Day #9 : Disillusionment at the top
I went on a hike recently with some people. It was a cloudy early morning and there were a lot of boulders and mini-hills around to climb. The group consisted of mostly beginners. So they were all climbing the same rocks and helping each other out. I did this for a while and later, wanted to explore on my own just for the adventure & fun of it. That adventure spirit is truly something else man. Bear Grylls gets it.
“The core of man’s spirit comes from new experiences.”
- Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
The only rock-climbing technique that I was made aware of was called chimneying. It’s where you use three of your limbs for holding your body and the other limb for pushing up or down. This can be used when you want to climb between two rocks and the length of your body is atleast as long as the distance between the rocks. Just google it.
So I set out to explore and climb rocks by myself to get a richer experience, away from the crowd. I was relying on my intuition and instinct to guide me. It was a very novel experience. It was one of those times where I felt totally self-reliant. I was away from the crowd and climbing steep rocks in dangerous settings. So it was all up to me to manage myself. I had to assess the difficulty, manage my thoughts, shift my focus, calm down my heartbeat etc. A lot of inner management. You can’t let your brain trick you into fear or over-excitement. You have to rely on your body and learn to trust it (like in the movie Avatar). You have to become a natural. There is no other way. If you get in your head too much, you won’t be able to do it.
Anyway, as I was exploring these rocks, I saw a big-ass rock nearby. It was sort of the centre piece of the region. Surrounded by a lot of other rocks, thorns and bushes, it was not clearly evident as to how one may go about climbing it. The challenge intrigued me. My mind got activated and focused with this new task. Sometimes you need the problem to be difficult otherwise you can’t and won’t solve it because your brain does not perceive it as a challenge and hence does not direct enough bandwidth for it. Anyways, I felt a drive to climb and started going around it, trying to find the best possible way to the top. I soon found one and climbed to the top. It was entertaining. As I got to the top, I felt a temporary sense of accomplishment followed by some clarity. At the top, I could see everyone and everything.
But a sense of disillusionment followed that clarity. Is this all? What’s here? Nothing physical. No gold. Not even a permanent sense of accomplishment. I feel like there’s something missing. Others who were climbing the other hill were in the same predicament of life as me. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. There is no secret ingredient. There is no reward at the end.
Another guy saw me, realized that it was actually possible to climb to the top and started his own climb. He asked me for directions and I gave them to him. But there was a steep tall jump-climb that had to be done just below the top and I estimated that it was difficult for him to do it on his own because he was a little stubby(not judging). The guy followed my directions and slowly started to climb. I was left with a few minutes for myself to ponder over my thoughts and feelings. I looked around and revelled in the newly acquired clarity. Soon enough though, I got bored and started to contemplate on that feeling of disillusionment.

Reaching the end point eliminates(or massively reduces) desire. I wrote about how desire is the fundamental basis of every problem in my article on Problems and Solutions. Up till that point of climbing to the top, there was one question that I didn’t have an answer to. And that was the problem of “Post Paradise” — what happens when we solve all problems in the universe and become gods? And this experience helped me get some sort of an answer to that question.
Something about human nature and the design of mind/consciousness makes it let go of desire once the endpoint is reached. I’ve played computer games(Zeus, Age of Empires) before where the game becomes boring once you overcome all the challenges and defeat all the enemies. There is no difficulty. Everything is solved. The game is essentially over but they let you keep going. The city is built. The war is won. You become a billionaire. And there is no dream left to accomplish. No goal left to achieve. No problem left to solve. There is only harmonious existence till we quit/die/loose consciousness. How do you stomach this truth and keep going when you’re at the bottom of the hill? The guy climbing wasn’t aware of this. He wanted to climb to the top to see things for himself. I felt that maybe in a way, life encodes in everyone, through evolution, an innate drive to climb to the top, become gods, solve all problems. But it doesn’t equip us with the tools and the framework to operate after solving them all. Or does it?
Matter is trying to reorganize itself in the most effective way possible. And we’re all prisoners of this game, bound by the laws of the universe.
The desire to solve problems, climb to the top, finish this experiment of “progress” is innate in us. We are wired to climb. But once we get there, we have nowhere to go. But the game continues. So we’ll have to evolve or live miserably. That is, evolve into inaction-enforced beings which donot have this innate drive to climb/solve. This is another way of saying that once we solve all problems, we have to solve the problem of existing without solving any problem. I think this is where spirituality comes into the picture. They say that a true yogi is one who has complete detachment from the need to act. Apparently this is what frees him up to take the most action. I don’t understand this paradox completely. Sadhguru says that yogis who are enlightened can choose to close their eyes and live their life out in a blissful state without ever doing anything(of consequence). But some of them do stuff and get involved in life only because it is necessary. But necessary for what? Why is doing anything necessary? That is the ultimate question isn’t it? Why should we do anything at all? The answer to that question, in it’s complete form, will be the purpose of existence and give meaning to life. Ofcourse, it is possible that those yogis are taking action without a complete understanding of the reason behind it. By “complete”, I mean that they may act without knowing the meaning of life. But in any case, it seems to me that the yogis in India(and other places) have solved this problem that becomes necessary after solving all the problems which is : how to simply exist without any need for action.
Some things can only be understood with personal experience. Kuch kuch hota hai Anjali…tum nahi samjhogi.
Peace.
