Upon hearing Evola's use of nirvāņa as "cessation of restlessness" exactly what the term was supposed to mean became perfectly clear. I believe this sort of restlessness should be immediately familiar to any other modern man. It is a pre-occupation with all things sensory, an over-stimulation of the rational capabilities of the mind, a constant nagging desire. Shortly later Evola also translated it more literally as "non-mania" which only cemented my interpretation. Physical restlessness of the body and mental manic restlessness are two parts of a whole, and both parts must be addressed for the whole soul to be at the 'peace' of which Buddhism speaks. This restlessness is the nature of the 'desire' to be shorn; it is the source of all ties to the external; it builds the false self which distracts one from one's true Self.

To overcome it requires discipline and the employment of techniques. I'm grateful for these examples as I have been feeling the need to expand my daily routine. Meditation has seemed too difficult for too long and it is time for the restlessness to go.

“The great Zarathustra wanted knights to fight under the banner of light in the struggle against darkness—the Turanian idolaters, the demons of impurity and ignorance, and lastly the spirit of Ahriman or Satan. He wanted that there should be people able to say yes to the light—and who, consequently, learnt to say no to the darkness.” - Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XVII

“The great Buddha wanted to awaken the will to say no to the great routine of desires which make the wheel of births revolve. He wanted ascetics with regard to the automatic mechanism of the psyche, who would learn to say yes with regard to the free creativity of the spirit.” - Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Letter XVII

A fascinating legend of a lost Island (Atlantis) which predates Plato and his account comes from Vedic literature. The Mahabharata speaks of "Atala (Atlantis), the White Island."

"The men that inhabit that island have complexions as white as the rays of the Moon and they are devoted to Narayana (the supreme God)... Indeed, the denizens of White Island believe and worship only one God."- The Mahabharata.

"The fact remains that modern man needs these degraded and desecrated forms of action as if they were some kind of drug; he needs them to elude the sense of his inner emptiness, to be aware of himself, and to find in exasperated sensations the surrogate for the true meaning of life. One of the characteristics of the Western 'Dark Age' (Kali Yuga) is a sort of Titanic restlessness that knows no limitations and that induces an existential fever and awakens new sources of elation and of stupefaction."

- Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

"In order to clarify this point it is necessary to explain what time means today. Time is perceived as the simple irreversible order of consecutive events; its parts are mutually homogenous and therefore can be measured in a quantitative fashion. Moreover, a distinction is made between "before" and "later" (namely, between past and future) in reference to a totally relative (the present) point in time. But whether an event is past or future, whether it takes place in one or another point in time, does not confer upon it any special quality; it merely makes it a dateable event, that's all. In other words, there is some kind of reciprocal indifference between time and its contents. The temporality of these contents simply means that they are carried along by a continuous current that never inverts its course and in which every moment, while being different from all others, is also equal to all others. In the most recent scientific theories (such as Minkowski's and Einstein's) time even loses this particular character. Scientists talk about the relatively of time, of time as space's 'fourth dimension' and so on; this means that time becomes a mathematical order per se that is absolutely indifferent with regard to events, which may this be located in a 'before' rather than in an 'after,' depending on the reference system being adopted.
The traditional experience of time was of a very different kind; time was not regarded quantitatively but rather qualitatively; not as a series, but as rhythm. It did not flow uniformly and indefinitely, but was broken down into cycles and periods in which every moment had its own meaning and specific value in relation to all others, as well as a lively individuality and functionality. Each of these cycles or periods (the Chaldean and Hellenic 'great year'; the Etruscan or Latin saeculum; the Iranian aeon; the Aztec 'suns'; the Hindu kalpas) represented a complete development forming closed and perfect units that were identical to each other; although they reoccurred they did not change nor did they multiply, but rather followed each other, according to Hubert-Mauss's fitting expression, as a 'series of eternities.' Since this wholeness was not quantitative but organic, the chronological duration of the saeculum was ephemeral. Qualitatively different periods of time were regarded as equal, provided that each of them contained and reproduced all the typical phases of a cycle. And so, certain numbers such as seven, nine, twelve, and one thousand were traditionally employed not to express quantities, but rather typical structures of rhythm; thus they had different durations though they remained symbolically equivalent."

- Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World