Three Mountains
Before the student begins to learn Zen, a mountain is a mountain and the waters are waters.
After the student has gained an understanding of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains, and waters no longer waters.
When the student has fully absorbed Zen, mountains are once again mountains, and waters once again waters.
– Zen Saying
Essentially, this site is concerned with switching our basic mind-set from a dualistic mindset to a non-dualistic mindset. This process is also known as enlightenment, awakening, and moksha. While the dualistic mindset (also referred to as the Standard Dualistic Model) contributes to a general state of conflict within ourselves and the world, the non-dualistic mindset contributes to perfect peace within ourselves and the world.
The imagery used below will help you understand just what each mindset is, and will follow the usual progression toward ‘achieving’ the non-dualistic mindset.
I must, however, include a caveat. While the dualistic mindset can be easily and clearly described (since our language is designed to describe it), the non-dualistic mindset (as outlined in Mountain Two and Three below) cannot be described in words (because our language, which divides the world into symbols with each spoken word, cannot capture the essence of something which contains no symbols).
Let’s have a look at the three mountains.
The First Mountain
Life Basics articles correspond to the First Mountain. They are meant for people who feel they best fit into this mode of thought. The articles are designed to help you examine your world so that you naturally flow into the Second Mountain.
This mode of thought is our ‘everyday mind’, our usual way of seeing the world. From this vantage, everything is normal and follows the rules of common sense. Because everyone in our culture lives according to this Standard Dualistic Model of reality, we can all communicate pretty well with each other – we know exactly what we mean when we say ‘I like chocolate’.
Although it’s fabulously practical, this model suffers from some serious downfalls. It functions by dividing the world into symbolic bits, and then forgets that it did that. As a consequence, most of us live our whole lives thinking that the symbols created by this model are actually realities. This gets us into no end of trouble, and is the cause of all our stress, frustration, anger, and conflict, both on the individual and world-wide levels. We live our lives trying to fit the bits (which we created) back together into workable relationships.
The Second Mountain
Deeper Understanding articles correspond to the Second Mountain. They are meant to move us through the Second Mountain (which is full of pitfalls) and into the Third Mountain.
Here we examine all the symbols presented by the Standard Dualistic Model, and come to see that they don’t do a very good job of representing reality. Our usual breakdown of the world falls apart, and we may feel ‘enlightened’, since we begin to see the world as a single ‘oneness’. We might also struggle, at this point, to create new models of reality that correspond to the observations we’ve made.
If we’ve really examined things carefully, we’ll be unable to experience stress, frustration, or conflict, and will be infused with a blissful sense of our integral unity with all creation.
Everything we took seriously before – money, identity, career – these are seen to be nothing more than manifestations of a particular insanity – an insanity that seems ‘normal’ because it’s sanctioned by our culture as a whole.
We come to understand how the whole mess began.
When we say something like ‘I like chocolate’, it will mean something like ‘The non-being that others call ‘me’ actually has no preference between apparent chocolate and apparent gravel.’
This is an easy place to get stuck. We can feel like we’ll never re-integrate or be able to understand ‘regular people’ again. This is also an easy place to delude ourselves into thinking we’re ‘enlightened’ or awakened. If we’re having trouble understanding why people continue to live the way they do, it’s a good sign that we’re fooling ourselves in some way. There is a vast difference between ‘knowing the principles’ of the non-dualistic viewpoint, and actually experiencing them.
If you can conceive of an opposite to what you’re feeling, you’re not experiencing non-dualism. You can also check out the Pitfalls page to learn about more signs that you’re still operating under a dualistic mindset.
The Third Mountain
Here we take the wisdom gained in the Second Mountain, combine it with compassion (by remembering what life was like in the First Mountain), and come to find that we’re free to play with all the symbols we took so seriously before. Things like money, identity, career . . . these just become part of the playfulness of living in the world as it actually is. When we say ‘I like chocolate’, it will mean something like ‘The ‘me’ I’m playing at really enjoys chocolate, but with my perfect state of true enlightenment, really nothing will do but Amedei.’
From this perspective we not only can enjoy any situation in life, from winning the lottery to dying of cancer, but we gain an eerie ability to manifest whatever we dream of. See How the World Really Works to understand a little about the ‘why’ of this situation.
It’s quite impossible not to want to help others from this vantage – remembering how exhausting and painful it was to be stuck in the First Mountain, you naturally want to reach out and help others to ‘unload the baggage’. At the same time, you experience a profound appreciation for people just-as-they-are. Being in seemingly paradoxical states such as this are normal in the Third Mountain, and are part of the reason that words cannot adequately describe the sensation of ‘being there’.
Elsewhere on this site I speak about the difference between most methods of self-development, which are progressive in nature, and non-dualism, which is not. Looking over the Three Mountains, this sure looks progressive in nature (meaning that it’s a step-by-step process, ascending to higher levels each time). Some of the writings in Deeper Understandings should make it clear why this doesn’t qualify as a ‘progressive path’. A good thing to remember is that the Three Mountains outline the usual route followed by people moving toward non-dualistic thought. It’s also important to realize, however, that no route is necessary, and the key to the whole affair is profoundly simple – it’s simply experiencing the Now. Thus, the Three Mountains don’t detail the pathway you must take — they detail the pathway which, by default, most people use.
Explore posts in the same categories: Awakening and Reality
November 15th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
I’ve been rooting around in your web site whenever I get a chance with my Teacher/Editor hat on and wanted to send you some first-impression, general comments. Since there is so much of interest on it, be assured I’ll continue to visit it!
Your writing style is readable and effective, and is a pleasure to read. My first husband earned his Ph.D. from UW-Madison in Buddhism (specifically, Tibetan Buddhism). I was corralled into reading and editing his extremely dry, dusty, pompous writing in his dissertation and dozens of articles that were published in journals of other equally dry, dusty, pompous scholars. I always found the whole thing a snore. You write in a voice that is not condescending, but still expresses clearly complex issues, using examples that do an excellent job of clarifying your point. For example, I really like your explanation that the first mountain is practical, everyday—your example of understanding “I like chocolate” is effective! And then you go on to say how it has forgotten it has broken down the world into symbolic bits and “forgets that it did that.” Years of hearing Tony expound on Eastern philosophies fell away. Your words made sense and I actually GOT IT.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:50 am
Hey Kenton, great stuff. Very helpful, especially the 2nd Mountain! I was looking forward to reading the pitfalls to nondualism post but got a 404 error?
May 5th, 2007 at 2:42 am
Thanks for the 404 notice — fixed =)
July 31st, 2007 at 3:09 pm
its beautiful.please keep on posting informative posts.thanks
August 1st, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Thank you, Priya =)
Kenton
August 18th, 2007 at 10:45 am
is there anyway to cure the “the world is boring” sickness?
August 21st, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Greetings littleboy,
This ’sickness’ is incredibly prevalent, and its roots are simple to understand. Overcoming it, however, requires us to ‘wake up’ to seeing the world in its marvelous, indescribable ‘nowness’.
It begins as we start laying our symbols over the world. As we learn a name for everything, the mysterious, organic world becomes chopped into symbolic bits. These symbols (the word ‘tree’, for instance), then take the place of the real deal. And the symbol is pretty boring. This is because instead of beholding the supreme wonder of the actual tree, we become satisfied with making a noise (’tree’), and our mind draws a simple picture of ‘tree’ in our head. In essence, we see the symbol instead of the actual tree.
As the world becomes fully symbolized, it can become pretty boring — everywhere we look there is just a dry, dessicated symbol. To make this less boring, we have to invent conflict between the symbols, and as even that grows boring, we have to resort to techniques to stimulate more potent brain chemicals. Soon we are watching constant TV, doing drugs — anything to get more of a thrill or ‘deeper experience’.
What we’re forgetting is that it isn’t the world that is boring — it’s just that we’ve conditioned our minds to needing more and more stimulation. We get used to a stronger and stronger ‘buzz’, and feel bored when we’re getting less.
After three months in the wilderness, during which my mind became conditioned to dealing only with very subtle stimulation, I found that our regular, everyday life wasn’t boring — it was painful. Constant sounds, flickering images, and an assault of stimulation. It was enough to make me want to just disappear back into the wilderness forever.
Unless we can ‘wake up’, we’re doomed to dealing with the world on a contrast basis. Under these conditions, we’ll always be on a sliding scale. We can make the world exciting again by spending a few days just sitting quietly in a room or in the forest, but as soon as we come back to the ‘regular world’, our mind will begin conditioning itself to more stimulation, and we’ll be right back in the same game. Our experience will be a slow and growing need for more and more stimulation, balanced by times of boredom as we force ourselves to re-adapt to a less-stimulated environment.
If we can see the world outside of our symbols, we become permanently enchanted again, and boredom becomes impossible. Just breathing, or touching the grain of wood, or looking out a window becomes an immense and incredible experience.
Sweetwater,
Kenton
December 23rd, 2007 at 11:41 am
Thank-you
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
You’re welcome =)
March 9th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Hi Kenton,
Great stuff. I can feel a bit of almost “disappointment” in me as I scan through your discussions of models. For me, the chair is here, the mountain is there (a real one, *smile*), Michael in the chair, and I lucked out on finding your page which described this and other bits of awakening. The er uh, “disappointment” is then finding many more pages about beginner stuff such as the nature of IM manifesting The Secret et al — I suspect I’d like to see them in the category of This Isn’t It. *smile* As you write so nicely, “dry dessicated symbol”-world which is so right-on, I think I’d like more of that view. Now, I only say this because you are astonishing able and SO willing to drop into the dryness — I totally get that You Get It, *and* hoping in the comment to point out that too much “dry” makes even your writing dry! Which actually surprised me, cuz I love your writing. I carefully decided to share this with you, because as a awakening writer also, I know you will appreciate the feedback. For instance, I Really Love you intro warnings such as, ‘if you aren’t a teacher, skip this”! I’d like to see more of that, is maybe what I’m saying. Then I would feel less rude when I only scan some of your pages — even if I know you wrote them appropriately leveled for that audience.
OK. Enough of that kind of thing!
littleboy asked:
> “is there anyway to cure the “the world is boring” sickness?”
hmmm…. welp, there is no boring. I’m not being fancy, I mean that the word “boring” covers over a deeps disjointedness. That is, we most often use the word “boring” when we’ve separated ourselves from what bother we are experiencing. So being up in a new layer, we’re also disconnected from anything spiffy. Very boring indeed! If you wish to look to find the core of it, you might start with looking for a “No”, a negative, a refusal, a “I-don’t-like” type thing. This may lead you to some neurosis or the like (which is likely to be why you use the word ’sickness’.)
Hope that helps!
Michael
March 9th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Sometimes I feel like if there is anything that can be said about the awakeness experience (and even those words miss the mark), that there is a *texture* of sensate experience of the mountains — before being a student, and after the resolution back into they be mountains.
Ah, I can say it maybe nifty clearer: That if the *student* saw the way s/he might later see the mountains, s/he’s eyes might pop open like the first time we see movie special effects. Whereas the nature of the middle experience is a change where we “get it” and there is no longer surprise to see a real live juicy 3D world in place of the dry dustbowl of condensed thought. It is this transformation wherein the viewer changes, not the mountain. If you modify the experiencer, it’s experiences will change, yes? But being that it itself is changed, the mystery of why the mountain experience can change without the mountain changing, can be seen. Yikes! Is this too wordy?
Ah well, nice site. Kenton you’ve choosen a really lovely theme…. have you considered making a website instead of a blog template? Your work Is Really Good and worthy of that kind of extra effort. This is not mere opinion you share, but good writing/clarity on difficult-to-type subjects. I reference as evidence, Erica’s Comment above. I totally get that you’re already doing “good” but I’m saying yep you’re real good and could take it to another level if you had more design leeway. Just saying.
Thanks for your site.
Michael
March 9th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Greetings Michael,
I’m so glad you wrote — not only because of your thoughtful commentary, but because I’ve now been led to your site! Wonderful to meet another writer on the subject
In regards to your first comment, I’ve tried to craft this site so that it’s not just a collection of posts, but an interconnected process where people of different mindsets can find writings which will challenge them. Writings on subjects such as I-M can seem ‘fluffy’, but they serve two purposes — one, I’ve hidden some challenging new thoughts within the context of ideas that many people are interested in. Two, for those who might be leaving IM and such things behind, it serves as a reminder that awakening is not about exclusion or a process of modifying behavior. Too often I hear people speak about awakening and insist that awakening is about having a quiet mind, being free of desire, being emotionally placid, etc. Most of us who are on a quest for enlightenment harbor ideas such as this, and end up trying to adhere to an idea in our heads rather than just ‘being’.
So my fluffier articles serve as a reminder that even the pursuits of ‘normal’ life are not anti-awakening. Awakening, of course, can be found anywhere — not just in a temple, but in our greed, our desires, and our symbols and ideas. So the secret is that the article on I-M can be read from any of the ‘Three Mountain’ perspectives outlined above, and as our mindset changes, we’ll discover different things within it.
I want to thank you for the view you expressed in your second comment. The blog format does indeed present many weaknesses. It’s odd, because in the past I’ve only dealt with websites, and ventured into the blog template because I thought it might give people more of a chance to interact. I do love the interaction that goes on, but I’ve often thought that a website would indeed be more appropriate. Lately, I’ve been busy with a ’secret’ writing project, and so I’ve taken to only writing here once every one or two weeks. But it’s likely that in the not-too-distant future I will turn this url into a website having to do with the secret project, and will move much of this content onto another site and create a new format where a reader can be guided to appropriate reading material.
Thank you again for all of your words. It is very exciting to have your commentary here, as you add a wonderful perspective. I’ll look forward to exploring your site, as well =)
Sweetwater,
Kenton
August 11th, 2008 at 3:06 am
Hey Kenton, that’s really great how you’re presenting the Third Mountain as the ability to play with the illusion without seeing it as real, to be in this world, but not of it.
August 12th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Hello Ariel,
Words pretty much fail when you try to do something like describe the Third Mountain. I was hoping that some light-hearted fun and the idea of Play would give people a new impression of what they’re searching for. Often, it seems we create a goal in our minds, and it’s good to mix that goal up once in a while, to give it another flavor and confuse our thinking minds a bit. Glad you liked it!
Sweetwater,
Kenton
August 24th, 2008 at 3:14 am
Dearest kenton,
Your articles and site have helped me so much! Starting in 2006, around my 16th birthday, my father passed away. This led me to question everything i thought I knew, and everything I didn’t know. Down a spiritual path that led me to where I am today.
Just last week, everything sorta clicked with me. I was everything, and nothing at once. I had before thought I understood this conceptually, but it was nothing like what i experienced/am experiencing. There is no Me, and in seeing this, It seems like my center is everywhere. if that makes any sense..?
As I’ve been sinking into this great void, I cant help but worry how i will act at my first job next week, or communicating with people in general. Maybe this is just my remaining ego trying to hold on to something. I don’t know, but thank you so much sir.
much love,
josh
August 28th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Hello Josh,
It means so much to hear that these writings have given you something. Thank you for sharing =)
Sweetwater,
Kenton
August 30th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Kenton!
sorry to be bothering you again, but it seems ive uncovered something.
In my last post I stated that I was falling into that void. Well that experience ended, as do all experiences. I then proceeded to search for it again. I seemed to be so close to the ever present presence, but just couldnt grasp it.
After an amazing insight, i realized that that presence was here already! Even when im pretending to be “josh”. Its looking through my eyes! It is in me, as much as I am in it, and it is never lost! Just wanted to let you know. I thank you so much!
josh
August 30th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Hello Josh — You’re never bothering. This is so very interesting to hear of your experience! I’ve often told people that the ’snap’ will feel like an ‘Oh, duh!’ sort of feeling. As if you’ve just realized something that’s been completely obvious the entire time, and you can’t believe you were looking so hard for something that takes no looking whatsoever. This sounds similar to what you’ve experienced. Keep me updated as things unfold for you. This is marvelous to hear =)
Sweetwater,
Kenton