(With thanks to David Taylor)
Enlightenment is sometimes referred to as ‘The Narrow Gate’. Note the words carefully. The gate isn’t hidden, or difficult to access, or far far away. It’s narrow. The sort of gate that a person would get stuck in. Neither able to go through, nor go back.
Zen is part of Mahayana. Mahayana means ‘Great Vehicle’. It’s ‘great’ because there’s nothing outside it. The whole chaotic miracle is there. That being so, there is no gate in, and no gate out. Enlightenment and delusion are both there, and nowhere else.
Delusion is taking experience and constellating it around the fiction of a ‘person’. The sort of person who might get fixated, who might get stuck. But enlightenment isn’t an attribute of a person, actual or potential: it’s universal.
In wholehearted expression and exertion, everything is the narrow gate.