Samsara

samsara - the meaning associated with this is the cycle of life i.e birth, death and rebirth. I feel and I could be absolutely wrong here; It is conjecture on my part. It should have ment something else. if you look up the root words "Sam" and "Sara" and look at those meanings it would mean "completely" or "constant" "to move" or "to flow". Constant Flow. Reminds me of the Dao. Could the conceptual meaning be wrong ? Which raises an uncomfortable possibility.  What if samsara isn’t primarily about multiple lives? What if it’s about this one?

A thought arises. An emotion follows. A story forms. An identity crystallises. Then it fades. And something else takes its place. Over and over. Every day.

You wake up with a version of yourself. By lunchtime, it has shifted. By evening, something else is in charge. The confident self gives way to the tired one. The hopeful one collapses into doubt. The observer becomes the participant. The participant becomes the critic. Each feels solid while it’s happening. Each feels real. Until it doesn’t. Isn’t that also a kind of birth and death?

We like to think of change as something that happens occasionally. A new job. A breakup. A move to another city. A turning point we can point to on a timeline. But most change doesn’t announce itself. It slips in quietly, between moments. The person you were ten minutes ago is already gone. The one reading this sentence is not the same one who started it. There is a continuous dissolving and reforming taking place beneath the surface of our awareness. Not dramatically. Not ceremonially. Just mechanically.

What makes this especially interesting is that the motion itself isn’t the problem. Everything moves. Cells regenerate. Seasons change. Thoughts come and go. Even mountains eventually wear down. Movement is natural. Flow is natural. But there’s a difference between movement and being caught in movement. There’s a difference between flowing and being dragged. Saṃsāra seems to point not just to change, but to unconscious change. Motion driven by habit rather than awareness. Becoming propelled by momentum instead of choice. You could call it psychological inertia. Or conditioned flow. Or simply: autopilot.

Seen this way, saṃsara isn’t something that happens after death. It’s something that happens between emails. Between conversations. Between one emotional state and the next. It’s the subtle compulsion to keep becoming something — productive, successful, admired, secure — without ever pausing long enough to ask who is doing the becoming. Because underneath all of it lies an assumption we rarely question: I am incomplete, and I must keep moving to fix that. What if that assumption itself is the engine?

What strikes me is how often ancient ideas get turned into distant metaphysics, when they may have begun as simple observations. Someone noticed that people suffer in predictable loops. Someone noticed that desire regenerates itself. Someone noticed that identity is provisional. Someone noticed that awareness changes the nature of experience. Over time, these insights became systems. Doctrines. Cosmologies. In reality they were about sitting quietly and watching the mind move.

If saṃsara is constant flow, then liberation isn’t stopping the river. It’s realising you’re in it. And maybe realising that you don’t have to fight it. You don’t have to build a spiritual identity around it. You don’t even have to fix it. You just have to see it. Which is surprisingly difficult. Because seeing requires stillness. And stillness feels unfamiliar in a world optimised for momentum. We fill every gap with sound. Every pause with scrolling. Every silence with productivity. Even reflection is often turned into a project. Yet the most important things don’t reveal themselves in motion. They appear in the spaces between.

I find myself wondering how many of our struggles come not from external circumstances, but from being unconsciously carried forward by internal ones. And what would happen if, even briefly, we stopped moving long enough to notice?

Perhaps samsara isn’t a cosmic punishment. Perhaps it’s a description. This is what happens when awareness goes offline. This is what life looks like when patterns run unchecked. This is how suffering perpetuates itself. Not through grand tragedies. Through tiny repetitions.Through unquestioned assumptions.Through the quiet continuation of yesterday.

I don’t have conclusions here. Only curiosities. What if the cycle isn’t out there? What if it’s closer than we think? What if every moment offers a small exit ramp — not away from life, but deeper into it? And what if the real shift doesn’t come from acquiring new beliefs, but from noticing what’s already happening? Maybe samsara isn’t about escaping existence. Maybe it’s about finally arriving in it.

C