Back to the Teacher's Mountain

The return to the mountain came at the right time, a golden opportunity to disconnect from that digital chaos and noise of data—especially when taking part in them now seems so barren.

The mind, as usual, carries the feverish restlessness of the valley up and onward with it, and the first steps also bear that ancient battlefield, where a muddy mind clutches at the promise of clarity, and so on, over and over.

But as the path lengthens, and perhaps as is the nature of every pilgrimage, the capacity of a geography steeped in holiness to soothe the vanities of the everyday—into a coherent movement anchored in purpose—does its work.

The mountain is of course a metaphor, just as much as it is made of solid granite, and generations of seekers of meaning, religious and political alike, have made it a dwelling for their longings—the loftiest of which also served as real ground for transcendence. The figure of the true teacher (and these are sometimes as rare as the phoenix or as hidden as the dragon) then becomes one with the promise of that mountain.

But the days of choice lie precisely in the descent, when the mountain, fading on the lengthening horizon, remains no more than a potential, and all that bowing and ritual, charisma and cloud, become no more than a memory to make into a vessel—empty of content, or holding true validity.

If you can bear the din of the market and the vanity of the world, with the teacher-mountain planted in your bones, and when everything, after all, is like dew—you may perhaps, despite everything, come to rule. If only in your own narrow world.

Choose well.