Zen Roshi, Lola McDowell Lee, opens with the core question: How does one enter the gateless gate? Lola points to a mountain stream, suggesting that "listening" is entering. She distinguishes between the someone’s simple interest in Zen and the actual acquisition of a Zen mind.

Lola says the spiritual path begins only when the soul moves beyond a mild interest in Zen and raises the question: "Who am I?"

This inquiry is described as poking a stick into a beehive—it disturbs thousands of inmates within the psyche, necessitating a new way to deal with the disturbance of selfhood.

Lola contrasts psychology with Zen. While psychology attempts to study feelings like fear and insecurity objectively, Zen reverses this process. Zen's method is to experience the subject—subjectively, refusing to be lost in external objects or intellectuali ...