The word Samsara is really a very beautiful word. Here is the meaning taken from Google: the cycle of death and rebirth to which life in the material world is bound. In the meaning, the word Cycle is very important. Samsara simply means Cyclical. It is a desolate word. Empty from within. When I say empty from within, what I mean is we are all in a cyclical movement. Our whole life is cyclical. We repeat our activities.

Once we sleep, it is not like we will not sleep again. We will have to sleep again. That is how we exist here, so that is our nature of existence: Repetition or Samsara. We eat and again we eat. We have been repeating it. So, one can say that there are so many activities that we repeat. we will have to repeat. There is no choice here. This is where the Creator has given us no choice. Thus, we are all in a Samsara.

Life is what you make it

But somehow that Samsara is not enough for us. We are not happy with repeating things, but anyways we do. We are all looking for something more than repeating things in life. Therefore, I said Samsara is a desolate word. Empty from within. Since we all are in a Samsara, feeling empty is in the very nature of it. We all have a little Emptiness within that we are trying to fulfil in different ways.

We are all trying to add things to our lives. Things will not fill this emptiness and we all know it from within. We have been adding things to our lives, and till date we have not stopped. Most of us are trying to come out of this Cyclical Process or fill that emptiness of Samsara by adding things to our lives. I am not telling the material world is of no importance. It has its own importance. We are made of some material. Our very body is material. Presently our very nature of existence is materialistic. Only because we are materialistic, we have an opportunity to become Spiritual.

Anything that is Physical / Materialistic is cyclical in existence. The whole physical existence is cyclical, from the galaxies to the atoms. Everything is moving in circles. But the emptiness within cannot be filled with material / things. Material has its own importance but that is not the way to come out of Samsara. That is not the right direction to Samadhi.

Life is Just a Cycle

Samadhi can be attained by understanding the emptiness within, not by adding things one by one. Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Saying that we are empty does not mean that we do not exist. No matter if something is full or empty, that thing clearly needs to be there in the first place. When we say a vessel is empty, the vessel must be there in order to be empty. When we say that we are empty, it means that we must be there in order to be empty of a permanent, separate self.

Life is ONE. We do not need to slice it into pieces and call this or that piece a self. What we call a self is made only of non-self-elements. When we look at a flower, for example, we may think that it is different from “non-flower” things, but when we look more deeply we see that everything else in the cosmos is in that flower. Without all of the non-flower elements—the sunshine, the clouds, the earth, minerals, heat, rivers, and consciousness—a flower cannot be.

The very word Samsara becomes the steppingstone to Samadhi if we pay close attention to it. The problem will guide us to its solution. We need to understand that we are all empty from the inside and we just need to realize the beauty of emptiness. The peace we achieve in that state of emptiness is tremendous. That emptiness is our space: It remains untouched and intact from the physical realm.

Let us Practice Living in God

We should practice of taking shelter in that emptiness, keeping all our physical and mental problems aside. Every individual deserves 15-20 minutes of total peace out of our 24 hours. We should sit with the eyes closed and simply become aware of everything around. Consequently, Gradual and everyday practice will allow us to shift from becoming aware to simply becoming awareness, personality to presence, then we get Samadhi.

Samadhi is living in God. The creator works through his creation. He sees, touches, smells, hears and feels through his creation. The creator and the creation cannot be separated, just like the dancer and the dance cannot be separated. There is dance, when there is a dancer and there is dancer when there is dance. We cannot be separated from God, our source. We just have forgotten.

Just keeping this awareness that we live in God and God is working through us will help us be mindful in all our activities.

The post Samsara, The Nature of Our Physical Existence appeared first on Syed Usman Haniel.