The Restless Gate

The Restless Gate

Every gate is a doorway to a secret.

Leaving the port, the driver explained that this was a place that had drawn different waves of cultures, Phoenicians, Greeks, Arabs, Christians, for over 2,000 years.

The first thing you notice, approaching from the sea, is the great wall of Montgo mountain, looming over the pretty town below, majestically reassuring.

Walking before sunrise along narrow streets that are tranquil during the day, sealed and swept in the darkness, lights leading to the mountain shores gave way to ancient terraces, to limestone rocks, tinted blue by the twilight, steps like stones in a black river that ran down from the sky and secret places.

From the slopes it appears that the entirety of the broad plain below is enclosed against the rest of Spain, an open shell on the seashore cut off from the flow of history.

And in this place, a graffiti’d ruin at the foot of the mountain, the youths had come to tickle their itch for freedom, for mystery and broken rules.  It seems a town where people are captives of a kind of peace, where inner callings run along the walls of safe routines, looking for openings that pictures of the wider world suggest are elsewhere.

But what if there is no where else to go?  What if what we’re fleeing, in always surrenduring to the restless wind, is our self?

It had been a year since I had been away from Ibiza and however impressed I was with these new surroundings, I still found my attention drifting casually ahead to what was next, to food, beer, bed, plans, conversations.  That this was an indication of discomfort, that my mind was trying to solve a problem I didn’t know I was experiencing did not occur to me until for some mysterious reason I stopped, and sat, and for awhile did absolutely nothing.

There was a talk once in the desert, in a tiny, temporary world on the other side of this one, where it was said: “You can’t hear God if you have to pee.”  It was about how satisfaction is a progression of wholeness, and that the crisis and opportunity for people who have checked all the boxes, as far as what should make them happy, is that they are in a unique position to appreciate the limits of chasing things, chasing experiences.  A unique position to approach the final gate.

Having everything, having nowhere to go, nothing to attain or achieve, Buddha stood with his back to the door that opens to the soul.  And sitting under the Bodhi tree, he turned from the flow of history and went in.

What surfaced for me, as I sat against the endless urge for more and somewhere or something else, is that boredom is a crossroads that modern impulses try to solve with more and more stimulation. But because we usually try to cover up what we unconsciously sense as an inadequacy in the moment, we are continually looking away from the part of us that makes us bored.

If we all have it within us to be Buddhas, then is the recognition that we are in conflict, when our circumstances invite us to be at peace, a glimpse into the layers of our false face, reflections, in the mirror of reality, of the dysfunction of our own minds?

Fighting uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, burying them, keeps us in a relationship with them, but by consciously allowing them, by just being aware of them, we step outside of the mind’s inevitable conflict with what is.

We step inside.

Consciousness, the part of us that sees suffering, that is aware of suffering, does not suffer.  It is the water in which unhappy thoughts and feelings swim.

We are raised as these unhappy fish, not knowing that we are the water that allows and flows with everything.

And that when we are turned into vapor by the truth that shines at all times, even when we don’t see it, we are not destroyed because one day again we return in the rain to feed the endless expansion of life.

Traveling, looking back across life through places that feel different turns and churns the elements of our incarnation that the latent quest for identity is always trying to settle.

We need motion, and we need stillness, and which at which time is a rhythm that maybe no one else can know, but instead is something we each can feel through signs that speak to us alone, through our unique versions of universal experiences.

Has the power of our intuition become clouded by the density of our societal and technological preconceptions?

Satellite maps create straight lines to where five-star reviews tell us is where we should go.  But when we wander, when we don’t know, is when we are open to receive.  Could it be that this is where the intuition, the inner intelligence that does not require perfect information, is reborn?

What is left in a place after the pictures have been taken?  What unknown dimensions wait in time, as the restless momentum sweeps us ever on?

To sit in that fire, as the mind makes its reasons to press on to each next gratification is to open a door to where there is no inner fight or flight from the present.

Compared to psychedelic adventures, sex, cinema, the torrent of thought, one’s inner being is initially subtle, seemingly an inadequate alternative to all the modern forms of stimulation.

But with simply noticing what is happening in the body, the mind, without labeling, judging, trying to change it, we are changing the inner laws of motion, and where we once fled we begin to flow.

Staring up from the heart of the sea, as the sun glitters down across the shadows of old wounds, is the layer of each one of us that transcends the drama of forms.

Suffering’s gift is that when we begin to see its roots in our resistance, it brings us to the threshold of awareness.  More ego becomes apparent, tries to correct itself, and awareness expands gradually in turn, to embrace, eventually, all colors and shapes passing through us.

There is an energy in very old places.

Was this what called me to sit longer in the shadow of Montgo mountain,  were these its words?  Maybe its my imagination, but imagining that it is there, ignites a special kind of listening, opens something that was perhaps never meant to be closed.

Listening as if everything is speaking, we are called toward a deeper un-bored space, that runs silently under our thoughts like a river between all things.