Objectivity or conscious awareness necessarily creates a division or separation because objects need a subject to perceive or be aware of them. The perceiver and the perceived. The aspiration and the aspirer. The lover and the beloved. To avoid the necessity for this duality, we must go beyond all craving and clinging, even for and to deities and gods. We should even let the gleaming sacred images of the Buddha and of the King of Suffering, Jesus Christ, fall so that others can use them as we have. If our hands are full of images and gods how can we hold compassion and heal others from our unique nature?
Guilt. Compulsion. External obligations. Fear. The conditioned mind will throw these spanners into the spokes of our wheels to distract us. But our wheels need to spin naturally without sticking so we can freewheel down the eternal hill of true freedom. We need to let nothing and no-one interfere with our absolute sincerity to ourselves, and it is our wheel which is designed to turn eternally, so nobody else can initiate the spin.
All around there are people separated from others and from themselves. Their wheels cannot continue to spin because they interfere with what is natural. The practitioner says she is desperate because she cannot practice the teachings. ‘Practice’ and ‘Performance.’ ‘Practitioner’ and ‘practice.’ ‘Practice’ of the ‘Buddhist teachings.’ My ‘practice’ is superior to her ‘practice.’ We can find so many dualities here. Employing and becoming attached to these words prescribed by religionists is adding many and various cogs and electrical devices to our already perfect natural wheel.
Another ‘disciple’ clings to my hand and tells me how she envies my western mind, yearning for my culture and white skin. This lack of acceptance of her personal reality and mission has rusted and broken her wheel. There is no contentment even while taking full refuge in the Buddha. How then can others take refuge in her?
The few freely spinning wheels are of those who suffer and have recovered from death. Only in this extreme of physical extinguishing can some allow their wheels to spin. They are no longer afraid or dishonest because they have faced reality full on.
Akira speaks with difficulty, his eyes moving slowly, and as he searches for the foggy words he turns away to reveal long white scars down his neck from two of the 8 surgical operations he needed to allow him to be revived and restored. Now in his second year of daily rehabilitation, he has no roles in life except as an invalid, and this he embraces. He is his broken self, and he is the patches which have put him back together. He is not separate from his condition, and in that oneness he freewheels. He is content to be the misfortune which has uprooted the smooth passage of his young life. There is no barb of blame in sight.
Only when we go beyond all expectations and hopes, any and all fixed ideas, will our wheels spin freely. Only when we let go of the permanence of the physical and material form, of beginnings and ends, will we find contentment and the unimpaired flight of our true mission.
