Samsara

I may have been 10 or 12 years old when I read The Search For Bridey Murphey by Morey Bernstein. I found it fascinating. A few years later I read the story of 13-year-old Lurancy Vennum and found it equally fascinating. Whether as a result of that, or whether it would have happened anyway, I developed a lifelong interest in reincarnation and life after death – or Life After Life, as psychologist Raymond Moody would put it. Over the years and decades that followed, I read dozens of books containing many accounts of reincarnation, near death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and after death communications (ADCs). For the most part, these lifelong interests occurred after the incident I describe here.

One day, forty years ago, I took a course in TM – Transcendental Meditation. I had a specific reason for learning TM – a life problem with which I was wrestling at the time. I questioned whether TM would help me, but I wanted to try it anyway. Learning TM was a leave-no-stone-unturned kind of thing.

I resolved to meditate every morning and every evening for one year to see what, if any, difference it made in my life. A few months passed. One day as I sat meditating, the word samsara popped into my head. I dismissed it and returned to my mantra, but samsara continued to pop back into my head when I didn’t want it there. I suspected it was Sanskrit but I didn’t know what it meant. At that time there was no Google (nor even an Internet). Though I was curious about what the word meant, or if it was even a real word, I wasn’t curious enough to go to a library and research it.

Fast forward to the present and we have the Internet and search engines, so I can easily research the word. Samsara is the Westernized version of the Sanskrit word संसार. The word refers to the endless cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth (reincarnation) which humans and all other mortal beings must endure, according to the beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, and some other eastern religions. According to those beliefs, the only escape from this endless cycle is to achieve the highest state of enlightenment.

I will leave the reader to pursue his or her own enlightenment. I simply found it interesting that a Sanskrit word should pop into my brain while I was performing an eastern meditation. Not just pop into my head only to be forgotten, but pop into my head so forcefully and persistently that after forty years I still recall it. And not just any random word, but a word meaningful to eastern philosophy and religion, and though I didn’t know it at the time, meaningful to me.

 

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