[The following is a repost of something Shugz posted in a religious forum somewhere.]
I gave this topic some deeper thought. I was asking myself why some people philosophically hypothesize that reality is an illusion. I personally have a very hard time accepting the idea that a semitruck on the street is maya and that if I walk in front of it, it’ll pass right thru me like a phantom ((phantom being one of the meanings of “maya”).
There are certain schools of “Hinduism” that does also interpret reality to be a mass hallucination ((which is another meaning of “Maya”)) but these are usually crazy people.
I say they are crazy because they say that reality – the earth, the trees, the stuff we exist in – is all an apparition ((another meaning of “maya”)) BUT… they believe that invisible gods and a whole host of invisible heavens and abodes of devas are real???
That’s like me saying to you guys, “You know my house is an hallucination ((another meaning of “maya”)) but that white elephant and wholly rhino I have in my closet… that shit is real.”
I really don’t know the origins of this Occidental perception of reality being fake. It could be a native Western thing, if so then I can’t don’t know enough about Western Philosophy to talk about it. But if it is in someways inspired by “Eastern” schools of philosophy, then I can try to make a few clarifications. But I can only speak from a Theravada Buddhist school of thought.
We have today the convenience of many modern English words to describe a certain type of abstract ideation: “Paradigm,” “World-View,” “Weltanschauung” ((which is borrowed from German)), and now “The Matrix.”
The minds of thinkers 3000 years ago were just as capable of ideating this same abstract concept, but they did not have English, and what language they had was composed of very simple words. So if you were a philosopher living 3000 years ago, and you have a language that had simple words, how would you capture into words what we today call a “paradigm” so that you can talk about it with other philosophers? Our word “paradigm” actually comes from the ancient Greek word “Paradigma” which means the “Patterns” of Grammar, such as syntax, word lay out, and the flowing of words used.
Or how would you say “world-view” with what words you had back then, during a time and in a place where Latin and Greek weren’t known to exist to borrow from. In Sanskrit you can’t really say something like “Lokate Loga/Loka” for “world view” because it just mundanely means to “Look at the place or world.”
So if we were to say that a river can symbolically represent the world for the sake of philosophizing, then when somebody says “world view” it paints the picture of a person standing by the river looking at this river and perhaps explaining to you what he sees… and so we call it his “world view.”
So when as Satanists we explain our Satanic World View, what we are doing is basically explaining how we as “Satanists” sees, interprets, and understands our world or “reality” to be from our Satanic perspective.
Except when we do that we leave out a very significant aspect of our Satanic World View: Our own Stand Point… or POV in relation or relative to our world view.
What I mean is, when as Satanists we talk about our world views, we don’t do so as an anthropologist describing the world order of a tribe of Satanists and their ways of life. We are explaining this world view of ours from the inside, as we experience it… as we are already immersed in it.
So back to using a river to symbolize the world. This means that when we explain to other our own world views, we are not standing out side of that river… we are INSIDE of it sharing what we see and experience of it, as one who is inside experiencing, not as one who is outside observing.
This idea of being “inside” one’s world-view ((that symbolical ‘river’)) or paradigm ((as we call it today)) is the fundamental essence of the Sanskrit and Pali word “Samsara.”
Sometimes Samsara is rendered in English as “Reality,” sometimes as some “Cycle of Life and Death.” Both of these grossly misrepresent what Samsara actually means in its native etymological sense. Samsara is what is most often described as having “maya” as its essential nature. Samsara is composed of two simple Sanskrit words: Sam(a) and Sar(a). I put the final “A” in quotes because in Sanskrit they are not real independent letters. They are inherent vowel sounds attached to the “M” and “R.”
The word “SAM(a)” is a distant cousin of the English word “Same,” as in alike or the same. Sam(a) means “Together,” “Same,” “Equal,” “Shared,” and “Common.” It is the root word in the Sanskrit word “Samgam” ((Sam meaning “together” and Gam or Gang(a) meaning a ‘group of people’)) which in Pali is Sangha meaning a Collective, an Order, association, or Assembly.
SAR(a) means a number of things, it means a “River,” “Flow,” “Current,” also “Substance,” “Essence,” “Thing,” and “Reality.” It is the root word in the name of the Goddess “Saraswati” which basically means Lady of the River/Lake.
When you put Sam and Sar together you get Samsara which roughly means a “shared thing,” a “common substance,” a flow we share in common, a reality we have the same of.
Then we can better capture the essential meanings of this word by looking at the meanings of other words it forms:
Samsarati ((-ati is a verbal suffix)) means something that “Flows Together,” like when a school of fish swims down stream together they are “Samsarati-ing.”
Samsarasukha is a Sanskrit word which is the most revealing. It means to Enjoy the Pleasures of the Mundane World. “Sukha/Sukkha” meaning pleasant, pleasure, joy, peace, happiness… and so Samsara means here the Mundane World.
Mundane World, not in the sense that it is the planet earth or the material universe. Samsara originally means “Worldly Existence,” “Secular Life,” which is basically the Life you are living in a city and the world you experience or perceive.
Samsara is thus an ancient world which basically means your Paradigm that you exist in and are experiencing. It is the “world view” that you are inside of. It is the religious or spiritual or secular paradigm you are a part of that you share with others.
That is what is Maya. Your paradigm, world view, conceptualization, or intellectualization, or interpretation of the World/Nature/Earth/Life is what is an illusion or a hallucination that is not natural or “real.”
Most of us never are able to escape the paradigm we exist inside… so Samsara is often described as some cycle of birth and death. It is symbolical and philosophical.
For example not too long ago in Europe when you were born into human existence, you were born into the Samsara – the shared paradigm – of Christendom. You are born a Christian, and you die a Christian. And as the centuries go on by this Christian samsara ends up being a prison of life and death inside which countless lives born and die within… never realizing of any other paradigm ((reality)) besides their own.
Most likely the Sramana ((the ancestral tradition that gave birth to both Jainism and Buddhism)) first came up with the word Samsara, as these people were the ones in vedic India to renounce vedic world order to live outside their Samsara in forests.
The Hindus later borrowed this idea of Samsara and misunderstood the symbology to mean an actual Reality or cylcle of re-incarnation.
In something like Theravada Buddhism, the point is to strive to “Awaken” ((Buddhi)) from Samsara, meaning to realize that one’s paradigm or world view – no matter how reasonable or realistic it may feel, is not real when compared to what is actually Life, Nature, the earth, and the Universe.
When you have finally realized that your paradigm, world view, “reality” ((in your head)) is a phantom or deception ((maya)), and you extricate yourself out of that trap, you are said to have “transcended” Samsara and thus have achieved Nirvana – the state in which you are Not Born into that Samsara again.
So in Buddhism you have a number of ways to learn to directly grasp or apprehend Nature/Life minus the paradigm shit and world view. One form of meditation is called Sati. Sati is when you mindfully experience your world wordlessly and thoughtlessly.
For example when you practice Sati eating strawberries, you fully experience every moment and aspect of eating, chewing, and tasting that strawberry without talking or chattering in your head thoughts. In the same way that a baby who has not yet learn language to think in experiences things directly without the envelope of words and thoughts coming between itself and its experiences.
It’s that envelope of words and thoughts that you put up in between you and reality ((the world)) that is the illusion. A strawberry is not “sweet.” That “sweet” is only an idea, an opinion, an approximation in word/thought, a phantom in your own mind, which is not the actual strawberry.
Gradually as you grow older into adulthood, that envelope of Samsara grows thicker and wraps you up like a mummy so that what world or reality you do think you exist in or are experiencing is just a figment of your own imagination, words, thoughts, opinion, convictions, and conceptualizations. That is what is “not real” or artificial.
So from this specific perspective of Theravada, the world/reality “out there,” is very real. What is artificial is the “reality” we have “in side” or the paradigm we are inside of. That artificial reality made up of patterns of ideas, thoughts, theories, opinions, convictions, human valuations, “what if’s,” etc, is what is maya. By this I don’t just mean ideas in our heads. I also mean the materialization of such ideas, such as the life/world Conservative Christians exists inside is maya or Samsara. In the same sense that the reality/life/world that a secular civilian shares with other secular civilians is maya. What is real is wordless and has existed long before thoughts or human interpretation or humans.
There is a saying that goes, ‘you know a person is lying when they open their mouths… or something like that. Which would mean you should know that when any person opens their mouth to explain reality… that it is a lie ((artificial)).
For a Theravada perspective on samsara, Click This. The link represents only one individual bhikkhu’s understandings.
