The Gate Opens
- Dan camps in the mountains, eating roots and berries and feeling content. Out of nowhere, Socrates shows up.
- The student says he feels lost, failed. His teacher replies that he's very close to the gate.
- The next night, after a carefree day of hiking, Socrates tells Dan a warrior should be happy without reason, which makes happiness the ultimate discipline and something you are rather than something you feel.
- Dan says it seems impossible to always feel happy. The teacher says feelings come and go, but the secret of unreasonable happiness is to remember the innate perfection of one's life unfolding.
- Socrates and the student arrive at a sacred place in the mountains, a burial site for an early American tribe of warriors, among whom Socrates had ancestors.
- They camp in the mouth of a cave. Socrates tells Dan an adapted version of Plato's allegory of the cave, saying people are trapped in the caves of their own minds and only a few warriors see the light outside.
- Lightning flashes, and Socrates hurries Dan deeper into the cave. The capital-F Feeling tells Dan that Death is stalking. (Maybe a bit like this dude?)
- Suddenly Dan falls back into the cave, his skull shattering. He hears Socrates telling him this is his, Dan's, final journey.
- The student is dying. Socrates pushes him down over a precipice, and Dan falls out of the mountain cave and into a sunlit meadow. His body is all broken and stuff, and rodents and worms and the like feed on his decomposing flesh. Millenia go by until even the meadow disappears.
- Dan realizes he's the Consciousness that observes and is all, and the Dan Millman who lived long ago was just a flash in time. The Grim Reaper/Death whom he feared was just his great illusion. His life too was an illusion, a problem, a moment when Consciousness had forgotten Itself (capital-I!).
- Waking in the cave, Dan smiles, realizing that nothing at all matters. This strikes him as very funny. He and Socrates laugh and dance in the cave. Mission complete.
- They leave the mountains, Dan feeling energetic and free of any meaning or any search.
- Socrates warns him that he'll lose the vision, that it's just an experience, but Dan says it doesn't matter: he has lost his mind. Socrates is pleased and says his debt is paid.
- Dan returns to Berkely and walks the streets, imagining telling people to wake up, to realize achievement leads nowhere, to relax, to realize Love is the only reality, that everything is One. But he knows people would consider him deranged or even dangerous.
- Dan drives to the gas station. He and Socrates work on the car. The teaches gives him a journal about his, Socrates', life. He tells Dan to write and teach, and then says he has to go.
- He enters the bathroom, shuts the door, and doesn't come out. After a while, Dan wonders what the deal is, and sees a flash of light under the crack of the door. He enters the bathroom only to find that Socrates has disappeared.
- Dan thanks Socrates aloud and realizes that the teacher is not really gone, because the two of them were one. Not in the Fight Club doppelganger (ghostly double) sense, but in the sense that everything in the universe is one.