THRESHOLDS, PART I

The great Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi writes:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
        Don’t go back to sleep. . .
    People are going back and forth across the doorsill
        where the two worlds touch.
        The door is round and open.
        Don’t go back to sleep.

As I awoke this morning for a brief moment I was aware of the world of unconscious slumber and conscious awareness touching.  As I stretch and yawn and breathe deeply I move from one world to the other; it is not a linear movement, it is a movement — a rhythm? — back and forth or a movement from inner to outer or a movement from being asleep to being awake.  The unseen, but deeply experienced, boundary between these two worlds is called a threshold.  Just as we cross over physical thresholds many times a day, we also cross internal thresholds.  These thresholds provide access to the deep mysteries of our inner life.

Our inner thresholds signify a separation between the known and the unknown, between the spirit and the body and between the hidden and the manifested dimensions of my life.  The ancient Celts believed there was a thin veil that covers the threshold between the concrete world and the spiritual world of their ancestors.  Certain members of the Clan were gifted with a special inner sight that would enable them to communicate with the ancestors; this gift allowed them to cross back and forth between this world and the world of the spirit.

For me, the concept of threshold — a metaphor perhaps — clearly describes a crucial component of my own spiritual journey.  The threshold marks the division between who I am today and who I am choosing to become — between who I am and who I am called to become.  Throughout recorded history images of thresholds, gates, arches and doors have served as symbolic passageways into new worlds.  Thresholds symbolize the possibility of the ‘new’ — new life, new experience, new identity.  They provide us a way of marking the divide between two very different worlds — the world of the mundane and the world of the sacred and the world of the sacred and the world of the profane.  They help us move between the internal and the external, between the subjective and the objective, between the visible and the invisible and between being asleep and being awake.

A physical threshold announces a passageway between two different external spaces.  A nonphysical threshold announces a passageway between our external life and our inner life.  The threshold ‘announces’ these only; we have to choose — we do choose — whether to cross the threshold or not.  The threshold also provides us an opportunity to ‘pause’ and ‘reflect’ before we decide to cross over or to withdraw.  In literature the term threshold experience indicates a significant crossing over not just any crossing over.  A threshold experience involves a search for clarification of one’s essential beliefs, core values, guiding life principles, life-choices and life-markers.