The Four Sided Mountain

The mountain in the header of this blog is Mount Kailash, located high on a Tabetan plain. It is sacred to four world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bön (not Marché, silly). It is revered by a large swathe of the world's population, because adherents of the first two traditions alone number some 2.5 billion people.

Kailash is considered the most sacred mountain on earth, and, paradoxically it is among the least visited of all.  Historically, the has been due to geographic considerations: its location in a  remote part of Tibet is far off the beaten path.  Its climate is harsh and unforgiving, and it can take a week of difficult travel from Kathmandu.  Since the Chinese take-over of Tibet, it has become even more rarely visited: for years, it was closed to pilgrims. Since the late '70s, travel has been strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities.

The mountain rises from a windswept Tibetan plain like a goddess overlooking her realm. Four of the longest rivers in Asia  have their genesis around its base: the Indus River, the Sutlej, the Brahmaputra and the Karnali  (a tributary of the Ganges).  Kailash is wonderfully symmetrical; its four sheer faces presenting themselves to the four cardinal directions, and all of these features give it a holy, mandala-like character.  And it is this for which it is revered in the Asian world.

Mount Kalaish has a mandala-like, or mandalic,  character, with its perfect four sides oriented toward the four winds.  Mandala's are prominent in both Buddhism and Hinduism, where the preferred term is yantra. The psychologist Carl Jung recognized the special nature of the mandala, which he regarded as symbolic of the unconscious self.  With it's four symmetrical sides, it represents the four information-processing functions of the psyche: sensation,  intuition, thinking and feeling.  The center of the mandala represents the self, the true, integrated core of an individual's psyche.  What is perceived by the self/soul is filtered by the functions, which represent how an individual views and evaluates the world around her.  The self or, to use religious motifs, the soul at the center holds all things together.

In the quest for wholeness that Jung called individuation, a person's ego -- the part of the consciousness of which she is aware -- must become conversant with the self, and with all the personalities contained therein.  In this way, she can become a whole person, with all her pieces, both masculine and feminine, integrated more or less harmoniously.  That is my personal quest, and the subject, in the main, of this blog.