– The human soul is stifled with heat
Wim Hof argues that the practice of cold helps man re-connect with his soul.
But what if cold will no longer be found on planet Earth, what will happen to the soul of the man? The awful consequences of pollution and of the resulting global warming, are not just going to affect next generations, they already affect us, our souls, right now. And in order to really understand this, contemplating the way factory chimneys everywhere destroy the landscape won’t be enough; we need to look up to the sky and take in the mountains, the glaciers. Right up there, however far and out of our view, is a reservoir of vital energy, nectar for the land, held as sacred: ice. The below-zero lifeblood is melting down bit by bit with every passing day, by human hand and its greed. Up to the mother of all mountains, and the holiest: the wondrous Himalaya; a mountain range spanning more than 3,500 km and eight different Asian countries, feeding major rivers like the Ganges and Mekong.
– From the majesty of snow-capped peaks to the naked stone
Should the climate protection goals set during the 2015 Paris Conference be unattainable, and temperatures rise with a further 2°C, the consequences would be devastating, for the Himalayas and planet Earth as a whole.
At least according to the Nepal-based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development, an inter-government science organization that has employed 350 researchers from 22 different countries over a 5-year period, to come up with a report of over 600 pages. According to this geological study, more than 2/3 of the glaciers in the entire Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain range are at risk of disappearing completely by 2100 due to global warming. Basically, what is now ice and snow will soon be nothing else than a bunch of bare, lifeless rocks.
To that end, the great Italian climber Simone Moro spoke with words of grave apprehension, as reported by Il Corriere della Sera newspaper:
"It's frightening, not just how much glaciers have melted and shrunk, but how much they've thinned as well. Just to be clear, the glacier used to be a blanket for the mountains, but now it's only a thin veil, and in a few years the mountain is at risk of being left naked."
– Great Shiva, where art thou?
Among the more celebrated occurrences of Hindu culture is the pilgrimage to the phallus of Shiva. Located inside the holy cave of Amaranth, at 3,888 meters of altitude in the Kashmir region, said phallus (lingam in sanskrit) is an ice stalagmite over three and a half meters tall and two and a half meters wide that, as if by magic, swells and shrinks with the lunar phases. For a very long time now, hundreds of thousands devotees have been braving the steep climb to offer their votes and prayers to this icy manifestation of Shiva, one of the most powerful deities of Hinduism. Yet the staggering rise in temperatures, by now stable at around 33°C, are causing it to melt. The Lingam of Amaranth's very survival is now at risk, and it is now down to a tenth of its original size. And perhaps, today the survival of the very soul of man is in jeopardy, without an icy cave in which to exist.
