Samsara

reprinted from The Dog and the Saint

Samsara* is the society of the self-involved. Samsara is people caught in the spider web of desires. Samsara is a maze of spider webs, all connected together, thickly interwoven — forming an impenetrable trap. And in that web, samsaric people are caught like so many flies and fleas, their energies being sucked by their hyperactivity and restlessness like the blood being sucked by a black widow spider. Ego is a black widow —a husband killer. The duty of the ego is to surrender to the soul and serve the soul. But when the ego is not controlled and directed towards God, that ego will make it impossible for the embodied soul to know God —that ego is a killer of God-Consciousness, a killer of soul.

Self-involved people get involved with other self-involved people and produce more self-involved people. This is called samsara. This is called the way of the world. Nobody is involved with the Self, but everybody is self-involved. There is only one remedy for samsara: self-sacrifice, dropping the self-involvement. But how can a dead fly that is all sucked out drop anything when it's already dropped dead?! So, the best remedy is DO NOT GET CAUGHT IN THE SPIDER WEB to begin with, then we won't have any problem. And if we're already caught and struggling to get free, then we better be careful that in the process of struggling we don't get more caught up in the web and draw the attention of our ego. In other words, we must take every action to free ourselves, but we must be careful not to become egotistical or proud in the process.

Alas, samsara exists for the selfish, and so long as a human being is selfish and self-involved, samsara exists for him. As soon as the self-involvement is dropped, samsara has no hold over the embodied soul.


* A Sanskrit word: pronounced -- sum (or sun), sar (rhymes with `far'), a (as in `about')

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