I’ve heard of a story that might give you a lively metaphor for beginningless samsara. In 1964, during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, there was a man who was going out at sea as part of his daily life. But on that particularly day, he found himself surrounded by a great bombardment of artillery shell, he was so shocked that he jumped off into the sea and almost drowned. Later he was rescued, everybody was glad that he had survived such a horrendous encounter. When asked about if he was afraid of death at that moment, he answered that the struggling for his survival was nothing compared to what happened after he began to lose consciousness. He said at that moment, he started to remember that somehow he had died over and over again before, so many to the point that when he was floating and struggling for a single gasp in the giant sea, he looked down into the ocean and felt that even if all the water of the entire sea of this earth was to cover all the time that he had died over and over repeatedly, it would not suffice. And it startled him so much that he began gaining back consciousness, and grabbed onto a piece of wood nearby and finally got rescued. He said it was that particular moment itself must had been the most scary thing he had ever met in his life and not anything else.
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