Here is what climbing is
Photo by Henry Lim on Unsplash
Climbing is only intensification
If you could speed your life up enough, you'd see the art of it, and you wouldn't need "adventure."
But you can't do this, and you need food. Not bread -- food for the spirit inside. And so you climbed.
You carefully built a petri dish of sorts, with rules both arbitrary and deadly. You placed yourself inside, and dove deep. Why? Because your spirit flagged. You refuse to live without meaning, and so another part of you comes to your rescue, concocting medicines of snow and ice, friendship and fear.
(Quick question: who's to say you aren't doing this even now? Could this entire life be an intensification carried out as diversion for a being whose life moves at the speed of a bristlecone pine tree?
All climbers are also technicians. So they must intuitively understand that no experience is truly singular -- they are all nestled like layers of an onion.)
Innumerable experiences, underlying Unity
It's all the same thing.
And this is great because only through repetition we finally get the pattern. We are pattern recognition devices. To see the single truth under the disparate data, is truly our purpose.
Dion Fortune in one of my favorite books, "the Cosmic Doctrine," said:
It is only by death that we can reap the fruits of life. We graze in the fields of Earth, and we lie down in the fields of Heaven to chew the cud. It has been said, 'for one hour's study, do three hours meditation'. To each span of life there are three spans of death. In death is the soul's meditation and life its study.
I'm definitely chewing the cud of my prior experience. I'm looking at them with different eyes. I've changed so much. Sometimes, I almost have contempt for who I was then. At other times, I give myself a grudging sympathy.
One thing I do not regret, is thinking heroically. Like a child with a spaghetti strainer for a breastplate, and a stick for Exaclibur, I went to the mountains with music ringing in my head. Sure, I'd laugh at myself about it, but I never stopped seeing the peaks as sites of foreboding adventure, with me as the intrepid and probably doomed knight.
The thing is, I was onto something. Said another way, I refused to let go of something from timeless childhood.
What was it?
The idea that this is a place of great and terrible adventure. Where the spirit of how a thing is done makes it meaningful.
If it's done with deliberate lack of imagination, unwillingness to see the larger dimension -- then it should never have been done at all, because entire dimensions of meaning were smashed like so much breaking glass.
So, the peak rising before us...we must meet it with as many internal dimensions as it will offer us in its language of chimneys, dark moats, hidden ledges with an unexpected bonsai tree. The whole thing is sex, really.
You meet the mountain with all parts of you alive, ready to give and take. And "you" reaches into deeps of which you will require lifetimes more to become conscious of. And yet, your promise to meet the mountain awakens those parts. And so they ring with a single note centuries before you will know them consciously.
And you must have faith that the song rings through the mountain to its heart. And it, for its part, is holding that faith with you. Do not doubt it!
Not for an instant! For here, in the darkness before dawn, your spikes digging into the gravel and ice of the bergschrund, your first step must be confident. And this means with honor. Your partner, the granite across the harrowing depth, expects nothing less.
And you know. You know your lovers, and they know you. It is not a thing that time changes.
It would be easy to imagine that an old climber visits the mountains and (poor doddering fellow) pawing softly at erratic boulders, dimly remembers old experiences. But it's not this way.
A master needs do nothing to inhabit the space to which he gave himself up. He is there, and there is a recognition in the surroundings. There is a gazing across dimensional boundary, and no one anymore thinks to compare what he is now and what he was. A reverent silence spreads out from the intersection point of the Knower and the Known.
So it is. Make it ever so in your life. If you disagree, go back to the one of you who still agrees with me, and give your burdens to him. For he will carry you through not to safety, but to the mountains of the moon. And there you will know Justice, which is what you have ever sought.
And then you will climb no more. Out of your love, you will contrive to be climbed. Your dream of the greatest climb will sing its note into the dawn of a world not unlike our own. And a being, something like our men and women, will hear it.
And seek you out.
I do not know what comes after, but by the law of systems, it will be great.