The Good Ship Nirvana
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“Nothing is real but God. Nothing matters but love for God.”
( Maher Baba )
In sailing, as in living, there’s a place we all find our selves in, sooner or later –it’s called the Doldrums. Now the term “Doldrums” describes an area off the east coast of Africa well known and feared by centuries of merchant sailors on treacherous trading treks carrying spices and other valuable cargo. The ship and crew would be at sea for months and every day away from returning to their home with their cargo was costly and an added hardship. Enter the Doldrums!
Entering the Doldrums, a vast sea area, was always filled with a lot of angst about Nothing. That is, no wind! The area was infamous for its dreaded long hot windless days and nights. A ship could be “stuck in the Doldrums” for weeks waiting for a merciful whisper of a breeze in its sagging sails. There was nothing anyone could do except ship duty, carefully ration limited food and water, endlessly hope and endlessly wait to get underway home.
Enter the Good Ship Nirvana!
Nirvana is something all spiritual sailor-seekers know before they set out on their solo voyage around their invented mind/world . The word “ “Nirvana “ has many meanings, one of which we’ll use here: “no wind!” No wind means no movement. No wind of thought enters our sails and we are left in the Goldrums, in a still, silent, space. A hopeless and timeless place where everything is abundantly and obviously “me”. To live aboard the good ship Nirvana takes a certain seamanship; a certain maintaining of ones sea legs. It’s like the Bible says: “ “Except you be as a child, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”.
“Children are in heaven,” says Adyashanti, “ until we convince them they’re not!” Until we take aboard the bloody pirates of mind, of “me” and “you”, and that artificial separation drives us before it like the violent winds off Cape Horn. The truth is, we never actually leave Nirvana; the child-like is who we are and who we remain throughout the voyage, whether the winds of life blow fowl or friendly. It’s only when we tie ourselves to Identity, Time and Circumstance that we seem to lose our natural state, our innocent inheritance. It’s only when we think we have some other imagined place to go, some other imagined person to become, that we sail into our mind-rigged separation and suffering.
“We must always bear in mind that we are not going to be free, but are free already.
Every idea that we are bound to is a delusion. Every idea that we are happy or unhappy is a tremendous delusion.”
Swami Vivekananda
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