THRESHOLD

threshold 

a strip of wood or stone forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room.

a level or point at which something starts or ceases to happen or come into effect

ORIGIN: Old English therscold, threscold; first element related to thresh (in the sense 'tread').

"The threshold of a new order of life.... the thresholds we face now involve all humanity, indeed, all planetary life."

David Spangler.

       Mircea Eliade on THRESHOLD. 

       THE FIRE GATE - Me’hi kHor.lo - Incombustability as necessary for gaining the interior spaces of the Mandala.

       THE PATH: The Archetype of The Way. Tao. The Journey. Road. Path, i.e. meta-cartography - maps and their uses.

Steps = Sequences - see the Scarf in Lankavatara Sutra.

PATH: Tantra as Ground - Path and Goal. Ascent - Descent. Directions: e.g. N.S.E.W. Centre -

GATES, DOORS: see MAIER -  Thresholds -

Need KEYS: - Decipher - unravel, (Thread) Knots - Woven Circuits.
 

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ELIADE ON THRESHOLD

How are we to make the passage

between two modes of being?

 

“For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in which it stands. The door that opens on the interior of the church actually signifies a solution of continuity. The threshold that separates the two spaces also indicates the distance between two modes of being, the profane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.

 

      A similar ritual function falls to the threshold of the human habitation, and it is for this reason that the threshold is an object of great importance. Numerous rites accompany passing the domestic threshold—a bow, a prostration, a pious touch of the hand, and so on. The threshold has its guardians—gods and spirits who forbid entrance both to human enemies and to demons and the powers of pestilence. It is on the threshold that sacrifices to the guardian divinities are offered. Here too certain paleo-oriental cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Israel) situated the judgment place. The threshold, the door show the solution of continuity in space immediately and concretely; hence their great religious importance, for they are symbols and at the same time vehicles of passage from the one space to the other."

From Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt  Brace, 1959), pp. 24-26.