Since we have just passed through a major yearly portal, the fall equinox, I decided to revisit a really interesting newsletter article I wrote in 2014, with some new updates. In both Feng Shui and Vastu, and many other cultures, the vital importance of doorways as transitional or transformational points was always part of the wisdom teachings. The masters taught that “to enter through a doorway, you must become the doorway,” or “to enter the room, you must know how to open the door.” These are cryptic ways of saying that you must be in in resonance the threshold you are crossing in order to gain access to another dimension or reality. This concept holds true for all planes from physical to spiritual.

I was excited to find a scientific study done by researchers at the University of Notre Dane that explored the “doorway effect.” It was entitled, “why walking through a doorway makes you forget.” The researchers found when testing participants that their responses to questions were both slower and less accurate when they walked through a doorway into a new room than when they walked the same distance within the same room. They were two to three times as likely to forget what they were supposed to do after walking through a doorway and walking through multiple doorways increased the error rate even more! “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away, “ said coauthor Gabriel Radvansky.

One of the their most amazing discoveries was that the phenomena held true whether the participants were navigating virtual worlds or real world settings! The implications of this are mind boggling to say the least. It brings to mind all of the scientific discussions currently about simulation. This knowledge has been with us from time out of mind and like so much ancient wisdom, we have just forgotten it! (more…)