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Vitarka Mudra
Transmission of Wisdom Teaching
What is truth? -
morning Sun kissing
peace lily leaves
Last day of year. Writing. Wintry December morning, Maine. Soothing Sunlight streams through window. Blessing the lily, warming my face.
*brian wilcox
Try to find what’s real and what’s real becomes more distant
try to end delusions and delusions multiply
followers of the Way have an all-embracing place
the moon in the sky and its reflection in the waves
*Stonehouse (Chan Buddhist, China, Poet and Hermit, 1272-1352). The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse. Trans. & Commentary Red Pine.
Last line refers to the metaphysical, or absolute - (moon in the sky) - and the physical, or relative - (reflection in the waves). Looking either way, we can see truth, "what's real." Wisdom resides in the ground beneath your feet, and it resides in what has never touched the ground beneath anyone's feet.
* * *
There are times when we step through an unseen gate, not necessarily an unforeseen one. Life places something life-changing in our hands, something we could not have discovered on our own. It comes just in time. It happens somewhere we likely never planned for it to happen. We may have had no idea, consciously, of what could happen - but it happens. We may be alone or with others. We could call these moments of grace; we could call them many things.
A turning happens, but not a turning back, like turning words - also called Zen Word, or one-word barrier - in Zen koans. The teacher gives a word, phrase, or action that halts the student's mind, and the student is never the same again. Such moments have been known to come through an act in nature, without any teacher or formal koan. After, one is more themselves than before.
The turning word may seem to make no sense - likely does not. The gateless gate swings open. How? You did not have a key, did not even touch it - no one did. When the gate opens, you have already walked through.
These moments are prepared for - they do not just happen. We do not open the gate, but the gate does not open without our doing something. Jesus told this story in the Gospel of Luke 15.8-9 (TLB), when speaking of our discovering the Realm of the Sacred -
Or take another illustration: A woman has ten valuable silver coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and look in every corner of the house and sweep every nook and cranny until she finds it? And then won’t she call in her friends and neighbors to rejoice with her?
* * *
We are ripened for these revelations. Our efforts are part of the ripening. We are gardens self-tended and tended by others, and by an unseen hand.
Often, the opening opens after a time of struggle, discontent, loss - any number of shades of suffering. Frequently, it comes after a season of sharply sensing there must be more than this - whatever this is for us at the time.
Frequently, the gate opens after our suffering from a belief we have clung to for dear life. A tale shares of Massie. She was always complaining about her feet hurting. One person asked another, "What's going on with Massie? She keeps complaining about her feet hurting." The other replied, "Massie's shoes are a size too small for her feet." What fit us then, may not fit us now.
* * *
After growing up a conservative evangelical Christian in the United States, in what is called the Bible Belt, I left home, attended three schools, focusing my studies on religion. The last was a seminary. At the seminary, I was changing my views on varied matters of my native religion. During my Ph.D. studies, some fellow students viewed me as the only liberal in our department. Not that I, now, as then, would wish to wear any such label be it liberal or other.
One of those thoughts I was challenged to rethink: only Christians go to heaven. For some, possibly most, in my Southern Baptist upbringing, that excluded even Catholics. Also, they had a long list of not-gonna-make-its who were of other sects - they were called cults. Basically, any other religion was called a cult. This list included Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, ... well, you get the idea. We were warned to be wary of these groups. If you were a Christian, you did not associate closely with them, did not date from among them, and, so, only married Christians - 'Christians' as defined by our group.
Heaven was a gaudy place, a lot of gold, expensive looking, an exclusive, sensually-oriented resort for elites who would not suffer about friends, family... - anyone burning in flames of a burning hell not far away. It was a place of pleasure gluttony. Heaven was a celestial Country Club, and you never would have to leave, or want to. Somehow, I learned we would sing hymns forever. How many hymns can one sing, until one is hymned out? As for the highway of gold, who would not prefer a beaten dirt path?
* * *
A turning moment occurred, and after my views on heaven and who does and does not get in were changing. I was still in the Christian-only camp but had made revisions that most in the denomination would disagree with - my future in the Southern Baptist club was looking bleak. Rather than agreeing, I was in post-graduate school thinking, and that is dangerous in many places. Buddha said, "Be a light to yourself." Well, my native religious group would never agree to that. And, no, I was never kicked out, but I escaped after graduating and serving as a Professor of Religion for six years.
The turning point I alluded to above happened on a vacation trip with my ex-wife and her family. At the time, we were all Southern Baptists. We attended a Native American dance gathering near the Georgia-Tennessee border. The dancers danced in sacred circle. A crowd of us watched. Yet, much more was going on than the dance itself. To others, it might have been good entertainment, and likely was that; to me, it was a revelation.
A dawning in awareness arose, a resonant sense of knowing surfacing. I recognized - not a mental thing - Sacredness in those dancing and the dance. Being in the environment, I felt the Holy in my quietly enraptured body. There was recognition that these Indigenous Americans were my family, as much as any who called themselves Christian. The Sacredness I felt did not, I knew, fit inside any one people. I knew this, though no human ever taught it to me in the isolated, insulated world I had been living for some thirty years.
* * *
I had long felt a tension between the love taught me in the church and other teachings that did not appear loving at all. I could not fathom how a loving god would send people to torment simply because they disagreed with Christian teaching. I had been divided - my heart and my head, in collision.
Well, this opening at the dance may not sound profound to some people - oh hum. But those who have been raised in a fundamentalist religion, bordering on cult, maybe cult ... they know how profound such turning moments are. They understand how challenging the path to a new way of seeing beyond the hard, harsh edges of groupthink is. Such systems are designed to prevent disagreement, with built-in words, threats, and punishments to protect against anyone who challenges the dogma. Two such words in my sect were "liberal" and "heretic."
I kept exploring this matter of heaven, who makes it, and how. I learned different theories. Studied over several years different religions, psychologies, and philosophies. Changed my view little by little over time - it kept opening more and more. It began with exclusive. It moved to inclusive. Finally, the search ended, for the question lost its meaning.
* * *
That day at the dance gathering, as with other turnings, the gateless gate did not swing open from something told, read, or heard. It was not "The Bible says" or "Jesus said" or anything like that. I was not taught the secret code to open the gate. There was no teacher, prayer, or chant. It was not, "I was just taught a lot of BS!" or "All that religion stuff is a batch of bonkers!" Turnings do not exhibit such reactivity.
* * *
Insight is always with us and somewhere out in front of us, reaching back to us. Inborn is the Eye of Spirit. For those receptive to the seeing, something in them reaches forth to touch that reaching back to touch them. They are there, and yet, truth draws them onward to itself. This wisdom we see by spontaneous recognition, a whole-body realization.
We see what lives in the heart long before we can live it as our everyday life. Consciousness is emergent. Turning back is regressive; looking forward is progressive. And, yes, along the way, I have often felt the times before the turnings kept turning me - and still are - were easier. I have lost much along the way, but never my integrity, and the love of truth has grown beyond what I could have ever dreamed possible.
This way of walking through gateless gates may not be easier than just closing our eyes and refusing to see, stubbornly standing against the tug of the Wind. We all have a choice.
Coming closer and closer to sacred insight requires a surrender many cannot seem to take. And the surrender only deepens. We live yes after yes. So, to live the way of intimacy with truth, as more than what we think, is to accept we will bow low many times to be able to walk on.
* * *
We turn and turn and turn, being turned. Gate after gate opens. Does it ever end? Would you want it to end? And, where does it come from? It comes, and is here. It is in the Sun and the lily leaf. The "Yes" gets easier, the Way more wonderful, and truth becomes a more intimate Friend. How close can we get?
EnJoy Life, You Lotus Blossoms!
(C) brian wilcox, 2025
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