Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Mountain Zen



“The only Zen you find on top of mountains is the Zen you bring there.”

-Robert M. Pirsig

 

We discussed this quote when we were discussing Christopher McCandless.  McCandless went out into the Alaskan wilderness trying to find something.  Jon Krakauer, the author of Into the Wild, was also trying to find something when he climbed the Devil’s Thumb in Alaska.  Both of these men had inner problems that they were trying to heal in the Wilderness.  In class we came up with a meaning of Zen as inner peace.  Going into the wilderness can be an escape from your problems, but you can only heal these problems in yourself.  You can only bring the amount of inner peace into the wilderness that you had before going. 


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