Lake of the Mind

What Manasarovar and Mount Kailash means?

Manasarovar is two words. Manas is mind. Sarovar is lake. The lake of the mind.

Kailash is Shiva.

The ancient teaching is sitting right there in the names. When the lake is still, the mountain appears in it whole. When the water moves, the reflection breaks into pieces and you see fragments in the reflection. Nothing has happened to the mountain. Everything has happened to the water.

The mountain in Tibet is real. It rises to 6,638 meters. The lake below it is real, one of the highest freshwater lakes on earth. People have walked around that for a very long time.

I have never been.

The pictures

Years ago a cousin of mine made the pilgrimage. He shared pictures.

They were striking. The light up there does something you cannot fake. Water the color of nothing I had seen, and above it a shape so unique it looks chiseled.

I said good for him but I felt envious. Envy, plain and immediate, the way you feel it when someone has a thing you have decided you should have.

Notice the interesting part. Photographs of a sacred place produced acquisitiveness in me. A picture of the still lake made my own water churn. The teaching was in my hands and I responded by wanting the merchandise.

I did not go for various reasons.

The desire stayed. It sat there for years, low-grade, the way an unfinished thing does.

What I climbed instead

I lived in Colorado for more than a dozen years, and in that time I went up a lot of mountains with my kids and my friends. The fourteeners were always the target.

You leave the house at three in the morning. Not just for the sunrise and alpenglow. You leave at three because afternoon weather above the treeline is unpredictable and you want to be walking down by noon. That is a logistics decision, and it produces something that people who have not done it mistake for a spiritual decision.

You walk in the dark for hours. You move up through trees. Then the trees stop, all at once, and you are out in the open with nothing above you and nothing to hold the wind.

By the top your legs are finished and the air is thin enough that you are counting your steps. And then there is the thing that happens up there. Everything opens out in every direction. It is silent in a way that is not the absence of noise but something with more presence than that. There is no cell signal, which is one of the better features of a mountain.

Something real happens to me on those summits. it happens to everyone.

What the mountain actually does

Here is the part I would have resisted hearing at the time.

Nothing about those summits was mystical. I had been awake since two thirty. I had walked five hours uphill without eating properly. Everything I carried felt ten times heavier. My blood oxygen was low. Steps are slow and injuries can happen suddenly. Every routine that normally maintains my sense of myself was thin, including my phone, my work, and my ordinary surroundings.

That is a substantial interrupt fora nervous system. Depletion quiets the mind. It does it reliably. A body that is low on energy stops running the background commentary because the chatter is expensive.

So the water went still. And because it went still while I was standing in front of something enormous and beautiful, I assigned the cause to the mountain.

That assignment is the mistake. It is an easy one and I made it for years. The mountain is what I was looking at when it happened. It is not what did it.

Which means the trip works. It just does not work in the way the names are pointing at. Exhaustion at altitude is a real method. It is a blunt one, it is expensive, and it wears off on the drive home, a nap, and a warm meal.

The harder mountain to climb

Some time after I left Colorado I ran into a mountain that does not have a trailhead.

My own psyche. There is rarely a paved path up it. Old charge is stored at every step, and you set it off without warning by putting your foot in the wrong place. The weather turns without notice and drops you into the dark in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

Nobody photographs this one. There is no summit register. You do not come down from it and get to say you did it.

I have found it harder than any fourteener, and I have found the training useless. Physical fitness does nothing here. Willpower makes it worse, because willpower is more churn on the surface of the lake.

What works is smaller and less impressive than that. Stop adding to the disturbance. Wait longer than is comfortable. Notice what stirs the water and notice what you do in the ten seconds after it gets stirred.

That is it.

Where the envy went

I would still goto Mansarovar.

If someone handed me a ticket tomorrow I would take it. I know exactly what the last hours of a climb feel like when the air is thin and my legs are done, and I would take it anyway. I would take photographs. I would probably send them to someone who would look at them and feel what I felt looking at my cousin's.

The wanting is still there. What changed is what I think the wanting is for.

I know now what I was after in those pictures. It was the stillness. I had already met it on ordinary mountains at seven in the morning, and it turns up sometimes in a room in my apartment.

The lake is still on some days and churning on some. It has not gotten perfectly still with years of practice, and I have stopped waiting for it to. Because that’s the nature of water. Some of what churns it I can see now while it is happening. Plenty of it I still cannot.

That is not a phase I am moving through on the way to somewhere else. It appears to be the arrangement.

Manasarovar means the lake of the mind. You have one. It is here right now, doing whatever it is doing, and you can look at it without going anywhere. There is also Kailash, waiting to be glimpsed.

Which brings up the thing nobody says out loud.

The people who make this trip can afford it. It is just true. The altitude, the two weeks away from work, the flights, all of it is available to anyone with discretionary income and an open calendar.

So money was never the obstacle.

Try the other thing instead. Sit in an ordinary room with nothing to look at and nothing to reach for, and stay past the point where it gets uncomfortable. No altitude. No photographs. Nothing at the end of it to tell anyone about.

Most people I know would rather buy the ticket than sit with their eyes closed and do nothing for a few minutes.

So would I. I said so a few paragraphs ago.

Ten minutes this week. Sit in a room, nothing to look at; no inputs. Watch what moves the water and what you do next.

If you want company for that exploration, that is what I do.