“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
– Edmund Hillary
[New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist]
On the 29th of May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to reach the summit of Mount Everest.
Mountains offer a portal to a world far from our suspended daily responsibilities. Taking these trips several times is the equivalent of regular meditation. Each offers the chance to go deeper into the journey, and each trip becomes a stepping stone to self-discovery.
We activate our right brains, enabling us to think about the bigger picture and handle contradiction and ambiguity. This experience can be a personal pilgrimage with sacred, spiritual or religious connotations. Equally, it can be a chance to shut down the noise and clamour of civilization and listen to our intuition.
It’s simple to explain, but it can also be a difficult path. Insights are complex; transcendence suggests solitude, which is not necessarily available in groups and not everyone is interested or ready. And whilst it’s a grand romantic vision, it seems increasingly out of step with our evidence-based, chaotic and fractured lives. In contrast, the timelessness of the mountains calls to mind our human history and the deep role played by mythology.
Carl Jung believed that when ancient gods like Zeus and Athena were no longer widely worshipped, they did not disappear entirely. Instead, they became a part of each individual’s psyche or mind. So, as religion and mythology declined, the focus shifted from worshipping these gods collectively to each person’s inner experience of them. So, the rise of science, with all its insistence on measurement and analysis, unravelled a mythology that had served humanity for thousands of years as a collective pressure valve.
Making a similar point, Prof. Iain McGilchrist, a neuroscientist, believes that the left brain usurped the right brain when science led to the dominance of logic and our relentless need to categorize, cluster, order and file everything. In that process, mythology crumbled, denying us access to that part of our being that longs for a symbolic connection to something greater, a sense of the bigger picture, or perhaps the cosmic Web of Indra – a delicate lattice connecting all things…
The mountains are the keepers of this bigger cosmic picture. They are portals leading us from the mundane into the profound.