The Darker Mountain

The same mechanism that builds your proudest achievements builds your suffering too — and you hide that darker side even from yourself.

I was walking with a dear friend on a nearby hiking trail recently. We had not seen each other in a few years. We were chatting about what had happened in our lives in the interim. To spice up the conversation, I asked her to pause for a minute to reflect on one of the worst moments of her life. She paused, thought for a few seconds. I asked her to describe the situation — no specifics. She said that something had happened and that she was hurt and distraught. Her beliefs and assumptions were shaken. It was tough for the next year or two, but she finally managed to move past it.

Then I asked, “Would you describe that one- to two-year period as suffering?” She said, “No...” then paused and added, “Yes, I was indeed suffering during those years.” We didn’t discuss what we each meant by “suffering” or why she paused before acknowledging it.

Fast forward a few weeks. Enter hot mush time.

Hot Mush Time

One night, I was in India, 12:30 hours away in a different time zone, a few hours past midnight. I was alerted to the news that the company I work for had decided to reduce its workforce by 30%. A big number. There was also a voluntary separation plan. My mind went numb and stayed that way for a few days. I was in India because my father was ill. He had a mild stroke. He was in physical therapy, with my mom as his primary caregiver, struggling hard to regain his lost mobility. Frail body, further weakened by the stroke, struggling to regain control — that’s suffering we quickly recognize. For me, it was a ripe condition for a mushy mind.

As the company announcement spread, there was widespread uncertainty and confusion at work. Being available to the team while in a different time zone was physically and mentally taxing. I did what my role required. I barely slept for the rest of that night and the following night. My body was already struggling with jet lag.

I wish I could write about all this as someone who had conquered such situations. Patterns learned over a lifetime kicked in. My mountain resisted what was happening. I felt numb as I went through the motions. My thoughts and emotions pulled in different directions, assessing, predicting, imagining, and scheming.

First, there was a sense of freedom and mild excitement. Maybe this is the time for me to gently step away from work and explore a different working identity. What would that look like? Am I ready? Are my finances in order? How might the situation pan out? What happens if I decide to stay, but my company does not want me there? That could be another forced outcome, but not much different from me choosing to exit. Just different timelines and different runways. My mountain was seeking vindication and assurances for its survival.

What if I get to stay? What about all the things that needed to be done? Who might stay? Who might leave? Who might be impacted? How can I help? How do I pick up the pieces and restitch? How do I earn the trust of those who remain? Why should they trust me? How do I drive clarity and purpose? What about my purpose and clarity? Is that still intact and valid? More questions that required more assessing, predicting, imagining, and scheming.

My mind was a mushy mixture of sadness, concern, and anxiety. I knew that I was suffering. I have dealt with much worse before. I could name and describe the phenomena in my head, and yet I was stuck in that mush for a few days. Why was it? What happened to all the wisdom I tucked on my mountain? Shouldn’t that awareness free me from that suffering? What was going on?

Appropriation — The Scenic Side

Remember how the mountain forms — slowly, with effort, experience, expertise, and accomplishments over time adding mass, weight, and shape? That’s what we refer to in good times, and when our status and stability are threatened. But what is the precise mechanism that helps such mass, weight, and shape accumulate? That’s essence building and appropriation.

Imagine your team’s accomplishment becoming your leadership success. You first see an accomplishment. You quietly explore your relationship with it. You notice all that you did in that situation. Those stories then become your contribution to that success. The more meaning you give them, the more real your contributions appear. They become part of your story. Notice the trick? You quietly feed the essence — events and actions become contributions — and then you claim them. That claiming is mamaṃkāra (mine-making). Your story solidifies. I boldly set an ambitious course for the team. I masterfully unblocked everything. I fought for resources. I hired the best. You feed the essence and then appropriate it. That “I did this” is ahaṃkāra (I-making). That story is now part of your mountain.

Consider the rapid growth your unit experienced as evidence of your perseverance and hard work in your narrative for your job interview. We executed hard. We beat our competitors. We kept winning. I made that happen. The same mechanism.

Or think of your kid’s accomplishment at school that makes you proud. That’s my kid. We gave him the best. We taught him everything right. We set him up for success. Look at him right now. That’s the same mechanism.

Appropriation is how the mountain is formed in the first place. It feels earned rather than imagined, with shape, weight, and history. It appears self-made — you got evidence. Our minds reflexively superimpose fixed, independent meanings onto our fluid experiences, as Nagarjuna warned. The mind quietly compresses messy, contingent, distributed events into clean, bounded things, giving Svabhava (intrinsic nature or essence), and then quietly appropriates them.

That’s the pretty and scenic side of the mountain. That’s the side you want others to see. That’s the side you refer to when you are challenged. That side affirms your existence and uniqueness in this world.

Appropriation — The Darker Side

Back to my situation. I was rapidly assessing the situation, predicting possibilities, and imagining options, constantly cross-checking with the mountain. What does this situation mean to me? What does it mean to the ideas I hold? What does it mean to the worries I protect?

It’s like building sandcastles — imagine a little at first, then more, then come back a bit later and imagine more, until it takes shape and feels real. I was predicting what might or might not happen. I was giving those sandcastles meaning and essence. I was rehearsing possibilities, like a broken record playing the same music in a loop. I was fabricating possibilities to keep my mountain — my identity — intact.

But I didn’t stop there. While fabricating those sandcastles, I also started annexing some of them, making them mine. Sadness became my sadness. The uncertainty became my uncertainty. The leadership challenge became my leadership challenge.

Just as you make your company’s success your success, my company’s decision to trim by 30% became my burden to carry. My doubt about what would happen to me, my worry about how to hold the team together, and my sadness about the situation all join those other failures and setbacks I have hidden on the other side of my mountain. They thus became part of my identity. Same process and same outcomes — scenic or dark, proud or sad.

This is the darker side of the mountain. That’s the side you and I hide — not just from each other, but also from ourselves. I must feel sad for the people being impacted, I told myself as I dug myself into the suffering.

The Hold

This system is self-reinforcing — essence feeds appropriation, appropriation feeds identity, identity feeds essence-building. No single entry or exit point. You know you are suffering, but there does not seem to be an exit. Suffering becomes something that the mind wants to continue. Here is who I am, this is what happened to me, and I must suffer in this situation — the mind continues to argue to protect that identity. That’s what my friend went through. That’s how people spend months and years grieving and carrying forward their traumas for decades.

I was threat analyzing and problem-solving in near real time as the situation unfolded. That got me into that mushy mixture of sadness, concern, and anxiety. I knew what was going on. I have written about parts of it. I had elegant metaphors for describing it — like the mountain, sandcastles, and clouds. Yet, I was stuck in that spiral. My awareness didn’t free me.

The two sides aren’t different in how they’re built. They are different in how you experience them. You experience the scenic side as your dignified visible identity. That’s how you like to appear to others. You claim it openly, you defend it knowingly. You proclaim it as your authenticity. But you experience the darker side differently — it’s not you, it was a mishap, it was something that happened to you, as if it were not your doing.

That’s the trap. That misunderstanding is what digs you deeper into suffering. Letting go of such suffering would mean letting go of the narratives it supported. That’s scary — a destabilizing situation calling for destabilizing the mountain?

Does time help? Time heals, they say. It appeared so in my friend’s case. But no. Time does not heal. Over time, the hold relaxes, not because the mind becomes wiser, but because it moves on to other ways of feeding essence and appropriation. The old suffering just got old. My friend had less identity investment in that particular situation now than in the past. It was still painful, but there was new fodder. The mind needs new fodder to keep reifying the mountain. Time is a false exit. But what’s the real exit?

The Real Exit

Back to my friend’s story. A day after our conversation, she told me what had happened. We spent almost two hours at the coffee table. She talked about the hurt, how she felt about that situation, and what she did to cope. I listened. After a bit, she said something in passing that stuck in my head: “When you renounce self, you renounce suffering.” I noted that sentence in my journal that day.

As I stand in the wreckage of the fresh situation, I see that sentence landing harder now than that day. What got me into the spiral was the appropriation. It has to dissolve, and the mountain has to go.