The Cycle Doesn’t Blink: Trapped, Dancing, or Finally Still
We wake up again. Same sky, different body. The first breath tastes familiar, like déjà vu in the lungs. The Tibetans call it bardo, the Christians call it judgment, the atheists call it coincidence, but the feeling is identical: “I’ve been here before.” The wheel turns. Samsara keeps its receipts.
You are born crying because you already know what’s coming: love that leaves, bodies that betray, pleasures that turn to ash the instant you swallow them. Every infant’s wail is an ancient protest. We spend the next eighty years trying to forget what we remembered in the womb. Then we die, forget everything else, and come back for another round. The game is rigged for addiction. That’s the joke.
YOLO, they say now, laughing over cocktails, as if one life could possibly be enough to justify the depth of the ache. One life? That’s not a philosophy; it’s a coping mechanism. You only live once if you’re lucky enough to stay unconscious between deaths. Most of us aren’t. The soul is a frequent flyer with too much karma mileage.
Look at your own timeline. Joy, terror, lust, grief, pride, shame, all on shuffle. An emotional rollercoaster is exactly right: the higher the peak, the sicker the drop. We chase the dopamine summit (new lover, new car, new follower count) only to plummet into the same hollow the moment the chemicals balance out. The Buddha saw this 2,600 years ago and basically said, “Stop buying tickets to this ride.” Christianity dressed it differently (the world is a vale of tears, set your heart on the kingdom) but points to the same exit sign. Even the hedonic philosophers eventually admitted the feast ends in indigestion.
The three poisons, the three attachments, whatever label you prefer: craving, aversion, ignorance. They are the fuel. Wanting keeps us leaning forward into a future that never arrives. Hating keeps us leaning backward into a past that no longer exists. Confusion keeps us from noticing we’re leaning at all. Cut the fuel and the wheel slows. Not because you’ve smashed the machine (good luck), but because you stopped feeding it.
But what if higher emotions are the answer instead? What if, instead of detaching, we ascend? Love without possession, joy without condition, rage transmuted into fierce compassion. The tantric traditions say yes: don’t flee the energy, ride it to the roof of the world. The mystics of every tradition claim to have done it (turned the poison into medicine, kissed the wheel instead of cursing it). Rumi spun until the ego fell off. Milarepa sang to demons until they became choirboys. Maybe enlightenment isn’t escape from samsara but perfect play within it.
Still, most of us aren’t Rumi. We’re the ones vomiting in the amusement-park bathroom after the fifth ride on the Gravity Max. Detachment starts to look merciful. Not the cold kind (the monk isn’t numb, he’s unclenched). He feels the burn but doesn’t add the story “this burn is happening to me and it must stop.” The fire still rises; he just stops pouring gasoline with his mind.
So here we are, trapped or dancing (same floor, different music). If this is existence, then every religion is a postcard from someone who woke up mid-ride and tried to describe the view. They contradict each other because language is clumsy and the angle keeps changing. But they all agree on one thing: you don’t have to keep paying for another turn.
You can get off. Not by dying (that just sends you back to the ticket booth). You get off by seeing the ride for what it is while your hands are still on the safety bar. Recognition is the only real exit, and it’s always available, even now, even in this body, even in this sentence.
The wheel turns, yes. But it only turns because we keep pushing it. Stop pushing and something astonishing happens: it still turns (because galaxies, seasons, breath), but you’re no longer strapped in. You’re the stillness at the center.
And from there, strangely enough, the ride looks beautiful.