"Despite the fact that it sounds like it‘s all very natural, it can still be deconstructed, and you can still have these environments in the middle of a city. For example, mountains. If you‘re living in New York City, make sure that your condo is on the highest floor. And then you‘re in the mountains just like that.
The reality is that that mountain is about oxygen. It‘s one of the things that‘s really, really, really important to understand about mountains and valleys.
Mountain people suffer from having too much oxygen. If it wasn‘t so horrendously, politically incorrect for me to say so, I‘d say smoke. If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, it‘s like living at 17,000 feet. No, really, that‘s the equivalency. It‘s about 17,000 feet. You have all the tar on the cilia; it cuts down on the oxygen to the brain, so basically you‘re at high altitude, which is not a joke. The reality is that if you‘re a mountain person, thin oxygen is what you‘re looking for because this is what you thrive on. And it‘s healthy for you.
Remember something about oxygen. Oxygen is a corrosive. It can have a deeply negative impact. Anybody who‘s ever gotten drunk knows that because what being drunk is that your neo-cortex is flooded with oxygen, literally. Oxygen just destroys cells. We think of it as life giving but, in fact, it is a corrosive. Look at the side of any car. So it‘s really something to understand about being a mountain person.
The high ground isn‘t just about the fact that you have a better view, which by the way, is very important for mountain people. Everything about being a mountain person is about being above things. Think about that—it reflects on their personalities.
They‘re here to be aloof. They‘re here to be above things. They‘re here to be looking down on them. This is what it is to be on the mountain. It‘s not to be down in the heavy oxygen with this heavy weight that it brings, with the pressure that brings. It is about getting up to the high ground. A lot of that is psychological. Being high enough so you are looking down, that you do have this kind of refuge.
Active & Passive Mountains
You can see that mountains are active and passive [determined by the direction of the environment variable arrow]. You can have the mountain that is deeply isolating and you can have the mountain that's not. But the whole thing is, going back to the deep activity levels that are there. To be passive in the high ground or to be very active on the high ground. Everything having to do with environment has to do with your activity level whether it‘s high or low activity. The high activity mountain people need to burn off as much oxygen as possible, literally.
The diminishment of oxygen in the brain is the bedrock of the hallucinatory experience. If you take LSD, it cuts oxygen to the brain. If you take amanita muscaria, it cuts oxygen to the brain. So basically these are people who are intended to be high. And I don‘t mean that in the drug sense because that‘s not the point. I literally mean that in the sense that they‘re here to be high. Anybody who‘s ever gone to very high ground knows that there‘s a certain giddiness that comes when you begin to not have enough oxygen.
This high ground for mountain people is very important. But the other side of that is really getting to see what it means for you as beings. Mountain people are not here to get involved in the nitty-gritty. They‘re not Moses. They don‘t have to come down from the mountain and deal with all that stuff down there. It‘s one of the most important things for mountain people to realize. You‘re above all of that. It means the only people you want to be connected with are those who are ready to climb the mountain and come to you. Because that is what high ground is all about.
Sometimes that‘s not about ground at all, that‘s just philosophical. You take the high ground in some kind of discussion or argument and you have to wait for the other to climb the mountain to you because you take the high ground. So keep this in mind about any of these aspects. They are always going to reflect on your basic nature and allow you to see that if you‘re not taking the high ground, if you‘re not above things, and you find yourself getting stuck in all that nitty-gritty, you know right away something is wrong and you‘re with the wrong people dealing with the wrong things.
Ra Uru Hu
from Radical Transformations – The Four Lectures - Environment
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