The Buddhist Account of Nirvana or Liberation from Unhappiness
The ancient Indian theory of liberation is the view that one can liberate oneself, permanently and in this life, from unhappiness. The idea of liberation was first introduced as early as 800BCE in the Upanisads, part of the founding literature of Hindu thought. It was subsequently accepted by all other ancient Indian schools of philosophy, including Jainism and Buddhism, except for the materialists. It is an important theme running through Indian thought, right up to the present day, and a special Indian contribution to the world.
It is a tradition that has become most widely known in the case of Buddhism. Here liberation is put centre stage, and here it is expressed most clearly that liberation is from unhappiness or duhkha, and that this is ordinary everyday unhappiness. There is the well known story that Siddhartha Gautama achieved liberation while sitting under a tree at the age of about thirty five, thereby becoming the Buddha or enlightened one. The image of the seated Buddha at the time of his liberation is the most recognisable image of liberation in the world today. ‘Nirvana', the Buddhist term for liberation, is a word that has entered the English language.
The fame of the Indian notion of liberation hasn't been all good news for the wider reputation of Indian thought. It has led to a popular Western view of India as the land of religion and mysticism, contrasted with the rational philosophies and sciences that developed in Europe. It is understandable that exponents of Indian thought nowadays tend to play down liberation in order to draw attention to India's many contributions to critical philosophy and science. But is liberation itself just a matter of religious belief?
An initial reason for thinking so is that the ancient sources say it is liberation, not just from unhappiness, but from rebirth, which it is widely agreed is an unhappy state of affairs. But this depends on how one interprets the notion of rebirth. Undoubtedly the most visible interpretation of rebirth in Indian thought is that it means physical rebirth after death, and this is a religious notion in the sense that it is not supported by empirical evidence but just accepted as a matter of faith. However, I have argued in my article "Rebirth in Hinduism and Buddhism is Also an Image of Unhappy Consciousness", that, as well as the notion of physical rebirth after death, there is also the notion of psychological rebirth, a poetic image of the restless and changeable nature of ordinary, everyday, unhappy human consciousness in this present life. So there is physical rebirth after death, but there is also psychological ‘rebirth' in this present life as an image of mental unhappiness.
Whether or not one accepts that, there are, I would now like to argue, certainly two kinds or stages of liberation along the same lines.
When one achieves liberation in this life, Indian accounts widely agree that the first thing that happens is mental liberation from psychological unhappiness in this life, from the unhappy round of everyday conscious and emotional states. This sort of unhappiness is uncontroversially and incontrovertibly part of our lives. Mental liberation replaces it with a settled state of inner peace and happiness, a notion of human transformation of relevance to everyone. This is the exhileratingly optimistic tradition of liberation in Indian thought which is the main concern of this article.
The second stage of liberation, physical liberation, is said to occur when the mentally liberated person dies, and what this amounts to is that he or she isn't physically reborn. I shall deal with this briefly in the next section.
Physical Liberation
The ancient Indian theory of physical rebirth has it that unliberated people are physically reborn after death into a different life, whereas the liberated person is not. Given this belief in physical rebirth, physical liberation from being physically reborn is a significant achievement. However, since the existence of physical rebirth is something just assumed in ancient Indian culture without evidence, liberation from it appears to be an archaic and local religious belief. As such it is a less interesting, less impressive aspect of Indian culture, and it is quite appropriate that it should take more of a back seat in modern expositions of Indian thought. This is compounded by the fact that those who continue to believe in physical rebirth generally want to be reborn, and so are not interested in bringing it to an end!
The existence of the doctrine of physical liberation alongside that of mental liberation doesn't have to be an obstacle for someone who doesn't believe in the former but is interested in the latter. For a person who doesn't believe in physical rebirth, physical liberation is something he can both accept and disregard. He can readily accept that the liberated person isn't physically reborn, because he believes that this is true of everyone. This leaves him free to move on to a consideration of mental liberation, which I shall do myself in the next section.
Before I do, I'll just say a few words about physical liberation in Buddhism. Here mental liberation is called nirvana, and physical liberation, the mentally liberated person not being reborn after her death, is called parinirvana. It is occasionally said that the latter is more the real or full or ultimate nirvana than nirvana in this present life, which seems to be saying that extinction is preferable to happiness. We don't need to accept this viewpoint.
I say ‘extinction', because there doesn't seem to be anything that could survive the death of a liberated person, according to Buddhism. The Buddhist view is that the person is a combination of the physical body and the mind or consciousness (nama-rupa), without anything else such as an inner self or soul. No-one suggests that the liberated person's physical body survives her death. Death leads to the dissolution of the body, speedily helped on its way by cremation. As for consciousness, this is said to depend on a physical organ of the body, which we now know to be the brain. Since after death there is no body to support it, neither the old one nor any new one, it looks as though consciousness doesn't survive the physical death of the liberated person. There is nothing else to survive it. So it looks as if death for the liberated person is extinction, that this interpretation sometimes given to nirvana is literally true in the case of parinirvana.
However, when the Buddha was specifically asked what happened to the liberated person after his physical death, he didn't give this straightforward answer. Instead, he refused to give an answer at all, saying that it would be speculative and would not help the person asking the question to reach mental liberation in this life. There has been much speculation since about what the Buddha's answer might have been had he given it. It seems that he thought there might be something going on after the death of a liberated person, but he necessarily had no empirical evidence for what that might be, and so could only speculate, and he didn't approve of speculation. On the subject of parinirvana or physical liberation in early Buddhism, there is little more definite I can find to say.
Mental Liberation
Whereas physical liberation is from physical rebirth after death, mental liberation is from the unhappy condition of our consciousness in this present life. The normal state of our consciousness is one in which we are not in full control of our emotions or our thoughts, so that thoughts arise unbidden, and we automatically react to them emotionally which drives the arising of more thoughts and more emotions. The first experience anyone has who tries to sit down and calm his mind, is of this cavalcade of discursive thoughts with their attendant emotions, and of his inability to get rid of them. This is the situation we can readily introspect today, and, the human brain having not changed for thousands of years, it was the situation which confronted the introspectors of ancient India. Their ambitious claim was that it was possible to learn to control these thoughts and emotions and see reality undistorted by them and so gain mental liberation from mental unhappiness.
They claimed that human beings were capable of doing this, and doing it on earth in this present life. This was what Siddhartha Gautama said he had achieved, thereby earning him the title of the Buddha. He said this was a human capability, not limited to himself, but something anyone of reasonable ability could do, and the early Buddhist texts record many ordinary people, with help from the Buddha, becoming mentally liberated and entering nirvana. In his book The Psychology of Nirvana , Rune Johansson says that one essential part of the definition of nirvana is that it is attainable in this life.
He says that another essential part of the definition is that nirvana is a transformation of consciousness. The ancient Indian conception of mental liberation is more than just a set of ideals or virtues. It is said to actually bring an end to the normal unsatisfactory consciousness and replace it with a new perfected kind of consciousness, what we might call a different sort of brain organisation.
It is claimed that this changeover to the liberated state of consciousness, though it might be preceded by a long period of gradual progress, when it happens does so quite suddenly at a particular time. This is what is said to have happened to Siddhartha Gautama, who became a Buddha at a specific time and in a specific place, and the same is said of those of his followers who also gained their liberation. In terms of the brain, mental liberation is a tipping point, where the brain is suddenly changed from the old mode of operation to a new one.
Although it is liberation from unhappiness, this new state could have been a merely neutral one. But it is claimed that this is not so, that it is in fact a pleasant state, and this is another essential part of the definition of nirvana according to Johansson's survey of the early Buddhist literature. We might say that it is a state of happiness.
It is often said that mental liberation, when it comes, is a completed state, a state of perfection. There is nothing else to do, no further progress to be made. The Buddha spoke in these terms. One has worked towards this state by training oneself mentally, and the idea is that there comes a time when the training is completed, and the new skills have been mastered.
Furthermore, it is claimed that the mental liberation that follows from this completed mental training is a permanent state which lasts for the rest of one's life. This is another essential component of the definition of nirvana listed by Johansson. Moreover, the liberated person knows that the liberation is permanent, as the Buddha is said to have done. Presumably this is because the liberated person knows she has mastered the required mental skills. Having said this, there is some mention of the liberated person having to do a little from time to time to preserve the liberated state, presumably because mental skills have to be maintained through regular practice.
So, it is claimed that human beings are capable in this present life at a particular time of decisively transforming their unhappy consciousness into a settled and enduring state of happiness. There is, moreover, widespread agreement about the mental abilities and other components that comprise this liberated state.
Right from the start, from the Upanisads onwards, it was agreed that the state of mental liberation includes desirelessness, the control of desires, including sense desires. In Buddhism one of the three main foundations of nirvana is non-desire or non-attachment. Another is non-aversion or goodwill. This more or less covers control of all emotions, which can be broadly divided into reacting emotionally either for an object (desire) or against it (aversion), this being linked to whether the object is associated with a feeling of pleasure, or with a feeling of pain or unpleasantness. So one component of mental liberation is equanimity, a state where the emotions are in abeyance. Part of the mental training for mental liberation is practising not reacting emotionally either for or against whatever object arises in consciousness.
Emotions have at least two constituents: a state of arousal ready for action, and a thought directing this arousal towards a particular action, for example moving towards something (desire behaviour) or backing away from it (aversion behaviour). This means that controlling emotions doesn't only involve calming emotional arousal. It can also involve changing the thought that directs the arousal, for example replacing the thought "I want" with the thought "May I do what is beneficial", and an aggressive thought with the motivation of goodwill or love. It is clearly understood in Buddhist psychology that establishing ethical behaviour involves changing the thoughts that initiate behaviour. This altering of motivation is one of the eight sections of the Buddhist path to nirvana, that of right attitude, in which one establishes thoughts such as that of compassion, and the three following sections are the resulting ethical behaviour of right speech, right action and right livelihood. There are mental trainings in Buddhism for implanting these new motivations, involving a technique of autosuggestion not unlike that used by some present-day businesses who have their employees repeat company slogans so as to adopt the right corporate attitude. There is, however, some ambivalence in the Indian tradition as to whether this new motivation and ethical behaviour is an integral part of mental liberation. It is sometimes said in Hinduism that the liberated person is "beyond good and evil", and in Mahayana Buddhism developing compassion seems to be seen as taking a step beyond nirvana. The original attitude of the Buddha seems to have been that the person in nirvana needed to practise compassionate and other ethical behaviour whether or not it arose naturally in that state.
There is unequivocal agreement that the state of mental liberation is one of attentiveness, of mental alertness. In the early Buddhist schools mental laziness (thina and middha) is one of the things one has to get rid of in order to achieve nirvana. Probably the most common form of Indian mental training for liberation is attention training. Both of the mental trainings mentioned in the eightfold Buddhist path to nirvana are of this kind: mindfulness and concentration.
Connected with this, it is clear enough that another aspect of mental liberation is the control of thoughts and conceptual activity (vikalpa). Three of the things listed in early Buddhism as having to be eradicated if one is to attain nirvana are uncontrolled restless mental activity (uddhacca), mentally flitting from object to object (vicikiccha), and speculative beliefs (ditthi). More positively, ordinary consciousness, according to early Buddhist psychology, already contains an ability to pay attention to a single object (ekaggata), but the problem is that this may not last for more than a moment. One of the main Indian trainings for liberation is samadhi or concentration on a single object for a longer than usual period of time, which involves the control of any other thoughts. This meditation is the eighth and final section of the Buddhist way to nirvana, with attention divided into the initial application of it (vitakka) and the continued holding of it (vicara).
Another factor, in this case not essential to mental liberation, but not excluded by it, is physical activity. Anyone whose knowledge of the Indian tradition of mental liberation is limited to the familiar image of the seated Buddha at the time of his attainment of nirvana, might get the impression that mental liberation is a physically inactive state. This opinion might be reinforced by learning that the liberated person has stilled his emotions. But in fact we are told that shortly after gaining nirvana the Buddha got up and spent the next forty five years leading a full and busy life, walking all over northern India giving talks, meeting lots of people, and starting to organise the Buddhist movement. Even in the days when he was dying he was constantly on the move. It is accepted in early Buddhist psychology that one in the liberated state still has volitions (cetana) and a simple wish to do things (chanda) like doing a job of work. Three of the eight sections of the Buddhist path to nirvana are about physical activity: speech, action and livelihood, and one of the Buddhist meditations, mindfulness of the body postures, teaches how to remain calm and alert while engaging in physical activity.
The final component of mental liberation, it is universally held, is knowledge. This is stressed right from the start in the Upanisads, and in Buddhism eradicating ignorance is one of the three main ways of developing nirvana, and all the other schools agree that knowledge is part of mental liberation. On the way to liberation this is knowledge of how to get there. In the state of mental liberation itself knowledge is directly seeing reality as it truly is. While all the schools agreed that mental liberation involved such knowledge of reality, they nevertheless all disagreed concerning what the truth about reality was, and it is at this point that unanimity on the subject of mental liberation is fractured, with each school having a different philosophy. But this doesn't have to mean that there are lots of different kinds of mental liberation. It is possible that the actual experiences of mental liberation being had by people in India were broadly the same, including the direct seeing of reality as it truly is, and that what differed were the philosophical interpretations of it. The Buddha was alert to this distinction, as we can see in the Mahakammavibhanga Sutta. Philosophers who had the experience would have been inclined to interpret it in terms of their own philosophical viewpoint, and would have told their pupils that they had to accept this philosophy in order to gain the mental liberation. This is not the place to give an account of the different philosophies, which has already been done in many books on Indian thought, except to repeat what has often been remarked on, that there is an important difference between
1) early Hindu and Jain theories or interpretations of mental liberation, which we would now call broadly religious, and
2) the early Buddhist theory or interpretation which we would now call broadly scientific or psychological.
(This is a difference that later became less obvious because of Hindu and Buddhist influence on each other, but never entirely went away).
In the Hindu tradition two central concepts used in the philosophy of mental liberation, the inner self (atman), and the supreme principle or God (brahman), while they have a rational philosophical side to them, also have a religious dimension, and this leads to an account of mental liberation similar to the religious one of it in terms of opening up to one's immortal soul and seeking unity with God.
The Buddha rejected these two concepts, denying the existence of an enduring inner self and a supreme God, and gave an account of mental liberation in ordinary psychological terms. There was an anti-metaphysical attitude in early Buddhism, with an emphasis on the Buddhist doctrines of no-self, impermanence, and interdependency being pragmatic, practical aids to gaining nirvana, to be put aside when nirvana is reached.
However, despite this significant difference in outlook between Hindus on the one hand, and Buddhists on the other, they may both agree that the direct knowledge of reality in the liberated state is consciousness undistorted by concepts, and differ mainly in that Hindus may call that reality brahman or God, whereas the Buddhists do not.
So, to sum up, the ancient Indian account of unhappiness is that its internal cause is the fact that we are largely at the mercy of our mental processes. The answer, the way to liberate ourself from unhappiness, is to train ourself to have mastery over our own consciousness. We are capable, in this life, of gaining full and permanent control over our emotions, so that we enjoy emotional stability and efficiency and inner peace. We can establish beneficial motivation so that our behaviour is dedicated to doing what is for the best for ourself and others. We can learn to be mentally alert. We can gain full and permanent control over our thoughts, so that we use them economically when we need them, and empty our head of them when we don't. This will give us mental clarity, so that we are presented with consciousness as it truly is, distinct from the concepts that are applied to it. All this is a decisive and enduring change to a new perfected state of consciousness, or, as we would now say, to an optimum state of brain organisation.
Temporary Experiences of Mental Liberation
I want to suggest now that there is present day evidence that the state of mental liberation from unhappiness as set out in ancient India is possible. I am referring to spontaneous and temporary changes of consciousness that many people report happening to them, in which they forget themselves, feel deep peace, and experience sense consciousness more vividly. I want in particular to describe such an experience that I had myself in 1980, and of which I wrote an account at the time which I still possess. It had much the same range of features as are given in the ancient Indian writings on mental liberation. People have reported such experiences over the centuries, and in ancient India the Buddha mentioned having such a spontaneous experience when he was a child. The human brain has not changed since that time, and it may be that such experiences now are a living link back to such experiences then, and even that such temporary states provided the basis for the ancient Indian development of their theory of mental liberation.
In the case of my spontaneous and temporary experience of mental liberation, it could be said that I had done some prior training for it. I had been studying Buddhism and practising Buddhist meditation for about four years. I was also on holiday, and so was relaxed and had no work to do. Nevertherless, the experience happened in otherwise ordinary circumstances, on the lower deck of a ship sailing across the English Channel from Boulogne to Dover, sitting next to a family of people chatting, with constant pop music from a nearby loudspeaker, and with a rolling sea causing some passengers to be sick.
Just as is said of permanent mental liberation in the ancient Indian sources, so my temporary liberation experience started at a particular time. I record that it came on stealthily, but nonetheless say it happened at about 6.15 in the evening, so the changeover occurred within the space of a few minutes. If the brain can make this change as quickly in the case of these temporary liberations, it demonstrates that it could do so in the case of permanent liberation, as Indian sources claim.
I found myself with hardly any emotions. I was almost entirely without the usual emotional responses of desire or aversion. This demonstrates that the desirelessness, the non-attachment and non-aversion, the equanimity, of the Indian account of mental liberation is a state that can occur naturally, that the human brain is capable of, even in a normal noisy environment. This gave me a deep feeling of peace, mainly because having no emotional reactions caused me to be muscularly deeply relaxed. In particular I noticed how heavy my feet and my hands felt. Relaxation is not a feature much mentioned in the ancient texts, though being physically relaxed is a prerequisite of meditations leading to liberation, but it is probably a physiological fact that without emotional arousal muscles will be in a state of equilibrium. I noticed that the muscles in my stomach area were not quite fully relaxed, and this I think was because I had a low level generalised background emotion of exhileration. An interesting point is that, although I had no sense desires, I still had a rich sense consciousness, and was able to take pleasure in it. For example, I enjoyed the langorous feeling of relaxation and found the sensual awareness of my body very pleasurable and pleasant and luxuriated in it. I was able to do this, yet still have no sense desire for these bodily feelings. This is in line with the Buddhist distinction between emotions and feelings (vedana). I felt this state of emotional equanimity to be freedom, because I was free to use emotional energy as I needed to. I wasn't at the mercy of habitual emotional responses for or against things. I was free to decide how to deal with a thing regardless of whether I liked or disliked it. It was a state of economic and flexible use of emotions. My emotions were like a reservoir, ready to be directed anywhere because they started without any prior bias.
Being without aversion, I found myself behaving towards people in a tolerant and kindly way, and once in a mirror I noticed that my eyes were filled with love, which I wasn't expecting. This would seem to support the Buddhist idea that non-aversion is equivalent to goodwill or love (metta). But beyond that, there wasn't any noticeble change in my motivation. For example I wasn't aware of having a strong attitude of compassion towards those people who were being seasick. This suggests that compassion may not arise naturally as an integral part of the liberated state, but has to be inculcated through training, which seems to be suggested in the Indian tradition.
Probably at least partly as a result of the lack of emotions, I had hardly any thoughts. The usual activity of discursive thought which normally characterises consciousness most of the time, was absent. Each thought that did arise, lasted only a short time, and didn't set off a train of others. I was able to actually observe thoughts arise, in the form of a vague mental image, or mental speech, and then fade away. This was in part because these stray thoughts didn't have to compete for attention with a background of mental chatter. I had a considerable reluctance to in any way conceptualise the experience I was having. If ever such a thought arose, I would dismiss it rapidly, saying several times to myself "It's nothing, nothing at all". The thoughts that I hardly ever had were discursive thoughts, such as comments on my surroundings, memories, fantasies, or mental reasoning. I must have still had the concepts that are naturally built into sense consciousness during the perceptual process, because I still knew who I was, and where I was, and what the objects around me were. I don't think these concepts can be removed, and it wouldn't be a good idea to do so in any case because it would cause debilitating conceptual disorientation. When thoughts did arise, I sometimes had a little emotional attachment to them, and I noticed that this caused slight muscular tension in my neck and forehead. When I did need to do some thinking, I did so economically, using thoughts just as much as I needed to, and no more. I noticed that when I spoke, although the experience wasn't disturbed, it was a little diminished. I could understand why it is said that the Buddha to some extent renounced his nirvana when he decided to spend his life teaching. Because I had hardly any thoughts, I had hardly any thoughts about myself. I had clear sense consciousness of my body sensations. But I did not have many thoughts about myself as a particular person with an identity, a history, likes and dislikes, plans, and so on - what is normally called the ego. If I ever did think of myself, I felt like an empty vessel, or the invisible man, that I was nothing special at all. This meant that I related to other people without either shyness or assertiveness, and looked them full in the face rather like a very young child does. This selflessness was not a moral feature, or a renunciation, but simply an example of a general lack of thought about anything at all. However, it provided a basis for me to treat all people morally as equal to myself.
All through the experience, though I had few thoughts, I remained mentally attentive. I was never sleepy or lethargic. My muscles were relaxed, but my brain was alert. I was aware of my surroundings. I immediately responded to other people when I needed to. If a thought did arise, I noticed it at once. I was also laying down clear memories of the experience, which enabled me to write quite a detailed account of it afterwards.
Although my muscles were deeply relaxed, I was able to instantly initiate physical activity when I needed to, indeed more readily than usual. For example, in a normal situation of being comfortable in a chair, I would have been unwilling to stir myself, and would have heaved myself out of it reluctantly. But during my liberation experience this wasn't the case. I was very deeply relaxed indeed, yet when I needed to get out of my chair, I did so at once. This, I take it, was in part because, unaffected by any prevailing emotional attitude, my muscles were in a state of equilibrium, ready to be activated in whatever way was required. Added to this, in a brain emptied of thoughts, when an activating thought did appear it stood out alone without any countermanding thoughts to modify it. It gave a clear order to my muscles, and so they responded at once. More significantly, I was able to readily do things despite having no desires. One view is that actions require desire or other emotions to make them happen. I had no emotions, yet found it entirely easy to initiate and perform actions. The Buddhist explanation of this is that my actions weren't driven by desire, but by wish-to-do (chanda). An alternative might be that desire did arise to power the action, but only as much as was required, so that the desire was entirely used up in the instantaneous process of producing the action. No doubt a psychologist could shine light here. Once initiated, engaging in physical activity felt effortless. When I walked, I seemed to glide along. I suppose because my energy wasn't being drained by continual emotional responses and thoughts, it was all available for me to use in physical activity.
I had no thoughts, but what was left was sense consciousness, and it was nonconceptual sense consciousness, not in the sense of lacking embedded concepts, but in the sense of having no discursive concepts overlaying it. This is what, in the Indian tradition, is widely held to be the knowledge part of mental liberation, directly observing reality as it truly is. In the unliberated state we conceptually classify consciousness of our surroundings as soon as it arises, and if it is of no conceptual interest to us, we ignore the presented consciousness. In my temporary liberated state, with such concepts put on one side, sense consciousness was revealed in all its particularity, all its variety and detail. I became aware of my body tingling. When I spoke I was much more distinctly aware than usual of the sound and diction of my own voice. At the end of the sea crossing, when I walked through the Western Docks Rail Station, it was like a miraculous cathedral, and I found the smell of smoke and soot a strikingly beautiful one. Not only was sense consciousness fully revealed by the removal of thoughts, but also my attention was entirely on my awareness of my surroundings, because I rarely had to turn my attention to my thoughts. I was also observing the distinction between sense consciousness and all the thoughts and concepts, all beliefs, all doctrines, all theories, all philosophical views that are applied to it. I observed consciousness standing alone, without any need of thoughts to support it. I observed that all ideas of consciousness being mine, or being of a physical world, or of being brain activity, and so on, were just conceptual ideas distinct from the consciousness itself. They might be true beliefs, but they were beliefs, not the consciousness they were about, and if I didn't need them I could let them subside. This was the direct knowing in the liberated state. It left all the conceptual knowledge untouched, the seemingly endless and onerous task of gathering conceptual information, and by reasoning and experiment sifting out the true beliefs from the false. This is the additional work left to be done by the philosophers and the scientists, and it is in this area that the different schools of ancient Indian philosophy disagreed with one another, as different schools of philosophy do in the West.
Overall, my temporary experience of mental liberation was a wonderful one to have, and bears out the Indian view that the state of mental liberation is a pleasant one and well worth striving for. Yet at the same time I could understand the Zen view that it was "nothing special", in that it was what just presented itself, my awareness of the everyday world around me, and calling it special would have been to apply a concept to it.
My experience was certainly a transformation of consciousness, as the Indian account says mental liberation is, in that my usually uncontrolled consciousness was replaced by a new and quite different kind of experience of mental mastery.
This complete control that I had, for the duration of this temporary state of mind, over emotions and thoughts, with optimum efficiency of mental processes and physical activity, and clarity of consciousness, provides an insight into why the permanent state of mental liberation is said to be one of completeness, with nothing left to be achieved. At the time I certainly couldn't see how this perfected conscious state could be improved on. However, looking back at it afterwards, I realised that in the conceptual area which is put on one side in the liberated state, there still remains much that could be improved, better memory, more logical thinking, greater factual knowledge, and so on.
My temporary experience indicated that a state of mental liberation, along the lines described by the ancient Indians, can occur, can happen to an ordinary human being in this present life. It is not an impossible ideal. It is a realisable state of the mind, or brain.
One thing my temporary experience cannot show is that this state of mental liberation can be made permanent, as claimed by the ancient Indians. Nevertheless it lasted for five hours, from 6.15 till I went to bed at 11.15, which shows that it has a degree of stability to it, which the right mental training might prolong.
The human brain that spontaneously produces these temporary experiences of mental liberation will have been doing so for many thousands of years, because the brain hasn't undergone any evolutionary change in that time. So such states predate the first mentions of mental liberation by the sages of the Upanisads. It is possible that such states provided the raw material for the development of the ancient Indian thinking about mental liberation. As part of their new interest in consciousness, philosophers may have studied these temporary states and analysed them into their constituents. It might have been on the basis of this information that yogas or mental trainings were then devised to teach these constituent skills found in the temporary states. People underwent this training and as a result began to experience more of these temporary episodes of liberation. Some people persisted with the training till the skills were completely mastered, and as a result entered a permanent state of mental liberation. This then became the goal for all seekers of liberation to aspire to. This may have been how the tradition of mental liberation from unhappiness developed in ancient India.
Conclusion
There are, then, two stages of liberation in the Indian exposition of this topic, the mental liberation which is gained in this life from the psychological unhappiness of this life, and then at the death of the liberated person physical liberation from being physically reborn. This latter stage is of interest now only to those who both believe in physical rebirth and don't want to be reborn, a small group of people I suspect.
Mental liberation, on the other hand, is potentially of interest to everyone, and deserves to be better known. At the moment Western discussion of the nature of happiness may not even mention the Indian contribution, even though it is much more an Indian topic than it is a Western one, raising interesting crosscultural questions of values and norms of mental excellence and happiness.
I believe that to do the subject of mental liberation from unhappiness justice requires an interdisciplinary approach, involving scholars and philosophers, but also psychologists and psychotherapists and brain researchers too. Mental liberation is something accessible to empirical and experimental study, and some initiatives along these lines are already being made. The theory of mental liberation developed in ancient India deserves to become a live issue and ongoing project in the world of the 21st century.
Back in the 1970s Gerald Dupre wrote a series of articles on Buddhism and Science for The Middle Way, journal of The Buddhist Society in London, which were reprinted in a book of essays, and also translated into German. In the 1980s he was founder chairperson of the Scientific Buddhist Association, and major contributor to its magazine The Western Buddhist dedicated to setting out core Buddhist doctrines in clear language, as well as beginning to present Buddhist mental training in easy steps. He then moved away from Buddhism, studying philosophy at London University, and continued studies in this area and that of consciousness for a dozen years. He has retained a great admiration for the ideas of the Buddha, and is now writing new, and, he hopes, more philosophically acute articles on this subject.
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