In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
Interpretation
The quote conveys a sense of transcending the self to experience a profound connection with the world.
Reinhold Messner's quote reflects a state of spiritual elevation where the individual feels detached from their own identity and perceptions. This radical abstraction suggests that in this elevated state, one becomes more of an observer, absorbed in the larger essence of existence, symbolized by the image of a gasping lung floating above the world. It speaks to the concept of losing oneself in the beauty and complexity of nature and life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding inner peace and connection with nature.
I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, 'He does all these crazy things.' But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, 'Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen - impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.'
A 30-year-old rock climber is an old man. At 40, one is in the middle of his high-altitude power. At 50, a crosser of deserts is at his best age. But at 60, each of us is out of the game.
I think my cultural work is more important than the adventures I did. The adventures are not important for human beings. It's the conquering of the useless.
In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.
I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.
I go to the mountains for an adventure and each time I pray I will get up and down again.
(What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness).Familiarity can blind you too.
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.
I see thee better in the dark I do not need a light.
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Men walk almost always in the paths trodden by others, proceeding in their actions by imitation.
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