Once you have reached the mountain top, keep climbing

Only when you drink from the river of silence,

shall you indeed sing.

Only when you have reached the mountain top,

then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs,

then shall you truly dance.

~Khalil Gibran

When we refer to mountains and their tops and climbing, we refer to them as we are. We live in a deep unconscious state of identification with material. Even if an example that may point towards our essential nature beyond space-time is given to us, we interpret that example as we are.

For sure, any example that is given would be given in words or at least this much may be said that any example that is given would be preserved in words. We do not really have examples of how teachers help and guide their students. We have stories of how they help and guide their students. The teacher’s guidance might be his instantaneous touch, but that touch cannot be captured or replicated later on.

So what we will end up having is a story about that touch, which is mere words. We would be trying to put the timeless in time and the beyond material in words.

Wherever there is word there would be something that begins and ends, there would be causation, there would be limits.

We anyway live in limits and it would be doubly bad to take even a spiritual example at face value and use it to reinforce our pre-existing limits.

Khalil Gibran is saying “Only when you have reached the mountain top, you can begin to climb“. These words befuddle us. We do not know what they mean. It is for precisely this reason, that we are attracted towards them. These words seem to violate the normal laws of cause and effect, of sequence and duration.

They are pointing towards something else that has to be understood:

The material world is a clumsy world; nothing happens instantaneously here. There is always a lag, there is always an elasticity, there is always a gap. For…