the here and the now

"Buddhism, more than any philosophy I am aware of, has no interest in "dreamlands," or in the places in our head that stand in the way of our engagement with what is happening right now; the Buddha, after all, took his very name and meaning from the sense of being wide-awake in the middle of confusion and ignorance. The philosophy that arose out of his teaching affirms no absolute paradise of the kind hymned in Christian or Islamic texts; for those in the Dalai Lama's tradition, Nirvana itself is just a way station, a state of mind, really, that the true bodhisattva sees not as an endpoint but a viewpoint, to carry back with him into the clamour of the world." 

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Pico Iyer, p. 40