Nature teaches us, it draws the landscape of our psyche, it reveals the mystery of what is hidden. From its contours and its nuances our unattainable and unsuspected depths unfold before us. Its rough edges are sometimes soft and nuanced, sometimes sharp and contrasting. This exterior mountain is our interior mountain, its visible height symbolizes our invisible abyss. So immense, it is conquered by the desire to surpass oneself.
Because the spiritual world is purely ascensional. The outer ascension is our inner dive. The goal: to reach the summit. And the inner summit is our greatest depth.
At the top as at the bottom, everything is stripped. The outer ascent and the inner descent have this in common: they give access to solitude. But it is not a solitude of emptiness and isolation, it is a solitude of fullness and authenticity. It generates true friends and a renewal of existence for the benefit of what is essential.
During the ascent, the landscape becomes smaller. From the vast forests of the plains and lower levels, the landscapes become empty as you climb. Trees shrink and disappear, homes become rarer. In the same way, everything that makes up the inner world is reduced during internalization. Fullness requires a prior emptiness, the intoxication of the summits is reached when everything is reduced to the essential. In the heights of the mountains only a few plants and a few animals remain. The mineral, the basic kingdom on which life is built, becomes omnipresent.
But reaching a peak is demanding and dangerous. No stable dwelling is possible on a summit, in the same way no certainty of the personality is lasting in its deepest interiority. Climbing, even mountaineering, places beings in a requirement of vigilance: landslides, the risk of fatal falls, sudden variations in weather and temperatures… The crest line of consciousness places beings in a requirement at all times: every error, deviation from oneself or beliefs distinct from higher laws can be brutally rectified. Spiritual awareness of one’s inner heights demands rectitude.
At the top, the vision widens and it is possible to contemplate the most vast landscapes. At one’s deepest interiority, the divine and impersonal gaze broadens one’s field of perception. New perspectives that previously seemed unknown to us appear.
To climb a mountain in consciousness is to reach the depth of the divine.