 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our Mechanics Institute online program, featuring Sacred Mountains of the World with author Edwin Bernbaum, who will be in conversation with Phil Kosano, who's the author of The Art of Togermage. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute. And if you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854, and we are one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library, our International Chest Club, ongoing author and literary programs, and our Friday Night Cinema Lip Stone Series. So please see us at milibrary.org and also visit our website and come down in person at 57 Post Street in San Francisco. So in this time of political strife and pandemic, we offer you a respite. Tonight we're going to celebrate two new editions of books that will both inspire you and also that are very aspirational. First of all, Edwin Bernbaum's second edition of Sacred Mountains of the World takes of a reader on a fascinating journey, exploring the role of mountains in the mythologies, religions, history, literature, and art of cultures around the world. And Phil Kosano, author of another examination of sacred sites in his The Art of Pilgrimage, The Seekers Guide to Making Travel Sacred, gives us remarkable stories from famous travelers, poets, and modern day pilgrims. And it's also in his second edition. And it's a wonderful guide for the mindful traveler who's longing for something more than just a version or escape. So I'd like to give you a little more detail about their biographies before we begin. Dr. Bernbaum is a mountaineer and scholar of comparative religion and mythology, whose work focuses on the relationship between culture and nature. The first edition of Sacred Mountains of the World won the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal for Nonfiction and the Italian Award for Literature of Mountaineering, Exploration, and the Environment. He is also the author of The Way to Shambhala, a study of Tibetan myths of hidden sanctuaries resembling the fictional Shangri-La of Lost Horizon. He initiated and directed a program working with the national parks, such as Yosemite and Hawaii Volcanoes, to develop interpretive material based on the evocative cultural and spiritual significance of mountain environments on the cultures around the world. And he was also featured in the film, The On the Mountain Tops, Extraordinary Mountaineers, Extraordinary People. Actually, that was a museum exhibition, not a film. And Phil Kosano is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher, and editor, lecturer, storyteller, and TV host, with more than 35 books translated into more than 10 languages and script writing credits to his name. Kosano has also appeared alongside mentors, such as Joseph Campbell and Houston Smith. He was host and co-writer of Global Spirit, which is on PBS TV. And he's also appeared on CNN, Discovery Channel, The Smithsonian Channel, and interviewed for many publications. Also, we're so pleased to welcome him back because we featured many author events with him for his book, such as The Word Catcher, Burning the Midnight Oil, and several other wonderful events. And so we're so pleased to welcome you back, even though we're here virtually, and we hope to welcome both of you to Mechanics Institute live in person very soon. So please welcome Edwin Bernbaum and Phil Kosano. Well, thank you very much, Laura, for the introduction for both of us, and thanks also to the Mechanics Institute for hosting this. This is my first time, and it's a real pleasure to be here. My book on Sacred Mountains of the World basically looks at the incredible range and diversity of the ways in which mountains are sacred to people all around the world, not only in traditional cultures, but also in modern cultures. And to give us sort of an overview of the book and how it works, the introduction deals with the experience of the sacred and how mountains have a powerful way of evoking the sacred in various ways. And then the first part of the book is called Sacred Mountains Around the World, and it basically deals with mountains on every continent except Antarctica, because in Antarctica there aren't permanent residents and we need people for whom mountains are sacred for them to be sacred in the usual sense. It deals with these mountains around the world, and let me give you a sense of how the book works, reading a few passages. For the introduction, this is the way the book opens, the first paragraph. As the highest and most dramatic features of the natural landscape, mountains have an extraordinary power to evoke the sacred. The ethereal rise of a rigid mist, the glint of moonlight on an icy face, a flare of gold on a distant peak. Such glimpses of transcendent beauty can reveal our world as a place of unimaginable mystery and splendor. In the fierce play of natural elements that swirl about their summits, thunder, lightning, wind and clouds, mountains also embody powerful forces beyond our control, physical expressions of an awesome reality that can overwhelm us with feelings of wonder and fear. And then this is how the mountains go on to look at how mountains basically function in different cultures. So another passage from the introduction, because of their power to awaken an overwhelming sense of the sacred, mountains have come to be associated with the highest and most central values and aspirations of religions and cultures throughout the world. Mount Sinai occupies a special place as the awesome site where God appeared in cloud and thunder to give Moses the Torah, the law and teachings that form the core of the Jewish religion. The graceful cone of Mount Fuji represents for many a sublime symbol of the beauty and spirit of the Japanese nation. The remote peak of Mount Kailas, rising aloof above the Tibetan Plateau, directs the hearts and minds of millions in Indian Tibet toward the realm of the highest deities and the utmost attainments of spiritual meditation. The Hopi and Navajo view the San Francisco peaks of Arizona as a divine source of water and blessings on which their lives and communities depend. For many in the modern world Mount Everest symbolizes the highest goal they may strive to attain, whether their pursuit be material or spiritual. The second section of the book basically looks at different regions of the world with each chapter opening with a general description of the mountains and their importance for that particular region and then focuses on a few representative peaks in each chapter. In all the book deals with a bit over 50 sacred mountains in detail, but of course there are many many more. And to give you a sense of how the chapter in the Himalayas opens, the chapter in the Himalayas is the abode of the sacred. An enormous range, 1500 miles long, the Himalayas rise in the monsoon drenched jungles north of Myanmar to sweep in a great arc of snow and ice northwest along the borders of Indian Tibet through Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal, up to the dusty glaciers of the Karakorum on the remote desert frontier between Pakistan and China. From the plains of India the mountains appear as luminous tracings on the far blue sky, wisps of light hinting at another world far above ours. As one approaches they dwindle behind intervening hills to reappear in more substantial form and flashes of white, glimpse now and then through the opening of a dark green valley. From the vantage point of a high ridge gained by an arduous climb, they emerge sharp and solid against the horizon, their glaciers glistening in the sun, too brilliant for eyes to bear. At twilight, after the colorful displays of sunset, their jagged snows soften to take on a strange lavender glow as they fade into the depths of the night. No wonder that millions of devout Hindus and Buddhists regard them as the dwelling place of the gods and the pathway to heaven. Now to give you a sense, I also incorporate a number of sort of personal anecdotes and experiences I've had on these mountains as well as looking at in detail what they mean for the people who live there. And in the chapter on Japan, there's a mountain called Mount Koya and let me read a more personal experience there. Most of the visitors to Mount Koya focus their attention and devotion on the cemetery, the largest and most impressive in Japan. Over a mile long it runs through an ancient grove of gigantic cedars whose straight trunks stand like columns of silver-grey marble rising into a cloud of foliage. I came to the cemetery about a year after our son Jonathan died in a warehouse fire at a music event in Oakland, California. I asked the monk accompanying the group I was with if he would say a prayer for Jonathan. He took me to a priest who wrote with a brush and black ink our son's name in Japanese characters on the thin strip of wood at the foot of a bronze image of a Buddha. While the monk recited a mantra in a deep voice, I scooped up water with a ladle and poured it over and over Jonathan's name. Its smooth flow slowly cooling and soothing the lingering grief I felt over his fiery death. When my wife and I had first come to Koya many years earlier, the cemetery with its trees had had a particularly haunting effect. Walking through the cedars, watching pilgrims make offerings to images of silent Buddhas, I had been strongly reminded of hikes we had taken through redwood groves in California such as the mirror woods outside San Francisco. Here the trees rose as straight and tall with the same aura of primeval simplicity but the additional presence of shrines and incense accentuated the natural sanctity of the forest producing an overwhelming atmosphere of spiritual devotion in which the living could commune with the dead. A sense of another reality, another world deeper and more mysterious than the one I knew hovered on the edge of awareness palpable and evanescent as the gray mist of incense floating around us ascending toward the sky. So after looking at mountains all around the world the second part called the power and mystery of mountains deals with the symbolism of mountains and there I extract 10 major widespread themes or views through which mountains are experienced as sacred by people and cultures around the world. For example the mountain is a high place epitomized by Everest, the mountain is center is center of the universe, Mount Kailash in Tibet, the mountain is a source of blessings such as water and healing and mountain for example is a place of inspiration or revelation. And then what I do is using this framework I apply it to areas that you normally not normally think of in terms of the sacred looking at how mountains evoke a sense of the sacred and well known works of literature and art from the eastern and western culture for example the snows of Hillman by Hemingway, the magic mountain by Thomas Mann, some of the poetry of Yates, Chinese poetry Lebo and so on. And then I look at using again this sort of framework to look at the spiritual dimensions of mountaineering and then the last chapter focuses on the relevance of sacred mountains for climate change, environmental conservation and also for everyday life. And I have new sections in the second edition for example and work I've done with National Parks that Laura referred to and also World Heritage programs that I've worked on with that and to give a sense in a way of why the relevance of sacred mountains. I mean we talk about sacred mountains around the world many of them are very distant cultures. You've got a sampling of a few from a passage I read from the introduction but many of the other mountains are very unfamiliar. So let me read here the opening paragraph of the last chapter which is sacred mountains, the environment and everyday life. For most of us sacred mountains are remote from the experience of everyday life. They lie far off in space and time revered by distant cultures, many of which vanished long ago. Even the peaks that we managed to climb and visit rise on the borders of our lives, removed from the cities and plains where most of us live. What is the value then of thinking about them? It is simply this, the contemplation of sacred mountains with their special power to awaken another deeper way of experiencing reality opens us to a sense of the sacred in our own homes and communities. A sense that we need to cultivate in order to live in harmony with our environment and with each other. In looking up to the heights and reflecting on the world around them we discover within ourselves something that enables us to lead deeper and more meaningful lives. So that gives sort of an overview of the book. The first edition of the book I had about 120 photographs and it was a large format and unfortunately from my point of view since I put my basically most of my efforts into the text and creating beautiful evocative images, many people sort of treated it as a coffee table book to look at the pretty pictures. So fortunately the second edition which was published recently by Cambridge University Press. This is the book here. Let's see okay well anyway it doesn't appear so well here. This one focuses highlights the text and it's in a smaller format so you can read it easily. There are a number of photographs about 24. They're all in black and white but they're all new compared to exception of one or two compared to what was in the first edition and one of them is the mountain you see behind me here. It's in this is in color but it's in black and white in the book and this is a mountain called Huashan which is one of the five principal sacred mountains in China the most spectacular of the sacred mountains in China and it has huge granite walls something like Yosemite but rather than being sides of the valley these walls go up and culminate knife edge ridges and you have to walk through these temples along the crest of the ridge in order to reach the summit. It's the most spectacular of the major sacred mountains in China. So I think with that as I say sometimes people say and I'll conclude with this thought well you know sacred mountains that's sort of an esoteric subject on the fringes of things well kind of quite the contrary since they are associated with the deepest and most central values of cultures around the world they take us straight into what's most important and most deeply felt in people's hearts and minds and cultures and traditions around the world and have great applications for even those of us who live in the modern world who may not even have any traditional aspirations and I should say I look at the sacred very generally it's whatever evokes a sort of an experience of something a deeper significance of reality that makes life meaningful and worthwhile and that that can be either religious or it can be communion with nature it can be you can be a secular as well as religious in order pursue what sacred mountains have to say to us today. So Phil let me turn it over to you and to Pilgrimage because many of these mountains that I discuss in the book are places of pilgrimage. Thank you Edwin thank you that's impressive you just compressed and condensed a lifetime of work into 15 minutes so thank you I hope you all appreciate what that man just did just now that was wonderful and very poetic I love some of the new prose so I'm looking forward to reading the second edition. I'm here because Ed and I have known each other for years we actually talked together at Esalen a number of years ago yes we did that was marvelous so we've had a great deal in common over the years and I am very thankful for this long relationship that I've had with the Mechanics Institute I wish my dad were alive to see this because he introduced me to Mark Twain when I was young we read Huckleberry Thin and Tom Sawyer together when I was a kid and Mark Twain actually lectured at the Mechanics Institute so my dad is one of those guys who would have loved that connection so I love to keep this what I used to call with Joe Kam with a long conversation going we're talking about things that people have always been concerned about always cared about so thank you Ed for joining together this evening I'd like to start with a very modest anecdote but it came to me this morning as something that helps bridge our work together and it's from the wonderful essays Anna Quinlan who wrote for the Boston Globe for many years and she was out here in San Francisco for an event a number of years ago and she happened to be walking across over the Embarcadero along San Francisco Bay looking out over the ocean and was a little bit wistful at a crossroad which is one of the signifiers for the time the Cairo's time to embark on a pilgrimage on a sacred journey somewhere when you're at life's crossroads and you need some time to be contemplative some time to get off your couch and walk around the world so this is what Anna Quinlan was doing walking along the Embarcadero and she came across a homeless man who seemed as she writes beautifully in this essay almost beatifically content so she was as a good reporter wondering how he could do this she noticed that he was um had been sleeping on this bench for a while with and she asked him why aren't you in a in a hostel tonight why aren't you trying to take care of yourself in some way just trying to start a conversation and he said just look young lady look at the view and she writes this so subtly but lovely she said she looked up and she realized she had been walking for quite a while around San Francisco and she had not been looking at the views and yet this homeless man was who looked poor distraught but he had a sense of contentment because what he was in that moment he was feeling something sacred in the day and so Anna Quinlan ends up her essay by saying every time I get a little distraught a little melancholic I think of this brief conversation I had in San Francisco Bay with his homeless fellow who turns out is one of the happiest people I ever met and his phrase excuse me comes back to me look at the view and look at the view and as she ends the essay she says and if I do that I am never disappointed so that's a bit of a modern parable and it drops us down into this wonderful conversation that some of our pilgrimages some of our explorations can be grand they can be life a world tilting I love that old phrase but sometimes they're modest as well walking around your own neighborhood as something Ticknaut Hahn said in a conversation I was privy to here in San Francisco years ago when someone asked him what is the the ultimate message for a pilgrimage and he said without pause which you then know comes from the deep sense someone has he says it's it's the capacity to have gleaned something from your travel something from your sacred journey that allows you to come home and recognize your own backyard as sacred ground and that became then the the direction and the arc for my book the art of pilgrimage it's good to know where to begin it's good to have an endpoint all right this is where I'm going so that was very helpful for me when I was writing that book that's where I wanted to end up all of the wisdom the the epiphanies the grand maybe dark revelations about ourselves on these journeys ideally help us develop a new sense of respect and even reverence for our own backyard so how did this all begin that's the great mythic question Rob Roberto class so when others come up with when we're talking about mythology so for me 1997 I was reading through the New York Times Sunday travel section and I came across what they used to call a bullet piece just two or three lines in the travel section and it just said by the year 2000 travel will become the number one business in the world so of course as an inveterate traveler and a tour later that seized my attention and I read it was a very brief piece but what it what it suggested also had its aspect of being a parable if you remember the lines in the Old Testament about how someday we shall hope to turn swords into plowshares so this article was saying because of the recent upsurge in travel 1997 so 25 years ago or so travel is taking tourism is overtaking the armaments industry as the number one business in the world and that's it's god's parable value there's a wonderful metaphor in there things have gone topsy turvy since because of the recent wars but I still love the power of the metaphor but as an old journalist I had to ask why so I did a little hunting around hunting and pecking and discovered that traditional pilgrimage had had an upsurge throughout the 90s in all of the world's religions from from Islam to Judaism Christianity but there was also an uptick if you will in the reference to and the reconsideration of things like travels to to see precious disappearing animals in Africa there are the the word pilgrimage was being used to describe going to the the Bronte sisters home in Yorkshire England pilgrimage was being used to describe going to scientific centers like Albert Einstein's office in Zurich Switzerland where he had his three great breakthroughs in physics and I believe 1905 so that began to move me a bit and I said there's a book here what is happening in the world that we are traveling more than ever safer longer more grandiose tours but that also we have expanded our notion of pilgrimage and what is sacred to include the secular so that then became the the touchstone so to speak of my book there are plenty of other books about traditional travel let's say the Michael Wolfe's wonderful book the was it the thousand roads to Mecca he covers traditional pilgrimage in that sense in in Islam many books about the roads to Santiago de Compostela Rome and so on but no one as far as I know had ever tried to find what the overlap was between the two which is what I did and I found a number of points of overlap commonalities and so I divided the book into seven simple sections the longing because all great ideas all great creativity all all travel takes place in this moment of I'm at a crossroad in a life my best friends can't help me anymore my my spiritual counselor my psychologist nobody can help me anymore often at least I count through about 60 000 years of human behavior if you go back to the Australian Aborigine Walkabout which is roughly 60 000 years old that's the the date I've gotten from them by the way for about 60 000 years people have come to moments of crisis like this and decided enough talk I need to walk or in Ed's case I need to climb so I use this as my metaphor the longing and then there can there can be a call it can be a spiritual call it can be a secular call the departure every tradition that I examine has a number of rituals that one might go through to properly prepare for a pilgrimage and they can be cutting the hair changing your garments changing your diet a series of prayers interviewed Houston Smith my my dear friend about the way that he would travel the world when I asked him Houston how many pilgrimages have you been on and his voice dropped an octave and he said Phil I have girdled the globe 12 times which I found was a wonderful phrase and I loved the cadence of that and he began to tell me his own approach to this was similar to what I was doing cobbling together what you might say is the wisdom that's been gleaned from all these different traditions because as Ed maybe we can talk about that when we when we come together things that don't work rituals ceremonies that practices that aren't effective anymore tend to fall by the way wayside if they're not working because I remember you telling me at Esalen once Ed that for every tradition including monks moving around my come on kailash pilgrimage can also be rote behavior if we're not careful so that's what also what I built into the book and there's the pilgrims way the labyrinth because in all kinds of travel including pilgrimage there will be a kind of confrontation with the dark night of the soul why did I leave home why did I come with these people why didn't I travel alone or why did I choose this destination you might have trouble at customs did you did you read the story about an American who had bought a subway sandwich I think at Heathrow and mistakenly didn't finish it put it in her backpack and when she flew to Australia they they found the sandwich in her backpack at customs and then find her $3,500 for bringing food illegally into their country so this is something I write about in the book to know the customs know the laws because you are about to cross some thresholds there are many of these sacred ritual aspects to these kinds of travel so I just encourage people to to brush up on on the on the cultures and the customs or wherever you're going the moment of arrival tends to be very traditionalistic everywhere there are certain customs that you it's very wise to know how to behave how to dress and so on and then the final chapter we can you and I could talk about this as well it's bringing back the boon what happens when you come home again all this by the way if you are well-read in sociology mythology anthropology some of this might be familiar one of the models that I used for this of course was from Joe Campbell who I worked with extensively for eight years I wrote the film and the book about his life the hero's journey but Joe would have been the first to tell you that he got his model of the hero journey not from his own imagination he put it together but he got it from Thomas Mann, Carl Jung, James Joyce and especially this curious scholar from Europe Van Genep, G-E-N-N-E-P who wrote a brilliant book on rites of passage I believe in the 1920s and this then became the the the foundation of the hero's journey which then helps me write the the the art of pilgrimage why it's relevant here because I believe along with many great travel writers throughout time from Dante to Pico Iyer that well rehearsed respectful reverent travel can change people it's a the rites of passage model itself it was Van Genep's way of saying that these there are forms of rites of initiation there are ways in which we can learn and teach each other there are ways we can ask questions of the natural world as you so beautifully do Ed and then gleaning that wisdom we slowly incrementally change our own consciousness so that's at the at the heart of a book like mine because what I've I've gleaned I talked to even we have my friend palma here was just with me on my tour to to Italy she'll remember that I talked about this here one of the dirty secrets in the travel business is how many people are actually dissatisfied we're not supposed to talk about this but it happens people are mad at their travel agent they're mad at the hotels they're mad at the tour companies disappointed in the center I remember standing in front of shark cathedral a number of years ago when I was teaching using the famous shark labyrinth as a model for our creativity and I heard someone sent next to me looking up at the cathedral the beautiful rose window and saying it looked a lot better in the video mod so this is shocking to me this sacrilegious but it's also very revelatory in the sense if you are reduced to saying something like that oh it looked better in the video oh it read better in the book by Henry Adams about shark you haven't prepared you are not centered you are either condescending or you're unprepared so many things can happen so a book like mine is really offered up in the in the spirit of trying to help people deepen their travels get to the core of what I think of as sometimes the soul of the world the anima mundi the genius loci the heartbeat the truth of a place so just a couple more comments on this and then Ed you and I can talk I think one one famous book about mountains that has inspired both of us is the one by Rene de Maul mount analog which I learned first from Joe Campbell of all people it's just from a single footnote when he uses this book about the ascent of a mountain which is unfinished by the way because this great scholar he was also an endologist he wrote beautifully but Indian mythology Indian religion he died probably a chapter away from finishing the book but what he left us was one of the great explorations of using the mountain as a metaphor for raising one's consciousness and he has a line that I just recall I just remember it's one of the epigraphs for my own book the the art of pilgrimage in which he says like I use the word the art of pilgrimage rather than the technique of could have used so many others but Demolo inspired me here when he said art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action and this is an old sense in religions around the world that it behooves us to get out of the synagogue the the church the cathedral the mosque get off the couch and put your feet to the foot to the soles of your shoes or your sandals to the soul of the world so you're realizing your prayers trying to lift your consciousness in some way in the actual world itself so Demolo helped me there and then finally a kind of unexpected realization but two days ago I just gave a three hour presentation to the Jungan the Hudson group the New York Society for Jungian Studies three hours on my new book which you could see here the Lost Notebooks of Sisyphus one of my favorite stories as again it's a tremendous model of behavior for model for as Jung himself said fortune consciousness how do we change our mind how do we change our hearts is it is it even possible so Sisyphus to me has been a model I've used this metaphor for teaching writing and filmmaking for many many years and then it dawned on me that the whole middle portion of that myth from the ancient Greeks and the mid portion of my book is of course what happens when the king of Corinth is condemned for not betraying but for revealing something pretty nasty that the god Zeus has done so he's condemned to the underworld to do what this is one of the most recognizable mythic images in history and I'm told it's the most popular motif for New Yorker cartoons Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill has has become a common motif for jokes about work how often can I go back to the office pushing this boulder up the hill and I'm never pushing that boulder over the other side it's it's been used to discuss sports his boulder then becomes a baseball pushing the baseball up the hill or raising children this is us you and I baby we're trying to raise this kid together pushing the boulder up the mountain it can seem as it was taught during the middle ages by the way as being a story about futility but I believe as Albert Camus did in his famous essay a rawl may one of the great humanist psychologists for our time that it's actually an antidote for the very naive and very corrosive American myth of unrelenting individualism that I can always make more money I could always have a beggar house a better car all this accumulation I had a long discussion with the great rawl may about this and he said this is one of the great metaphors of our time pushing something ourselves maybe pushing the boulder up the mountain until we realize there is a moment when we need to do what to let go let go of expectations let go of the belief that we can constantly constantly grow while destroying the earth and so on so maybe there'll be something for us to talk about there as they're they're two sides there's a transcendent notion of going up the mountain having some kind of realization at the top and then there's the other there's the metaphor for the difficulty in life the difficulty of simply coping going to work every day raising our kids getting through the pandemic the the sycophus metaphor was used over and over as a cartoon when will this ever end when will this ever end so there you go a few things to think about laura welcome back yeah i'd love to hear um ed's response to that that metaphor and from your experience on mountains well first of all i want to say you know phil and i did do these two workshops at s1 and actually it was on another subject of great interest to us which directly relates to phil's last book which is a subject of myth and the importance of myth and and what it reveals about who we are and our aspirations looking at you know myths i'm especially interested in myths in living myths of traditional cultures often we look at ancient Greek myths which are literary myths today but they don't have the power that they did for the ancient Greeks but that's that's all very important and i just wanted to say phil i really enjoyed doing those workshops with you and keeping up our our friendship over the years now as far as going up i mean sometimes going up the mountain can be uh you know it can feel like you're pushing a rock uh but the deepest experience i probably ever had in the mountains was on a mountain called anapurna and let me back up a little because there's a very amusing story about this there's a book called anaburna by marie's herdsawg it was the first of the world's highest peaks to be climbed in 1950 it's a classic of Himalayan mountaineering when i was a teenager and my younger sister was about 12 at the time checked the book out of the library and she thought it was a Nancy drew mystery story about a girl named anapurna she was partly right because anapurna is the name of a goddess anapurna she was filled with rice but when she opened it up she she wasn't interested and she tossed it on her bed and i happened to come in and i found the book and i read it and it was really uh it it really inspired me uh and uh later on um i went on an expedition to one of the peaks in the anapurna range and as i say i was trying to make up for all sorts of things that had gone wrong i went to the peace court in napal uh dreaming of the mountains and they put me on the plains down next to india where it was very flat very hot 110 degrees no electricity and i could see just in the far distance occasionally when the when the haze you know dissipated i get to get a glimpse of the Himalayas and it was sort of like uh being in hell and seeing heaven and and experiencing hell even more deeply because i could glimpse heaven where i wasn't uh and eventually i left and went up into the mountains and on anapurna i walked into a huge avalanche which was a transformative event for me but the reason i related to your sisyphus myth or not yours but the sisyphus myth of the ancient greeks is on the expedition i was trying to make up for uh having felt myself a failure i went to the peace court to help the people and i finally had quit because i was drawn to the mountains you talk about the call in your book and your great book on pilgrimage uh and the call is essential to a pilgrimage or a quest or journey i felt you know just call to the Himalayas i felt i should be staying there in the plains doing my peace core work that was the reasonable thing to do but something kept on pulling me to go and i finally left but i left with an awful lot of feelings of chagrin over what i've done shame of of having sort of blown it and i went up there and i was trying to climb the mountain in order to make up for that and it was just a really ordeal it was like pushing the rock up the mountain up the glacier in this case and then finally this avalanche hit i won't go into the end of the chapter on the Himalayas has a long description of the avalanche and what i went through but the night after the avalanche i thought i was going to have a terrible time sleeping that i would have terrible nightmares in fact i had the best night's sleep i'd had an awfully long time i've been having a terrible time getting to sleep at altitude we were right up at almost 20 000 feet and it keeps you up at night and in the middle of the night i woke up and the first time on the entire expedition i felt like climbing the mountain just for the sheer joy of climbing it now i wasn't able to do that because i'd lost everything my glasses my pack even my identity i lost my passport in the avalanche and i had to come down but it was a lesson a transformative lesson that took me actually years to fully understand and what i eventually realized is when i or i think any of us do things for the joy of doing them that's when we do the best that's when we fulfill ourselves and when we also have our best effect on other people that was a major lesson a transformative lesson uh so that's what your that's what the what the rolling the ball up the mountain makes me think of uh however uh i was hit by an awful lot of chunks of ice rolling down the mountain so it can go the other way the rocks can sweep you down as well as up well as my old friend angeles arian used to say the bohemian the basque mystic and anthropologist i'd like to hitchhike on that point and the point is the point of joy i'm so i'm so glad you brought that up because that i i've thought about you a number of times over the last few years when i am cobbling together my itineraries for these art and literary pilgrimages that i lead including just in april to italy and to greece i try to culminate them with exactly that a sense of joy now how can we achieve that because travel can be grueling it's challenging it's demanding i try to find the highest place possible in the last two or three days of the trip and it's there well what you either were climbing figuratively on uh crete just four or five years ago my co-leader was a cretin archaeologist we climbed to mount ida i believe was 2900 meters to get an overview of crete an absolute joy and he told me how he had had an epiphany very zorba like epiphany on the top of this mountain because he was he had just been diagnosed with cancer he had had some tragedies in his own life so he wanted to go up to the highest peak where there was an altar to the goddess and he wanted to say a prayer to the goddess to ask him which way to then go with his life so four or five of us on the trip we we actually accompanied him up there we were together with him with a sense of solidarity which you write about beautifully in your books about taking leaders to the tops of mountains and then you lift your prayers up to the heavens up to the gods and the goddesses there in hope that they are achieved there was tremendous joy and all of us doing that together just recently on italy in italy with palma here one of our participants tonight we ended up in corfu the island of corfu and um we went up to the top of a fortress to do what it was a little rigorous to get up to the top but it had an overview of the entire island there and that becomes then uh a source of where i will create some kind of practice ritual a ceremony of some sorts while i'll ask people let's look back now what have we done over the last week what stood out what was your for in italy what was your ladolce vita moment your sweet moment and then you talk about these and you try to give the entire journey some perspective that happens when you go to the highest place it could be a cathedral you climb to the top of the mountain for the cathedral wherever that might be and i've thought about you about about this because you taught me that that the the exhilaration the effort that takes place in going up to the highest point can or should bring us some kind of joy so thank you for that gift ed uh thank and thank you for the gifts as well as in your book uh yeah no that you mentioned it's interesting uh i also climbed Mount Eda and creed as well uh because i went with a colleague the national geographic sent us there uh to explore the possibilities of stories linking sacred mountains to ancient greek mythology and archaeology so we went from climbing Mount Olympus in the north down to creed in the south and since you mentioned creed there's a famous paradox called the creed and paradox which is all creed and sly i am a creed and then you're caught in a circle so the reason that uh that paradox came about and was called the creed and paradox is that the greeks uh you know according to greek mythology zeus was born in a cave at either the foot of mount dictea or mount edda and then he was raised in a cave at the foot of mount edda hidden from his father cronos uh who would have otherwise eaten him if he'd known he was still alive in fact uh it won't go into all of that but the reason people talk about the creed and paradox is that elsewhere in greece zeus was the king of the gods and you know he lived forever more or less but the creedans believe that zeus had died and was buried in creed and everybody said well all creedans are liars because zeus didn't die i can use that thank you thank you but uh but you know the other thing is yeah you go into places like like greece where there is this uh you know history of pilgrimage and myth one of the things i talk about is a lot of myths and sacred mountains and myths sort of gather around mountains like clouds around the mountains and uh the first time i climbed Mount Olympus i had two experiences that seemed to come straight out of greek mythology i got to i was hitchhiking up the coast of greece i'd come back from india napal and i i was going to climb Olympus and i ran into a blind englishman who was traveling around sightseeing and the greeks were very puzzled by this how can you sightsee you can't see and he said well i touched things so he heard i was going to go up the mountain and he asked me to take him up now oh my god i'm not going to do that until we ran into a couple of swiss who had a climbing rope so we could do it safely so we put him on the rope and we started climbing and to go up to the top of the highest mountain peak of Mount Olympus you actually have to use your hands it's a you know a rock scramble so we were showing him where to put his hands and i looked at him and i saw the sort of joy radiating out of his face as he was going up the mountains and i thought of teresius the blind seer of ancient greek mythology who was said to have been able to see more in his blindness than those with sight and i was wondering whether our companion wasn't experiencing more of the mountain than his blindness than we who could see it shining in the sunlight around us so i left him on the summit and there's another summit of Mount Olympus called nicknamed the throne of zoos that found it very appealing so i decided to go off and climb it by myself i didn't have a guidebook and as you say in the way and uh in the uh art of pilgrimage it's very important to prepare yourself and learn as much about where you're going well i hadn't done that so i started climbing this thing and it turned out to be much more difficult than i thought i got on a knife edge ridge uh it got very eerie the mist came in there was a thousand foot drop on one side 500 feet on the other i came to a place where i had to go under an overhang out over the thousand foot face and my legs started to shake so i pulled back and i started thinking well what am i going to do and at that very moment a flight of black birds came sweeping out of the mist across the top of the ridge and disappeared on the other side well it turns out black birds are omens from zoos himself and i remembered from reading the odyssey and the iliott in college that bird flights were always omens for the ancient Greeks if the birds flew from one direction it was a good sign if they flew from the other it was a bad sign but i couldn't remember which direction was which so i thought about it for a moment and then i went across i made the move and i got to the top so i figured it was the right direction and a couple of years later i was talking to a friend of mine who was the chair of the classics department at harvard and i asked him which direction was which and he couldn't remember either so i didn't feel so badly about it that's a great story laura before we take questions very brief response to that what you just awakened to me because of the pure joy that you are telling these stories with is that i'm already organizing for tours for 2023 so i'm in conversation with land agents in greece in italy alike and both are saying that they're experiencing what they think will be a robust and record-setting year in 2023 for travel there is such a pent up desire excuse me from all around the world because we've been what we've been on the couch we have been cloistered at home choose your image and what then happens when we are corralled in our desire for freedom which is a word we haven't used but i think it's at the heart of travel it's at the heart of the creative enterprise is about to be exercised so let me end briefly with this what i was in conversation once with the great union psychologist james hillman and talking about this is the power of this notion of the the transformative journey which is how i think of pilgrimage it's a spiritually transformative journey to a sacred place one way to think about it is to put the the the prefix re in front of the verbs we're using and then you can get to the heart of why this kind of travel moves us and occasionally changes us we are renewed rejuvenated reintegrated maybe with lost parts of ourselves revitalized on and on and on so maybe you can play with that what is it in you that is really longing to be renewed revitalized right now and where can you go that might spark that kind of let's call it joy Laura let me let me add to that as well for pilgrimage places you know the pilgrimages can also be pilgrimages i think it's very important as you say to get out and walk but i always think of t.s. elliott's you know passage we shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploration will be to return to where we started and know the place for the first time and that's what i think the most important thing to bring back from a pilgrimage you're going to a mountain and i should add sacred mountains yes some of them you climb some of them you walk around like chylas others you just contemplate for the distance and the beauty of the subject is that you know you don't have to climb the mountain you don't even have to walk around it you can just contemplate it from the distance and there's a famous quote from the pranas the hindu pranas saying uh that the site even the thought of him a child of himalaya will cleanse you of your sins wow and bringing that in and then there's this quote i'd like to sort of finish with uh this is from uh china this one of china's greatest landscape painters guo shi from the uh sung dynasty around the 11th 12th centuries and this is what he has to say about landscapes and landscape paintings and their value the din of the dusty world and the confines of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors while on the contrary haze mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks and yet can rarely find what you're looking for in the pilgrimage having no access to the landscapes the lover of forest and stream the friend of mist and haze enjoys them only in his dreams how delightful then to have a landscape painted by a skilled hand beautiful beautiful before we jump into uh questions in the chat i just want to throw out a few things and ask you going back to that essence of joy um because i want you ed to tell us about what mountain is behind you there and also my question is what place or places or mountains resonate with you and i'd like both of you to answer what we're we often go to a place or a city or whatever and we just feel like we belong there or resonates with us deeply and other than like anna perna which you've mentioned at other places that you've gone to uncrete uh were there other places that resonated with you well in in my case uh well first of all the mountain behind me is called hua shan it's uh the highest of the five main secrets it's the western mountain the mountains in china the main sacred mountains are in the four quarters and one in the center and incidentally china has probably the longest record of a sense of mountains in the world it goes back to maybe the third millennium before the common era the first legendary emperors of china were supposed to have gone and climbed the mountains in the four quarters to establish their sovereignty over the realm this is one of them uh it's since become a place of transformation what you emphasize in your book on pilgrimage because this is where daoists go to transform themselves into immortals and meditate and be on the mountain um you know when i was younger i was focusing on high mountains i really started climbing in the andes when my father was in the foreign service and uh we moved to ecuador in fact my earliest memories are snowcapped peaks on the equator because we went to ecuador when i was two and those are my earliest memories and then it came back when i was a teenager and i thought well i wouldn't it be neat to go up to snow on the equator the conjunction of opposites somebody put me in touch with an ecuadorian mountaineering club and i started climbing with them and uh the club had a great debaucative name which was new horizons and the new horizons you get from going to a mountain and so on so you know i went to the himalayas because they were high and i got interested in the culture but to tell you the truth as i went on and exploring what mountains mean to people i developed a growing appreciation for smaller and smaller mountains and also the fuller not just climbing a mountain but seeing life as a journey or an ultimate pilgrimage which is basically more like trekking through the himalayas you go up over a pass you may climb a peak you go down into a valley you have another hot up and down that's the way life goes and that's also how pilgrimages go it's not just going up to the top and if you focus entirely on getting to the top of the mountain the problem is you can't stay there very long so what do you bring back so you can bring back that sense of joy the memory of something that sustained you during the down periods that you talked about phil you know the you know when everything's going wrong in life you can sort of recall that memory there's another thing that's very important about mountains if you get to the top of the mountain you're not only reaching its high point you're reaching its center because that's where the center emerges from it and if you can get that sense of being centered which you see from the top of mountain you see the whole world around you and feel yourself as a center that sense of centeredness gives you the balance and serenity to get through the turmoil especially today with what's going on and i just taught a class for u.c. berkeley extend ollie on sacred mountains and i you know i concluded by saying mountains remind you that the world is a place of beauty and splendor what you experience if you take a real pilgrimage and you know that can sustain you and you realize that there's more than just what's going on in the politics and what's happening and and even climate change there is an underlying something that's worth getting out there experiencing and bringing back into your life and you you just reminded me and in response to your question laura that one of the in the last chapter of mount analog the wonderful rene de maul book he writes something that's had a deep influence on me and feels very buddhist in nature and that is that the most important part of the the ascent of the mountain is actually finding a place to leave a cache behind c a c h e it could be food it could be boots for someone who's coming up behind you you're leaving something that will help those who are following in your footsteps along their own ascent along their own path and i think there's a powerful powerful metaphor there that we're not only climbing for ourselves we're not only writing for ourselves we're writing helping teaching putting on book events like this laura to help those who are just behind us and that in itself brings me a great deal of joy to follow up on your question laura so a few quick places for me these are different ways of saying i feel home here those of you who are listening in i'm sure you have felt that sense of astonishment my first time in dublin ireland i felt like i was home walking in the footsteps of my heroes uh shanno kasey beckett james joce of course uh paris walking in the footsteps of hemmingway i felt home i'm french cuisineau right where the the family that comes from from paris but especially greece so i had this feeling a mighty experience of this just recently when i took my group the highlight of the greece tour just in april and again next spring going to ethica which is the great island destination for what for getting home again our word nostalgia by the way comes from this the story is a great old greek word that means the return so the odyssey is made up of stories of return stories of how we get home again but the greek brilliance as you put nostalgia and the story together with algae which is pain going home again can also have some pain involved if i go back to detroit it's not all excuse me it's not all peaches and cream to go back to detroit as you might imagine that's built into our great stories where can we go that will help revitalize us rejuvenate us bring us some sense of joy but at the same time risking that there could be some pain involved so i i i give it to all of you out there listening tonight where could you go that would help you in many senses come back to life again because that's what this metaphor is about all of us for one reason or another one circumstance after another it could be a pandemic it could be war it could be a change of job it could be a death in the family we all have to start over again and again and again and the model of pilgrimage has been with us for millennia i think to help us do this yeah i would agree and and i think you know i relate in particular to the odyssey because the journey there is the journey home you know it doesn't take uh it doesn't take odysseus very long to get to troi but it takes them a long long time to get back home and i i related to that personally because i've been on a number of journeys out to the hemoleas and i go out there very quickly in an airplane and then i i came back by land it took about 11 months and it was a long journey home and the point is it's the sense of being at home when you feel completely at home you feel the oneness you feel at home not only with yourself but with others and you know i like there's there's this great navajo prayer may i walk with beauty before me may i walk with beauty behind me uh the word that's actually translated as beauty is hojo which means it's a sense of beauty that comes out of being in harmony with yourself with others and with your environment so i i agree with you you know it's not just you go off to a mountain and a pilgrimage for yourself you do it you know as well for the benefit of others and you know as you pointed out in mount analog it's essential in order for you to get to the next stage of the journey that you leave something behind to help others who are coming be coming with you and that there's also can be a great sense of camaraderie and i'm sure you've experienced that and taking people on the tours of pilgrimages i've you know done a number of lettreps in the hemoleas and i was doing things on leadership and you know we take these really type a people uh business people who were very competitive uh back in new york and you put them out in the hemoleas and suddenly they become very cooperative in a very different atmosphere and they start to really work together and they turn to things that are spiritual which they can't really accept back home or they be laughed at back home so it's a very powerful experience to get away from where you take everything for granted experience the world fresh and new and as you say bring that back home we've got a question in the chat and pam is going to be reading out uh questions from the audience so uh pam would you like to uh read this question here it's it's a question from ellen junk could you provide some comments about building structures on mountains e.g weigh stations shrines creating cultural landscapes versus keeping the mountains natural without structures we don't really see this in the u.s thinking the mountains should be kept naturals okay that's that's a very good point um you know certainly for example you go to tai shan which is the most important sacred mountain in china and you climb it and i've climbed it it's about five thousand feet high and if you're going there thinking for a natural wilderness experience you'll be deeply disappointed because the mountain has the influence of uh basically there are buddha sutras carved into the rocks there are temples all over it there are people going up but it's a really rich cultural experience and as i indicated in the quote that i read about koyasan i yes it was like walking through the murah woods but there are all these monuments you know little buddha images and so on in the woods that really enhance the effect of it so that can work together on the other hand it can work against um and i often compare mount kylos to jerusalem incidentally jerusalem in the bible is really seen as a conflation of two mount sacred mountains mount zion and mount mariah um and uh if you look uh with kylos kylos they're both kylos is sacred to uh followers of four major religions buddhism hinduism gynism and indigenous religion of buddhism of course is sacred to christians jews and muslims big differences in kylos a buddha can stand next to a hindu and they can look at the mountain one of them can visualize it as the abode of shiva one of the three forms of the supreme deity in hinduism the other can see it as a pagoda palace of a buddha's deity called chakrasambara and they don't have to squabble over it they can each have and be with each other but the trouble with jerusalem when you put man-made structures on it is you impose one particular view and that leads to an awful lot of stripe in jerusalem because uh for many uh fundamentalist christians or jews you know jesus cannot come back or the messiah can't come until the temple is reconstructed but it happens to be on the site of a muslim mosque so that means that needs to be blown up and turned out so you get stripe happening there and then finally to answer the question mount olympus a number of years ago there were plans to build a tourist development up high on the mountain with fake temples and images of the gods and put a cable car up to the summit this aroused consternation in the western world and about 250 climbers went climbed it to demonstrate against it uh there were various Nobel prize winners like dunter gras who wrote letters condemning this idea showing the importance of mount olympus is a symbol of western civilization and the need to keep it uh you know keep it from being sort of trivialized by the wrong kind of tourism excellent i think you covered it as thank you another question then any other questions otherwise i'll jump in um yeah well let's i just wanted to also touch base on the climate change issue and what areas and what mountains are being threatened we just had a report you know recently kqed was talking about um you know when scientists was talking about the the melting of this this in other words the snow that is on mountains with climate change and um increase in temperatures at the melting of the ice packs on the mountains will will dissipate and this will affect so much of our life and resources today but i wondered ed if there if you are you know are appraised on what areas of the world are in the most danger and what can be done um well you know mountains and especially mountains with glaciers and snow um they're the canaries along with the arctic and the Antarctic where you know climate change effects are seen most quickly uh and in fact what all our people don't realize is over half the world's population depends on mountains for water either in the form of rivers or rain clouds and so on i mean here in california we depend on the snow cover of the sierra navada and it's dissipating and dwindling away i where you have sacred mountains for example in the andes near the driest desert in the world outside of Antarctica the atacama desert there are villages there that uh rely entirely on the snow melt from the glaciers and once the glaciers are gone life won't be sustainable um let me just uh tell you an amusing story it's also deeply uh the uh it affects the sacredness of mountains as well i mean if a mountain is revered because it's white and pure and then as in a case of a a mountain in ecuador called kotakachi near the equator all the snow has disappeared people take that as a sign that the goddess of the mountain or mama kotakachi is now angry with them and you know they feel that you know they've lost something that's really important uh i spent a lot of time in the everest area nipal and a friend of mine was the uh incarnate lama rinpoche of tango shea monastery the main monastery in the south side he felt that climate change was happening because the practice of religion was dwindling away and this was uh an effect of it and he within his own tradition was trying to do something about it so he uh was making these special ritual bases which he would give to sherpas to put in critical places like the summit of everest to arrest climate change so he gave me one of these to come uh to bring back and plant here in california so i got to the airport in kotmandu was going through security and then poli security guy looked at it and he said what's inside and i said i don't know and he said open it up and i said i can't it's it's a you know a tautomodic religious object won't work anymore and he said he got to open it up so i said can i talk to your supervisor so the supervisor came over same thing so out of desperation i said look apasherpa who was a national hero in napal he climbed everest 19 times more than anyone else i said he took one of these up to the summit of mount everest and the guy said are you a climber and i said yes although i was kind of a has been i haven't climbed in a long time and he said okay you can take it through so i came back and i know a tibetan lama who worked with me on my book on shambhala lama kunga in kencington and he he knew the rituals about these vases he was making them for other purposes so he and i and my son david went up into tilden park in berkeley very surreptitiously with a spade because you're not supposed to be digging up a regional park and we dug a hole he performed a ritual and he buried it with a good view and later on i talked to the director of the east bay regional park district and said well you know we did something illegal at tilden park and he said that's okay um i have a there's let me try to address that very quickly just a very practical way of of dealing with this uh ed i loved your response that was is poetic it was uh politically astute a friend of mine is uh jeff greenwald who wrote a famous travel book called shopping for budas is an old friend of ours he has a group now called the ethical traveler and if any of you are about to leave on a on a journey check this out before you leave because he has a a running list of 10 12 sometimes 15 different points for you to consider before you leave for example um if you were going to stay at a certain hotel make a couple inquiries does the money that you are paying let's say they're in uruguay or chile or nipal does it stay there in that town in that village or does it disappear and go away to some major corporation and your money isn't staying there check out the the ethical behavior of the of the uh restaurants that you're going to the tour company these are all practical ways that we can all say uh i am aware of the traveler's footprint i i have thought this through i i know there are some dangers involved if i if i take this this 8 000 mile journey if i spend all this money but there is a way for us to think this through and say my journey can help it can help keep some money it can raise some um political ecological even spiritual behavior because my group will be respectful in these different sites i have a couple of questions from people um from lin it's is mount shasta a sacred mountain and laura asks about mountain diablo well to answer both of your questions are both sacred mountains in fact i have a whole section in the chapter in north america on mount shasta it's uh sacred all sorts of new group i know new age and other religions but even more important it's sacred to a number of uh american indian tribes in the area such as the shasta and the wind tune and i participated in a ceremony well actually i didn't say i participated i was allowed to be there at a sacred spring on the side of mount shasta that an ritual is being conducted by a wind two spiritual doctor and healer named flora jones so it's a very important sacred mountain here in california uh diablo is a sacred mountain uh and in fact um i did have a section on it in my book but my editor in the first edition said well you already got so much on california you've got to drop something so unfortunately i dropped it but a friend of mine is the executive director of save mount save mount diablo public land trust there so i was just out hiking near mount diablo a week or so ago with him we had a wonderful time and diablo is associated in particular with a flood myth very much like the flood myth in the bible in which the human race is in this case recreated on the summit of mount diablo after a flood and then when it goes down people come down i got this from a very good friend of mine here in berkeley malcolm margillon who's a real authority on native americans especially native californians and started a publishing company heyday books which focuses on a lot of this so yes the other sacred mountain close by here of course is mount tan as well great well on that note on that sacred note i want to encourage everyone to go to your local bookstore and purchase sacred mountains of the world and the art of pilgrimage and also yes please visit heyday books for wonderful books on native american culture and the california institute of community art and nature which is also malcolm's new organization and also i want to encourage everyone wherever you are walk up to telegraph hill walk up to indian rock and berkeley get that high view that panoramic view where you can feel at the center of your community and the center of a world both inside and out and i want to thank um ed burn bomb and also phil cosano for an inspiring evening together and we look forward to seeing you in person soon