“
Samsāra is often somewhat flatly rendered as “conditioned existence” or “mundane existence.” These two English equivalents fail to convey the rhythmic or cyclic nature of our individual worldly lives, which ride on the current of time, now submerging into the invisible, “subtle” realms, now reemerging into material visibility. Samsāra is the round of birth, life, death, rebirth, renewed life, and then again death, ad infinitum. It is existence determined by fate (daiva), the intricate and inviolable web of karmic indebtedness that exists between beings. Samsāra is karma. This means, as the contemporary Tantric adept Vimalananda pointed out, that it is mostly memory.2 Cyclic or conditioned existence is governed by all kinds of laws (which are the frozen memories of nature), the most important of which is the law of cause and effect. Newton captured its physical aspect in his formulation that every action has an equal but opposite reaction. India’s sages assure us that this law applies with equal force in the realm of the mind to our thoughts and volitions. Because science looks only at the material realm, it fails to appreciate the comprehensive nature of causation and therefore also allows for meaningless chance events. From a deeper, spiritual perspective, however, all events are governed by causation. Existence is an infinitely complex network of conditions giving rise to other conditions. This is what karma signifies. Samsāra, as the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would say, is “process.” And what is being processed is the human psyche (jīva), which must undergo repeated world experience in order to realize its true destiny beyond all manifestation, consisting in the realization of Being-Consciousness, or Spirit. The world is a school, which is an idea given expression in non-Indic spiritual traditions as well. If human life can be said to have an overarching purpose at all, it is to graduate through the awakening of wisdom (vidyā, jnāna). From yet another angle, samsāra is māyā. That is to say, it is a finely woven mesh of illusions, rooted in our fundamental misapprehension of ourselves and the world. The misconception about ourselves consists in looking upon ourselves as ego-personalities rather than the indivisible pure Being-Consciousness. The misconception about the world consists in looking upon it as an external reality rather than as being identical with our own nature. This root error (avidyā), which is a matter of spiritual blindness, is what keeps the karmic nexus going. It is at the bottom of our limited and limiting experience of space and time and is the primary cause of our experience of suffering (duhkha) as seemingly individuated beings. The Hindu texts describe in graphic terms the nature of cyclic existence.
”
”