Impermanence is referred to as one of the Three Dharma Seals (core of the teachings). The other two are non-self and nirvana. All Buddhist teachings contain these Three Seals. Impermanence is the first Seal, and for many (including myself) the most difficult. The humanness of us wants what we enjoy and find pleasurable to go on forever. We even resist letting go of pleasant dreams.

I tend to go to sleep early and rise early. One night, after I had gone to bed early, the telephone rang at 9 P.M. I roused myself into consciousness and answered it. It was my dear younger cousin Grady, who with his adorable family was vacationing in our ancestral coastal fishing village where I was staying and writing for the month. We all had had lunch together that day, and we spent the afternoon seeing the sights of this picturesque village. As we said good-bye, we made plans to have dinner the next evening.

As I spoke to Grady, I could hear his wife, Kim, wailing in the background. My heart froze for a moment. Then Grady said they had just received a phone call telling them of Kim’s two-year-old nephew’s sudden death. He had drowned in the backyard pond. She had just hosted a joint birthday for their son, who turned three, and the two-year-old nephew. Now the unspeakable had happened. I hurriedly dressed and drove over to be with them. We held one another, as raw emotion erupted at Kim’s and Grady’s loss.

There is nothing quite like the loss of a loved one through death to bring home the truth of impermanence and to shock our minds out of our everyday perception of reality. The death of a tiny child seems so pointless. There is no explanation, and yet if any of this teaching is true, then we must accept the destiny of each soul, no matter how seemingly tragic or untimely.

All phenomena will one day cease to exist. The process of change is a moment-by-moment experience. It is consistently going on. All things have the nature of cessation implanted in them from their inception. This is a very important teaching to ponder. From within the birth is the death.

The infant grows into the toddler, and babyhood is gone. The toddler grows into the kindergartner, and innocence begins to wane. The school child grows into the teenager, and childhood with its wide-eyed wonder is gone. The teen becomes the young adult—now bearing an ever increasing myriad of responsibilities—and the years add up, perhaps the girth expands, hopes bloom and die, and the years roll by until the reflection in the mirror very often becomes startling. Nothing lasts forever: a gorgeous rose, a dream, a controversy, political pundits, feelings, concepts, family structure, the love of your life, children, you.

Life is impermanent. The teaching is that if we can deeply understand and accept this and release our attachments to the idea of permanence, we will suffer less (the Second Noble Truth). Nothing in this world will last, including this world. But in this moment we have enough material to work with without worrying about the disappearance of the world at some far-off, distant time.

The lenses of impermanence help us view reality more accurately. I am reminded of the stories of the baby Buddha’s (Siddhartha’s) early life within the confines of his father Suddhodana’s palace walls.

Young Siddhartha only saw flower buds or blossoms, because each night while he slept, his father’s servants would pluck any flower that had reached its peak. This way the child would never see a dead flower, or even an old flower or an aging animal or person. His father endeavored to shield Siddhartha from the harshness of this earthly existence. But, alas, this fantasy world could not be maintained forever.

As Suddhodana aged and Siddhartha became a young man, the son set out on a great adventure to see the kingdom beyond the palace walls. On his grand ride he spotted a sick man, then an old man, then a dead man—none of which he had seen before, or had any awareness of their existence and the stages of life. He was puzzled and confused at what he was witnessing. He asked his companion and male servant Govinda what it was that he was seeing. In this way the future enlightened one was introduced to sickness, aging and death. He was introduced to the human condition of suffering and to impermanence.

Thich Nhat Hanh shares some very wise words in The Heart of the Buddha: “It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” Further clarification on this important point comes from Sogyal Rinpoche. I heard him say, “Life is not suffering, rather it is samsara [the endless cycles of birth, life and death within this world] that causes us to suffer.”

I invite the reader to explore in her/his own life how the teaching applies. How recently have you suffered as a result of desiring a situation that was changing to remain the same? Releasing our attachments to people, places and things is one of life’s more difficult undertakings.

When my mother suffered two debilitating strokes and could no longer navigate the steps of the two-story home my late father had built, we moved her to a condo we owned across the street from where we lived. The task was left to me to go through the home where my father’s spirit still filled the rooms and select which items would go to the condo and which would be sold or given away. Waves of sadness rose and swept over me as I looked at and made difficult choices concerning each piece of “stuff ” of their lives. Impermanence.

Two years later her health deteriorated more to the point where we had to move her out of our condo and into a nursing home. Then we sold the condo, and I had to repeat the process of ridding it of her material possessions. The same sadness recurred, so I sat down and began to consciously breathe deeply, releasing the rising sensation of sorrow. After several minutes the energy was released, and I returned to the task at hand. Impermanence.

People ask me how I can deal with impermanence when it rises in my life or the life of a loved one. The best answer I have is to say, “Prayer and meditation.” When something overwhelmingly sorrowful occurs in your life, train yourself to immediately turn to prayer. As soon as possible, find a place to go and sit and breathe. Release your sorrow to God, to the Holy Spirit, to Buddha, to your Higher Power along with your feelings, mind chatter and sensations. Do this until you feel the shift. Then remind yourself that what is happening is but a part of the ever-changing flow of life. Train your mind to seek refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.

One of our closest friends was recently and suddenly left by her husband of eight years. I had officiated at their elegant and lavish wedding out of state. They share an intense and demanding professional life, literally traveling the globe to lecture on their specialties. She is world acclaimed, and, although he is well respected, he doesn’t receive the accolades she does. I often wondered if there was any hidden professional jealousy. On the morning he awakened her from a deep sleep and handed her a letter saying he was leaving immediately, I wondered again about his real reasons.

She was devastated. This was not a teenage breakup. They are both middle-aged, accomplished intellectuals. This brilliant woman was reduced to an almost mortally wounded ten-year-old. It took her back to when she was ten and her father died, and it brought forth all the pain and loss that caused.

Both of them are dear to my husband and me. They are close friends. When I went to comfort her a few days later, it felt to me like she was grieving over a death. Her pain was so intense she could not function. She canceled all of her many appointments and stayed at home and cried. I felt deeply for her, but I knew there was no way I could take away her pain. When we were together, I suggested she seek refuge in the Three Jewels. She needed refuge. I suggested she choose one and go to it.

We spoke that day on impermanence. She kept saying, “But our marriage was ‘till death do us part.’” Of course that isn’t always the case. However, such an unskillful departure by her husband seemed like an unexpected death.

She had overcome much loss in her life, and she had to do so again. Although she didn’t like the idea at all and wasn’t ready to embrace it, I urged her to pray and meditate on impermanence so healing could eventually occur. Such situations cause much suffering and call for the Eight-fold Path to be engaged.

Life is not always what we think we ordered or expected to show up. Sometimes the rug is pulled out from under us, and we are lost and baffled. The death of a toddler, a husband walking out, a career collapsing—on and on the beat of impermanence goes.

An associate recently called asking for support with a very perplexing situation in her church. It seems that a congregant who for years had been a trusted ally and a dear friend had without apparent reason or provocationbecome a completely different person. She was hostile, highly critical, totally nonsupportive, volatile and exhibiting out-and-out aggressiveness. After decades in ministry, my friend and I have learned to see the humor in the most bizarre situations. And, believe me, they do show up. We joked about how unfortunate it was that we did not believe in evil entities (i.e., the devil) taking over a person, because it was such an easy answer to an outrageous situation.

For whatever the woman’s reasons at that time, the relationship and her minister changed. What appeared to be a mutually supportive, loving relationship unraveled and was no more. Impermanence at work!

Our executive director’s thirty-six-year-old athletic husband became racked with a raging, untreatable cancer. He dwindled to 114 pounds and died, leaving her a widow with three young daughters. Impermanence.

A physician’s stable and secure position in the medical community was threatened by several frivolous malpractice lawsuits, all of which were eventually dropped. Even so, his insurance then tripled from its already astronomically high premiums. He had no choice but to sell his share of his twenty-plus-year practice and relocate across the country. Impermanence.

This physician loved his practice, had the respect of his fellow doctors and served his patients conscientiously. He had a network of friends, was active in his community and served actively in his church. In less than a year it came to a halt. It was over. Impermanence.

We don’t have to go looking for impermanence. It is waiting to greet us everywhere we turn. I am writing this in a small seaside community where my maternal family comes from and where I lived as a child. All the family that remains here is one first cousin. She is my only living first cousin. When I’m back in my original hometown, occasionally my mind will float back to earlier times, happy times with both my parents and a pair of aunts and several uncles, my maternal grandparents and my cousin Bobby. All that are left are my elderly mother, my two brothers, my cousin Sabrina and Bobby’s son Grady.

Impermanence touches every family. Sometimes we may have several years or even a decade or more with no deaths occurring close to us. But no matter how much we pretend in our society that sickness, old age and death can be kept at bay, they cannot. Impermanence shadows each one of us. The teaching is that, if we accept this, we will suffer less when it makes a stop at our door.

We can find the blessing in impermanence if, when we are healthy and strong, we can learn to value our good fortune rather than squander it. Impermanence can cause us to be very appreciative of all of our blessings, be they family, children, church, position, prosperity, good health for ourselves or family or friends, peace, plenty, spiritual connectedness and insight.

Even our deepest and most holy states of being are still impermanent. We can achieve great states of mind and being and live for a while in a state of clear light. But something rattling always occurs. Life makes its outrageous demands on our time and attention, and our elevated state of being collapses into the mundane. Impermanence.

Impermanence and an understanding of it can cause us to value our beloved, our parents, our children, our family and our friends even more. My husband, David, daily engages in the Buddhist practice of meditating on his own death, a practice I have yet to begin. He says that meditating on his impermanence assists him living in and appreciating more fully the present moment.

He finds this meditation to be most beneficial among his spiritual practices. Once several years ago I heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak of this practice and his having done it for many years. In his engaging, whimsical way he said, “I have been taught that this will be beneficial at the moment of death, but since at the moment of death I won’t be able to tell you if this is so, I’ll just have to see!” Then he laughed heartily.

Practicing clinging, grasping and attachment is the antithesis of embracing the Dharma Seal of Impermanence. We cling to what was, and we cause ourselves to suffer. We grasp at what we once had, and we cause ourselves to suffer. We attach ourselves to mistaken concepts and attitudes, to unskilled behaviors, to unconscious people, and we cause ourselves to suffer.

Through these three ego activities we endeavor to keep life like it was. We endeavor to keep the river from flowing, but we cannot stop the flow of life no matter how much we protect or fight our own battle against it. When we awaken to the fact of impermanence, we can then begin to live a more mindful existence, which in turn results in a more loving and joyous life.

A renowned Buddhist teacher, who himself was a teacher of the Dalai Lama and who spent twenty-two years of his life in retreat, said near the close of his life: “When you look deeply, you realize there is nothing that is permanent and constant, nothing, not even the tiniest hair on your body. And this is not a theory but something you can actually come to know and realize and see, even with your very own eyes.”

Meditating on impermanence is not something most of us relish doing. We have become very adept at pretending that, if we do not look deeply, we can keep the masquerade going forever, but . . . we cannot. Everything we treasure will one day be visited by the three fellows of sickness, aging, death. This applies to a body as well as to an automobile or your home or the Grand Canyon.

If you have been laying up your treasures in the material world, valuing your “stuff” as though those things have meaning, the day of awakening will come. And if you aren’t mindful now and don’t endeavor to know a deeper truth, that day can be quite painful.

A dear and beautiful friend of mine, had been, as long as I had known her, Velcroed to her possessions. She believed her “stuff” gave her a sense of self, status and position. Time went by, her accumulations grew, and her husband’s accumulations grew. Among her husband’s accumulations was a girlfriend living in their second home. My friend was slammed in the face with some very unpleasant facts. Filing for divorce was extremely difficult, for she did love her husband. But she had been in total denial about his extended “business” absences. She did not live in an “equal division” property state and had not been married for twenty years, which would have put her in a better financial position.

To shorten this grim story, she did not fare well in the divorce settlement, in part because she was too traumatized and frightened to stand up to her estranged husband and his powerful attorneys. Her life as she had known it was over. Her husband was gone. Her home had to be sold. Her possessions, besides being divided up, also had to be sold because she was so cash poor. What she had been and what she had possessed was no more.

For the first few months she was inconsolable and considered suicide. Why? Because she had no inner resources. She built her sense of self on outer resources and was quite clueless about any inner world. With the help of family, friends and therapy, she slowly began to crawl out of the black abyss to which she had descended. She did have a good heart, albeit a wounded one. Life forced her to look at her attachments and her clinging and grasping. She was taught a very harsh lesson on impermanence that she is still learning. She thought all her stuff gave her life meaning. Now she is seeking meaning from within through finally finding a spiritual practice, seeking a spiritual community and continuing in therapy.

The teachings on meaninglessness, which I first encountered in A Course in Miracles, were a perfect introduction for me to have to grasp impermanence. To learn that nothing has an inherent sense of meaning than to come to understand that with practice it was a tiny leap for my conditioned mind to make into understanding impermanence and emptiness.

The Seed of Impermanence does not mean that we do not treasure life. Rather, a true understanding of impermanence allows us the experience of being truly alive and all that accompanies that feeling. It brings us to a state of mind where we can value every person, each moment, because we know however wonderful, boring or challenging it is, it is fleeting. Don’t make the soul mistake of not valuing those you love while they are with you. Love them now. Be kind to them now. Be generous with them now. Treasure them now.

We can learn through pleasure or pain. Unfortunately most of us choose pain. And it was then that through loss, chaos, cheating and deception my friend was forced to learn her lessons. In time it did bring her closer to her core, the love and goodness that was and is in her.

May the profound words of Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche resonate in your heart: “Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you.” What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.

In meditation do a life review of the 10 Destructive Actions. These ten break down as three physical, four verbal and three mental.

THE THREE PHYSICAL

THE FOUR VERBAL

THE THREE MENTAL

These ten destructive actions lead to great mental confusion and distress. To do this meditative practice properly with adequate focus on each action, you may need to do it in three parts over three days. Practice releasing them until you feel a positive shift in your consciousness and sense your perceptions clearing.

Look at each one of the ten and ask: How has this shown up in my life? How does this apply to me? It may be helpful to have a notepad and jot down whatever arises in your mind.

To deepen this practice you can on another occasion explore how you feel others have directed these ten destructive actions toward you. Practice forgiving yourself and others for whatever arises in order to free yourself from its karmic hold on you.

Repeating this meditation frequently clears out these destructive factors from our minds and the other person’s and leads us into having a pure heart. This is particularly beneficial to prepare one to be conscious at the time of death.

Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully communicates in The Heart of the Buddha Teachings: “As long as we see ourselves as the one who loves and the other as the one who is loved, as long as we value ourselves more than others or see ourselves different from others, we do not have true equanimity. We have to put ourselves ‘into the other person’s skin’ and become one with him if we want to understand and truly love him. When that happens there is no ‘self’ and no ‘other.’”

Like certain other Buddhist teachings, non-self is a difficult concept initially for the Western mind to grasp. I generally think of non-self as oneness, although my Buddhist friends tell me it is not exactly the same. It can be more fully explained as emptiness. There is no self that remains the same.

There is no permanent self. We can understand this, because we know every second countless cells are dying and others are replacing them. Thus, we are not exactly in the same form from one moment to the next. This is non-self. Nothing is ever separate.

I can understand the concept of separation. Believing we are separate keeps us from knowing the depths of the great spiritual teachings. One can adamantly believe that he is separate from you, from the annoying relatives, from the homeless man on the subway—but the truth is, he is not. This is non-self. Personally I think something has got to be lost in the translation of the word “non-self.” Healing the Divide is a Buddhist organization founded by Richard Gere. As the name implies, it is dedicated to assisting us in seeing the oneness of us all.

Those I call annoying are in me. You are in me. I am in you. The homeless man is in me. The radiant child is in me. The flower, the tree, the sky, the ocean is in me. We are all interwoven in the same fabric of life.

Non-self is not a Buddhist philosophy, it is an insight. In our Western thought, when we grasp non-self it is an “aha” moment, a great and profound insight into the fundamental nature of life.

To explain this challenging concept of non-self more fully, I have adapted a teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh in which he explains non-self in a family construct.

Our families are in our consciousness. We carry all the seeds of our particular families in our “store consciousness.” We can deny them, attempt to shut them out of our lives, but there they are, lurking in our store consciousness.

I know a number of families in my work and world where an adult son has pulled away and completely rejected his family of origin, usually for no apparent reason. A minor upset or infraction occurs, and “Joey” is gone. It makes no sense whatsoever to everyone in the family. It seems unreasonable. Joey has left no forwarding address. This is not a rare or random occurrence. I know of at least six families where this has occurred. Such family dysfunctions show up everywhere. Oh how we wish it was not so. But it shows us, if we are willing to see, that when we run away we are still carrying our family in us.

Impermanence and non-self can open the doors to reality for us, as we begin to touch all things and all aspects of life deeply. We come to understand that one thing is all things, that one person is all persons.

Many years ago I learned this wonderfully insightful exercise from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I have taught it to numerous folks:

“Just Like Me” Exercise

Whenever you cast a judgment upon another person, you train your mind to instantly respond by saying, “Just like me.” Examples:

A truth I have long endeavored to live and have taught is that it is not possible for us to observe, witness or judge a behavior or trait in another person unless it lives in us. People generally resist this teaching, and some even raise bitter objections. No matter how adamantly they argue, it does not alter “Just like me.” If anything, it brings the teaching into greater clarity.

I teach this concept in my first book, A Course in Love. There was a woman who was in my congregation years ago who really loathed me (we know she actually loathed herself, even though she focused her venom toward me). For the longest time I could not get a grasp as to why she was in my life. I’d practice forgiving her, blessing her, letting her go, sending her on to meet her good, and she would still be there snarling at me from the front row and taking notes. I later found out the notes were about my wardrobe, not my teachings. She was vitriolic in her hateful words toward me, but she would not evaporate or go away no matter how much I prayed.

Finally I remembered “Just like me.” How I was like her was very difficult to fathom initially. So I made a list of her hostile and annoying characteristics, and after each I would say, “Just like me.” After a number of repetitions the light began to dawn. She was the outer voice of my inner critic. “Aha, just like me.” She would criticize loudly for anyone within earshot to hear, just as I criticized myself at times silently within my own mind.

Through the years I have made enormous strides in that area and have silenced and released the inner judge, resulting in increased freedom and much greater peace and happiness.

“Just like me” is a wonderful and profoundly aware insight to make. We are not separate from our nemesis, no matter how distasteful they are or how much we dislike them.

She finally did go away, but not until my inner work was done and my own inner critic went into retirement.

Years later I was co-officiating with an Orthodox rabbi at the funeral of a member of my congregation who had been raised in Orthodox Judaism. It was very uncomfortable, because several of the family members were literally yelling at one another. At one point, when I was at the podium speaking, the elderly rabbi began raging at me because I was a woman, and no woman had a right to speak at a funeral. The entire situation was ugly and certainly not what the deceased deserved.

Afterward, when the funeral directors and sane family members were apologizing to me profusely, out of my past came this same woman who had been in my congregation. I almost laughed out loud. Okay, God, I thought, is there anything else that could happen today? Bring on the locusts! Amazingly this formerly angry woman said kind and thoughtful things to me and said not to take on the ragings of the old rabbi. For me that encounter was a miracle.

The raging Orthodox relatives and the rabbi are me, and I am them.

Some races and cultures and religions are completely into separation and the sense of a separate self, never to find any connection with others. Other races and cultures and religions look for the similarities and seek to recognize the inter-being, the non-self.

“Just like me.” What we perceive, we are.

What I saw in the rabbi was fear, fear that his tightly controlled world was coming unraveled by my presence as the leader at that time. I knew the deceased well. The rabbi had never even met him. The rabbi is an Orthodox Jew. He saw me as a Christian (not how I define myself) and female. From his viewpoint it was absolutely blasphemous that I would be present, let alone leading the service. It was inconceivable to him that the deceased, one of my favorite congregants, a precious elderly man, would be attending Unity with his son. So he was in fear. “Just like me.” When in fear, attack is a common response. My presence became like a lightning rod. By my very presence I was saying, We are one.

With non-self we are all waves in the great ocean of life. Non-self helps us begin to see all as our brothers and sisters—from the Dalai Lama to Uncle Ed, to your mother-in-law to the grocery store clerk—as one. This in turn gives us not only great insight but also great compassion for others.

When we have developed the ability to look deeply, we can begin to see that there is no separate, independent self. We see how we are interconnected with all beings. Many people live just to satisfy themselves, not realizing that in living to bring happiness and joy to others, they will attain happiness and joy themselves.

I visited my mother’s cousin Margie, who lives about twenty miles from where I was writing and whom I had not seen for a number of years. She is a tiny, sweet, dear woman, now a widow living alone and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. When she first saw me, she thought I was my mother. Throughout our visit at various times she thought I was all of the women in my mother’s family, including my grandmother, who left this life forty years ago.

She was very chatty remembering with joy all kinds of tales from the past, saying, “You remember Theresa. We all went to school together.” Gently I’d remind her, “No, that was my mother.” Then we decided to call my mother, who she soon thought was my mother’s mother.

As we continued to visit, I began to see the energy of non-self dancing about the room and within our conversation. Cousin Margie’s brain had the female lineage of her family intact, but the individuality was no longer discernible to her. She didn’t introduce females from the old neighborhood or relatives from her father’s or husband’s side. There was simply a fading and a blending, and in her mind my grandmother, aunt, mother, her sister and I became one person.

If we all could see life that way and then multiply it by a billion, then we would be getting close to non-self, oneness, emptiness.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama speaks of our “grasping at self existence,” that this is “an erroneous belief that keeps us imprisoned in the cycle of existence,” which is to say, samsara—birth, life, death, rebirth, again and again. All of life is impermanent and without self. We can eventually develop profound insight to deeply touch all of life without self and become free from birth and death. We can become free from impermanence and permanence, as well as free from non-self and self. Only then do we arrive at the Third Dharma Seal, Nirvana.

A wanderer spoke to the venerable Sariputta: “Reverend Sariputta, it is said, ‘Nirvana, Nirvana.’ Now what, your reverence, is Nirvana?”

Reverend Sariputta replied, “Nirvana, it is said, is formless. It has always been. It was not created in man. It cannot die. The way to Nirvana can be pointed out, but it would be impossible to show a cause for the production of Nirvana.”

Nirvana is our true, ultimate expression of being. I heard Thich Nhat Hanh teach that Nirvana means “extinction.” Now this is where the Eastern mind and that way of teaching is very different from the Western mind.

How can it be defined as “extinction”? All normal beliefs, concepts, ideas, perceptions become extinct with Nirvana. Our perceptions fill our minds and keep us in ignorance. On our way to awakening, we have to rise above our notions, concepts and perceptions.

In Nirvana we touch our real self, our non-self, our profoundly spiritual nature. This true self is what we can learn to touch—the ultimate nature of reality. Nirvana is the ground of being of all that is. In metaphysics this profound state of being is called Christ consciousness, illumined consciousness, when we are truly at our essence. We are in our Buddhahood.

Nirvana is the extinction of suffering. It is our notions, concepts, attachments and perceptions that cause us to suffer. When we give these up and silence our monkey mind, our suffering begins to diminish, our joy increases, our state of awareness is clearing, and we are waking up and reaching Nirvana.

In Nirvana we know we have already had all along what we were searching for. We are what we have always been. We touch our true nature.

The greater truth is that we need do nothing. What in the world can that mean? It is absolutely a Buddhist principle. We do not need to run here to there, rushing about in our quest for enlightenment. We do not need to search anywhere. All we need “do” is turn within. Here lies the vast reservoir of our true self. Just being our authentic self is enough. And yet there are many paths and methods and schools and practices to get us in touch with our authentic selves.

I perceive all of the above as a means of discarding our unknowing to reach our knowing. We can carry around a shipload of unknowing, false knowings, mistaken concepts, beliefs and perceptions.

A Buddhist term that is used here is “aimlessness,” again difficult for the Western, educated mind to understand. Often the meaning is lost in translation and convoluted in its character.

From the Dhammapada: “There is no fire like lust, no sickness like hatred, no sorrow like separateness, no joy like peace. No disease is worse than greed, no suffering worse than selfish passion. Know this and seek Nirvana as the highest joy.”

Says American Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, “. . . realization of Nirvana transforms the ordinary, relative world into an extraordinary, perfect environment or ‘Buddhaverse’” (Thurman’s term for what is generally called Buddha-land). Imagine living in a Buddhaverse. How would life be different for you? For all of us?

In Nirvana we are free from all concepts and notions. In Nirvana we have had and continue to have our own direct experiences of blissful reality. Theory does not result in Nirvana. Actual experience and deep practice is what can bring one to this remarkable state of being. No one person or teaching can take your experience from you. It is now your very own. You own it.

We know what we know, and we do not know what we do not know. An example I often use to illustrate not knowing what I do not know is that I’ve never had a baby. I have not given birth. It does not matter how many times I have seen actual births on video or in person. I DO NOT KNOW what giving birth is like psychologically, physically or spiritually. There is not a man on the planet, including all male ob-gyns, who knows what giving birth is really like. One has to have the experience to know. So therefore we can only truly know what we have experienced and do not know what we have not experienced.

Nirvana is the state of awareness of all that is. One of my remarkable, blissful experiences came in the mid-1990s while studying with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles. It was several days into the teaching when my dear friend Linda and I arrived at the UCLA auditorium early in the morning to be present when His Holiness would be doing his morning chanting aloud.

She and I stood in place for twenty or more minutes, drinking in this remarkable energy. After the chanting, the morning session was to begin and we returned to our seats next to my husband, David, and our friend Roger. As the session began, something very out of the ordinary began to occur in my mind and body. Every cell and atom began to vibrate with light, and I began spontaneously to go into a profoundly altered state. With each passing moment the experience accelerated.

Linda was acutely aware something was going on within me and asked if I needed to go to a quiet place. We left and returned to the hotel. In my room she proceeded to work with the burning energy that was radiating from my entire body, concentrated between the second and fifth chakras as a great turning wheel spiraling out from me and emanating from above me.

I was not afraid. I had had some experience with what can happen in extremely deep and profound meditations, but the earlier experiences paled in comparison to what was then occurring. It felt as if my entire electromagnetic field was undergoing a cosmic tune-up. It was like I was moving out of a human experience into something other, something beyond.

Thank God, I have a husband and friends who have seen beyond the veil and could hold the space, so to speak, for this transformation to run its course. I stayed in this state for approximately twenty-two hours. It slowly began to subside after dawn on the second day. I told our Tibetan friend Lama Chonam and American Tibetan Buddhist translator Sangye Khandro what I had experienced. Lama Chonam responded that he had heard about such occurrences but had no direct knowledge of them. I now do. I experienced it.

For me that experience of opening and awakening so distinctly to bliss for almost a full day was, I dare say, entering the threshold of Nirvana.

At a later teaching of the Dalai Lama, he stated, “Nirvana comes after mind has been thoroughly cleansed of all mental pollutants. The mind is then totally free. This is true Nirvana.”