THE NARROW GATE
THE NARROW GATE
Not only inconspicuous and wordless, humble and small also are two other characteristics that typify higher centers. Different schools occurring in different epochs and places have described or illustrated these two virtues in various ways. The school of Christ taught “….strait is the gate, and narrow is the way.”, not so subtilely implying that the unconscious psychological bulk that makes up the four lower centers do not and cannot partake in the third state of consciousness.
In the ancient Egyptian and Mesoamerican cultures we often find narrow openings or entrances to various edifices, that an individual must squeeze through to gain entrance, symbolizing the same. Even the relatively contemporary poet Walt Whitman gives us a clue how to invoke the humble and seemingly diminutive nature of higher centers in his verse, “Resist much, obey little.”
The Japanese school developed the tea ceremony as a tool to teach students the humble and inconspicuous nature of the third state through a moving center practice. The entrance to a tea ceremony house, the niriguchji, is about two feet wide by about two feet high. In the Japanese tradition Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony created the entrance to the tea ceremony house so that no swords and other weapons could pass through. Moreover, the individual had to make themselves small to the point of having to crawl through the niriguchi in order to enter the the tea ceremony room.
Although we don’t know if Sen no Rikyu was connected to a school - and thinking about this for any more than a moment or two is simply a deviation from self-remembering - esoterically, the disallowing of weaponry and having to make oneself small to enter a sacred space symbolizes disengaging from the ten thousand I’s of the lower self, for the small inconspicuous state of presence. And while the state of divine presence is humble and small, it behooves us to bear in mind that higher centers are all and everything.
Niriguchi 躙口 (crawling entrance), Nitobe Memorial Gardens
University British Columbia
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