The Mountain Sage observes the play of shadow and light dancing on earth

“There is always somebody that knows, while you think you are hiding.”

The sages that have informed my writing, poetry, musings, stories, and art is Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Carl Gustav Jung, Siddhartha (primarily through the wisdom embodied by Lama Anagarika Govinda and Robert Thurman), Jean Gebser, John Vervaeke, Aldous Huxley, and many more – and the of course, the Mountain.

Knowing yourself beyond knowing happens in a relationship. Without such a relationship, it is difficult to move beyond what you know in your explorations of the relentless suffering in life.

To me, a sage hovers in the in-between Hermetic space, where agape ( unconditional love or divine love) is in relationship with dialogus ( a conversation or a genuine relationship ‘above and beyond mind’). There is a fractile continuity between the finite and the infinite, continuously transforming the love the sage embodies. We learn from the sage to deepen, see, be, and change how we participate in the properly lived moment in this world – an understanding that addresses the fugue of the meaning crisis.

In this sense, the wisdom of the Mountain sage is the air that rushes through the wings of poetic intuition as it bears itself to a great vantage to observe the play of the shadow and the light dancing on earth.

As Plato says, “whithersoever the wind, as it were, of the logos blows, there lies our course” (Republic III: 394d 9–10). Namely, to relinquish the theories of truth as coherence or correspondence and to see truth as a verb and an activity—like “balance” or “life.” It is a state we can enter as we can be “in love,” so we can attempt to dwell “in truth.” This is the only resolutiion

on to the “post-truth” phenomenon and the only deliverance from the fugue of the meaning crisis.