Chapter One
THE MOUNTAIN

1. Out of the Dark
2. The Unity of the Days
3. Wings of Choice
4. The Basis of Humility
5. The Inner World
6. The Nature of Choice
7. The Universal Unity
8. True Meaning
9. The Hand of the Infinite

On the mountaintop I contact my greater self, see through greater eyes. It is as if the world is a great, parabolic bowl and the tip of the mountain its focal point. Relevancies converge here. 

Today I have come to the mountain in the role of chronicler as well as student. The mountain has taught me much over the years. Now I wish to collect and record its pronouncements on the topic of choice. 

Once my interest was not so finely tuned to this subject. But then in a contemplative moment I sought remoteness and a high view. It was many years ago. A tropical island. High on a mountain, a house set in emerald palms. White clouds. An azure sky. Two thousand feet below, across a sunswept plain, the sparkling blue Caribbean Sea. 

I had come to gaze from the mountain eyrie upon plain, sea, and sky and invoke an equally panoramic view of the inner world. Led to the Jamaican mountain by a thin but enduring thread, a guideline woven from fibers of faith in a benevolent and accessible universe, I aimed to discern the place where rationality, intuition, and divine benevolence conjoin to illuminate the meaning of life. 

Though the island was a spectacle of immense day and bright sunlight, it was also a land of deep night and blazing stars. In retrospect I perceive that some faculty, long overwhelmed by the clamor and shearing tensions of society, was released by my retreat on the island, allowing me to sense that I was in darkness. 

My search, therefore, instinctively became a quest of the evening. 

Nightly from the mountaintop I scrutinized the ebony, diamond-pierced heavens. No obscuring glare arrived from below. Elevated from the maze of everyday life and the rectangular grillwork of culture, the mountain was a rare observatory. 

Like lights in a thousand-eyed planetarium, the circling constellations summoned to the screen of my questing mind the prominences of an inner sky. And I, like an ancient Sumerian caravan master who must traverse the dark sands of the Arabian Desert, or a Phoenician ship's captain who prepares to cross the night-muffled Mediterranean Sea, studied these personal guidestars. 

So it was that I gradually perceived that I was plagued with one great, ubiquitous problem. What the problem was, I did not know, only one symptom: a puzzling failure of some of my goals, even assessedly greater ones, to deliver feelings of meaningful achievement when attained. 

Creatures of nature can be observed at their best where two contrasting environments meet. Waterfowl bask and feed where the marshwater pools. Deer graze on tender spears at the tree line. Humans, likewise, are fashioned for the thin line between two worlds. Endowed with feet and hands that can contact things that are physical, they also possess hearts and minds to perceive goals that are not. Thus they inhabit a wondrous, fertile strip. Away from it wait only the awful, sucking bog of unchecked materialism or the dread, empty vacuum of unanchored spirituality. 

The mountain is the place where heaven and earth meet. At night, the visible distinction between the two diminishes. From the Jamaican mountain, this effect was heightened by human technology below manifesting the image of natural processes above. The twinkling lights of nighttime Kingston, piercing the blackness, mirrored the starry expanse above, creating the appearance that I hung suspended between two heavens. 

But only one was what it seemed. Finally, with surprising clarity, I comprehended the lesson of the mountain. The fertile strip of bright achievement and lasting fulfillment is not attained by accident or fortuity, nor by the indiscriminate pursuit of goals commended by others or by tradition. 

Choice is ultimately mine. I can achieve intelligent, enlightened choice only if I examine and order the constellation of values inhabiting my inner sky and the reflected goals clustering the face of my inner earth. I endanger choice if I confuse the two or relinquish the role of one to the other. 

My quest of the night became an undertaking of the day as I realized that it had happened. The inner landscape had opened. 

Of course, said the mountain patiently. How could it do otherwise? 

To the east, the earth shimmers and melts in a silvery horizon. Farther, beyond the planetary curve, stands yesterday, bright and untouched as it was when the window of the east first opened to reveal it. A full turn around the planet stands another yesterday. And another. Like shiny mirrors they overlay one another, thin, crystal plates in the treasury of time. 

The line of days is a corridor of successive, reflective panels. My portion of each connects to its predecessors and successors, constructing a laminated sculpture, the sum of my life abloom in a realm of time miraculously transformed into space. "Or on the hillside," wrote J. R. Lowell, who seemed to have a feeling for such things, "always unforewarned, a grace of being, finer than himself, that beckons and is gone--,a larger life." 

The planes of the days crowd closer together as they recede, fusing into a clear block, visual portal to an ineffable terrain. Realities there are multidimensional patterns. The essence of space, time, meaning, and value. Melted and cast into transcendent forms. 

With absolute grace, each complements all the others. Their totality is vibrant. Alive. Beautiful beyond words. Ultimate of meaning and worth. 

A few miles away, though I cannot see it from here, a narrow road winds to where gentle hills open like cupping hands upon Camp David. Presidents have visited there to gaze out upon the peaceful countryside as they pondered questions of power and compromise. Right and wrong. Loyalty and expediency. 

I, also, face issues of choice. Considerations scaled down from the impersonal scope of a nation to the personal significance of a single life. 

Invariably, choice involves extroverted behavior. A reach across boundaries. 

The timeless unity beyond the horizon of the days shines out through human choice. It is a slim, golden chain of personal values threading through the unified life of a person. A bright, elastic bubble of shared values encompassing a group of persons. A luminous, attractive influence building associations from groups embracing mutually harmonious values. 

A great influx of people from a multitude of cultures pours into this country. Widely removed places and deeply contrasting circumstances produce us. We reflect light in a variety of hues. We contrast as warm wood and bright steel. 

Within one another's proximities we conduct our affairs, picnicking in the same parks, paying taxes on the same roads, frolicking on the same beaches. 

Restaurants poll our tastes for their menus. Theaters vie for our attendance with their marquees. From our disparate visions emerge place names, architectural designs, and opinions. 

Inevitably in this bouncing stream of life there will occur times when I am jerked up short by a response from someone that clangs to my sensibilities as puzzlingly inappropriate. At times I may feel myself floundering in a sea of accumulated differences. If not attended to by clear vision and lucid reason, these incongruities can lodge in the deep places of my mind to annoy, frustrate, or even threaten me. For they do not wear the smooth, comforting familiarity of my tradition or experience. 

Near the peak where I stand, golden eagles once flew. Solitary sovereigns of the trackless skies, even they know reliances. Air to soar. Prey to hunt. Universal rhythms to impel them up to take the day. 

Many of my reliances are grounded in groups, which influence my perceptions. But like the golden eagle measuring the heavens with outstretched wingtips, I possess attributes and significances that transcend these things. My culture is an ocean of air. And I am equipped with wings of choice. 

We of the variegated stream of humanity brush shoulders in shopping malls, our eyes dreaming of diverse things. Like floating soap bubbles, spheres of group tendency enclose each of us. Separate us. Truncate our dreams. We perceive each other confusedly, for the globular membranes which encircle us reflect back our own images. 

It would seem hopeless of reconciliation. But the high perspective of the mountain is a way shower. From this peak I see a rich vista of treeland, meadow, lake, and hill. Each imparts irreplaceable tone to the countryside. The absence of any one of these would diminish the singing beauty. 

I am only one small element in the landscape of life. If I were a grassland, would I desire that the whole world be grassland? Or all places in my vicinity? And even in the latter case, would not all the grasslands adjacent to me similarly desire grassland neighbors, resulting in a global, featureless plain? 

I am glad that I cannot dictate what the world should be. Whatever my specification, however grand my intent, I would design a narrow place. And it would be extremely grassy. 

The view from the mountain reveals to me that mine is not the only way. And in its clarity I detect that there is no objective guarantee that mine is the better way. 

My mountain teacher speaks, pleased at this brief insight, telling me that every person of every race and every partaker of every outlook has a way that is judged by that person as right. 

What more, it asks, should I expect? 

Numerous aspects of humanness can be categorized. Concentric layers of personality definition clothe us as we face the world like muffled Arabs. 

The outer garments follow the lines of the group. Cloaks of religious outlook reflect a mixture of circumstance and personal selection. So, also, do tasselled garments of education. 

Inner coverings conform more closely to individuality. Personal mannerisms are clinging fabrics that reveal hidden contours of personality. Attitude toward authority is a flowing veil hinting at the outlines of one's heart and mind. 

Though I could not see it from the jostle of the crowded lowlands, the clear air of the heights brings to my eyes the recognition that exercising my power of personal choice does not require that I judge the worthiness of others or the way they choose to do things. 

A dynamic life requires that one evaluate the practices of other persons for possible adaptation to one's own use. This kind of openness is a doorway to rich surprises and expanding horizons. Strange odors give way to savory new foods. Distracting gestures transform into subtly descriptive forms of self expression. One expands. 

To assess a person's practices for any other reason, however, would be to set oneself up in one's mind over that person, a subjective, meaningless, and potentially harmful act. 

The assemblage of persons whom I accept as peers in the circle of humanity, though smaller than I would like, is expanding. I am helped toward this attitude by noticing a circularity associated with the attempt to judge others. What I direct toward another inevitably returns to me. If I categorize someone as insensitive, I am insensitive in the judgement. If I assess a person as uncaring, my opinion savors of uncaringness. 

As a person, the most highly valued reality with which I make contact is personality. Thus compassion in its many faces--concern, encouragement, good will, sympathy--is the rational attitude of one personality toward another. 

Volition is a measure of personality presence. To the extent that I choose for another, that person is not present as a volitional being. To encourage another to exercise his or her own volition instead of abandoning it is to nurture that individual as a person. 

Should an individual's choice prevail over mine in matters affecting me, then even though I might endorse the theory of respecting the choice of another person, how am I to accept that? Shall I have no choice over my own affairs? And where there is contention for resources, how shall it be decided? 

These are not matters for me, but for the group, whose determination is neither right, wrong, nor absolute, but ordinance. Judgement is by its nature a group function; it cannot be executed by an individual; if attempted, it becomes something else. 

Paradoxical studies in compassion come to mind, but they express limitations of perspective. For example, a terminally ill person desperately seeking citizenship to my land. And I desiring to help but believing it harmful to the country to admit terminally ill persons. 

The view from the promontory reveals an immense patchwork of roles spread out over the countryside of human affairs. My chosen reaction in each decisional element of a situation depends on the nature of my involvement. If I am a maker of laws, I shall vote legislation in accordance with my beliefs. When my vote has been cast, then as an individual I shall help the needy candidate for citizenship within the recourse established by the group. 

Once, long ago, my mother removed me from the solitude of our home and entered me into the care and companionship of others in a first-grade classroom. As I walked timidly into a room of bright-faced children, an unknown world mysteriously began to materialize around me. 

It is like that again. 

Later in the year the annual leaf fall will begin. In a vast rainbow of moulting, dry leaves will twirl their indecisive ways to the ground. Like coy butterflies they will dart in minute feints this way and that in circuitous but inexorable descent. 

I have read that the earth is immersed in an invisible ocean. That the ceaseless redirection of falling leaves is the result of the clear fluid of the atmosphere differentially resisting the passage of various aspects of the leafy surface. Picturing the fall of a leaf, I can recognize its likeness to that of a flat, heavy object dropping through a body of water. 

Humankind, wearing the mantle of volition, inhabits yet another unseen ocean. A greater atmosphere. A sea of values vitalizing our humanness, quickening our hearts with a sensitivity utterly beyond the wide-eyed, innocent slumbrousness of animality. 

The language of humanity has not been developed to deal with the things of the world of choice. Relevant concepts and words are lacking. But a consideration of the marvels of the physical atmosphere might suggest some of the magnificence overspreading that bright domain, of which our physical processes are only shadowy precipitates. 

The atmospheric ocean is a complex structure of delicately joined components. Within its regions, endless reactions between forces of nature glow, sparkle, gather, and move. 

In the troposphere, our immediate environment, drift cumulus and cirrus clouds. Topping this is the stratosphere, chamber of nacreous clouds and the ozone layer. Farther up, the mesosphere, lit in the night by fiery, plunging meteors, flashing with the glow of noctilucent clouds lit from below by a sun hanging unseen under the brim of the dark horizon. 

These are quiescent phases of the planetary air sea. Other atmospheric aspects speak of the dynamics of the bright world of choice. 

Dawn arriving. 

The heavens arching in quivering yellow. 

Glittering, red-gold sun companions climbing the earth rim. 

Fiery splendors playing in the high regions of the sky. 

Glaring mock suns. 

Shining sun pillars. 

Dazzling sun halos. 

Glowing glories. 

At the moment of sunset, the fabled green flash scintillating in an emerald microburst and disappearing, its tart, lime vividness perceptible only through recall. 

In the thermosphere and above it, in the exosphere, ceiling of the air ocean, the aurora borealis. A glowing, multifaceted, cosmic curtain, fired in the furnace of the solar wind, moulded by the terrestrial magnetic field into a blazing polar ring. 

At the other end of the earth, the south pole wearing the luminous circlet of the aurora australis with equal glory. 

The inner world, too, is flawlessly joined. A landscape of complex and harmonious design. There human life is actually lived. 

Life might seem to be a succession of objects and situations swelling up, encompassing all, and fading into nothing. 

And so it is, if that is what I believe. 

But the actuality of my accruing being remains untouched by spoiling time, bloomed like a thousand-petalled rose beyond the crystal portal of the days in direct response to my day-to-day choosing. 

For as I choose, so do I become. 

As one approaches a truth, one can observe it appear to contradict itself. As one draws closer, the apparent contradiction disappears. This is simply the phenomenon of a high reality interpreted in a reference frame of lesser altitude. It marks the transition zone from the lower to the higher vision of a particular reality. 

For example, to choose for myself signifies that I do not choose for myself. Not in the sense of egocentric self-interest. Otherwise I would not be choosing but rather would be led by enslaving reaction. 

Or to shape my being in the timeless land beyond the days, I do not try to shape my being, not as an absolute end in itself. To do so without higher ends would be to collapse the sky of my values onto my persona, becoming my own goal of attainment and beginning an inward spiral toward infinitesimality. 

From my mountain vantage, where the breeze whispers in unaccustomed purity and I see the world step out of the invisibility of vastness, I begin to detect that the nature of choice is not what I had supposed. Rather than assertion of self without regard to other selves, it is exaltation of self to include all other selves. 

Choice is a cosmic reality of countless dimensions. It rises from a single point, spreading up and out to become an inverted pyramid. 

In every fraction of every turning of the earth, the planet's billions of human beings are given one primal choice. Just one. Over and over. 

They can choose to choose. 

This is the quality raising us up from four paws. Our animal cousins look at us with plaintive eyes. They lack this choice about choice. It eludes their tactile world. They cannot perceive that at every instant we can be one of them or, donning the magical jewel of volition, which they cannot touch or see, transmute into something greater. 

If I can marshal the presence of mind and power of will, I should like to ask myself this question consciously in each of life's situations: shall I choose, or shall I react? I feel that if I remember to ask, the answer shall always be for choice. 

Interpersonal matters are the currency of choice. One halts descent into volitional debt by refraining from judging other persons. Capital accumulates when one affectionately comes to view others as cherished resources to the species and to oneself. 

This perspective emerges from the awareness that one's own interest does not contend with the interests of others, in fact is inextricably bound up with them. 

A unity hovers over all things. In countless ways it joins them together, as on a smaller scale the hand of unity resides over my individuality. My many physical parts are one body. My several thought processes are one mind. My multitude of perceptions one awareness. My gathered aspirations one soul. At a higher level, these diverse realities are one being. Myself. 

Below me the land undulates and leaps, breaking and gathering in its toiling climb up from the submicroscopic dimensions of the atom. 

Though I do not see them from here, I can visualize clumped soil and pebbles beneath the terrestrial surface and imagine unseen layers of earth-folded granite. 

The green and brown planetary covering of flora is a waving, organic banner of countless trillions of tiny, living plant cells joined in chlorophyll-centered community relationships. 

My physical being, too, is the aggregation of living cells. Billions of them. Respiring, eating, reproducing. Some of them thinking. Perceiving. 

All the living cells of my brain interconnect in a community of outstretched axonic arms. They live for one function: sentiency. My thinking is the supersummation of their thinking. My perceiving is their perceiving. They are the channel of my decision making, though I believe that a part of me exists anterior to their being. 

How do my brain creatures, in their limited dimension of sentiency, view me? I occupy no space in their universe-that-is-my-brain. Diffusely and absolutely, I hover over them, encompassing their lives and their world. 

Some of these diminutive intellectuals labor to formulate the concept, immanent in them, of the overbeing. Myself. 

Certain of them perfect this concept as it emerges in my mind and finds its way to the page. 

Teams of them mobilize as living repositories of each aspect of this concept. 

Among their peers, those cell-beings who are invested with an awareness of my spaceless, incorporeal presence might be considered to be prophets. 

Does this enstructuration of reality stop when it reaches humanity? Are not the individuals of our species also interconnected, by arms societal rather than physical? 

"A larger life," wrote Lowell, peering beyond his niche of space and time. "A larger life upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse of spacious circles luminous with mind." 

One can puzzle over the bounds of such a being. How, though, can I discuss this without stumbling into religious stereotype? Once my words have passed into the hearing of another, they are translated into the conceptual architecture and experiential framework of a different mind. 

It is enough, now, to sense the universal unity and its bestowal of special kinship. To take heart, as Lowell assured with his poet's heart, that that circling, larger life is "a grace of being, finer than himself." 

The enstructuration of things into one reality surpasses the limits of visibility. A single code of law converts incinerating logs into scorching light and brings the eagle to earth when it lowers its wings. With limitless jurisdiction, it impels the stars in fiery solitude across the heavens and wheels the bright galaxies along the velvet highways of space. 

Animal behavior, human affairs, and physiological processes sink deep roots into one sustaining soil. All things that walk, fly, occur, rise, live, begin, and wait are interrelated in ways beyond number. They act and react in their immediate spaces, molecules in a shifting sea that reverberates with their endless doings. 

Choice is founded on values. And values are like the stars in the skies. Those who navigate by them view them better when they are grouped in meaningful patterns. And just as from my mountain overlook I might perceive a secluded glade more greatly within the framework of its containing forest, decision-making situations can sometimes be better evaluated in larger terms. 

Perceiving true meanings--the significances of situational detail in terms of motivational values--can be complicated. Things are not always as seen in the immediate view. 

I have decided that after I descend from the mountain and re-enter the day-to-day stream of life, I shall undertake a quest to identify my one supreme value. Subsequently I shall develop a hierarchical map of values that emerge from this ultimate motivation. Then, when confronting a choice that is difficult to evaluate, I can ask myself why I am doing this thing or that and refer to my ordered set of personal values for guidance. 

True meaning exists only in interrelationships. Through these I transcend myself in the structure of existence. I am a leaf on a living tree. My greater significance actualizes as I gather light and water for the sustenance of root, bark, and branch. 

I feel within and around me the world that has brought me forth and even now speeds along the currents of time. I sense the race that humankind runs through the vaulted corridors of physical, social, and spiritual evolution. 

As I gaze out upon the wholeness of the land, I see reflected in it the unity beyond the crystalline portal of the days. The fields, the cities, they are the moving tip of the brush of eternity on the canvas of actuality. 

Life steps its measured tread. The rains come and pass. Bittersweet, the years turn tenderly. Beloved and loving faces drift near and pass soundlessly on. 

But the hand of the Infinite holds it all, a matrix of exquisite beauty, an indescribable tapestry glimpsed from the high mountains of the soul. None of it is lost. All endures. 

This I see from the mountain. 

The mountain breeze whispers a soft diminuendo, and the charge in the air stills. I see the radiance of a transformed world below. No longer do the plains clamor and threaten. Their fertility brims with opportunities to carry out decisions formulated on the peak of high perspective. 

It is time to go. 

Like all good instructors, the mountain labors to make its student independent of the teacher. My massive teacher has guided me to the true peak, which I carry within me. As I depart from the hill for the last time, it reveals one final lesson. 

It shows me that it is not a teacher, only a mass of rock and earth. My teacher wavers and disappears and I stand alone in a way I have never experienced. But then a familiar strength touches me. It is my alpine teacher. It had resided in my inner mountain all the time. 

Together we descend the rocky slope.