Yes, we do seem to have a few closet spiritualists here. I've gathered some of "our" words below without having our individual names attached to the quotes - I think this helps keep us from making these statements "personal stances" that end up being "overly defended." Religion and politics….gotta be careful here if we're all to stay friends, eh? Below each quote is my comment. I am a philosopher first and trikker second, so below, I fly my true colors, but let me at least say that I'm having "fun expressing my philosophical self" far more than I am "looking for converts to my way of seeing things." I am a cajoler more than a controller, but that said, I do like a good debate too!

"…remind {Buddha} that's it's just mechanical impedance matching to which we've attached mystical meaning"

To me the best aspect of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was how a motorcycle was viewed as a set of concepts - NOT as merely a physical system. He saw the motorcycle as a manifestation of harmony - as Plato spoke of his ideal archetypes' existence. Form follows function (ideally,) and he was dealing with the relationships of functions more than the shapes of the forms. Carburetors come in all shapes and sizes but the aeration of gasoline is the function. However, a definition of a carburetor cannot be complete without defining what a combustion chamber is. The combustion chamber that accepts fuel coming from a carburetor is engineered differently than a combustion chamber being fed by a compressor, so the carburetor-combustion chamber is not, functionally speaking, the same as a compressor-combustion chamber. They're different, and so too are ALL conceptions which ALWAYS turn out to be defined RELATIVE to each other. All concepts are but six degrees or less separated from ANY other concept.

The Trikke presents us with a system of parts too, and the rider is obviously one of the parts! Clarity about the Trikke must necessarily include how a human mind interacts with it. A UFO alien archeologist who digs up a Trikke a million years from now could guesstimate the human body's design. The Trikke's requirements for efficient processing of energies into forward motion would tell that alien about the qualities of the human mind too; we'd have to have a brain that can coordinate umpteen dynamics AND find a reason to do so! I feel that such an alien would think nice thoughts about us if all there was to go on was a Trikke. And I say, "better that then finding, say, a Segway perhaps?"

Because the Trikke defines us thus, it is also true that we define it, and here's where trikkers get to choose what level of appreciation they will develop with the Trikke. For some it's just a ride, for others it will be a mantra that leads them to ever more subtle refinement of how the "meta-parts" of the Trikke are engaged holistically with the physical parts. Am I a better trikker if I do not have an ego blasting out thoughts that have nothing to do with the oneness I attempt to generate with the Trikke's physics? Answer: get rid of the ego and find out! How to do that while trikking? -- Wu Wei !!! Now you've got yourself the basis of a major religion.

The only way trikking can become a spiritual tool would be if one viewed the Trikke like a Samurai looks upon his sword. A tool cannot be mastered unless the mind that uses it is also as finely honed as the blade (or as precisely "honed" as the close tolerances needed for the wheel bearings of the Trikke?) As one improves one's trikking, it WILL indicate a growing CALMNESS in the trikker's mind. Why? Because if I see a patch of sandy cement coming up where I want to carve, then the more I have practiced this in the past, the more likely am I to hit that carve at a correct speed. Practice makes perfect. The more I've done it, the easier it gets EMOTIONALLY to do the carve without fear.

With skill comes the lessening of fear. With less fear, the mind's natural background quality, blissful peacefulness, can be more clearly realized. Just as the person next to you can be heard easily once again after the passing fire truck with sirens blaring is far enough away, so too can PEACE be more easily experienced if we are in a fearless state of consciousness. The fears that came up when we first trikked overwhelmed us with trepidation, and we didn't try to get tricky with the beast, but later, we will try to control the Trikke in higher energy states as our comfort level rises. Just so, as we rid ourselves of fears in general, we find ourselves attempting "high-energy" self actualization too. See Abraham Maslow for details.

Learning the Trikke necessarily involves developing a trikking mind, and in doing so, we model to ourselves that "if I can get fear out of my trikking, I have evolved, and if I can get fear out of my life in general, I will have evolved too."

Bottom line: get good at trikking and you will find yourself erasing fears elsewhere with the same aplomb. Enlightenment is fearlessness - so, practice lessening fears until none are found.

"…that said... does the trikke alleviate suffering? does it lead to the de-struction of ego? does it seek an effortlessness? yes to all three, probably."

The Trikke will serve us, AS WILL ANY THING, as something to attend to that can be gradually experienced at more refined levels of human consciousness. The extreme result would necessarily be that the ego is completely dis-identified with as one becomes ever more certain that thoughts do not come from the ego - that is, that the ego is not the self but is merely a thought process that the self observes. Trikking that is practiced like a martial art will necessarily yield such a result. But, of course, it is hard to imagine that trikking ashrams will begin to spring up wherein celibate trikkers studied trikking with a master. Yet, despite the hilarity of this scenario, this would be as spiritually powerful as any of the technique-systems found today.

"…motion originating from the 11th charka"

Carlos Castanada's first book had these guys climbing a waterfall using "tendrils of light" that emerged from their navels - the navel being a well known charka (a place in the human body where spiritual energies are transmuted into a more subtle form that a higher-still charka can use to transmute the energy of into an even more subtle form.) It is pretty much the conclusion of the general public, now, that Carlos completely plagiarized all his tales from other writers, but, hell, if Hitler told me that one plus one is two, that doesn't make it incorrect math. I think Carlos' writings deal with a lot of concepts that are valid and practical for spiritual seekers to integrate with, and if that's the place one first comes across them, well, it will do. I can recommend far better primers for the budding seeker however which will unite spiritual concepts in ways far more clarifying than Carlos's adventure tales.

"…I'm not afraid to kick it when required."

"God helps those who help themselves" comes to mind. If I want to get up this slope, I can redefine the Trikke into a kickbike, get it to the top, and THEN relate to the Trikke as a trikking tool again. I have had a prejudice against kicking to get passed "bad spots," so thank you for this reminder that sometimes a Trikke is a scooter too, and that I can play with it any way I want to no matter what passers-by may think. See? I have to overcome my fear of what others might think. I have to be willing to fail Trikke 101 in public - time and time again. This diminishes my attachment to ego (my highly prejudiced and edited version of my body/mind's history.) If I do this perfectly, then at some point, I can finally wrest myself from the ego's thrall, i.e., my attention can be taken from the ego and "placed on the non-illusory, true self."

A good question arises here: if I am really fond of what-my-personality-is-right-now then how do I get myself out of indulging in and validating that opinion? It is obvious that if I want to grow, I must see myself as incomplete in some way, and I must change my personality. Kickbiking my Trikke erases my mind's tendency to pretend that a relative concept is an absolute concept. It allows me to let the definition of the Trikke actually be a Venn-diagram where "it" floats between scooter, kicker, slalomer, etc. Consider the electron clouds of Heisenberg; if I practice allowing my definition of what the Trikke is to have a level of uncertainty, so to do I begin to gain the ability to allow my ego to be less precisely defined, and I will be found to be less attached to it by the very fact that its form is indefinite, non-absolute, and is thus "more slippery." Like a circle made by a child swirling a sparkler on the 4th of July, my ego too is a process, a phenomenon which does not have a solid form - merely an illusion of solidity is created, and something that slippery is no place for a soul to hang its hat on.

"…my zen of the bicycle trip is to be entirely in the moment of the journey itself."

This phrase "entirely in the moment" beguiles us so. How can we make it our truth? It is a complex issue that can be viewed from several angles. From an angle I prefer, it turns out that "in the moment" doesn't mean "in time." It is a timelessness that must be entered, and this is not achieved by becoming a more refined perceiver of the passing of time. Yes, becoming a better perceiver benefits one's life, but it does not move one towards the timeless; in fact, it makes one even more resonant with the illusion that time exists.

No, instead, being in the now is about DISIDENTIFICATION with one's past times and one's imagined future times; that is, we begin to feel about our past's instantiations-of-self in the same way that we feel about what we "were" last night in our dreams. This is to say that if I was a rich man in my dreams last night, I don't feel empowered to spend like a king in my waking state. I am VERY clear that I was merely fooled by the dream state into thinking I was a rich person, and that any attachment I may have had to being fooled during the dream is now ENTIRELY gone. After I awaken, often right in the middle of a dream, never do I want to re-enter the dream so that my dream children would have their dream Dad back, or to finish the marriage ceremony I was in, or to kill the monster that hurt me, etc. etc. etc. Just so, being in the moment means abandoning all identification with thinking that we once were or will be. Trikking at this level cannot be achieved, in my opinion, without extraordinary intent - a trikking ashram would be almost required to foster the spiritual support to get to that level in trikking. For most of us here, I would guess we'll just enjoy the trikking as much as we can, and leave our spirituality's needs to be answered by other methods.

"…can there be a zen of operating a back hoe, or is it too complex?"

What can be more complex than operating one's mind? Thankfully, despite the fact that most of us think that we're running our lives, enlightened personages throughout time have assured us that it just isn't so, and that once we have clarity about that, we can begin to "let go, let God." When such surrendering occurs, the mind continues to function, but we now no longer insist that we are the thinker - instead we come to the conclusion that we are the observer of the thinker-thinking-thoughts processing (called simply "the mind.") It is the mind that evolves, NOT the observer. It is the mind that gets better at thinking subtler thoughts, NOT the observer of the mind's content/processes. And so, a zen master cannot operate the back hoe, but his mind can! He just insists that he's not doing it. He insists that he is the observer behind ALL THIS…not just one little mind inside of ALL THIS. Backhoing happens, but he observes from beyond. And, like trikking, backhoing could be used as a spiritual discipline, but that's even a stranger ashram, eh?

"…What I mean by Wu Wei is simply any skill that you become so "used to" or "Skilled at" or however you want to name it, that the technical skill to produce the "work" becomes a part of your consciousness and you "forget" that you are doing that. Example would be any skill where you do it without thinking about it."

Making a skill set so ingrained into our programming that, like walking, chewing, breathing, etc., it becomes "second nature," is useful. In fact, let's make an extreme sport of it, and do this with one's entirety. You stop thinking about your food after you swallow it, but your system keeps on handling it. The enlightened person would say, "I've eaten my world, swallowed it, and now I don't have to think about it. Though it may seem so to you that I am still thinking about that world, it is rather the case that my brain is "digesting it," and the products of that brain process are, yes, observed thoughts, but no more so than anything else in this BIG DREAM is observed. I don't call those brain processes "my" thoughts, just like you don't call the money you had in your dream "my money" after awakening. I have awakened to the fact that my thoughts are as unreal to me now as my dream thoughts were once considered. I have stopped identifying with thoughts as mine; now they are part of the whole expanse of life….not anything especially attention getting compared to anything else. I am free of such fetters."

"…there IS no there!"
"…the end of said journey is oblivion"

Science agrees. There is no place where the electron "certainly" is. Religions agree; at the heart of every religion is that mystical center wherein God is absolute and all concepts are relative. Oblivion is daily experienced by us ordinary mortals when we awaken from a dream. Where did my dream money go? Where's my dream wife now? (What happened to my lap? It was just here a second ago when I was sitting down?) All that we "are" today is destined to be similarly mused upon. All must be found to have NEVER truly existed; that only the eternal has reality; that true oblivion is where all mirages reside. The enlightened person says, "Go to oblivion, and delightedly discover that, after the ego and its history have been revealed as specters, yet does your timeless, spaceless, self remain." The enlightened person does not say, "Kill the ego." Instead, it is said that the ego is discovered to never have been. The enlightened person says, "You think your personality is alive, but in fact, it is you only that lives, and it is the observer of "a" personality that will end some day while you live on. The mistake is that you project your self onto the personality, that is, you identify with it so much that you insist that that is ALL that you are, but it is not so. It is but a wisp of a smidgen of a nuance of a fraction of a notion of a speck of the infinity that you are."

"…but to me Wu Wei is only a word, really and a pitiful attempt to explain that time when your MIND and BODY flow together, "effortlessness" is not the true definition any more than "complete awareness" though that may be closer at least in concept. Effortless effort? Unconscious awareness? contradictions in terms?"

We're all forced to become poets, thass fer shur. Only between the lines can truth be hinted at, and certainly never captured. Paradox is inherent in any statement. Duality is a vast set of opposing qualities/polarities. Any so-called truth MUST BE incorrect if made into an absolute. "God is love." Seems true! "God is omnisciently wise." Seems true! "God's creation includes Hitler." Hmmmm, how does that square? See? In order to see God as infinitely loving, we have to somehow fit Hitler into the mix, and with our limited human understanding, it is very hard indeed. So, yeah, words will always fall short, always produce paradox, always be poetry only. But, as I wrestle with this dynamic, I feel I am freeing myself from this very attachment to words. Another paradox!

"…rejoice , all you heart healthy freaks on trikkx or scootx or whatever nutty non gasoline wheely thing you do ! ! ! ! !"

Yes, rejoice! Trikking finds me often in such an attitude of gratitude, and practicing gratitude is, for my money, a deeply powerful spiritual technique. Trikking gives me practice letting go of mental patterns that would have me negatively emote because the world is not as I would have it. Practicing "accepting the sandy spots" in our environment "as is" give us more facility at letting go in general, and that supports us just enjoying what we can do given the holistic synergies. If Michelangelo is imprisoned in a junk yard, he doesn't even pause in his creative output. He may not have marble to carve or a ceiling to paint, but he sure can turn out fantastic metal sculptures, eh? Just so can we trikke, making sandy spots exactly those very places where trikking skills can be refined.

Trikking leads one, slower for some, quicker for others, to this: Ain't nuttin' wrong anywhere anyhow anytime.

Chop wood, carry water, carve your curve.