I’ve been writing about Samsara, the human reality we create and inhabit individually and collectively. Human reality consists of belief systems, social structures and the material results of imagination. We function and operate within and between these interrelated components; as an exceptionally adaptable species, doing so has become normal, much as walking through a woodland looking for fruit and nuts used to be.
As human culture has evolved, however, the Samsaric reality we have constructed has become increasingly complex and now forms a Labyrinth in which we are trapped. Filled with twists, turns, dead ends, dark passages, and danger, the Labyrinth also houses the beast, the Minotaur of extinction. Escape is not easy. In the Greek myth, a golden thread provided by Ariadne is unraveled and followed by the hero Theseus, providing a method of escape, but for us, all we have are our wits and our wisdom.
To navigate the Labyrinth, we have increasingly relied upon scientific technology expecting that it will save us. In some ways, scientific progress has made life in the Labyrinth more endurable but saved us it has not. As technology allowed cities to grow bigger, disease spread more easily. We built extensive underground transportation systems, but now they house rats and the desperately poor. We industrialized farming, but with that came the use of poisonous pesticides and degradation of the soil. Refrigeration improved food storage, but plastic packaging has created a microplastic health epidemic. Rather than making the Labyrinth easier to navigate, we’ve made it more punishing and have enlarged it to global proportions.
Digital technology may be the coffin nail. Nearly every facet of modern American life is now digitized. Cash is disappearing in favor of online transactions, but online security is a nightmare. With every advance of techniques of financial protection, new techniques of hacking, fraud and theft arise. I recently was told that I needed to provide a verbal password to speak with my financial advisor on the telephone; AI is now so good at cloning voices that even personal relationships are suspect. Passwords, authentications, facial recognition: like the rest of us, I am now enslaved to dehumanizing technology, handmaiden to the Minotaur.
It’s possible to escape, but it requires abandoning modern life: doing nothing online, destroying credit cards, tossing away cell phones, relocating to the wilderness, and developing survival skills like growing food, raising animals, and fishing; escape requires leaving everyone and everything behind. Few if any of us will do that. I won’t.
Some believe Samsara means everything is an illusion. That’s not true; human reality is sufficiently real. We have systematically replaced much of the physical world with a metaphysical one of our own making embedded with structures, rules and consequences. Samsara is dream-like, however, a waking dream that requires us to constantly make sense of the nonsensical reality we have invented.
Notably, the word Labyrinth is derived from Labrys, the ancient double-headed axe that in form resembles the double-sided human brain of two hemispheres. The Samsaric Labyrinth we inhabit and are trapped within is our own mind. The left hemisphere organizes experience by naming, separating and classifying, the root of our scientific abilities. The right hemisphere employs a holistic model of wholeness and connection; if there is a thread of survival, it can be found there.
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