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e16de76
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Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides. So on we go--we have a long way--no hurry--just one step after the next--with a little Chautauqua for entertainment -- .Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
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how-to-climb-mountains
rocky-mountains
montana
hiking
outdoors
mountains
meditation
reflection
patience
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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b79ee3f
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I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind. If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all. Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile. In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out.
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enlightenment
philosophy
high-country
montana
mountains
wild
meditation
reflection
consciousness
awareness
thought
introspection
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a4a6a79
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l yHtj lmr l~ tslq ljbl , ly`rf 'nh `ly@
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montana
novel
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Paulo Coelho |
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09f209f
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People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
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america
get-lost
montana
wild-west
country
explore
mountains
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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44635ab
|
"Chris asks, "What are you going to stick to?" "Mah guns, boy, mah guns," I tell him. "That's the Code of the West."
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montana
wild-west
guns
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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7faeec5
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But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.
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high-altitude
i-love-montana
montana
mountains
zen
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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a5b1b38
|
Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes. In Montana, however, it didn't have this effect at all. It identified one, instead, as a stuck-up Eastern ass.
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writing
rules-of-english-language
montana
grammar
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Robert M. Pirsig |