Meditation and Samsara

It is possible for someone to glimpse the truth of impermanence through some effort and then get lost in Samsara again.

I'd heard this line a couple years ago in a podcast, recently after clearly glimpsing the truth of impermanence myself. It was hard to imagine at the time how can someone get lost in Samsara again once they have seen the truth of impermanence so clearly.

As I write these words now, I know how. It happens through a gradual erosion of mental vigilance. Over time, you slowly begin to accept desires in your life, one little desire at a time. The thing with desire is, as I have discovered, once they are embedded firmly enough in the mind, they create a sort of a force field. Fulfilment of the desire (or the prospect of it) generates likeable experiences - thrill, anticipation, 'happiness', pleasure. Denial of the desire (or the prospect of it) generates unwanted experiences - fear, anxiety, discomfort, maybe sadness. More importantly, this deeply embedded desire attracts the attention of the mind. The force of this attraction depends on the nature of the exact desire but this dynamic does play out. And because the attention of the mind is focused on the desire and its status, the corresponding feelings its status generates are felt as 'real' and 'meaningful'.

I really wanted to date that girl. Now that we're actually going on a date, I'm excited and am looking forward to it.

I really wanted to sip my wine by the sunset. But I cannot get out of this conversation so I'm anxious and annoyed.

And slowly, as the constellation of desires grows in the mind, you are lost in Samsara - your attention is perpetually skipping from one desire to another, checking its status, focusing on its fulfilment, bemoaning another one's failure. This creates a false surface in the mind. A surface which reflects your desires back at you and keeps you simultaneously blinded and hypnotised. This surface becomes the latest version of your identity - this is what I want, this is what I don't want, and this is who I am.

While living life between this inner surface and the outer world, the truth of impermanence in every single moment becomes a mere conceptual graffiti painted somewhere on this inner surface. From time to time, the mind does go back to viewing it fully by dropping into the present moment. What's really interesting here is that the frequency and duration of instances when the mind drops into the present moment changes as well. In my experience, it is directly proportional to the amount and honesty of formal practice I'm engaging in during those days. After my first ever retreat, I used to almost spontaneously drop all thought and truly flow with the present moment throughout the day - during meetings, in the metro, while working, during sex. Over the course of the next two and a half years, consistent conditioning in the increasingly predictable patterns of my new life built a temporal split in the mind - when I sat down to meditate, I would often 'arrive' within minutes. However, when I was just living life - working, hanging out with friends et cetera, I would often be hypnotised by and lost in the identity of that pattern. Moments of deep suffering, like loneliness, would ring the mindfulness bell and the mind would almost spontaneously become present again. But as life got easier, the thinking mind converged onto the thought of being present less and less. As the desire for being in touch with impermanence diffused, and got replaced by worldly desires, the mind got lost in samsara again.