Samsara

Samsara (Sanskrit: संसार, saṃsāra, “wandering through”) is the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (reincarnation) that constitutes conditioned existence in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions. Samsara is driven by karma (the consequences of action) and avidya (ignorance of one’s true nature). Liberation (moksha in Hinduism; nirvana in Buddhism) is defined precisely as the cessation of this cycle.

Esoteric Parallels

Samsara is the Eastern equivalent of the Veil_of_Maya and the Demiurgic prison in Gnosticism: a flawed, mechanistic universe engineered to entrap divine sparks (consciousness) inside rigid matter, forcing them into a repeating cycle of material incarnation. The esoteric cinema analyses document this directly: Truman’s repeating daily routine in The Truman Show, the foods’ born-to-be-eaten cycle in Sausage Party, and Peter’s office purgatory in Office Space are all instances of cinematic samsara.

See Also

• Veil_of_Maya — the illusion that sustains the samsaric cycle
• Hinduism — the tradition in which samsara is a central doctrine
• Buddhism — the tradition that diagnoses samsara as the root problem
• Gnostic_Demiurge — the Western parallel: the system designer who traps souls
• Mara — the Buddhist tempter who maintains the samsaric illusion
• Individuation — the Jungian escape from the ego’s repetitive patterns