deep valley

I'm on a mountain side in Himachal Pradesh, in India, and I've paused in my walk to look down into a deep valley. I can see one stretch of the stream that runs in the bottom of the valley, far, far below – several hundred metres below where I am. The valley sides are steep and yet wooded. It's a beautiful scene.

And seeing this, it reminds me of the old analogy for the spiritual journey: that of climbing a mountain. When we're living down in the valley, we have a rather limited perspective. We can't see very far. And it's a busy place: many people a lot of social interaction, the usual everyday life. And as we leave that behind, at least for periods, and climb the mountain side, of course, our perspective changes. Not only do we leave behind that busy-ness, that rather superficial social life, but we start to get a broader and broader view of the world. From where I'm standing I can see not only this valley floor far below, but other mountain ridges, and in the far distance some plains stretching away into the haze. As we climb the mountain, we can see further, and it's like that on the spiritual path. The further we go, the more open our perspective is, the broader it becomes, the deeper we can see into ourself and into the more mysterious ways of existence.

But there's another interesting aspect to this analogy, and that was coming to me as I was standing here looking down into the valley. The valley floor is also a beautiful place to be. For me, the spiritual journey is not really about leaving everything behind and becoming a hermit. One could find, in these parts in fact, a nice Himalayan cave to live out one's days in. Doubtlessly one could reach a deeply blissful state of meditation, and be at peace within oneself. And yet we've been born into this human body. And so my way is to combine periods high up on the mountain, periods of solitude, periods of intense spiritual depths, to combine that with periods down in the valley floor, being very ordinary, interacting in those social ways. The import thing is to have been up the mountain, and then, even when we are living the more superficial aspects of life, we can at least carry the deep memory of our spiritual essence. And with practice we can come to reside in this core of our being, even whilst we are moving in the market place and living in the valley floor.