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It had been opened just three months before. Everything was electronic. Those three doors were almost impossible for any human being to cross. First they were all electrified -- just to touch them was enough and you would be dead. And they were so high that no ladder or anything was possible. And then... one after another, three.
They opened only by using a remote controller, which my jailer used to keep in his car. He would press the button, and the first gate would open. It was almost like a mountain, so big, so high, and as the car entered, it would have to wait for the first door to come down. Only when the first door had come down would the remote controller work on the second door. And when the second door had come down, then the remote controller would work on the third door.
When I entered for the first time that jail in Portland I told the jailer, "Perhaps you don't know, but you have managed a perfect symbol."
He said, "Symbol of what?"
I said, "This is the situation of man: the body is the first door, the mind the second, and the heart is the third. And then behind these three doors is the poor soul."
He said, "I never thought about it. It must be just coincidence; nobody has thought about it, that three doors... why three? Why not four?" He said, "I don't know. I have not made it."
But I told him, whoever made it perhaps unconsciously felt something of the symmetry, the correspondence between the imprisonment of human consciousness and being an architect for making a prison for human beings. Once you get beyond the body... which is not very difficult, because the body is very beautiful in a way because it is still in tune with nature. Hence to go beyond it is very easy; it does not give much resistance. It is very cooperative.
The real problem is the mind, because the mind is created by human society, specially designed to keep you a slave. The body has a beauty of its own. It is still part of the trees and the ocean and the mountains and the stars. It has not been polluted by the society. It has not been poisoned by the churches and religions and the priests. But the mind has been completely conditioned,
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