MYSTICISM AND THE MIND OF THE MOUNTAINEER

P. M. DAS

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED what makes a climber take on the hard challenges of climbing year after year, despite the well-meaning words of discouragement of near and dear ones, such as the danger of it all, the risk of a fall; of being trapped in an avalanche; of being hit by stone-fall; of an anchor coming loose on an abseil.

Let me narrate a feeling I had while on a traverse high up on the slopes of Mukut Parvat last summer: A diagonal traverse below the last camp was peppered with falling rock and stones which whistled past like bullets during the daylight hours. I found myself on this traverse with a companion at eleven in the morning, a little behind the others in our ascent. On seeing the rock bombardment, my companion wisely suggested we turn back, but my spirits egged me on, if only to see if I had understood their pattern and frequency. I danced and dodged the missiles and safely completed the traverse but turned back without completing the load ferry to the higher camp because of lateness in the day. I again exposed myself to the rock bombardment on the descent and rejoined my companion at the lower camp. Perhaps enjoying the flow of adrenalin in the process!

Why did I expose myself to this apparently senseless risk on this climb in the first place? On this traverse what had I achieved? Nothing tangible; not even a load delivered to the higher camp for future use. Yet there was this satisfaction that I had been able to move in harmony with dangerous elements of nature. Something a rational man would find difficult to comprehend. Yet it is a common streak in many climbers. It is this kind of urge which brings the serious mountaineer to take on high risk climbing, time and again, irrespective of the toll that these same environs may have taken on others of their ilk.

Asceticism:

Sir Arnold Lunn wrote about mountain mysticism and the mountaineer in 'Alpine Mysticism and Cold Philosophy':

He has chosen the ascetic way to mountain understanding, and among the hills, as elsewhere asceticism is the key to the higher forms of mystical experience. One need not question the sincerity of Ruskin's condemnation of those who had transformed the mountain cathedrals into arenas for athletic feats, but I have sometimes suspected that the peculiar venom of his attack may have been due to the fact that the mountaineer provoked an uneasy and unformulated doubt of his own life, which was essentially non-ascetic and soft.

The hardships and privations undertaken by the Buddhist monk or the sadhu, suffering a cold winter in the heights of the Himalaya is often taken for granted. Is it because we have thousands of such ascetics? Pari passu, asceticism is part of Indian character and since this quality is a basic requirement of a serious climber, it makes the Indian character temperamentally suited to take to mountaineering and the ascetic sports.

Mountain Worship

Few mountaineers distinguish between worship of mountains and worship inspired by mountains. Do they perform a worship inspired by mountains? To Sir Arnold Lunn the latter makes sense but the former appears ridiculous. The Himalaya are resplendent in mountains named after the Gods, as in Gaurishankar, Gurudongmar, Swargarohini, Kailash, Paravati Parvat, Shivling and are steeped in religious lore. Not surprisingly gods, goddesses and deities of the hills are deeply rooted in the lives of the simple hill-folk of the Himalaya. Therefore, I have often wondered whether most Indian mountaineers too, in identifying themselves with these hill people, worshipped mountains?

What is definite is that the Himalaya is so steeped with religious worshipping; many mountaineers seem to have succumbed to the cant and ritual of it. The scare of the unknown and lack of confidence in the climber's own competence and ability to work in harmony with the mountain leads him to clutch at these straws.

In fact mountaineering is perhaps the only sport in which its devotees have attempted to find a substitute for religion. Sir Leslie Stephen who had been an Anglican priest, before he wrote 'An Agnostic's Apology' was not the only mountaineer in whom mountains evoked something faintly like the sense of worship evoked by the religion he had ceased to believe in. About mountains he said 'their voice is mystic and has found discordant interpreters: but to me at least it speaks in tones at once more tender and more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher'. Under the influence of Leslie Stephen, Arnold Lunn rejected Christianity while at school and explored materialism. He declares that he become a rationalist but by nineteen he became an agnostic if not an atheist by belief. Yet his experiences of moving mountain scenery convinced him that 'no purely materialistic theory of evolution (as of Charles Darwin) offers the slightest clue to the origin of our sense of beauty'.

Philo observes 'All nature is the language in which God expresses his thoughts but the thoughts are more important than the language'.

'Thus mountains may be symbols or images of some other reality, but the worship of images as if they were something more than images is a form of idolatry in the strict sense of the term'. All those who profess to believe in the religion of the mountains must be prepared to defend themselves against the accusation of mountain idolatry. Thus do we believe, the mountain, Nanda Devi is a Goddess or the creation of God?

Carrying the argument a step further we may conclude that expression of mountain beauty must never be coloured by religion. There must be genuine mysticism in response to mountain beauty for the true mountaineer.

The Presence

How often the mountaineer feels as R.L.G. Irving wrote 'with each succeeding year grows an abiding conviction in the dependence of himself and his surroundings on the benevolence of some unseen power'. Is this the revelation which appeared before Willi Unsoeld as he set eyes on Nanda Devi for the first time before his traverse of Everest in 1963 that he came back for an ascent many years later along with his daughter whom he had named after the mountain?

Many climbers at high altitude, under stress, have experienced the presence of a companion in accompaniment while perhaps there was none. There is no dearth of instances such as those recorded on the upper slopes of Everest. I recall my own experience after a disaster following an ascent of Bhagirathi-II (6150 m), 18 years ago. On the descent from the summit one of my companions slipped on the rope and pulled me and another into a fall, which we failed to arrest. The result was that I found myself having to sit out a night in the open at 6000 m, badly bruised, without an axe, crampons or clothing and besides one dead companion and another dying. Shivering and stamping my feet, I shouted out to the rescue party which failed to reach me. I prepared to concentrate on keeping up the spirits of my living friend and on our survival. Throughout the night and till I was found by the rescue party while descending an avalanche chute next morning, I felt the presence of a Being. This presence was around me and at times I talked to it and it urged me to concentrate on my survival, which I was doing. It was not a ghost-like apparition, but like a companion. A presence. Eventually, the Presence disappeared from my sphere of consciousness as I sighted the rescue party. I am not sure what this phenomenon was. Was it a hallucination conjured up by a weary mind? If it was, it had a positive effect on me. Or was it more than that? Perhaps I made a connection with another dimension, in an ethereal space by a medium called stress.

Interestingly, five year later, I underwent a similar experience again after being severely wounded in the chest in the riverine belt of the Punjab, while leading combat operations against terrorists. I had lost a lot of blood and most likely would have been finished had I not been superbly fit after returning from making the first ascent of Mamostong Kangri (7517 m) in Ladakh. While I was teetering on the brink of consciousness after being brought into a hospital hours after the incident, I felt a strong reassuring power around me. In the emergency room, I recall, I told my chief that I would pull through and to please explain this to my wife. Everyone except me seemed to feel otherwise at the moment. The doctors and officers were unable to believe my amazing recovery thereafter. In fact within a month I went back to my post. How was I so confident of my survival prior to the emergency operation?

It was certainly a similar experience, which led Sir Leslie Stephen in 'An Agnostic's Apology' to write of the mystic voice of those gigantic masses, more awe-inspiring than that of any mortal teacher. 'The loftiest and sweetest strains of Milton or Wordsworth may be more articulate, but do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my imagination'. They represent for him the indomitable forces of nature to which we are forced to adapt ourselves. They speak to man of his littleness and his ephemeral existence.

SUMMERY

Author's thoughts and experiences about mysticism and mountains.

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