Dharma Wheels

Zen, Motorcycling & Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

By: Daniel Mintie LCSW

Narrated by: Daniel Mintie

Dharma Wheels is an examination of human happiness through the triple lenses of Zen Buddhism, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and the art of motorcycling. Each lens resolves particular details of one and the same picture - the great process of human living and dying. Zen addresses first questions of life’s meaning and death’s certainty. CBT provides leverage on the emotional aspects of existence. A six-week motorcycle tour through the American West is the vivid backdrop for this vital investigation.

Seekers have long sought out quiet places - desert cells, mountain hermitages - to locate their wellness at the center. The author threw a leg over his motorcycle. Like a hermitage, any day on a motorcycle is a laboratory, a controlled setting in which to see more deeply into the way things are. During a Zen retreat the author once sat still in a single place for 12 months. Dharma Wheels reports his sitting in this same stillness - at speed, atop a one liter motor. The book covers the essential ground of Zen and CBT while traveling through the classic Western landscapes of desert, mountain range, and coastline. Far from didactic, Dharma Wheels presents the wisdom of these two great world traditions in the only setting in which they ever come to life: the movements of one’s own own heart/mind.

Dharma Wheels reads on two levels. First, the story of a road trip through 11 western states that lie between the Continental Divide and the sea. The book puts the reader in the saddle to absorb firsthand the roadstead passing through. Glacial mornings silent save for the squeak of still-cold leathers. Pinion smoke wafting over late night country lanes. Meteors crisscrossing red rock canyon lands like some jai alai game of the gods. Six weeks sans email, wristwatch or phone, the ticking of the odometer the only clock.

Second, the ancient, ever-new story that is the human quest for happiness. Itself a journey, this quest is the backstory to any tale of the road. The author's whole life is an inquiry into the habits of heart and mind that enable us to live and to die well. As a Western cognitive scientist, his days are an investigation into precisely this. Forty years of Zen practice have helped him recognize the cognitive filters that cloud our direct apprehension of reality. Classic Zen texts and fMRI machines now agree: well-being is one the world over, throughout space and time. Through the lens of science East and West, Dharma Wheels snaps into sharp focus the moving parts of this well-being.

Dharma Wheel's two stories are not separate. The Buddha looked up from beneath the Bodhi tree, saw the morning star, and realized the truth that he’d been seeking. All people go the way from particular to particular, tree by tree, milepost by milepost, star by star. This way travels under local names, in any language ever spoken. Truth, wisdom, the good road, divine life, Tao, Buddha nature, mental health. These names are all fingers pointing. Dharma Wheels stands up in the place to which they point.

©2019 Daniel Mintie (P)2020 Daniel Mintie