The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

ON THE GENERAL SENSE OF ZEN THOUGHT
experience his liberty that is total and infinitely happy. What he has to do is
indirect and negative; what he has to understand, by means of work, is the
deceptive illusion of all the 'paths' that he can seek out for himself and try to
follow. When his persevering efforts shall have brought him the perfectly
clear understanding that all that he can 'do' to free himself is useless, when he
has definitely stripped of its value the very idea of all imaginable 'paths', then
'satori' will burst forth, a real vision that there is no 'path' because there is
nowhere to go, because, from all eternity, he was at the unique and
fundamental centre of everything.
So the 'deliverance', so-called, which is the disappearance of the
illusion of being in servitude, succeeds chronologically an inner operation but
is not in reality caused by it. This inward formal operation cannot be the
cause of that which precedes all form and consequently precedes it; it is only
the instrument through which the First Cause operates. In fact the famous
narrow gate does not exist in the strict sense of the word, any more than the
path onto which it might open; unless one might wish so to call the
understanding that there is no path, that there is no gate, that there is nowhere
to go because there is no need to go anywhere. That is the great secret, and at
the same time the great indication, that the Zen masters reveal to us.
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