Towards an Awareness of Samsara

Buddhism is at its most radical with the concept of Samsara, the human cycle of birth, death, and rebirth fueled by the never-ending, neurotic pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.  The thirst for pleasure and its accompanying aversion to pain is so ingrained that it has become invisible, like a lens through which we see everything, at the same time forgetting that everything we see has been filtered through that lens.  

 

I recently hit upon a metaphor that has helped me to become aware of my own immersion in Samsara:  Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is like seeking the day and avoiding the night.  Pleasure and pain, like day and night, are two sides of the same coin; you can't have one without the other.  Both are unavoidable, inevitable.  You might have difficulty taking someone seriously who told you that she planned to spend her entire life in the sun.  Picture her frantically hopping planes to stay ahead of the sunset and you begin to get a sense of how ridiculous is the effort to pass our days in pleasure without the interruption of pain.  But we are all caught up in this mad game, almost all of the time.  It is what we humans do.

 

Many Behaviorist theorists will tell you that all human behaviors are ultimately mechanisms for power and control.  The Behaviorists, understanding that we are all doing our absolute best to increase our power to control our experience of pleasure and pain, have simply described Samsara.  The Behaviorist theory resonates, as it is something we are already intuitively familiar with from our own experience of Samsara.

 

Buddhism is so radical precisely because Samsara is so potent.  The Behaviorist version of Samsara feels unassailable, because from the depths of Samsara it feels impossible to even imagine a behavior that does not directly relate to our effort to regulate our own pleasure and pain.  Even the Golden Rule, a moral compass if ever there was one, has echoes of Samsara in the "as you would have others do unto you" half of its equation.  Choose Frankl's search for meaning over Freud's pleasure principle, and you still find traces of Samsara;  finding meaning in suffering presumes the alchemical transformation of suffering into fuel for personal growth.  Somewhere in "No pain, no gain", the suffering is lost.   Seen through the lens of Samsara, the Behaviorist notion of human behavior, and its implicit limitations, appears to have won the day.  At the very least, in 2009 the Behaviorists are running out the clock.

 

But the Buddha taught another way of being in the world.  A Zen legend shows what this might look like:

A Zen monastery was overrun by a marauding gang of murderous pillagers.  One of the attackers approached a monk, put his sword to the monk's chest and threatened the monk, saying "I could kill you right now and I wouldn't even care".  The monk calmly replied "you could kill me right now and I wouldn't even care".  The aggressor became enlightened on the spot.

If anyone comes at me with a sword I'm running away as fast as I can.  But I am working in my meditation practice on not hating my next door neighbor who, among many other shortcomings, refuses to speak to me or my wife because he feels that we have not done enough yard work (ah, suburbia).  I must admit that I have yet to access the wellsprings of compassion for this man, but I have kept my tongue in check.  With lifetimes of work ahead of me in order to gently exit the cycle of Samsara, I consider this progress.