Hello world!

Hello, and welcome to samsara.

If you’ve ever had that itch in your head, that you just can’t get rid of; that basic unsatisfactoriness with life, but never knowing quite where it comes from; this is the place where we hope to find the answers to these things. In fact, the answers are already here for us. It just takes a matter of some undoing of all the brainwashing we’ve been through and replacing old, unskillful patterns of thought  and behavior with new, more productive ones.

In Buddhism, or the Middle Way as it is often called, this set of conditions, conditioning, ignorance and the consequent unsatisfactoriness and suffering that nearly everybody knows is called samsara. Samsara is often spoken about as if it were a place, i.e. the world we live in. Samsara is also defined as a state of existence outside of its opposite, nibbana or nirvana. In truth, neither samsara nor nibbana are places or states of being in reality. They are conceptual, existing only in the mind. You will notice many places in this writing that the word samsara is not capitalized as it not a proper noun because it does not exist. This can be so easy to realize and also so indescribably difficult to know.

It is the taking away of perceptions and conditioning that we deal with here. We will endeavor together to release the cycle of ignorance, a more appropriate definition of samsara, and dwell in the peace that is in all of us by finding real-world practical techniques and skills to bring it about.

“So if this does not exist, then what is all this pain, suffering and confusion in the world?”  We will find out together, bit by bit.

The Wheel of Samsara/Cycle of Aimless Wandering