“For what had happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. […] They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.”
This closing passage from Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins (Las Ruinas Circulares) unveils a recursive Samsara of creation: a sorcerer from the wilderness conjures another human’s flesh and consciousness through dreams, after experiencing ruptures of dream, delirium, and awakening, until finally igniting illusion life with fire. Yet when the newly born youth departs for the next crumbling sanctuary, the sorcerer’s own burned sanctuary is consumed once more—the creator, too, is an illusion dreamed by another.
