THE 3 FACTORS

POSITIVITY You can be cold/hot, sore, tired and miserable or you can just be cold/hot, sore, and tired. It's up to you. CURIOSITY Going out everyday with no pre-conceived notions about what you are capable of. SIMPLICITY Just you and the trail.

The Way of the White Clouds

it is our consciousness which by its selective faculties of perception and co-ordination determines the type of world in which we live. it is our higher aspirations and our ultimate aim that make us immortal - not the permanence of an immutable separate soul, whose very sameness would exclude us from life and growth and from the infinite adventure of the spirit and condemn us for ever to the prison of our own limitations. only a man who is capable of great passions is capable of great deeds and great accomplishments in the realm of the spirit. only a man who had gone through the fire of suffering and despair could have accomplished the highest aim within a lifetime. the juxtaposition of the sublime and the the ridiculous seems to deepen the sense of reality, in which the highest and the lowest have their place and condition each other, thus giving perspective and proportion to our conception of the world and of ourselves.

true freedom

In spite of the feeling of smallness in the vastness and grandeur of the mountain landscape, in spite of the knowledge of human limitations and dependance on the whims of wind and weather, water and grazing-grounds, food and fuel and other material circumstances, I had never felt a sense of greater freedom and independence. I realized more than ever how narrow and circumscribed our so-called life is, how much we pay for the security of a sheltered life by way of freedom and real independence of thought and action. When every detail of our life is planned and regulated, every fraction of time determined beforehand, then the last trace of our boundless and timeless being, in which the freedom of our soul exists, will be suffocated. This freedom does not consist in being able 'to do what we want', it is neither arbitrariness nor waywardness, nor the thirst for adventures, but the capacity to accept the unexpected, the unthought-of situations of life, good as well as bad, with an open mind; it is the capacity to adapt oneself to the infinite variety of conditions without losing confidence in the deeper connections between the inner and the outer world. It is the spontaneous certainty of being neither bound by space nor by time, the ability to experience the fulness of both without clinging to any of their aspects, without trying to take possession of them by way of arbitrary fragmentation. The machine-made time of modern man has not made him the master but the slave of time; the more he tries to 'save' time, the less he possesses it. It is like trying to catch a river in a bucket. It is the flow, the continuity of its movement, that makes the river; and it is the same with time. Only he who accepts it in its fulness, in its eternal and life-giving rhythm, in which its continuity consists, can master it and make it his own. By accepting time in this way, by not-resisting its flow, it loses its power over us and we are carried by it like on the crest of a wave, without being submerged and without losing sight of our essential timelessness.