The Door

The greatest loss is to forget the open space

Where God rests within us—

To have awareness of a door,

But to believe it will never open.

- Tobias Gale

Whether or not we call the Divine, “God”, I think we are all compelled to seek out the experience of it. Our Wounded Self believes the door to God is in the world, but (and I know it sounds cliché) the door is really within ourselves. The experience of God is within us because our Inner Child is within us, and the door to God is through them. But our Inner Child is not a means to an end. If we relate to them in this way, as some obstacle to overcome or project to undertake, we will not find passage through the door. They are the door; they are both the means and the end.

The truth however is that there really isn’t any door at all. Spiritual teachers, like Jesus or the Buddha, offered ways to understand the path towards freedom from suffering (i.e. the experience of God), using analogies and metaphor. “The Door” is one of them. But it only symbolizes our experience of how accessible God feels to us, rather than pointing to an actual barrier that exists. Our resistance to feeling our Inner Child’s pain is a door that we create, keeping the experience of God out. The moment we choose to embrace our Inner Child’s experience is the moment we realize there is no door.