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Because suffering is thus everywhere at the beginning, the middle, and the end, one should abandon samsāra, abide in Reality, and thus become happy. To be trapped in samsāra means to be doomed endlessly to repeat oneself, that is, one’s karmic patterns. Those sensitive to this fact have always sought to escape samsāra by burning the karmic seeds of future rebirths into the conditioned realms of existence. This is also the view of the masters of Tantra. As I will show, however, their transcendence of time does not take the form of mere escape from the round of spatiotemporal existence but of actual mastery of space and time. Propelled by the karmic forces set in motion by his or her own past actions or volitions, the individual who is bound to the realm of cyclic existence is called samsārin. The most common translation of this Sanskrit term is “worldling”; another rendering is “migrator.” By contrast, the person who has succeeded in escaping karma and the flux of time through the power of liberating awareness is known, among other things, as a mahā-siddha, or “great adept” who has transcended or “cheated” time.3 It is to such a one that samsāra reveals its hidden, divine nature. The Architecture of the World Similar to other traditional cosmologies, Hinduism conceives of samsāra as a vast, hierarchically organized field of experience, comprising many levels or mansions of existence, each containing countless beings of all kinds. The visible material world is thought to be only one of fourteen levels of manifestation extending above and below the earth. Both the realms above the earth and those stretching out below it, though invisible to the ordinary eye, can be seen by those gifted with clairvoyance (dūra-darshana, or “remote viewing”). As some Hindu texts insist, and as shamans around the world assert as well, it is even possible to visit these other realms in the subtle body. In fact, we can understand such paranormal abilities as the principal source of knowledge upon which traditional cosmologies are built. Many Western interpreters, however, prefer to regard these cosmologies as mere products of the imagination. The many variations found in the traditional descriptions of the higher and lower realms are generally taken as proof of their origin in pure fantasy, yet we know that a description is only as good as a person’s power of observation and linguistic facility. A dozen people witnessing the same event very likely will yield a dozen different descriptions of it, as in the well-known story of the blind men and the elephant. When we examine the cosmologies of the various spiritual traditions, however, we find a remarkable overlap. We can either explain this as being due to a borrowing of ideas from one tradition by another, or, more reasonably, see this as evidence that actual observation-based knowledge was involved in their creation. This is not to say that creative imagination does not come into play in the traditional descriptions of the world, just as it is an ingredient of modern cosmology and indeed any branch of knowledge.
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