Category Archives: Gateless Gate

My Brother – The Guide

The last time I blogged here my mother had passed away. It’s been a year since my younger brother passed away suddenly and totally unexpected. He had guided my mother through her passing the year before. He was a crisis care Hospice nurse and he was good at it. His life’s work was guiding people toward that unknown path.  I would guess that he guided literally hundreds of people through their last journey.

When it came his time, he didn’t have a Guide.  He didn’t need one. He took off without waiting for a Guide…it was a familiar path for him.  He took off totally alert, watching the process and I’m sure that’s the way he would have wanted it.

I wish I would have had more time to discuss his death and dying experiences during his career.  What I do know is that he talked about “the mystery” and that there are no answers until you walk the Path yourself. He seemed okay with the mystery of it all.   What I’m trying to learn from him is to accept that some things are just unknown to us and to be content with just being in awe of the mystery.  Working on it….Still miss him everyday.

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Filed under Awareness, Contemplation, Death and Dying, Gateless Gate, Self Realization, Spirituality, Thoughts, Uncategorized

Gateless = Freedom

It’s been a year today since I completed a “sort of” course called Liberation Unleashed. How I found out about it..I don’t remember exactly…..maybe through a long stream of events that started with Eckhart Tolle’s  “New Earth”.

The whole idea to me revolves around the Zen concept of the Gateless Gate.  It’s based on the notion that we all are looking for a way to find the Gate that will open up the path of peace, happiness with no suffering. We all look for a way to find that Gate and, more importantly, open it. When we finally realize that if there is a Gate at all that it is not locked, has no boundaries and can be freely crossed on either side or passed straight through without the least bit of effort….then we are “enlightened”.

To start the process, you are given a Guide who is a person who has already passed through the Gate so supposedly they will be able to lead you where you need to go. The Guide has only one goal…to help you realize that there is no separate self and never has been.  Sounds simple but believe me, it’s far from it. The questions asked are meant to dissolve the thought that there is a separate little person inside your head running the show…..that there is no separate little person that is separate from all other people or things.  That perceived separate little person is only a conglomerate of your past conditionings, feelings, your life story and exists in memory only.

If this is the first time you have been exposed to such a concept, it can be very unsettling and not accepted.  When something awakens in you and you begin to be interested in this crazy notion, you have started your way to finding the Gateless Gate….which is no Gate at all.

Gateless Gate

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Filed under Enlightenment, Freedom, Gateless Gate, Liberation, Nonduality, Zen