“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Such ideas literally held people in chains, fostering slavery and other inhumane practices. The same unfortunately applies to the Eastern concept of nirvana, and to the Christian idea of heaven. Both have been used by those in power to hold down the masses of people, to justify shoddy and inadequate living conditions by promising future bliss in the world after death.

There are many differences between the ideas of nirvana and heaven, but each has been used not only to justify suffering, but also to teach people to seek pain. The idea has been that the more persecuted and maligned a person is, the greater will be the reward in a future existence.

In a recent ESP class session, however, Seth said: “There is nothing more deadly than nirvana. At least your Christian concepts give you some twilight hopes of a stifling and boring paradise, where your individuality can at least express itself, and nirvana extends no such comfort. [...]

3. In Buddhism, nirvana — a state of heavenly perfection — is achieved by the extinction of individual life and the soul’s absorption into the supreme spirit.

NIRVANA, RIGHT IS MIGHT,
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS, AND THE
HUMAN BODY AS A PLANET WORTH SAVING

We will continue dictation, starting a new chapter, to be called: “Nirvana, Right is Might, Onward Christian Soldiers, and the Human Body as a Planet Worth Saving.”

(Ron Labadee had been speaking of the Buddha religion and nirvana.)

[...] To deny individuality or to speak in terms of nirvana is to deny the vitality from which all originally came, in your terms. [...]

([Ron:] “There is also the [Asian deity—name lost]   He has attained nirvana, but he stays around and helps people who are still in the reincarnational cycle.”)

[...] Disease states, so-called, are as necessary to physical life as normal health is, so we are not speaking of a nirvana on earth — but we are saying that it is possible for each reader of this book to quicken his or her private perceptions, and to extend and expand the quality of ordinary consciousness enough so that by contrast to current experience, life could almost be thought of as “heaven on earth.”

[...] There is no nirvana if you mean by nirvana a state in which your individuality is lost and gobbled in a great fish of a god that consumes you as the whale consumed Jonah. [...]

[...] They are also quite different from any concept of nirvana or nothingness. [...]

[...] There is no nirvana in those terms, in which individuality will be vanquished.

[...] Your consciousness is not snuffed out, nor is it swallowed, blissfully unaware of itself, in some nirvana.³  You are as much a part of a nirvana now as you will ever be.

The concept of nirvana (see the 637th session in Chapter Nine) and the idea of heaven are two versions of the same picture, the former being one in which individuality is lost in the bliss of undifferentiated consciousness, and the latter one in which still-conscious individuals perform mindless adoration. [...]

[...] The gods do not dwell in some nirvana innocent of everything that you know. [...]

[...] (A simile I often think of here compares Eastern and Western life and thought with the right and left hemispheres of the brain; they’re separate, yet united; each half performs functions that complement and to some extent overlap those of the other, and together they operate as a whole.) But we dislike the idea of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism, which calls for the extinction or blowing out of individual consciousness, and its absorption into a supreme spirit, usually after a series of lives. [...] Why should nature punish anyone if it doesn’t punish anything? The realities of nirvana and karma are not ones that Jane and I want to create.

[...] Priestley’s vision of the birds and the life spirit is not too much different from nirvana. [...]