We go through them every day, doors and doorways. Can doors and doorways be metaphor for experiencing life?
We hear expressions like: “at death’s door,” “darken someone’s door,” “get one’s foot in the door,” “open door policy” and “when one door closes, another opens.” Implications are death or an unwanted person, or impositions, or openness to everything and opportunities, both lost and found.
We have difficulties, we have challenges - we have dukkha in our lives. In this life we look for the door with a path to leave these behind, to leave sadness, pain and suffering behind and to walk through a door that has a way to new spaces and opportunities. The door and its doorway becomes the transition space from how we experience our life to an altered way.
I studied with a Sensei who would tell us “It is not better in California.” The message was clear, just leaving Ohio and moving to California isn’t a fresh start. It will be the same old same old. Why? Because we did not unlock the symbolic door that holds the way to “better.” And what is this better? It is the symbolic entrance to another way of understanding, another world.
The symbolic open door is inviting, a new beginning with a glimpse of what lies ahead - a view that is different. The symbolic locked closed door is what we typically do to ourselves. We stay trapped in a state of mind that believes there is no way out, no chance for change – dukkha.
A doorway is the passage leading from one place, one room, one state of mind, to another. It is the transition, not the change itself. It is the interval of saying farewell to what was left and an embrace of what lies ahead. Sometimes thinking of a door as a gate is easier. Doors are usually opaque and if closed, what lies on the other side is unknown. Gates usually have open spaces to see through, even if closed.
Regardless of the image, the door offers the line, a boundary, a frontier of two different alternatives, places. Walking through the door, or crossing over, is symbolic of a new beginning. Doors are both entrance and exit.
If you read the short excerpt in The Nightstand Buddhist below, we are shown a door and a doorway to reducing dukkha in this life. We each have our key to this door and doorway. We choose to keep it locked or we choose to unlock it. In the end, the choice is ours.
Amida Buddha’s 18th Vow is in sight on the other side of that door. Entrusting in that Vow sounds easy, but how many of us really truly believe it? It is said Shin Buddhism is the easier path, the easier doorway. It is easier but that does not mean it is easy. Easier is simply less difficult. We still need the courage and strength to unlock that door, view what is on the other side, entrust in it and walk through.
Sometimes it only happens when we are fed up with everything so much that we are willing to try anything to make it better. If that “anything” includes just moving to California, then guaranteed, the door is still closed to the next room. The only difference will be the same cell walls are painted a different color. Embracing and entrusting Amida Buddha’s 18th Vow, is the door, the threshold that is truly the first steps to awareness and enlightenment in this life.
Namo Amida Butsu.
In Gassho,
Rev. Anita
rev.anita.cbt@outlook.com
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