Nirvana and Beyond.
The Buddha, six hundred years before Christ created a big revolution.
He came up and said that there was no God, that there was no soul, the truth is Nirvana.
Nirvana means emptiness, the mind dies and then we experience nirvana or emptiness.
Many people were captivated by this idea and even today in the west, the fortune of Buddhism
is because of this rebellious concept.
You don’t have in believe in a soul; you don’t have to believe in a God, you only
have to believe in the thought process, the mind and extinguishing the mind.
But remember Buddhism almost died in India where it was born.
It’s because the Hindus put up a fight with the concept of Nirvana and Buddha’s teachings.
One of the criticisms was that the Buddha himself was not able to live the middle path.
He ran away from life, that’s one criticism; relinquishing his responsibility to the country,
to his wife and child and father and the people and that is more a political one.
The philosophical one is that the Hindus claimed that beyond Nirvana; beyond the emptiness
is God consciousness.
You are stuck in emptiness and you did not go beyond that.
If you go beyond that then you have access to a higher consciousness where you not only
see God but you say ‘Aham Brahmasmi’, I am god.
Then you have the ability to do everything, to disappear at will, you have transcended
your body, mind, ego, maya all that is there.
But within the Buddhist scheme the Gods are below Nirvana and he experiences all the Siddhi
powers and everything prior to attaining Nirvana or emptiness.
You have to transcend all this and then go and empty yourself.
The Hindus have great difficulty in accepting it.
They said that you got to become a master of all the principles and not get stuck in
emptiness and then die.
Particularly, the Siddhas of the Tamil tradition would not accept anyone who dies as a master.
Their contention is you have failed to master your own body, the five elements that constitute
the body and rise above it.
You are just thinking and talking about something that is philosophical.
The true enlightenment means mastering the body, mastering the mind, mastering the soul
and finally identifying yourself with god.
This is the concept of the Tamil Siddhas.