Gateless gate

God, whose love and joy 

are present everywhere,

can’t come visit you

unless you aren’t there.

- Angelus Silesius

Maria stood at the edge of the magical, monumental gate, gazing up at the wrought iron intricacies dancing between its metal posts. It must have been over thirty feet high…or, at least, it felt that way. She craned back her neck and squinted her eyes, and still the arrowed caps were barely visible from her vantage point.

The iron was old and worn, showing signs of copper-orange rust dusted along its weathered edges. She ran her fingers across the surface of the square posts, taking in the elegant ridges and irregularities. The metal felt icy against her fingers.

Her small hands moved slowly, purposefully, eventually finding their way to the thick, corroded chain which hugged the gate closed. Between two of the chainlinks hung a robust padlock. Age had smoothed its antique surface, but still she could make out the word Selfless engraved just above the keyhole.

Maria pulled down on the padlock to confirm that the gate was, indeed, unable to be opened, and eagerly scanned the ground nearby, lifting rocks in search of a key. Of course, there was no key to be found. 

Whoever erected this gate evidently wanted nobody to walk through it, and she knew right then at her first sighting of it that she had to, that she must, find a way in — to discover what was surely a great secret waiting on the other side.

She pondered the engraving on the lock: Selfless. Surely this word must hold a clue to the gate. 

“Perhaps,” she wondered, “if I could only become completely, fully, utterly selfless — living my life for the well-being of others and letting go of any selfish tendencies — perhaps that would unlock the secret of the gate.” 

After that first moment gazing up at the gate, finding her way through it became her obsession, her purpose. Maria’s career, her friends, her family, her relationships, her life…none of it came close to the importance of this new mission. 

The gate became the only thing that mattered. It became her objective in life to crack its code. It overtook her, like a puzzle she simply had to solve in order for life to be worth living.

Once the gate possessed her, Maria begrudgingly, painfully, went back to her regular life, except now she focused every ounce of her energy on becoming Selfless. She volunteered, made donations to local shelters, joined do-gooding organizations, and every so often she returned to the gate in hopes that she had made progress, in hopes that something had shifted.

Maria noticed that as she tried on different ways of being Selfless, the gate would somehow, as though by magic, be changed upon her next visit to its frontier. The look of it actually shifted and changed, practically before Maria’s eyes. Sometimes the wrought iron details displayed shapes of spirals and coils, and, at other times, the same part of the gate paraded angular, geometric accessories. But, to her disappointment, despite the subtle and curious changes, at each visit the gate remained secured and impassable.

One weekend, Maria poured absolutely everything she had into her Selfless endeavors. Saturday morning: volunteering at a soup kitchen; Saturday afternoon: trash cleanup along a local river; Saturday evening: a fancy nonprofit benefit event; Sunday: sifting through her entire house to find things she didn’t need that she could donate to a local shelter. 

Sunday evening, Maria haughtily made her way to the gate expecting to finally be able to get through it. The last she had seen it, the wrought iron curled in on itself in beautiful, delicate spirals. But today, as Maria greeted it, she noticed that the wrought iron details were jagged, sharp, and disjointed, and the height of the gate had exploded towards the sky like a sapling thirsting for the sun…almost to signify that her efforts had been altogether wasted.

Maria fell to her knees and cried out towards the gate in frustration, “What do you WANT from me?!” She knew she couldn’t possibly try any harder to help others at her own expense. To be honest, she was totally overwhelmed by the energy she was pouring into becoming Selfless.

As Maria looked up at the massive gate in defeat, she suddenly noticed something: the padlock was transforming before her eyes. She hobbled upright and shuffled on her knees towards it with curious anticipation.

The padlock had become thinner, more fragile. As she turned it over slightly in her hand, she noticed that the engraving had changed. In a thicker, bolder font, she read: Self Less.

She sat back onto the dusty ground, pondering this new development.

“Self…Less,” Maria repeated aloud.

The shift, although strangely subtle — hardly noticeable, even — seemed to ignite a fire deep in her chest. Her soul burned with these words: Self Less.

Maria wondered to herself. Had she been going about this all wrong? Had she been exerting all this energy helping others, thinking she was acting selflessly and altruistically when, in truth, her pursuit was nothing more than something that was propping up her sense of self and this self’s need for validation?

What was this Self Less? It seemed to be pointing to a deficiency, to a negation, to a minus of a self, rather than to the subtle, ego-laden humanitarianism she and every member of society had come to associate with the word Selfless. After all, what was this normalized, socialized selflessness, she thought, but a way to make people feel good, to feel righteous, to feed our sense of piety and morality?

This Self Less — this negation of self — seemed to be pointing to something else, entirely. But Maria wasn’t sure what that something was, to be honest. How could she not have a self? Was it even possible? Would she not, after all, cease to exist if she was not her self?

Maria made her way home with her mind nearly exploding with questions, and although she physically left the gate behind, she carried its enchantment inside of her now more than ever.

The concept of becoming Self Less plunged itself deep inside her breast over the coming weeks and months, blooming like the delicate layers of a lotus flower. She ceased her selfless acts of volunteering and donating, and instead naturally fell into spending her time in quiet solitude, contemplating the potential meaning of this Self Less way of being. 

Maria found herself puzzling over questions like “Who am I?” and “Who is it who observes my thoughts?” and “Who is the witness of my self?” and “What would I be without my self?”

These questions lingered in the stormy ocean of Maria’s soul, seeming to grow roots which began to wrap themselves between the very spaces of her being.

This idea of Self Less-ness permeated every thought, every word, every sensation, and every silence that seemed to make up Maria. It was a gnawing itch so deep that it could not be scratched.

As the truth of Self Less slowly unfolded within Maria, she began to realize that everything that made up her sense of self — her ideas, her opinions, her knowledge, her beliefs, her likes, her dislikes, her behaviors, her past — was like a wicker basket filled with old, rotting fruits which she had picked over the course of her lifetime and formed a strong personal attachment to. She began to realize that these things were no more her true self than the clothes she wore or the opinions which had run rampant in her mind ten years ago.

“If I’m not these things,” Maria thought in agony, “then what am I? Who am I?”

As the months went on, Maria began to hate the gate, to hate her self. They became the obstacles which sat between her and liberation…obstacles which must be destroyed at any cost. Their stench infected her like a disease, and she knew she needed to find the cure or die trying.

One day, months after her previous visit, she made her way back to the gate. She was so frustrated, so beaten down, so utterly exhausted that her mind was nearly blank. It felt like it was tearing at the seams with both everything and nothing all at once.

Maria was in such a haze that when she arrived at the gate, she didn’t even look up at it or take notice of it. She merely sat on the ground at its base, leaning forward until her forehead touched a bitterly cold pole. The chill of it seared her skin, but she didn’t have it in her to care.

The question “What would I be without my self?” had been spinning dizzily in her head for weeks now. 

She was so agitated that she couldn’t think — she could barely speak. Her eyes began to well up with tears.

“Have I ever existed at all?! Or am I just imagining this whole thing?” she asked aloud, half joking, as she began to sob.  

Maria suddenly jumped at the sound of metal clanging against metal. Her eyes widened with fear, and just a few feet to her right, she saw the thick rusty chain and padlock fall to the ground, landing like a coiled snake. The gate cracked open with a slow squealing that sent a chill down Maria’s spine.

She stood up and stepped back a few feet, positioning herself in front of the now-opened gate. She stood as still as a stone statue, feeling like her feet were suddenly made of lead. 

The gate was finally open, just as she had been desperately wanting for months. And yet, she hesitated.

“Why now?” she asked. What had she said that unlocked the gate? She retraced her thoughts, and her mouth fell open at the remembrance of her last utterance.

“…Have I been…imagining…this whole thing? Is my self a creation of my own imagination?” Maria wondered with shock in her voice.

She gazed up at the gate, and began to step towards it, slowly, one foot in front of the other.

As Maria pushed open the gate and cautiously stepped across its threshold, she felt a stark sensation rush through her body — a sensation like she was stepping outside of herself, like she was leaving behind everything which made up who she was. 

An immense calm washed over her as she stepped through to the other side, and every worry, every fear, every hesitance, every resistance, every inauthenticity melted away like hot wax dripping off a flamed candle wick.

A sly smirk came over her face as she turned back towards the gate with a twinkle in her eyes.

“My self was nothing but an illusion,” Maria said with a confident, mischievous smile. “An illusion that could never have any existence.”

Just then, the gate vanished before her eyes, leaving Maria completely alone in the grassy field with nothing but wind whipping around her. As though from somewhere beyond space and time, Maria felt something begin to bubble up from within her like a tsunami. 

It rose up her throat from her stomach, filled her mouth, and as she parted her lips, what burst forth was the biggest, loudest, heartiest, most joyful belly laugh of her entire life. The joy which bellowed from her lips felt as though it was being channeled from somewhere beyond this existence. Maria laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks, clutching her belly and knocking her head forward in jolly delight. 

She almost couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen it before. It couldn’t possibly be more obvious: there had never been a gate, at all.