The Spiritual Mountain
I want to tell you the myth of the spiritual life and process as the ascent of your spiritual mountain.
When you start out, you really enjoy living in the lush valleys at the bottom of the mountain. You love to have picnics by the streams. It’s so beautiful down there. That’s where your children are and all the delightful times you have had with your lovers and your partners. It’s very nice to be together down there, although it’s not easy because nothing lasts there very long and the good is always followed by the not-so-good.
When you start the spiritual process you turn against the life that you’ve been living. You say, ‘I’ve realised there has to be something more … ’ And there is something more. You start to climb your mountain and it’s alright to start with. It’s quite exciting as look back and wave to the people down below. And they wave back, so you know everything’s alright. But as you ascend of course the air gets more rarified. It’s more difficult to breathe.
But up you go, inexorably you keep climbing, and gradually the lush valleys start to disappear, along with yesterday, which you’re so attached to. You can’t see the people so clearly and you’re likely to get a little bit of loneliness. You are alone of course because it’s your mountain and you’re the only one climbing it. As you look back of course you look back and are reminded of what you’re leaving. You get unhappy sometimes, because your life has changed. Some of the people you loved have gone and many friends have left you.
You ask, ‘What’s happening to me? My life is changing … And yet I still must climb this mountain.’ And all the time the air is getting more rarified.
Sometimes you say, ‘I can’t go on. I just can’t do this. Doesn’t anybody realise that there are some things people can’t do? This is too much to ask of myself. I think I’d like to get off the mountain and run back.’
But somehow or other you can’t do that - because everyone can climb their mountain. There’s no excuse. Only the feelings and the mind say ‘I can’t do it’. On the mountain there’s no such word as ‘can’t’.
‘I must do it’.
And so you keep climbing. Eventually you start to learn: ‘My God, I can’t look back to yesterday. I can’t think about what it’s like down there and how I’d love to have a little picnic by the stream and hear some other voices and feel some love’. That is sentimental love, human love. As you go up the mountain you go above the pollution and everything’s so much clearer. But it seems so cold.
If I spoke as an intimation from within you and said, ‘This is love. You are climbing the mountain of love’, you’re likely to say, ‘What sort of love is this? It’s very cold and I’m all alone, so alone’. And I would say ‘It’s love. Do you want to really go back?’
You say, ‘I want to go back more than anything in the world … No, I don’t want to! I’m mad … I’ve got to keep climbing.’
So you keep going up. If you looked back you’d turn to stone like Lot’s wife and not be able to climb anymore. You are shown that if you look back you’ll be stuck; you won’t have the resilience, the flexibility, the non-existence that allows you to go on. So you mustn’t look back. You mustn’t think. You mustn’t look for sentimental love anymore. You’re leaving behind the love that is basically selfish because it always wants something for itself, something in return.
Climbing the mountain, it gets colder but it gets clearer and you can see so much further. You forget about the temptations of looking back to the bottom of the mountain. As you go up you see that you can almost look forever …
You’re the last one to see the sunset. In the valley they don’t see much of the sun at all really. Up here it’s so clear and wonderful. So you get used to seeing above the pollution to the splendour, the wonder and glory of the ascent of this natural pinnacle.
As you get further and further up, you notice something. There’s somebody else on the other mountain over there. You wave and they wave back. And you say, ‘That’s strange. I’m alone, absolutely alone here,and I’m not saying a word to that one, that being, climbing their mountain, but I’m communicating. It’s amazing.’
This is what happens in your life. As you leave behind your old friends, who want to stay in the valley having picnics, being happy today and unhappy tomorrow, being truly human (true to their feelings and their thought-processes) you discover that new friends come to you; people of truth, doing the same thing as you - people changing the consciousness of life on earth by having the courage to keep climbing and not looking back, to get rid of the future.
You’re not looking forward to anything as you climb. You’re looking out. You are seeing where you are and that’s good enough.
When you get further up, and you see these beings around you on the other mountains, there’s a delight in you because the communication is instantaneous. It doesn’t need words. It’s just beautiful where you are in the nature of your own being and seeing the other beings in the same place! There’s an exchange of consciousness; a communication that’s beyond expression, but not beyond being.
Once you’ve gone up the mountain, you can come down into existence again and you can do what you have to do there, without losing your being. Having gone up to a certain point and being able to breathe that rarified air, you can go back down and for a time be with the people in all the places where they live their happy-today-unhappy-tomorrow lives. You can speak with them and perhaps speak your truth to them. But you won’t be able to stay there long. You can’t breathe the air there so well now, so you’ll retreat into being. You won’t leave the people, but you’ll retreat into being, which is your mountain. You will just be.
Extract from the recording Climbing the Mystic Mountain
Deep Space