I live in samsara. Here, migrant children are taken from their parents at the border and housed in cages. Destruction of the world’s rainforests threatens thousands of species. Economists say homelessness could grow by 45 percent as a result of unemployment during the global pandemic. And at the grocery store, two people cut in front of me at the checkout and I seethe in irritation at the offense.
Samsara is the world of ceaseless suffering. It is propelled by the greed and anger arising from the delusion that we are separate from everyone and everything around us. The ruinous effects of samsara are so vast as to appear beyond any individual’s reach or repair, but the cause of samsara can be intimately known through our practice. Indeed, the cause must be known by you before the world you live in can change.
As Buddha taught, samsara is why we come to practice: because life is suffering. We continue our practice because the cause of suffering can be known: our attachment to desires. Lastly, there is a way for attachments to be brought to an end: the eightfold path.
Without a practitioner’s view of reality, samsara can sound like the superstitious belief in a mythological hell. But it is as real as the hungry people waiting in long lines at food banks or the grieving families of 1.6 million people who have died from COVID-19. We might think responsibility for those catastrophes lies elsewhere, but the pain and exploitation of samsara is perpetuated by each of us as long as we remain in the ignorant, dualistic mind of me-versus-you.
This is not hard to see. The ego-mind, our discriminating consciousness, is always defending the ground of the separate self, whether that ground is a place in line at the market or a cherished opinion. With practice, we see how the movement of our minds can speed up into the destructive impulses of self-service, or rest in the selfless and compassionate awareness of pure being.
What separates self from other? Ignorance from wisdom? Samsara from nirvana? In my world, it’s always me.
Photo by Andreea Popa on Unsplash