The Nirvana Principle
Had you ever seen the image of the burning monk on the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled debut Rage Against the Machine (1992) then you have a pretty good idea of what the Buddhist notion of nirvana looks like.
Because I grew up in a Christian household I had always misunderstood nirvana as a kind of heaven: a transcendent realm of bliss and beatitude. On the contrary, nirvana—probably, I can only speculate—is not transcendent at all whatsoever but is rather radically immanent; like, for example, being literally on fire. Not that you need to set yourself on fire to attain nirvana, but then again, we are all on fire to one degree or another, are we not?
Anyways, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in protest of the Christian persecution of Buddhists in Vietnam in 1963. It would seem that by the practice of a certain kind of attention one can create a space of awareness between perception and thought, sensation and word, so that what is experienced is not-known even while it is felt rather more than your ego-self can feel by knowing it. The ego-self would probably faint.
In other words, the Buddhist, by suspending thought, is not turning down sensation, but rather, turning it up to eleven. If, for example, pleasure and pain are the fundamental binary by which the precocious ego begins to organize itself, then should one find oneself outside or beneath the pleasure principle—by discipline, mystical experience, or trauma—then pleasure itself may become indistinguishable from pain; sensation can become the burning body in its truest sense, without predicate, without ideas and without understanding; and not dissociative either but rather super-associative; where there is no relation between yourself and the flames; just as there may have been no relation, once upon a time, between yourself and your mother.
It is no coincidence that the psychoanalyst places masochism under the star of the nirvana principle, nor, moreover, that the trend of the infamous death drive is expressed by this same nirvana of old.* Nirvana may drive us to death, it is true, but it is the death and degradation of the ego alone.
Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation, June 11 1963
*Technically speaking we may describe the nirvana principle in economic terms as pure primary process, freely mobile, unbound libido; the drive in its very essence. Language, thought and memory, the complex that makes up the ego is, on the contrary bound, and (mostly) organized and stable. That the nirvana principle makes a pretty good metapsychological description of actual nirvana is a fact that has been mostly ignored.
