Beyond Adventure - An Inner Journey
Beyond Adventure
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Chapter 2 - Deeper into Self
Most of my younger life can be expressed in terms of mental, physical and emotional experience. It was often a bewildering mixture of all these aspects. My actions, too, or most of them, can be defined in terms of the virtues or vices I brought to each situation. What I was unaware of, as a young man, were two other aspects of self that were of immense significance.
Autumn 1957. At my parents’ home. I have just returned from leading a university climbing expedition in Arctic Norway and am waiting to return to my studies at Oxford. The BBC news is on the radio as I have lunch. Vague interest becomes acute as a tragedy in the Himalayas is announced. I am devastated. My closest friend and climbing partner Bernard Jillot and another friend have been killed on the peak of Haramosh.
Reflection: As someone who did not make close friends easily, and whose relationship with Bernard could not have been stronger, my emotions searched my whole being. My world seemed, for a long time, to have little significance.
* * * * *
Spring 1958. At home in Derby. I am waiting to go climbing in Scotland. For something to do and with little enthusiasm, I go to a local tennis club dance. I am drawn to a young woman who seems to me the prettiest, and who is later to become my wife. I walk home in a daze, humming ‘Some Enchanted Evening …’.
Reflection: To be in love is to experience a magic that engulfs your whole being and transforms even your perception of the external world.
Love and death – these two extremes of emotional experience – only now begin to fit into place. It is as though I am on the first rungs of a seemingly endless ladder towards deeper understanding. My belief now is that within each of us, whether we are aware of it or not, lies a centre. It is a profound and mysterious area beyond rational explanation. The best term I can find to describe it is the spiritual centre, but other words are also used: heart, soul, conscience, moral being, wisdom. I thought at first that it was the basic aspect of being human. Now I am convinced that it is the most important aspect of being human. I find it amusing and ironic – a neat paradox – that in these times where an attitude prevails of “if you cannot measure it, then it has no value”, this essence of being human cannot be physically found.
But what is the importance of this spiritual centre?
I would suggest that it is the basis of what we value and the home of religious beliefs. It exists beyond our physical, mental and emotional aspects of character, all of which merge into it and emanate from it. It is the bedrock of our individual existence, which in itself is linked, in an even deeper, symbiotic sense, to everything around us. It is the basis of our sanity or insanity, and all points in between. It is the home of our dreams and nightmares, through which our subliminal responses to the external world are processed.
What concerns me is that the stress and pace, and the acquisitive frenzy of modern materialistic living can easily make us unaware that we even have a spiritual centre. Life is often too hectic in terms of making a living, having a good time, getting what we want or simply struggling to exist. As a result there is a spiritual vacuum in the man-made world, at least for the many who are not committed to religious beliefs. In the original plans for 2000 years of human celebration within the Millennium Dome, there were none for a spiritual zone, which illustrates the point.
To establish contact with one’s spiritual centre can be extremely difficult. Knowledge of its existence is one thing; feeling the certainty of its existence is quite different. Certainly for myself, and I suspect this may be normal, I was awakened to my spirituality only by reflection upon some very intense experiences.
In a broader context, I found the reaction to the tragic death of Princess Diana an event of considerable significance. It seemed to demonstrate the importance of the desire to praise and worship and connect. Millions of people were affected and moved by her death. Just for once the spiritual vacuum was filled, albeit in a sad and perhaps trivialised manner. I am aware that this massive reaction by the public could be seen as emotional mass hysteria, rather than as a spiritual response to a tragedy. That powerful emotions were involved cannot be doubted, but I sense a deeper significance. Those emotions, I feel, emanate from the spiritual centre. As I watched the funeral on television, tears began to well. I was not expecting to react in this manner.
* * * * *
The last key aspect of self I want to examine does not have the resonance created by the spiritual centre, but in its own way seems just as difficult to understand.
Spring 1981. The phone rings. Would I give a lecture on adventure and modern society? I agree and put the phone down. I feel great, at least until I realise that the lecture had better be good. The call is from Brisbane, Australia.
Reflection: I must be an important person. That was my view at the time, and for a long time afterwards. I now not only dismiss that view of myself, but regard my original view as a barrier to understanding myself. Viewing myself as important, I can now see, prevented me from beginning to discover who I am and how I relate to my surroundings.
* * * * *
1979. I am invited to lecture on ‘Young people in the hills’ at the annual BMC festival at Buxton. The event is primarily concerned with a celebration of mountaineering. Famous climbers are giving lectures. My lecture is ‘odd man out’ as there is concern in the UK climbing world about young people and ‘education’ appearing on the crags. I prepare very carefully as the subject is contentious. The lecture prior to mine, a visual show of two Americans soloing The Naked Edge in Colorado, is both wordless and stunning. I stand up in front of about 700 climbers with an utter sense of hopelessness. The audience’s bent is towards sensation, and not consideration. I know I have failed before I begin to speak. I soldier on, wishing I was somewhere else.
Reflection: Although, in the event, it was not a disaster, I felt threatened by the powerful, if largely unspoken, view that the crags were only for the climbers and their perceived values. Psychologically, I retreated into my shell, sensing that whatever I said would be likely to bounce off closed minds. The previous film had emphasised the great adventure and solipsistic joy of climbing, and to the audience that was all that really mattered. I still felt I was an important person in my outdoor education world, but felt hurt and disregarded by my fellow climbers.
In both these examples, two lectures with very different audience reactions, I am referring to the ego. As I understand it, this is either a crucial part of conscious self, or simply is conscious self. It is that key aspect of being human which overtly encompasses the physical, mental and emotional sides, and individual qualities. It emphasises uniqueness. I can put it another way by saying that “I am enclosed in myself and everything else is outside of me” or “the ego is my separateness from everything around me”. The lecture in Australia fed my ego and made me feel more important. The Buxton lecture diminished my ego. It made me feel less important because I could not make an impressive impact on the audience.
In my earlier days I don’t think I was very aware of this basic aspect of being human, and certainly not of its dangers. I was too consumed with the brilliance of adventure and a life of action. If someone, however, had said I was egotistical, or self-centred to an extreme degree, I would reluctantly have had to concur. I would also probably have tried to defend myself by saying that single-mindedness in the pursuit of success at whatever I was doing was necessary. I might also have added that I was normal in having such an approach. Success and achievement are, after all, traditional and culturally approved aims in life. For example, at that time I had an E-type Jaguar. One day, driving up the M6, I kept my foot down on the accelerator until I reached 150 miles per hour. Speed then seemed to be meaningful. As I passed the traffic on the inside lanes, which seemed to be crawling, I was no doubt thinking, at least subconsciously, “I am an important person in one of the best cars in the world and this is what life is all about.” At other times, as I crawled through small towns and villages and watched the envious glances from onlookers, when I looked down at that enormously long bonnet, similar thoughts must have passed through my mind. Years later I read something, which jolted me because of its truth – that a man’s ego is in direct proportion to the length of the bonnet of his car.
I can now see that the ego can be so dominant as to become personal enemy number one. By this I mean self-centredness can be so extreme as to block out or prevent any journey deep into oneself. If the spiritual centre is the most important aspect of being human, then access to it can be denied by the barrier of the inflated ego. With any idea of self-importance is likely to come the vice of arrogance. This vice is characteristic of the modern world, and can grow at an alarming rate. Even – or perhaps, especially – heads of state, prime ministers, and other important people have succumbed to this state of being. There are recurrent examples of where the populace has become so sick of the arrogant attitude of their leaders that they have forced them off their pedestals. The opposite of the vice of arrogance is the virtue of humility. It can lead directly into the spiritual nature of being human, and is therefore of crucial importance. There is a paradoxical wisdom here. “The more successful we are, and the greater our achievements, the more essential it is to possess the virtue of humility.”
I am aware that my analysis of self in these first two chapters is simplistic. In most situations in life any aspect of being human is not isolated, but merges or confuses into a personality which is itself subject to change. From what I have learnt it would seem that we should accept that all these aspects are not only important but are never static. They may grow and expand or diminish and atrophy. There is always a choice in this matter and it would seem obvious to go for all that is positive in the senses of being human. There is even a positive side to the ego. The latter may well be essential in order to find self-respect, confidence and affirmation, but it should never be allowed to dominate.
Another wisdom would seem to follow from the previous one concerning humility. How much we grow will depend not only on the quality of our experiences, but will depend also on the quality of our reflections upon those experiences. In other words actions alone, no matter how impressive, are insufficient. We need always to return to our base of values, our spiritual centre, in order to examine carefully how worthwhile are our actions.
To end the chapter I want to delve a little further into the mystery and paradox that although each of us is unique, separate, and different from others and from the world around us, in other senses we are all the same.
We are all the same in the sense that we have the same basic aspects of being human. (Including many I have not mentioned, such as instincts, drives and a subconscious.) We all come into the world through an essentially natural process and depart in similar manner – we are all part of Nature. Conventional living seems to indicate the opposite, in the sense that we usually feel separate from, rather than a part of, everything around us. We are deracinated rather than integrated in our world. This problem is explored later.
Despite the infinite variety of what we do with our lives, we would appear to have a common goal. Virtually all of us seek happiness and well-being. The search for these states, unless we are exceptionally fortunate, is likely to be lifelong and tortuous. That is probably in the nature of all human existence, and means, if we face up to it as best we can, that we are truly alive and on an adventurous and meaningful journey. The problem is, the journey in question has two apparently opposing directions – into the world outside and into the centre of ourselves. Somehow these two paths have the potential to meet in the form of well-being and happiness.
The fact that we are basically the same is a message of tremendous hope for the human race. Individually, however, we are each faced not only with ‘sameness’ but also with ‘difference’. Because each of us is unique, distinctiveness and separateness are implied and often accepted as fact. It is a major intention of this book to try to question this common feeling, because separateness can, and does, easily lead to divisiveness, exclusivity and an unhappy world. As one thinks of ‘separateness’ and ‘uniqueness’ it may be important to remember that this is not specific to the human race. It is true of everything in Nature. Each flower, each leaf and each snowflake, for example, is unique and yet remains part of Nature. This should give us not only a sense of wonder, but also might suggest to us that there are deeper implications in terms of our relationship with the natural world.
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