I listen to a song almost every morning that begins with the words, “You taught me how to see the small, the miracle inside it all.” 

 

As the Japanese wisdom saying goes, “Only this.”

 

Zen tradition instructs its adherents through a sacred book of koans known as “the Gateless Gate.” Koans are essentially questions (or maybe riddles) that cannot be answered with the logical/conceptually oriented mind. The implication within the “Gateless Gate” koan is that one must pass through this original gate and yet, the deeper one looks, the recognition dawns that there is no gate to pass through.

 

Zen typically focuses on kensho or enlightenment, a sudden or gradual awakening to the deep nature of reality. The “Gateless Gate” koan implies that no physical threshold actually exists and that there is no secret knowledge to acquire and no external authority capable of granting entry. 

 

Like a doorless frame standing wide open in a quiet garden, the path we are on is entirely unobstructed.

 

But (as is true in all wisdom study) we need to realize it’s not that simple. Our defensive, self-protective minds (and negative certainty) inevitably create a barrier. Our deeply engrained “It’s up to me” egos have a way of constructing a locked door out of thin air, one that seems to demand endless effort and clever strategies in order to unlock a barrier that was never there. 

 

Christians call this grace: unconditional love already and always present, regardless of who we are or what we do.

 

I had a friend in college who experienced a one-time enlightenment event that I believe was authentic. His learning was exceedingly simple: “To seek is to deny.” Those five words became something of a personal koan for years until one day I woke up to the lovely reality hidden within the ordinary. 

 

My wake up understanding: “It’s all ordinary, all the time.” Inside any average day I was being offered everything I could ever need. This exact breath, this shadow falling on the far wall at sunset, this stone in my pocket, this unexpected text, this tree I pass every day, this smile from a child on the playground, this next utterly ordinary event holds the only gift I require to realize I’m already home. 

 

Clinical psychologist and modern mystic James Finley puts it this way, “The unconditional peace we’re all looking for is already in the condition we’re in. Peace is always right where we are, not where we keep trying to get to.” This sunset, this infant’s eyes, this next moment of rest.

 

 Grace abounds when striving and strategy cease. 

 

My Zen teacher Joko Beck would consistently say the only way to pass through the Gateless Gate is to discover what is already here in what she called “nothing special.”  Only as we stop looking for something special, do we arrive (in each moment) to the home we have yearned to know

​