Here is something from Henry Shukman - it's the Zen tradition but speaks so much to what we try to practice:
"So what is the "gateless gate" spoken about in the Zen tradition? Well, on the one hand it's a gate, meaning there's something to go through – or some kind of shift that can happen to us. We can pass from one state of being, state of mind, state of consciousness to another. But on the other hand, it’s gateless – no gate, not a gate – because that other condition is already here, and has never not been. It's just that we haven't recognized it or noticed it. So it's a gateless gate, in Zen's old phrase. It's a shift. But even to say it's a shift is somehow to misrepresent it, because what it’s a shift to, is fully present already.
The project of meditation, from this perspective, is to come to recognize the great fullness and emptiness, the clarity and boundlessness, that our very experience already is.
One aspect of the wisdom and compassion of these great meditation traditions is that they recognize that this is not necessarily easy to do in a deliberate way. It may be better done more by a process of releasing, of letting go, of letting things drop, as we sit. In other words, we may pass through the gateless gate more readily, if, in a sense, we cease trying to pass through it.
One last word on this - the idea that there could be a kind of fundamental shift in consciousness that we can have, and that this could be a very good thing for us, and for others in our lives, and perhaps even rippling out wider into the world - that idea is ancient, and has been around and passed on, and endorsed and attested to, throughout human history.
What's different right now about it, is that we're living at an extraordinary time for this kind of practice, for awareness of this kind of possibility, because it's becoming mainstream. We're actually realizing, I think, for the first time in human history, globally, that we can experience our life in the radically different ways connoted by the term ‘awakening’.
The first step in that is mindfulness. The mindfulness movement has been pivotal in generating a society-wide interest in the practice of meditation. But there's something much bigger, much more wonderful, even than mindfulness, that the practice of mindfulness can lead us to. That's what we're talking about with this shift, and with this term, the gateless gate.
May we all discover the gateless gate, and find that we long since passed through it.
With love and thanks,
Henry Shukman"
NW. And a big thank you from us for this teaching.
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