What path do spir­itu­al con­cepts travel? Sam­sara – this Indi­an theo­lo­gic­al term has passed into every­day usage, just like the words yoga, karma, guru or man­tra. We use it, we mean some­thing by it, but we scarcely guess at its depths.

Sam­sara is a com­pound word: sam-sara. The first ele­ment (sam) points to work­ing togeth­er, but also to full­ness and per­fec­tion. It is as if this double mean­ing were hint­ing that per­fec­tion is a shared under­tak­ing. The mean­ing of the second ele­ment (sarah) has many shades: essence and cour­age, vital­ity and dis­ease, quint­essence and wealth, pur­u­lent dis­charge and the sap of trees, wind, air, cream, fresh but­ter, pres­ence of mind and nec­tar.

If we were to line the mean­ings up mech­an­ic­ally side by side, we would arrive at the per­fec­tion of essence, or an all-embra­cing dis­ease, total suc­cess and per­fect cour­age, the full­ness of truth, pure nec­tar, cooper­at­ive pres­ence of mind, the whole world, and even the per­fect chess piece.

Nev­er­the­less, the mean­ings of sam­sara are these: 1. pas­sage, going; 2. the cycle of worldly life, the world, this-worldly exist­ence; 3. trans­mi­gra­tion of souls, rein­carn­a­tion, rebirth; 4. worldly illu­sion, mirage. These senses speak for them­selves, and throw light on the path, the course, that souls travel. They show that the trans­mi­gra­tion of souls can be under­stood only with­in a bod­ily, worldly exist­ence lim­ited in time, and that in bod­ily exist­ence count­less illu­sions sway man and turn his atten­tion from the essence, from the search for per­man­ence.

In this light, what course do souls now travel, along­side con­cepts? Would a tran­si­ent soul dwell in a per­man­ent body? No, exper­i­ence shows oth­er­wise: bod­ies pass away and, so we hope, the soul remains. Con­scious­ness of etern­al exist­ence is also con­scious­ness of sam­sara, for only in the light of repeated incarn­a­tions can the per­man­ence of the soul be under­stood.

With­in a single body, too, an exchange goes on: cells, and at times organs, come and go, thoughts and ideas change, and this too is as if the soul were chan­ging its subtler garb. The body is embod­ied thought, so if the thought changes, even invis­ibly, the body changes too. And the con­di­tions of life are bound to change: high and low, suc­cess and fail­ure, the enjoy­er and the exploited, karma-caus­ing and karma-suf­fer­ing situ­ations fol­low one anoth­er. A labyrinth, or a maze?

Rivers ran dry, the moun­tains crumbled, the Pole Star shif­ted, and the plan­ets strayed from their orbits, then a flood covered the Earth – how does life dif­fer from the way frogs hop about in a dried-up puddle?

This whirl of exist­ence is there to whirl man round, to rob him of his wits, to teach him through stern con­sequences, to lure him with pleas­ant situ­ations, to lift him up or drag him into the depths. Sam­sara is at once a com­pel­ling law, sweep­ing souls from one sta­tion to the next, and a con­sequence that depends on those who main­tain it, just like a pris­on, which in truth is main­tained by its cap­tives. If there were no karma, there would be no sam­sara either. If there were no cap­tive souls, the whirl of exist­ence would lose its reas­on for being. Sac­red tra­di­tion iden­ti­fies many mil­lions of sta­tions: from the single cell to the demi­god, the soul can take on a thou­sand forms. But from the sage every veil falls away, the net dis­solves before his eyes, and sam­sara, instead of per­petu­al cap­tiv­ity, opens for him the path to sal­va­tion. Begin per­fect­ing your­self, for every long jour­ney begins with the first step!