The Boy in the Ferris Wheel

Somewhere in the world, on a Ferris Wheel, a boy is afraid of falling. He suddenly realizes, or remembers, how much he is afraid of heights. He didn’t know how he got here or how he even got pushed into being in this place. But here he is, dangling on a very loose chair, with no seat-belts, and not much in the way of security. He is bound by the sky, the sounds below him, and the sights of tall buildings around him. He might even be wondering, how did I choose to do this? Why is this not what I expected? And, in spite of the calm reassurance of his sister beside him, the boy starts to feel afraid of that very high place, where he hangs suspended, waiting for the Ferris wheel to lower him downward. Nothing can erase the boy’s fear, because it is etched in the primordial, karmic circuitry of his veins and the emotional sides of his brain. And nothing can quite reason with him. And there it is, a free-floating space where anything can happen, and there is neither safety nor lack of secure hands to attempt to reassure the boy.

Adults might laugh at this experience, but do they ever remember times when they felt this vulnerable, not having the layers of inner experience or ‘scaffolding’ to tell them that indeed things are going to be okay? Do you ever remember times when your parents or an older person seemed ‘magical’ to you, because they seemed to exude this miraculous confidence in the face of the greatest fears and dangers? Does anyone remember such an experience?

I think that most fears end up being explained away, and spiritual practitioners can overcome a lot of fear through their practice. At the very least, I found that listening to talks from monastic teachers have given me a way of contextualizing experiences so that they are less frightening. But there is also a kind of wisdom in the fear that this boy shows. It is, I think, the raw and vulnerable ‘knowing’ that, indeed, many things are possible, much more than what people imagine. And I think the biggest fear might be the realization that our ego, or our sense of self, is not that much in control to begin with. The way experiences unfold and the kind of situations that arise often stymie the ego. In retrospect, it almost appears that the nature of life and the universe itself is somehow designed to stump the efforts to create a protected sense of self in the world. Not only that, but in many cases, people actually choose to get into these situations precisely due to desires: the desire for exhilaration, or fun, or connection, or what have you. So the self goes into these experiences fully desiring for something to happen. But like the boy in the Ferris Wheel,  I often find myself in situations where my heart wants what it cannot yet handle, or longs for something that it is not fully capable of understanding or appreciating . All desirable situations have a thorny part to them, and perhaps it is the repercussion of trying to rush into something with full eagerness and a lack of caution.

             

            Is it bad to want something and then be challenged by what we desire? I don’t think it’s bad at all. I begin to think that it is exactly these kinds of ‘knotty’ experiences that might be needed to recognize the contradictions of the ego, and to go beyond those contradictions. Of course the ego (or self) ‘wants’ what it pleasant or ‘positive’ and tries to avoid what is unpleasant, only to find that even the most ‘positive’ experiences can contain moments of deep fear, complexity, and confusion. But if one is somehow able to stay with that complexity and contradiction, moments arise when there is no longer a struggle inside, and there is stillness to appreciate the way things are, and to really be silent inside, to be one’s true self, and not to struggle with these complexes. And these are true moments of silence and of just being, that can happen when one is not really looking for it.