Nirvana Sells
Over millennia, many cultures have created their own place of non-suffering and bliss. In Buddhism, there is Nirvana. In Hinduism, Moksha. In Christianity, Heaven. In Islam, Jannah, so on and so forth. Different names, same promise: an end to suffering, no pain or death, a glorious afterlife where no battle is lost. In other words, every religion acknowledges the challenge of existence, the suffering of the daily grind, the weight of hope and expectation, the collapse into failure and despondence. Fundamentally, we have called this 'darkness, this lower existence,' and imagined that we can go to a place of light.
How hard we resist our sorrows, how fast we run from our miseries. We cannot help it. Any creature with nerve cells does the same — even without a nervous system, like the hydra, it moves away from unpleasantness and toward pleasure, and food is a pleasure. This most basic survival need is what drives our actions and shapes our existence.
Maybe this is why the idea of Nirvana, or heaven, or any promised land, survives through centuries. It speaks to something we are already built to want. The longing is there before the doctrine. All a religion or philosophy has to do is give it a name, a map, and a set of steps. And once it has those, the promise becomes unshakable — not because it is proven, but because it fits the deepest pattern we know: move toward what feels better, away from what hurts.
Sometimes in our longing to be “on the other side,” on our father’s lap, or “gone beyond the other shore,” we forget to live here. I knew someone — a good friend — who was deeply religious. They were doing all the due process to secure, as they saw it, a first-class berth after death: prison ministry, Sunday school, every religious class. They often tried to convince me, but never in a way that hurt our friendship.
One day in our locality, a sixteen-year-old girl died from a heroin overdose. This friend said, “Well, they got what they deserved.” I was shocked. This was not a cruel person. But somewhere in the doctrinal world of should and should not, right and wrong, and living for something beyond, they had lost contact with what was in front of them. Instead of simply seeing the suffering, they were measuring it against a future dream.
Sorrow lies in the valley between what is and what we want it to be. We resist not just pain, but the shape life takes when it refuses to match our expectations. The more certain we are about how things should be, the more brittle we become. I think of it like a block of glass — hard, clear, and unwilling to change its form. When life turns up the heat, that glass will either shatter or melt. Shattering is fast. Melting is slower and leaves you exposed. But melting is also what lets the glass lose its edges, spread, and join what surrounds it. That is where some relief begins — not in escaping life, but in softening into it.
This isn’t a critique of faith. It’s a reflection on how easily the promise of elsewhere can make us miss what’s here
I’ve also started a Substack called Searching for Peace: Notes from a Social Warrior. It’s just beginning to take shape, but I’d be exuberantly happy if you subscribed — and if you like what we’re trying to do here, please ask a friend to subscribe too.
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