes to the end of becoming."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"Enlightment is understood as a direct realization of the unconditioned or, one might say, an immediate personal experience of nibbana."

Emptiness: a practical guide for meditators

"The body is not self. If it were, it would not get sick. You could tell your body: be like this or don't be like that. But because the body is not self, it does get sick. You can't tell it: be like this or don't be like that. He points out that the same is true for feelings, perceptions, inclinations and consciousness. You cannot determine in advance how you will feel, what you will perceive, how you will be inclined to act, or what you will be conscious of. You do not choose to feel happy rather than sad, to perceive a world that delights rather than disturbs you, to always incline to a calm rather than an agitated response, to be unconscious rather than conscious of something distressing. In others words, you are not in charge of what is going on within your own experience.

The liberating insight he [Buddha] proposes is not the realization that there is no self but the realization that I am not the same as or reducible to any or all of the five bundles (aggregates) that constitute me.

Gotama understood awakening as the result of directly knowing how experience comes about.

The key to freeing oneself from the repetitive cycles of reactivity and beholding nirvana is attention. When attention becomes embodied through contemplation of the transient, tragic, impersonal and empty nature of the bundles, our relationship to experience begins to shift in disconcerting ways. The practice of embodied attention challenges our habitual perceptions of self and world as permanent, satisfatory and intrinsically ours. By stabilizing attention through mindfulness and concentration, we begin to see for ourselves how pleasurable and painful feelings trigger habitual patterns of reactivity and craving. These two insights not only undermine our inclinations to hold on to what we like and to push away what we fear but open up the possibility of thinking, speaking and acting otherwise.

'Seeing things this way', says Gotama at the conclusion of his discourse on not-self, 'the attentive noble disciple disengages from form, disengages from feelings, disengages from perceptions, disengages from inclinations, disengages from consciousness. By disengaging, reactivity fades; non-reactive, he is freed; the knowledge arises: 'I am freed.'' This is the experience of nirvana as immediate and clearly visible; it is at this crucial point that one sees for oneself how one is free not to react to life but to respond to it from a perspective that is no longer conditioned by such inclinations." 

After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a secular age

"Once you fully experience the nature of your mind, you are a buddha. Awareness of your true nature is the stainless, single eye of wisdom.

The distinction between being enlightened and not being enlightened is whether you experience your nature fully or not. In seeing your nature, there is nothing to see, because there is nothing there."

Confusion Arises as Wisdom - p. 181

"If we have ambitions—even if our aim is enlightenment— then there is no meditation, because we are thinking about it, craving it, fantasizing, imagining things. That is not meditation. This is why an important characteristic of shamatha meditation is to let go of any goal and simply sit for the sake of sitting. We breathe in and out, and we just watch that. Nothing else. It doesn’t matter if we get enlightenment or not. It doesn’t matter if our friends get enlightened faster. Who cares? We are just breathing. We just sit straight and watch the breath in and out. Nothing else. We let go of our ambitions. This includes trying to do a perfect shamatha meditation. We should get rid of even that. Just sit."

Do nothing - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Winter 2009

"Para os budistas, iluminar-se é como deixar a sujeira de um lago assentar até que a água torne-se perfeitamente límpida.

A iluminação não é compreendida como um acúmulo de fatos e idéias, mas como uma filtragem do raciocínio impuro."

Budismo: significados profundos - p. 93

"It is not our world that is necessarily problematic; it's our point of view.

Enlightment is merely things as they are before we color them with our hopes and fears."

The Buddha walks into a bar

"It is the nature of our unawakened minds to be bothered about something."

Money, sex, war, karma

"Awakening too is a shunya concept. Nirvana is not something objectively real, for the distinction we make between samsara and nirvana is another example of dualistic thinking that we project onto our experience. Instead, Nagarjuna referes to nirvana as "the end of prapanca (conceptual elaborations)", which includes the end of such dualistic ways of thinking. I experience the world as it really is when I let go of the ways of thinking that I am normally stuck in.

Nagarjuna never actually claims that "samsara is nirvana". Rather, he says that no diferrence can be found between them. The two terms simply refer to different ways of experiencing the world. Nirvana is not another realm or dimension but the deep peace experienced when our mental turmoil ends, because the objects that we have been tryng to identify with - including the sense of self - are realized to be shunya. If things arise and pass away according to conditions, they have no reality of their own that we can cling to. When we do not cling to names and concepts, we can experience things as they are. This includes buddhist names and concepts, even the concept of nirvana and the very notion of  "a Buddha".

Lower truths are needed to point to the "higher truth". Yet, as Wittgenstein put it, after you have climbed up the ladder you must kick it away. Fortunately, buddhism is very good at helping us let go of such ladders."

Money, sex, war, karma

"[Nagarjuna] does not try to replace our deluded ways of thinking with the correct way of thinking, for there is no correct understanding that we should identify with. Identifying with any conceptual understanding is what gets us into trouble. Instead, the true nature of things (including ourselves) becomes apparent when we let go of our delusions, including the ones embedded in our ordinary language. Our emotional and mental turmoil is replaced by a serenity that cannot be grasped but can be lived."

Money, sex, war, karma

"We struggle here and there in our life with the same unconscious patterns of aggression, desire, jealousy or denial, until we're caught in a web of our own making. These are precisely the things from which we work to free ourselves on the buddhist path: the habitual patterns that dominate our life and make it hard to see the awakened state of mind.

Buddhism is primarily a study of mind and a system for training the mind. It is spiritual in nature, not religious. Its goal is self-knowledge, not salvation; freedom, not heaven. It relies on reason and analysis, contemplation and meditation, to transform knowledge about something into knowledge that surpasses understanding.


Although Buddhism can be practiced religiously, in many respects, it isn't really a religion. Because of its emphasis on questioning and working with the mind, it is spiritual in nature. But because it relies on logical analysis and reasoning, as well as on meditation, many buddhist teachers regard Buddhism as a science of mind rather than a religion.


Our confusion is created by our own mind, and it can only be transformed by our mind. So the most powefull entity in the buddhist path is the mind."

Rebel Buddha - p. 20, 24

"We might view Buddhist awakening, then, as seeing through the lies of stories. Enlightenment is a flight from the shifting, anxious, fundamentally dishonest ground of stories and the historical, linear narrative sense of time, to the pure wholehearted honesty of the eternal now, where thoughts and sensations just rise and fall without needing to mean anything beyond themselves, and we are free to be nobody, going nowhere."

Being Somebody, Going Somewhere - Tricycle: The Buddhist Review - Spring 2011

"Iluminação significa "sabedoria perfeita e insuperada", aquela que pode perceber a natureza autêntica de todos os múltiplos fenômenos da existência.

Apreensão intuitiva da essência da vida."

O Buda vivo - p. 72, 78

"Enquanto possui pensamentos ou idéias, a pessoa continua a mover-se no reino da conceitualização. A verdadeira iluminação, porém, tem, de alguma forma, que libertar-se do envoltório da conceitualização e captar a essência da própria vida."

O Buda vivo - p. 54

"Há duas idéias psicologicamente enraizadas no indivíduo: a autoproteção e a autopreservação. Como autoproteção, o homem criou a imagem de um deus pessoal do qual ele depende como uma criança de seus pais, para sua própria proteção, salvaguarda e segurança. Quanto à autopreservação, o homem concebeu a idéia de uma alma imortal, permanente, que viverá eternamente. Perdido entre o temor e o desejo, o homem necessita dessas duas coisas para se assegurar e confortar.

A vida é um momento entre o passado e o futuro; é apenas um fenômeno, ou melhor, uma sucessão de fenômenos produzidos pela lei de causa e efeito, ou carma. Cada um de nós é meramente uma combinação de características materiais e mentais; todo ser, ou coisa, é um aglomerado, um composto, em suma, um ajuntamento de coisas que permanecem separadas enquanto persiste no samsara ou roda da existência continuada, causada pelos desejos insaciáveis do homem, na sua sede de satisfação egoísta.

O supremo objetivo do Budismo está no oposto desta vida egocêntrica, está na vida una com o todo. O absoluto é uno, não pode haver um segundo ser para se unir a ele. O Budismo esclarece que, na iluminação, nada une a criatura ao criador; a iluminação surge quando, pela sabedoria, a idéia de um ego, essa ilusão de um eu, cai completamente por terra. O indivíduo vê a realidade e então, nesse momento, o absoluto, o eterno, a iluminação, o nome que se queira dar não importa, vem à existência neste indivíduo."

Budismo: psicologia do autoconhecimento - p. 156-157