21/04/2026
#9 About Kailash, I seemed to know it as if it were a distant memory of my soul, which in the present felt irrelevant to me, and therefore lay somewhere deep, repressed into the unconscious. Over the past decade, I had known of it from others’ accounts - that it is a mountain somewhere in the East, surrounded by legends, to which traveler-mystics make their way; that time flows differently there, that there are mirrors distorting and compressing time; it is also said that the mountain’s pyramid-like form was not shaped by nature but deliberately created, and that within it the entire treasury of wisdom is preserved.
The mountain is like an Axis Mundi, the axis of the world, equated with the Divine; climbers seeking the highest summits are not allowed to ascend it, which would be not only a breach of discipline but also a great sin - as if there were something that protects against the inflation of the human Ego. An Ego that strives to climb and merge with the Self, to take the place of the Divine - people who, somewhere unconsciously, seek to become gods, ideas, temples. It is said that the mountain itself does not admit the unprepared, or those driven by impure motives.
Eight months after the previous journey, I realized that I could write or say very little about the mountain. So much has already been spoken - too much, and too carelessly.
Toward the mountain, as toward the Self, there are two possible paths, two so-called sacred Koras - the inner one, which is currently closed to tourists, allowing one to come closer, and the outer Kora, intended for circling the mountain. It is a 52-kilometer pilgrimage route at an altitude of 4800 - 5650 meters, completed over three days. I wonder whether, for tourists, the inner Kora toward the Self is also currently closed? How many new outer circles of life must one walk, how many recurring experiences must one undergo, before the Self - or the Mountain - allows us to come closer?