Climbing a Mountain

A Small bit of Zen

The Zen Story of the Man and the Mountain

A man was climbing a mountain. At the beginning of his climb, he encountered an older man at the bottom of the climb. The older man noticed that the younger man was carrying a huge backpack. It looked very heavy. The older man inquired, "Your backpack looks heavy. What is it that you have in it?" The younger man responded, “My backpack contains things that I need.” The younger man began to climb the mountain.

As the younger man climbed, he noticed that it was getting more difficult to climb the mountain. He began to take small rests on a more frequent basis. When the younger man reached the midpoint of his climb, he didn’t know if he could go on, so he looked into his backpack and removed the one thing that he felt he needed the least. He left it there and resumed his climb. The climb seemed to get easier.

He went a bit further and thought that maybe there were other things he could leave behind. He removed a couple of more items from the backpack and left them behind. The climb became easier.

By the time he reached the top of the mountain, there was nothing in his backpack. He was no longer carrying the backpack.

At the top of the mountain, he once again encountered the older man he had met at the beginning of his climb. Surprised, the younger man asked the older man, “How did you arrive at the top of the mountain so quickly?” The older man just smiled and went onto the next path to the next mountain.

(Not an exact quote of the Zen story, but close enough.)

Question: What are you carrying that holds you back?

Our minds are amazing and wonderful. The mind thinks, imagines, creates, and problem solves. The mind learns and emotes. The mind’s power resides in our memory, and there is no function of our mind that doesn’t rely on this one facility of the mind. The problem with LLM-based AI is that it has no memory, and although the engineers who implemented this AI are trying to kludge this capability, they will fall short of the human memory capability. Unlike human memory that can readily participate in reasoning, LLM-memory cannot. An important lack in this context is that the representation used by LLMs is not integrated into any processing mechanism supported by LLMs.

Human knowledge and processing is a completely integrated system. That is what enables self-reflection and understanding.

So what does this have to do with climbing a mountain? Enter the stage, Zen.

Zen is an Eastern philosophy that offers ways to think about small things like life. It is a compelling philosophy and teaching that enabled us to overcome some of the chains that our mind produces. These chains come by way of our memory and events that have occurred to us during our lives. It is the memory of these events that causes the problems in our lives.

I certainly do not qualify as any sort of expert in psychology, but it seems to me that if we burden ourselves with old memories, then problems tend to arise. When these memories become overwhelming, they may dominate thoughts, actions, and behaviors that may be created that represent illnesses of the mind.

This is where the man climbing the mountain story of Zen becomes relevant.

If we think of our memories as occupying a backpack that we carry, then this load can become very heavy. If we are trying to achieve a goal, then the backpack’s contents may interfere with achieving that goal. To achieve the goal, if we can rid ourselves of the weight of the backpack by simply throwing out its contents, then achieving the goal, climbing the mountain, may result in achieving the desired goal. This analogy is the key to the Zen story. If problems could be solved so simply in life as is implied by the climbing of the mountain analogy, then challenges in life may be more easily dealt with. The problem comes when the chains of memory weigh us down.

The climbing of the mountain analogy is a truly beautiful story and a very practical approach to solving life problems. Care must be taken to apply the strategy of the story to problems we think the strategy might apply. The appropriateness of a strategy might change with a better understanding of the impediments to a strategy. Understanding the impediments is the role of psychological counseling.

Closing Comments

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