Jesus tells us how to enter into Unitive Awareness, which he called the Kingdom of God. He was a teacher of Nondual Reality and taught how to enter into what other spiritual traditions call Enlightenment, Liberation or Spiritual Awakening. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Jesus is pointing us to the door.
Jesus tells us how to enter into Unitive Awareness, which he called the Kingdom of God. He was a teacher of Nondual Reality and taught how to enter into what other spiritual traditions call Enlightenment, Liberation or Spiritual Awakening. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Jesus is pointing us to the door.
How to Enter Through the Narrow Gate
Jesus tells us how to enter into Unitive Awareness, which he called the Kingdom of God. He was a teacher of Nondual Reality and taught how to enter into what other spiritual traditions call Enlightenment, Liberation or Spiritual Awakening. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” Jesus is pointing us to the door.
This is not some esoteric teaching or rare experience for the spiritual elite. Every person has experiences of Unitive Awareness, what the Letter to the Hebrews describes as “being enlightened, tasting the heavenly gift, and partaking of the Holy Spirit.” If you are listening to me now, it is likely because you have tasted this Reality. You want to live in it, to abide in it. The reason why seekers seek this is because they have known it before, no matter how faintly or fleetingly.
In other words seekers know what they are looking for. They might not be able to put it into words, but they would know it instantly if they saw it again. The apostle Paul says in Romans that everyone knows God. He says that the God is clearly seen in the things that have been made, so that people are without excuse. Everyone has experienced the divine to some extent, even if – as Paul says in that passage – they have suppressed that awareness.
You have experienced the divine, if only for a moment. Think about those times you have had a spiritual experience that was meaningful to you. For many people that comes through Nature. It seems that the Natural world does a better job of communicating the Divine than religion does. That is why so many people say that they experience God better in the woods than in pews. Maybe that is true of you.
Maybe it was in prayer or meditation that you had that moment of spiritual sight. Maybe it was triggered by something you heard a spiritual teacher say or something you read in a book. Maybe it came out of the blue as you were walking down the street. Perhaps it came out of a struggle with depression or a difficult time in life. Perhaps it happened during a spiritual retreat. Perhaps it was prompted by music or art or athletics. Whatever it was, identify a time when Spiritual Reality came through to you most clearly. For me it is spacious places of natural beauty that opens me into the glory of God. But it can be anything. For CS Lewis a wardrobe in a spare room was the door.
Identify those times and places that naturally opens up into the Divine for you. That is your narrow gate and strait way. Recognize that and focus on that. It does not have to be an overwhelming spiritual experience. It need only be a subtle sense of the presence of the Spirit, a tiny glimpse of Heaven. This is an opening into Nondual Reality. Divinity is all around us, all we have to do is notice it. When we notice it then we have to follow up. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
Take off your shoes. That means to honor it as a door to the Divine. Draw closer to it. As the Bible says, “Draw near to God sand God will draw near to you.” As you draw near the Divine glory that shines through this opening becomes brighter. Focus and draw closer still. It is all about noticing and paying attention and focus.
This is the gate that Jesus was talking about. It does not matter how small it is. Jesus said in one story that it can be as small as the eye of a needle. As long as you can identify something in your experience as a divine opening into Reality, that is enough. All you need is a glimmer. This is the narrow gate that opens into the Kingdom of God. This is the gate to Liberation and Enlightenment. This is what Jacob called the gate of heaven.
You can enter into that gate, no matter how small it may seem. Jesus said that not many enter, but all are invited. That includes you. If the opening is the size of a peephole, then put your finger in it. Then at least then your finger is in the Kingdom of God! Wiggle it around and stretch the opening to fit a couple of fingers. Put in fingers from both hands and stretch it open. Work at it until you can get your arm in and then your shoulder and then your head and then climb through.
On the cover of my book Experiencing God Directly: The Way of Christian Nonduality I put a woodcut entitled The Flammarion Engraving by an unknown 19th century artist. It shows a man clothed in a long robe and carrying a staff, who has obviously been on a journey. He has come to the edge of the earth, where it meets the sky. He kneels down and passes his head, shoulders, and right arm through the star-studded firmament, discovering a marvelous spiritual realm.
We all can do this. We just need to keep focused until we are through this narrow gate into the kingdom of God, until we are fully enveloped by this this glory and bathed in the waters of heaven. This is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It does not matter how small that first glimpse of Nondual Reality is, it is enough. That is why Jesus told stories about a mustard seed that is the smallest of all seeds growing into the kingdom of God. He used the idea of a small amount of yeast that can enlarge into the kingdom of God.
These are different ways that Jesus had for speaking about the narrow gate and strait way to the Kingdom. The word strait used here is the word that means narrow, not uncrooked. Strait, not straight. The word is used in straitjacket. It means narrow and confining. You have to squeeze through this narrow gate into the Kingdom of God. There is a series of caves in the mountains of New Hampshire called Polar Caves that is popular with tourists. One of the passages is called the “Lemon Squeeze” because you have to squeeze through it to get through. I lot of people can’t.
That is how tight it is to squeeze through the narrow gate to the Kingdom of God. It is like going through the eye of a needle. You can do it, but you can’t take anything with you. You have to shed everything that you are including your own self. Your ego definitely will not fit through. If your ego is anything like mine it is way too large.
I liken the narrow gate to a black hole in space, like the one at the center of our galaxy. The gravity is so strong that nothing can survive going into a black hole. But it is theorized that everything that goes into a black hole may come through into another universe. We enter through the narrow gate, and we no longer are. But this no-self comes through into the Kingdom of God. We must become nothing, no-self, to enter the Kingdom.
It does not take too much examination of this metaphor to see that it is symbolic of the birth process. This strait and narrow way is a spiritual birth canal, and we are moving toward the light and being born again. This is what Jesus was talking about when he was using that term “born again.” This is true spiritual conversion, not the pale imitation hawked by televangelists.
This is the Kingdom of God. This is enlightenment. Entering through the narrow gate is like being born into a new world, transitioning into Reality. It is like going from darkness to light. It is like coming out of Plato’s Cave of Shadows into the Real World.
You are the Prodigal Son or Daughter to quote another of Jesus’ parables. The narrow gate is the gate to home. And the prodigal had to leave home to return home, but that is for another time. “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.” You have found it. Welcome home.