Not Preferring Samsara or Nirvana

If you wanted to pare phenomena down, all there would be are stillness and occurrence: space, and that which is continually born out of space, and returns into space—stillness and occurrence. Sometimes it’s called the background and the foreground. In any case, what I’d like to talk about is not preferring stillness or occurrence, or, you could say, not preferring the busyness of samsara or the stillness of nirvana. 

Usually there is some kind of bias. There are two common forms of human neurosis. One is getting all caught up in worry and fear and hope, in wanting and not wanting, and things: jobs, families, romances, houses, cars, money, vacations, entertainment, the mountains, the desert, Europe, Mexico, Jamaica, the Black Hole of Calcutta, prison, war or peace, and so on. So many of us are caught in all that occurs, somehow captured by occurrence as if we were caught in a whirlpool. In samsara we continually try to get away from the pain by seeking pleasure, and in doing so, we just keep going around and around and around. I’m so hot I open all the windows, and then I’m so cold I put on a sweater. Then it itches, so I put cream on my arms, and then that’s sticky, so I go take a bath. Then I’m cold, so I close the window, and on and on and on. I’m lonely, so I get married, and then I’m always fighting with my husband or my wife, so I start another love affair, and then my wife or husband threatens to leave me and I’m caught in the confusion of what to do next, and on and on and on. We are always trying to get out of the boiling pot into some kind of coolness, always trying to escape and therefore never really fully settling down and appreciating. That’s called samsara. In other words, somehow we have this preference for occurrence, so we’re always working in that framework of trying to get comfortable through political beliefs and philosophies and religions and everything, trying to gain pleasure in all that occurs. 

The other neurosis—which is just as common—is to get caught by peace and quiet, or liberation, or freedom. When I was traveling, I met some people who had formed a group based on their belief that a flying saucer was going to come and take them away from all of this. They were waiting for the flying saucers to come and liberate them from the grossness of this earth. They talked about transcending the awfulness of life, getting into the space and the clarity and the blissfulness of not being hindered in any way, just completely free. When the spaceship took them away, they were going to a place where there weren’t going to be any problems. This is what we all do in a subtle way. If we have an experience of clarity or bliss, we want to keep it going. That’s what a lot of addiction is about, wanting to feel good forever, but it usually ends up not working out. However, it’s a very common neurosis, being caught by this wanting to stay out there, wanting to stay in the space, like some friends of mine in the seventies who decided to take LSD every day so they could just stay out there. Sometimes that’s expressed by arranging your life in such a way that it’s very quiet, very smooth, very simplified; you become so attached to it that you just want to keep it like that. You resist and resent any kind of noisy situation like a lot of children or dogs coming in and messing everything up. There are some people who have tremendous insight into the nature of reality as vast and wonderful—what is sometimes called sacred outlook—but then they become completely dissatisfied with ordinary life. Rather than that glimpse of sacred outlook actually enriching their life, it makes them feel more poverty-stricken all the time. Often the reason that people go from neurosis into psychosis is that they see that spaciousness, how vast things are and how the world actually works, but then they cling to their insight and become completely caught there. It has been said, quite accurately, that a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

It has been said, quite accurately, that a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in. 

What I’m saying here is that ego can use anything to re-create itself, whether it’s occurrence or spaciousness, whether it’s what we call samsara or what we call nirvana. There is a bias in many religious groups toward wanting to get away from the earth and the pain of the earth and never having to experience this awfulness again—“Let’s just leave it behind and rest in nirvana.” Yet as one Buddhist chant puts it, the Buddha “does not abide in nirvana. He abides in the ultimate perfection.” One could assume that if he does not abide in nirvana, the ultimate perfection must be some sense of completely realizing that samsara and nirvana are one, not preferring stillness or occurrence but being able to live fully with both. 

Recently, in a friend’s kitchen I saw on the wall a quotation from one of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s talks, which said: “Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.” I was struck by it because when I read it I realized that I myself have some kind of preference for stillness. The notion of holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart rang true, but I realized I didn’t do that; at least, I had a definite preference for the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun, the quality of being continually awake. My reference point was always to be awake and to live fully, to remember the Great Eastern Sun. But what about holding the sadness and pain of samsara in my heart at the same time? The quotation really made an impression on me. It was completely true: if you can live with the sadness of human life (what Rinpoche often called the tender heart or genuine heart of sadness), if you can be willing to feel fully and acknowledge continually your own sadness and the sadness of life, but at the same time not be drowned in it, because you also remember the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun, you experience balance and completeness, joining heaven and earth, joining vision and practicality. We talk about men and women joining heaven and earth, but really they are already joined. There isn’t any separation between samsara and nirvana, between the sadness and pain of samsara and the vision and power of the Great Eastern Sun. One can hold them both in one’s heart, which is actually the purpose of practice. As a result of that, one can make a proper cup of tea. 

Ritual is about joining vision and practicality, heaven and earth, samsara and nirvana. When things are properly understood, one’s whole life is like a ritual or a ceremony. Then all the gestures of life are mudra (symbolic hand gestures that accompany tantric practices to state the quality of different moments of meditation) and all the sounds of life are mantra (words or syllables that express the quintessence of various energies)—sacredness is everywhere. This is what’s behind ritual, these formalized things that get carried down in the religions of different cultures. Ritual, when it’s heartfelt, is like a time capsule. It’s as if thousands of years ago somebody had a clear, unobstructed view of magic, power, and sacredness, and realized that if he went out each morning and greeted the sun in a very stylized way, perhaps by doing a special chant and making offerings and perhaps by bowing, that it connected him to that richness. Therefore he taught his children to do that, and the children taught their children, and so on. So thousands of years later, people are still doing it and connecting with exactly the same feeling. All the rituals that get handed down are like that. Someone can have an insight, and rather than it being lost, it can stay alive through ritual. For example, Rinpoche often said that the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, are like a recipe for fresh-baked bread. Thousands of years ago someone discovered how to bake bread, and because the recipe was passed down for years and years, you can still make fresh bread that you can eat right now.

When things are properly understood, one’s whole life is like a ritual or a ceremony.

What made me think of ritual as the joining of the sadness and pain of samsara with the vision of the Great Eastern Sun was that somehow it’s simply using ordinary things to express our appreciation for life. The sun comes up in the morning, we can use the sound of a gong to call us to the shrine room, we can put our hands together and bow to each other, we can hold up our eating bowls with three fingers in the same way that people have been doing for centuries. Through these rituals we express our appreciation for the fact that there’s food and objects and the richness of the world. 

Genuine, heartfelt ritual helps us reconnect with power and vision as well as with the sadness and pain of the human condition. When the power and vision come together, there’s some sense of doing things properly for their own sake. Making a proper cup of tea means that you thoroughly and completely make that tea because you appreciate the tea and the boiling water and the fact that together they make something that’s nourishing and delicious, that lifts one’s spirit. You don’t do it because you’re worried that someone’s not going to like you if you don’t do it right. Nor do you do it so fast that it’s over before you even realize that you made a cup of tea, let alone that you drank six cups. So whether it’s smoking a cigarette or drinking a cup of tea or making your bed or washing the dishes—whatever it might be—it’s ritual in the sense of doing it properly, if you can hold the sadness in your heart as well as the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. 

♦

Adapted from The Ordinary Magic of Meditation © 2026 edited by John Welwood. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com