A traveler arrives at a great wall. After much searching he finds a door, a gate in the wall. When he opens the gate and steps through, he finds himself in a world, a universe, which is different from the one he came from but somehow familiar; the same universe, but somehow very different. When he turns around to look back through the gate at the place he came from, he sees that not only is there no gate, there is no wall. Not only is there no going back, but he has not come from anywhere. Thus it is with awakening: there is no wall, no separation between a ‘here’ and a ‘there’. In a sense there has been a going beyond, yet that beyond is not other than here already. This is ‘the gateless gate’, and ‘I’ has always been here. Where else?
David Carse
