What Doorways Re-present
(Note to reader: This essay is concise, as I am finding I have less to say. I hope it will still be of use to you despite its brevity.)
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
~William Shakespeare
Have you ever heard of the doorway effect?
Perhaps you’ve had the experience of walking into another room, and promptly forgetting the reason you’re there. If so, you’ve encountered the doorway effect.
This happens because the brain treats doorways as “event boundaries”. Entering a new room creates a distinct mental scene, which causes the brain to clear old, short-term information from the previous room to prepare for new input. This reboot is a feature of how the brain manages memory load.
As frustrating as this may be, particularly to those of us in midlife and beyond, I propose we look at this phenomenon as a natural reset, one we can learn to welcome.
It’s an invitation to return to the present moment.
It’s an opportunity to release thinking.
It’s a chance to re-centre and refocus on the here and now - the only moment that actually exists.
We all understand that our thoughts can be alternately useful and a hindrance (more often a hindrance, if we’re being honest).
Let’s try to envision what it might be like to be free from thinking.
Our thoughts are centred on the past (memories) or the future (imagination). Test this by noticing your own time-focused thoughts. Time is an illusion, or construct. If there is no thought, there is no time. There is only ever now. Verify for yourself that this is true.
Usually we encounter the world as “form” - or duality. There is me, there is you. There is you, there is the world. An awakened person sees the reality of non-duality - there are not two, only one. During meditation, we endeavour to enter the formless state, beyond the body, beyond matter - only spacious awareness. If there is no form, there is no duality.
If there is no time, and no form, then it follows that there is no ego mind. If there is no thought, and no ego mind, there is no problem. We are able to access this state any time we return to the present moment. More often than not, there are no problems in the present moment, because problems are something we conjure in our minds.
While it may be maddening to walk into another room and forget what you intended to do,* passing through a doorway presents a gift - the opportunity to renew your commitment to the now.
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present.
~Alan Watts
*Here’s a tip for those who are not so interested in achieving non-dual awareness, and would like to know how to defeat the doorway effect. Get into the habit of repeating your mission to yourself aloud, or envisioning what you are about to do, and you’ll be more likely to accomplish it once you cross the threshold.
If this work enriched your life even a smidge, would you considering giving a modest tip?
I really enjoyed this one Amy.