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.
One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.
A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
Come into the silence of solitude, and the vibration there will talk to you through the voice of God.
The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.
I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
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