Samsara is not a place, she is a Goddess and you are her!
This little essay builds on ideas and terms from Essay #1 of Samsara the Goddess.
Let’s appreciate the profound miracle of our Samsara Nature. It’s stupendous, majestic, infinitely complex, beautiful, ugly, god-like and satanic. How big is Samsara Nature? It’s as big as the universe. How smart is Samsara Nature? It’s as smart as a thousand universities. Every painting, symphony, and story ever created, every language, every nation, every religion, every war; they’re all the work of Samsara Nature. (And THIS is what we’re going to try and subdue!)
Every single sentient being has one. But before taking a closer look at Samsara Nature, I’m going to give it life, just like Frankenstein!!! I’m going to give it free will because it is alive and it has free will. It has goals and strategies, and makes decisions. I’m going to christen this amazing force of our nature The Goddess Samsara. I call Samsara a goddess because she is unthinkably powerful. I call her a ‘her’, for her mother-like OBSSESSION with our survival. I describe her as a living being (not a place) because WE ARE HER.
So what does the Goddess Samsara want? What is her mission?
The first mission of the Goddess is to make sure that our basic physical and social needs are met. She has a fairly specific list of needs including water, food, shelter, safety, family, play, friendship, community, sexual expression, and so on. There’s a lot to be learned by examining that list. We’ll delve in to that list in a later essay.
The second mission of the Goddess is gathering knowledge to help her achieve her first mission. From birth until death she works night and day to discover and invent new ways to get your needs met. She builds a massive library of useful discriminations, things, ideas and strategies. Old lessons are never forgotten; new lessons are continuously learned.
She is a General. She rules. She has a specific LIST of your needs. Her mission is to meet the needs on her LIST. She enforces her authority by imbuing the things, ideas and strategies in her library, with pain or pleasure, good or bad, desire or aversion. Thus we carry out her strategies like rats in a maze. She is very smart (way smarter than you) devious and manipulative. You may be completely blind to her schemes even as she executes them. If we mutiny, she comes down on us like a ton of bricks. :)
Then The Goddess does a stupendous magic trick. She absolutely and utterly convinces us that instead of a library, her collection of things and ideas and strategies, is REAL and SOLID and PERMANENT. She deludes is into believing that instead of a store of information, her library is THE REAL WORLD.
Finally, The Goddess Samsara, our helicopter mother, our curse, and our savior, proceeds to yank us through life according to her whims, like a bull with a ring in its nose.
What an amazing feat. And every sentient being, down to a nematode with less than a thousand cells, has it’s own Goddess dancing around in its head. The Goddess Samsara is the ultimate magician. Look around. It’s all a magic trick. She dreamed it up, and we’ve been hypnotized to believe it’s real, permanent and solid as a rock.
Would you like to meet her and talk to her face-to-face? Then walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror.
YOU are the Goddess Samsara. YOU created her amazing delusion, which is the real world. Congratulations!