Well, first off, it was a really entertaining, page-turner of a read, with lots of cool stories, mostly about mountain climbers. Stories about ghosts, premonitions, telepathy, NDEs, hallucinations, and such. She does a very nice job of agnostically putting forth scientific explanations for things while keeping an open mind and respecting the experiences of her subjects. It’s fairly clear, on the other hand, that she believes in a lot of what she’s describing....
I’ve never been particularly interested in mountain-climbing myself given that, for one thing, I sure as hell don’t plan on doing any of it. It seems an even more dangerous and deadly endeavor than I thought. I think perhaps the majority of the stories in the book--including Coffey’s own--are told by those who lost loved ones to climbing....
The most interesting chapter, though, dealth with hallucinations. Contrary to what you might perhaps think, I don’t have a lot of experience with such. I had one definite auditory one. Two visual ones that come to mind, strangely, were both shared with one or two others, and so, who knows, may have been real. There was the standard Breathing Sidewalk one....
Anyway, my mom had some during her Alzheimer’s, and even--I guess, especially--secondhand, it’s disturbing. It’s often easy to ascribe them to some physical basis. Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, seizures, drugs. Still, when my mom saw dead people, it creeped me out. When my great uncle, in the late stages of Alzheimer’s himself, said, “I’ve seen what’s it’s like on the other side, and I don’t like it,” that was even creepier.
Not just mountain climbing, but enduring arctic conditions seems to lead to a particular type of hallucination where one sees and even interacts with another being. I was surprised by Coffey’s explanation of the mysterious lines in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When i count, there are only you and i together
But when i look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you....
Coffey says these were inspired by the extreme Antarctic experiences of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, during which he believed a mysterious presence guided him and his crew to safety. (Perhaps Eliot mentions this in his footnotes. I’m too lazy to get out up and check.)
Apparently, it is not uncommon for these apparitions to act as guides or aides. Anyway, Coffey discusses some research by Dr. Charles Houston that suggests that, in the case of mountain climbing, for instance, such hallucinations may be due to “miniature temporal lobe seizures, triggered by fatigue, low blood sugar, personal crisis, and anxiety.” To keep baggage to a minimum, mountaineers usually carry very little food and sometimes less than adequate clothing or shelter.
Similarly, BTW, as Coffey herself points out, Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed had their visions on mountains, each talking to devils, angels, or God. I know Jesus was subsisting on the usual locusts and honey diet, Moses had been living on manna, and Allah only knows what Mohammed had been ingesting. And while there is a long tradition in several religions of mystics and holy men living hermitic lives on mountains, there are also modern mountain climbers and other extreme atheletes who practice their sports for the express purpose of experiencing altered states of consciousness.
Surely there must be easier ways....
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