The fashionable Ray Jardine on Separate Reality

I have found that the climbers who question the motives of those who do first ascents nearly always lack the experience of doing them themselves...

As others are pointing out upthread, the idea is snoringly simple, adapted from other nearly identical devices that had been around for a very long time and even already devised specifically by climbers like Lowe. It was hardly something Jardine should be seen as a genius for.

My parents had tons of integrity but mistakenly assumed I would naturally follow along. So there was, as I remember it, little instruction in that area, a serious oversight on their part. I had to develop integrity the hard way, and I did -- with the help of many examples, and also with the long suffering and patience of my friends and for their not focusing on my stupid moments. The greatest of the climbers I knew were the most forgiving and good souled. It seemed always the lesser climbers who had the meanest hearts. Somehow my perception of this world is that a life is a progression, at best. Each of us starts somewhere and hopefully grows, hopefully learns, hopefully transcends pride, ego, dishonesty, and all the rest. Not one of us is perfect. We start out (using the analogy of a piano) playing Mary Had A Little Lamb. We make mistakes all over the keyboard. If we stay at it, we refine our technique, get better, do better. Some will always hold to the view they had of you when you were floundering to find the notes. That we are in a progression, or that life is the opportunity for such, I am convinced, and thus it often is better to worry about the mote in one's own eye rather than spend precious energy judging others. Sure judgments can be made, and accurately, but are they helpful and constructive to the person to whom they are given, or are they extensions of our own sense of greatness, our own sense of elitism? I've gotten caught up in this bad kind of judgment and criticism. And of course some won't grow, or won't visibly grow, with any amount of help, and some will go the other way, and that's always sad. They might be the people who least need our condescensions, in view of possibly sending them deeper the wrong way. Who knows?