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An escape route to the truth about reality
‘We all get a little dirty rolling around in the mud of samsara.’ Daniel McKenzie
The Eastern spiritual concept of samsara has many related meanings but they all arise from the idea that we suffer because we’re unable to see the truth about reality; that reality is not the familiar world we see about us in the quotidian but an eternal realm behind or beyond it.
Coming from the Sanskrit meaning ‘flow together’, samsara alludes to the flux and flow of the universe and empirical existence, the cycles of birth and death.
Yet Daniel McKenzie, in Samsara: An exploration of the hidden forces that shape and bind us (Mantra Books UK £7.99 / US $12.95, March 2022), points out that, in Buddhism and Hinduism, the term is almost exclusively associated with being bound or limited, ‘something more akin to imprisonment where individuals work out the effects of their past deeds in order to eventually obtain liberation’.
In only a hundred pages, and in clear and appealing prose, McKenzie delves profoundly into the nature and implications of human experience and the diverse aspects of samsara that affect all of our lives where the ‘grand illusion’ of everyday existence is seldom questioned. In today’s turbulent times, McKenzie’s serene optimism that we humans can reinvent ourselves as spiritual questers, upon…
