The Zennist: Attached to the wheel of samsara

The ordinary person (prithagjana) lives continually under the spell that they are the psychophysical body which Buddhism calls the Five Aggregates consisting of form, sensation, thought, inclination and sensory consciousness.

It may never dawn on such people that this body of theirs is not who they really are; that although they interface with it without break, their true nature is independent and other than the Five Aggregates, the latter being illusory. These same people are also unaware that their extraordinary desire to pursue phenomena, by which they become bound down to the Five Aggregates, means they have, in total ignorance, thrown themselves into transmigratory existence (samsara) from which there is no escape—at lest no apparent escape.

Turning to the subject of transmigratory existence, consciousness, again and again, by the force of habit to interface with phenomenal bodies, enters another body after death; one that it finds fitting based on its past inclinations.

“Just as a silkworm makes a cocoon in which to wrap itself and then leaves the cocoon behind, so consciousness produces a body to envelop itself and then leaves that body to undergo other karmic results in a new body” (Mahâratnakûta Sutra).

In effect, ordinary people attach themselves to the wheel of transmigration by their will (karma) which means they are always thirsting for ways of being which are inadequate with pure Mind; which consequently throws them into samsara with its varying degrees of suffering. For example, those who will to higher forms of being, which would be the gods or devas, are more proximate with pure Mind. As a result, such beings naturally experience less suffering since they are nearer Mind’s luminosity. This would not be the case with the denizens in the hells. This gati or destiny is polar opposite to the destiny of the gods in which horrible suffering is the rule because the will is not at all proximate with Mind—going even against it.

While all this sounds quite fanciful to the skeptical modern mind, a word of caution is advised. In more advanced star systems towards the center of our galaxy where evolution has been going on considerably longer than on our heavy gravity planet, there are beings who, were we to meet them face-to-face, we might consider them to be god-like. Chances are we might even be terrified of them as animals are of humans. For more study of this particular topic from a Western perspective, I advise reading as much as you can of the English philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) who wrote Space, Time, and Deity (1920). The following might be of help for those who haven’t the time to take this up.

“The basic stuff of the universe is space-time or pure motion, and everything in it develops out of the primary stuff by a process of emergent evolution. Things or substances are volumes of space-time with a determinate contour; low in the scale of evolution is matter, whence emerges life and finally, so far as we are concerned, mind; but no one can say what will emerge later in the evolutionary process. The next stage to which the universe is striving is at that stage deity; God is in the making but never actual. On this metaphysical foundation, Alexander built a realist theory of knowledge” (Urmson & Rée, The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy and Philosophers, p. 6).