Mountain Interlude

We speak in awe of mountains as though they are “timeless,” but that is an ironic misnomer because they are actually chronicles of geologic time.  Whether they are relatively new like the Trinity Alps, or as ancient as the Adirondacks, to geologists they are an open book of the massive, cataclysmic forces that shaped our planet.  Get outside, and learn the news.  Epochs unfold in the layers of rock and sediment, and the birth and death of countless life forms are preserved in vast, frozen pages of time.

We humans have existed only for a million years or so, but mountains have had a presence on earth for at least a thousand times longer, until their constituent minerals and molecules are worn down and become part of the soil, or the ocean floor, waiting for the next geologic upheaval to be reborn.  In this cycle, the mountains are eternal.  Perhaps that’s why we reverently refer to them as “timeless.”  In the same way, the primeval molecules of our bodies exist forever, in the physical cycles of death and rebirth.  And yet, we do not consider our somatic selves to be eternal, because we think we are more than our bodies.

Our thoughts appear and disappear as ephemeral fireflies in a meadow.  They take on a false sense of importance in our minds, and yet they lack the physical molecules to sustain their presence.  We can remember them with more thoughts, or try to preserve them in physical media, but when our actual thoughts are gone, they are lost forever – or so we believe.  How often have we said, “I was just thinking of that, and now it’s gone!”  We chase our forgotten thoughts like butterflies in a garden, as if they were something outside of ourselves that needed to be captured.

As humans, we can only exist by thinking or doing – there is no other reality for us.  We cannot think in the past; we can only think about it.  Likewise, we cannot think in the future; we can only speculate in the present moment.  And we all know we cannot do anything in the past or the future.  Therefore, in a fundamental way, the present moment in which we are thinking or doing anything is our only reality.  The past and the future aren’t real.  Why would we want to trade our only true reality for false unreality?  Why do we waste so many present moments – the currency of our existence – suffering about the past or worrying about the future?

We can learn from the past, certainly, and use it to improve our reality.  When right thinking and right action are applied in the present, we can also improve our future.  We can move mountains.  Our thoughts and actions together can create a cohesive continuum of optimal reality from our present moments.  The mountains abide in our experience.

By the way, what do the great monoliths think about?  If plants can perceive our thoughts – as postulated by The Secret Life of Plants – why not mountains?  Is life and perception endowed only to the animate beings on our planet?  The base minerals and molecules of the soil are transformed into vegetation, which are the building blocks of our bodies.  How can a carbon molecule existing in a leaf or brain be attributed more perceptive potential than the same molecule in a rock?  Anyone who seriously studies the structure of the most common atoms in the universe must conclude that there are many things about them that we will never understand.  If sub-atomic particles were simple enough that we could comprehend them, we wouldn’t have the awareness to know.  We are all just “atoms with consciousness,” in the words for Richard Feynman, a Nobel physicist.

Plants and animals die so quickly, and are subsumed by the greater pool of substance that is the earth, just as individual waves recede back into the ocean.  Great and small cycles of matter experience birth, death, and rebirth, in more ways than we could possibly understand.  The energy of the ocean manifests in the creation of endless waves that have force, so it is interesting to consider that the energy of the mountains is continuously reanimated in repeating cycles of living matter.  The very molecules that make up our brains – the organ of which we are proudest – were once the miniscule building blocks of mountains.  When our brain dies, the particles return to the earth; to be born again as mountains. What memories do the pieces of our cells retain as they decompose and are reborn?  They never really go away, you know; the molecules are just released from their bonds and associations, to rejoin the reservoir of potential.  Are the mountains consequently a repository of our collective thoughts, frozen in an atomic embrace with matter over countless millennia?

What is this thing we call thought, anyway?  Far greater minds than mine have wrestled with this question since humans began, well… thinking, and yet no empirical answer exists.  The mystery persists, and yet can never be explained objectively by logic, because the only way to consider what is thought? is by thinking.  Therefore, any explanation that results from even the most prodigious application of thought is patently inadequate.  Ironically, the only way to truly know about thought is by ceasing to think altogether; as in meditation.  This is a subject about which I have read a great deal in my lifetime, and to which I have given a lot of – ahem – thought.  Unfortunately, I have never been able to meditate well enough to escape from my own grasping thoughts and see them truly.  I flail in the desperate manner of a man endlessly treading water, knowing he is in the ocean, but trying to get his head high enough to see what it actually looks like.

I believe our thoughts dissipate into the same inexplicable void as do the subatomic particles of matter; where spirit and matter both lose perceivable existence.  We know that subatomic particles reappear billions of times per second to form mountains, but where do they come from?  Quantum mechanics tells us they come from a “field of potential” or some other fairytale euphemism.  In the myriad, indefatigable cycles of the universe where nothing is wasted, is it not reasonable to assume that subatomic particles are reformed from other subatomic particles that lost their form?  I would think it sensible to first disprove the most prevalent model before suggesting alternatives.  After all, everything else dies and is reborn.  So, what about thoughts?  Are they recycled, too?  Might they have something to do with how those subatomic particles are put back together in a cohesive pattern?  

I realize: “You are that which sees yourself thinking.” … and I wake up.  

Just as you have to awaken to know you have been dreaming, you must go beyond thought to know you are thinking.  What is the awareness you have right now, reading these words, knowing that you are thinking about them?  How do you gain that perspective, really?  It’s not enough to say that you are capable of thinking on multiple tracks.  There is something more; we all know it at the core of our being.  In the baseless depth of existence lies a focal singularity – the vanishing point of all perspective – which is the goal of meditation to attain.  Once there, at the origin of all awareness in humans, it is so laughably simple to see how meaningless all our worries and anxieties really are.

We are so good at making mountains of our misgivings.  This is why we see mountains as obstacles to be overcome.  We try different paths to get to the top, and often wind up wandering around, lost in our shortcomings.  The only true path is the one that contributes to the unfolding of the universe.  Imagine what lofty edifices could be constructed from positive thoughts!  The molecules that result from a consistently optimistic outlook are supercharged with the energy of allegiance with the All That Is.  With this awareness comes the inherent responsibility to act upon it.  We can construct timeless ranges of reality with right actions that follow from right thoughts, but we must learn to think those thoughts first; before acting.