Where the Wheel Stops

The Bhavachakra is not just a traditional artwork in Tibetan Buddhism.

It is a metaphysical unveiling, a symbolic mirror of the human condition that has been seen, spoken of, and drawn out by mystics and seers across time, place, and language.

Though the Tibetan Buddhists gave us one of its most refined visual articulations, the reality it reflects is not only Tibetan, and certainly not sectarian.

It is a truth that is seen, not invented. The saints of India, the sages of Egypt, the mystics of Christendom, the Sufis, the shamans, each, in their own way, encountered this same structure.

The wheel of becoming, the prison of conditioned mind, the machinery of karma.

Those with Bodha (realization) emerge in every tradition.

And what they realize is not culturally curated, it is existentially constant.

Religion, in this sense, is not manufactured.

It is discovered.

Not opium for the masses, but the antidote to a world already intoxicated.

Not escape, but the sobriety that ends the cycle of craving.

The Bhavachakra is a mirror.

Jyotish is a light.

And both point to the same thing: The wheel is turning. But you are not the wheel.

What We Know

We think we know the world.

But what we “know” is not reality, it is reaction.

In the center of the Bhavachakra, three animals spin the wheel: the pig of ignorance, the rooster of craving, the snake of aversion.

This is the machinery of perception.

We do not see what is, we see through the filters of what we want, fear, and ignore.

Jyotish reveals this too, the grahas are not mere planets, they are distortions. They grasp (from grah, “to seize”) our consciousness and color it.

We do not have pure perception, we have conditioned seeing. Each graha acts as a psychic filter:

• Saturn brings unhealthy attachment.

• Mars brings rage.

• Venus brings sensuality.

• Rahu brings confusion.

• Ketu brings unconscious inertia.

• So on and so forth, and all of them veil clarity.
  

Thus, the birth chart is not a snapshot of fate.

It is a map of distortion, a karmic lens through which we interpret reality.

And until we recognize this, we live projected lives, not real ones.

How We Exist

The Bhavachakra tells us: we do not exist as fixed beings, but as processes of becoming. We are not solid, we are spinning.

The six realms of rebirth are not places, they are states of mind.

Anger, pleasure, confusion, envy, ecstasy, suffering, these are not conditions we pass through; in a way they are realms of the heart that we inhabi, we believe, we then externally manifest.

Jyotish, too, shows that we do not “have” a life, we express a pattern. The twelve rashis and bhavas are not external domains, they are modes of engagement. They are how the Self/Consciousness participates in the phenomenal world.

• The 1st house and 1st Rashi is not “you”—it is the mode of self-reference.

• The 7th house and 7th Rashi is not “relationships”—it is the mirror of otherness.

• The 10th is not “career”—it is public becoming.

• The 12th is not “loss”—it is dissolution.
  

We do not have these houses and signs. We move through them. We are always moving. Always becoming. Always caught.

And yet, Jyotish and Bhavachakra both whisper the same thing:

You are not the movement. You are the witness of the movement.

What Must We Be Liberated From

Not the world.

Not the body.

Not even the chart.

What binds us is the drama of identity. The endless effort to secure a self. To stabilize something that, by nature, is in flux.

In the Bhavachakra, liberation comes not by destroying the wheel, but by seeing through it. The Buddha stands outside the wheel, pointing to the moon, not as romance, but as cool sobriety. Liberation is not intoxication, it is clarity. Now, this clarity is said to be quite intoxicating, but of a different sort.

In Jyotish, the Sun is the symbol of this inner light. Not the ego, but the pure attention behind the mask.

When the Sun is turned inward, and the Moon, our fluctuating mind, is stilled, the grahas loosen their grip. What remains is not “you.” What remains is seeing itself.

The real work is not to escape the chart. The real work is to fast from experience, as the mystics did. To turn inward. To face the light of the Sun within, And then dissolve even that, into the great non-self.

The Bhavachakra is not a diagram of doctrine. It is a revelation of the human predicament.

Jyotish is not a predictive toolkit. It is a metaphysics of perception.

Both, when rightly approached, show us the wheel not as fate, but as mirror. A mirror in which we see our cravings, our patterns, our compulsions, not to hate them, but to see through them.

What is seen with clarity no longer has power. And when the seer sees that even the seeing is not theirs—The wheel stops. Let's first slow down this wheel a bit, stopping will come in its own Time.