Mumon Ekai (1183-1260), the Ch'an Master who collected the forty-eight koans that make up Mumonkan: The Gateless Gate, used by Zen students to this day, wrote:
The Great Way has no gate,
Approached from a thousand directions,
Once past its barrier,
You stride through the universe.
After six years of rigorous self-inquiry, Mumon was enlightened when he heard the beat of a drum. Was it his monastery's "fish-shaped wooden drum" that accompanies sutra-chanting, or the "loud, reverberating sound by quivering the wings, said of the ruffed grouse."?
Avoiding the obvious and dogmatic, our species was conceived in the shadowless shadow of the Gateless Gate, with each heartbeat essentially a symbolic language, although it is frequently thought of as instrumental by those who practice it. It is a way of acting out and so saying something that is considered important, and, because the magic is so effective in saying what it does, it is thought of as beginning again, in the spirit of animals with the daemons of human beings; as natural as limestone, as creative as nature itself.
A wall of red bricks
built in the shadow
of a sycamore tree.
Authenticity advances the edge of who we are, the living and the dead conversing together, technologically or not, with youthful enthusiasm in the style of old age—each assuming an individualized path to the squeaky brink of the Gateless Gate.
In the Neolithic, walls defined newly protected spaces, creating an inner world prompted by the memory of caves, where there were no gates, and whose entrances were guarded by taboos.
We recognize everything from a contemporary perspective, even if inconsciously, as the brain is born with meme(ingful) updates, finding comfort in a community of patterns that are each of us and all of us. It is difficult to think "out of the box," but not impossible. Various shamanic practices that make one question the nature of reality have been used at least since the Upper Paleolithic, allowing one to see, as Lao Tzu said, the "Darkness within darkness" that is "the gateway to all understanding." Its gateway is taboo, what Freud called, "the holy dread." "It is generally assumed that taboo is older than the gods and goes back to the pre-religious age." He added that, "taboo throws light on the nature and origin of conscience...collective conscience," as tribal culture would generate. Can Freud's collective conscience and Jung's collective unconscious be woven together?
