Part II
A Closer Look:
The Inner Labyrinth of Pilgrimage
Introduction
Much of this work, so far, has been focused on contemplating the meaning of pilgrimage in its many manifestations. A variety of definitions of pilgrimage have been considered and illustrated, and a variety of religious and cultural traditions have been identified and discussed. Up until this point, I have been primarily pondering the external phenomenon of pilgrimage. This has been important in creating some sense of understanding of the great tradition of pilgrimage that has served the yearnings of millions of people since time immemorial. However, the time has now come to delve into the dark, shadowy, mysterious side of pilgrimage.
When considering what pilgrimage has been, it is easy to survey history, exploring the religious and cultural traditions of pilgrimage that have spanned thousands of years. In Part II, A Closer Look: The Inner Labyrinth of Pilgrimage, I will be considering a much different set of ideas. It is easy to stand outside of pilgrimage and define it, categorizing the details of the rituals and practices along the way. This has been done many times from many perspectives, and a significant amount of information is available. But from within the pilgrimage journey, the task becomes much more difficult. Regardless of religious traditions, cultures, and historical periods, individual experiences always vary, and are, in turn, rather challenging to study.
Challenging? Yes. Impossible? Hardly. Worthwhile? Absolutely, if for no other reason than the fact that there is a dearth of information pertaining to the innerworkings of pilgrimage, and specifically the process of personal transformation that occurs as a result of pilgrimage. These kinds of experiences have been left up to mystics and, more recently, the New Age movement for interpretation, since they often defy the logical processes of solid, rational research. The inner experience of pilgrimage is, indeed, inscrutable. When fellow pilgrim Phil Cousineau thinks of sacred journeys “the word ineffable comes to mind. The experiences that travelers have at Delphi, Avebury, Bodh Gaya, are often unspeakable, seemingly impossible to put into words” (Cousineau 165).
As I see it, in order to understand the ineffable side of pilgrimage, it will be necessary to suspend the demands of the rational mind for a while. It is necessary to enter into a variety of mysterious experiences and listen to the truths that lie within them. In doing this, two things must happen. First, patience. Just as there is no easy road to personal transformation, there is no quick path to finding these answers. I will address a variety of elements, one by one, and consider their contributions to the inner experience of pilgrimage. Second, it will be necessary to set aside our mind’s desire to reduce these experiences into a concrete set of generalized ideas that fundamentally define the innerworkings of pilgrimage. While a series of commonalities will certainly emerge, they are by no means definitive or all-encompassing. Keeping these limitations in mind, Part II will explore pilgrimage from the inside, attempting to offer a clearer understanding of its transcendent nature through a series of stages and phases that tend to occur during pilgrimages and spiritual quests with some regularity.
Phil Cousineau identifies two important sides of the study that I am in the midst of exploring: “For some travelers the meaning of a pilgrimage is in the moment of arrival. For others, the meaning is in the journey itself, where every step reveals a piece of the answer being sought” (Cousineau 173). As has already been seen, an extensive variety of research has been done about the holy destinations, the moments of arrival, the sacred offerings and rituals, and the whole traditional practice of pilgrimage with its solemnity, grandeur, and ceremonious displays. However, as Cousineau suggests, for some people the meaning is in the journey itself, and one cannot hope to find understanding of the intricacies of intimate moments of transcendence in the annals of cultural and religious history. It will be important to consider the experiences and reflections of individual pilgrims, relying upon personal accounts of the process of exploring the meaning of the journey, as well as the few works that exist that have already begun to approach pilgrimage from this angle. This is a daunting task that few have elected to pursue, and I can understand why. The attempt to study something as recondite as religious or mystical experience, including the transformative process of a sacred journey, is like trying to catch a cloud with my bare hands. So, I have not sought to catch the cloud. Instead, I have chosen to gather a few dewy particles from within the body of the cloud. I have chosen to flow along with the movement of the cloud, inspecting it under a magnifying lens from a variety of angles. I have consulted a variety of perspectives from other people who have ventured inside of the cloud and explored the experience, and I have ventured inside of it myself. This unusual style of research has proven fruitful, though unconventional. Indeed, “every step reveals a piece of the answer being sought.” Little by little, one piece at a time, I have assembled these ideas, offering a contemporary perspective of The Inner Labyrinth of Pilgrimage.
This section will approach the inner landscape of pilgrimage from a variety of angles in order to discover the characteristic experiences of pilgrimage and sacred journeys. Individual pilgrims have often shared their stories in autobiographical narratives and memoirs. These works have been instrumental, as they are the only sources I’ve found that offer honest revelations of intensely personal experiences, thoughts, and feelings from the midst of pilgrimage, and they have helped me to piece together a larger series of ideas. In order to inform my interpretations of these narratives, I have sought the guidance of specialists in the field of psychology. This has been indispensable in attempting to understand the motivations that bring people to embark on pilgrimages, as well as the reactions, struggles, and epiphanies that occur during the journey. It has proven important to consider these perspectives of psychology alongside an array of experiences of pilgrimage. It seems that what might drive one person to the therapist’s chair might drive another to the pilgrimage road. The struggles of discontent and feeling lost that individuals experience are much the same.
In addition, what might drive one person to the therapist’s chair might drive another to the ashram, temple, church, or mosque. With this in mind, I will also consider the teachings of a few contemporary spiritual teachers, as they offer thoughts on the spiritual search, of which pilgrimage is often an enactment. As well, I will address several works from the fields of anthropology, history, and religious studies, some of them written by experts who are also pilgrims themselves. I have not found any single source that proposes to study pilgrimage from this angle.
The goal of Part II is to introduce the reader to a broader vision of pilgrimage, at least in the ways that relatively wealthy postmodern spiritual seekers have begun to pursue it. What Part II does not seek to do is define pilgrimage or offer a definitive argument that declares an infallible set of ideas or structures of pilgrimage experience. It also does not seek to define a universal experience of contemporary pilgrimage for every culture and every person. There are a tremendous number of sources and ideas that could influence this discussion, for sure, and there are an endless number of possibilities for interpreting and understanding the innerworkings of the human spirit. For the sake of this work, I will engage in a dialogue with a variety of sources that will offer insight into the deeply personal, transformative experiences that occur in the midst of pilgrimage today, primarily in the Americas and Europe, and primarily over the course of the last 100 years.
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Perspectives on The Search
I will soon delve more deeply into the interior of pilgrim experiences, thoughts, motivations, and revelations, but it seems appropriate at this time to consider the deep impulse behind the whole of pilgrimage. Again, this could become an epic study in itself, and the purpose of this exploration is only to introduce some of the fundamental thoughts behind the spiritual search itself, of which pilgrimage is an enactment.
Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have been searching for the answers to questions that are often difficult to articulate, and nearly impossible to answer. Philosopher Frithjof Schuon, in fact, define humanity by this impulse. “The sufficient reason for the existence of the human creature is the capacity to think; not to think just anything, but to think about what matters, and finally, about what alone matters ... the why of the world, of the soul, of existence” (Schuon 149). He suggests that it is the nature of humans to ask these kinds of “questions and to have, in consequence, the right to answers ... to have access to them ... whether through Revelation or through Intellection” (Schuon 149). While institutions of religion have often provided a framework for answering many of these spiritual questions, these answers aren’t always enough. Some people are plagued by a lingering sense of longing, the desire to feel, touch, and experience for themselves something that leaves them filled with the kind of knowing that can only come from direct contact with the sublime.
Osho, a twentieth century Indian mystic and spiritual teacher, looks more deeply into the nature of the search in terms of two predominant states of mind:
The Hindu passion is not too concerned about knowing, but about being ... who am I? Not to know it in a logical way, but to drown in one’s own existence so one can taste it, so one can be it - because there is no other way to know, really. If you ask Hindus, they will say there is no other way to know than to be (Osho 38)
In contrast with this way of knowing, he offers his interpretation of the “Greek” mind, which is
dispassionate, standing outside, watching, unprejudiced. Be objective, be impersonal ... don’t allow your emotions to color anything ... You can never come to know mind that way ... you can never come to know consciousness that way. You can know the outside, you can never know the inside - because in the inside you are already involved. There is no way to stand outside of it ... How can I watch myself dispassionately? I am involved in it. I cannot be outside it. (Osho 38)
The “Greek” mind is undoubtedly more common in the west today, and as Osho argues, this kind of thinking is of little use as individuals seek to unravel their personal mysteries. Also, in considering his notion of “Hindu” mind, one gains insight into one of the primary reasons people have taken this search to the pilgrimage road: “to drown in one’s own existence.”
This “Hindu” mind of which Osho speaks is clearly more than a Hindu phenomenon, it is the intuitive mind that dwells within each person, filled with longing and yearning that is often vague and difficult to define, though powerful all the same. It is the “Hindu” mind that brings people, in the words of Phil Cousineau, “the intensity of intention, the soul’s desire to respond to return to the center, whether it portends ecstasy or agony” (Cousineau 15). Throughout spiritual literature there are vague references that refer to this “center” and the longing to return there, uniting with it in some way. This is often believed to be the seed of all that people are searching for.
Pastor Erwin McManus defines the search from a slightly different angle. “Our longing ... is to travel and live free from the constraints of conformity and compromise” (McManus 249). His words suggest that instead of seeking to “return to the center,” people are seeking to shed the shackles that bind them to ordinary, worldly existence, escaping into a higher realm. Whether people are longing for this mysterious “center” or to pursue a greater sense of freedom, it becomes clear that there is something that holds them back from experiencing the fulfillment of their longing. A significant part of the search, then, would be the discovery of these obstacles and their subsequent removal.
Much of the time, this longing is quelled in the midst of attending to daily life. People are pushed and pulled onward by the necessities of existence. People have to eat, to sleep, to pay the bills, and they are often caught up in taking care of themselves and others. Mystical yearnings are often lost. In the words of former monk Thomas Moore, “Religious traditions have long recognized the tendency in human life to get caught up in the mundane and to forget the eternal” (Moore 84). Life often traps people in its daily patterns, and has often led people to feel both “conformity” and “compromise” in their lives (McManus 249). Often people are happy in their mundane lives, and may live for years in contentment without a visit from this spiritual longing. However, Thomas Moore continues, “As strong as the yearning for attachment is, there is obviously something else in us that yearns for solitude, freedom, and detachment” (Moore 11). Though this feeling is difficult to articulate, a seed of discontent begins to brew, and one becomes restless.
This resulting restlessness, which has already been discussed to some degree in Part I, often fuels a desire to escape. Maria and Michael Scaperlanda have observed the ways that people attempt to deal with this desire: “When we realize how unsatisfied we remain, even with all our possessions, activities, and rewards, some of us just work harder to get more of the same. Others give up, preferring to numb their pain with distractions” (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 19). And for many people, the pursuit of distractions is satisfying enough for a while.
For some people, the longing to understand life’s mysteries never becomes a priority. For others, this restlessness is a fuel for the search, and mystical contemplation can only be brushed aside for so long before it erupts, demanding to be heard. This often appears as an identity crisis or an existential crisis, which overwhelms some people. William James, an expert in the psychology of religious experience, looks at this crisis as the accumulation of “Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations” and as these factors come together, the spiritual search is born: “something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it” (James 84). In the midst of this crisis, logic and reason are no longer sufficient to push it aside, and one must pursue answers. The spiritual search becomes all-consuming.
Sam Keen, noted lecturer in the fields of religion, philosophy, and psychology, is undoubtedly familiar with the search for meaning, both personally and professionally. Like many people, he was filled with the very human yearning to transcend his mundane daily existence and to find a deeper purpose in life. He describes this yearning:
Some urge, some instinct, keeps driving me to transcend my encapsulation. I have a completely unverifiable feeling that something in my DNA has destined me to become a butterfly. I am programmed to escape from this cocoon, to fly in the direction of the Beyond, but I neither know how to fly nor do I know the route ... I can only hope that some inner compass will guide me on the journey. (Keen 30)
The urge is enshrouded in mystery and unutterable; like Keen, people find it difficult to articulate what it is that they seek. All they know is that the pull is irresistible, bubbling up from deep within them, urging them to wonder, contemplate, and explore. Thomas Moore identifies the same yearning. “Something in us - tradition calls it spirit - wants to transcend these messy conditions of actual life to find some blissful or at least brighter experience, or an expression of meaning that will take us away intellectually from the quagmire of actual existence” (Moore 5). Both Moore and Keen identify the feeling as one of escape. The escape into a journey of transcendence, though, follows a much different path than the pursuit of distractions. It becomes less about an escape from something and more about a retreat into a realm of personal discovery.
It is up to each individual person to choose how s/he will approach the quest for answers. Some people pursue a creative process, some choose psychotherapy, others choose religion. The Scaperlandas suggest that some people pursue these questions by setting out on spiritual journeys:
How shall I live my life? Where will I find meaning? To whom or what shall I attach myself? These ultimate questions penetrate every human heart and unsettle it ... [some people] surrender to these questions by journeying ... to Rome, Jerusalem, Mount Carmel, Mecca, the Ganges River, the Shikoku temples in Japan, and various other places of “sacred wisdom” in search of answers. An abiding hunger for meaning permeates us, provoking us to seek our origins, purposes, and destinies. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 7)
Wherever or however a person chooses to engage this spiritual quest, its path is often as mysterious as the longing that drew him/her to pursue it.
In choosing to make a spiritual journey in attempt to satisfy this deep inner longing, many people may have no idea what to expect. In the beginning many people approach the search with vague ideas and mystical imagery, but in truth, much of the search is rooted in the process of self-discovery. Maria Scaperlanda suggests that this process is unfamiliar territory for most people.
Most of us don’t spend much time with self-analysis. In fact, if we err too much in one direction, it is in not giving the time and energy necessary to know ourselves and our God-given personalities, our needs, and our gifts. Coming to know myself is, clearly, an important part of the spiritual journey (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 21)
While this process of self-analysis and discovery is a crucial element in any spiritual discipline, with the distractions of everyday life, it is rare for a person to be able to dedicate a significant amount of time and energy to the process. When a person chooses to dedicate him/herself to the search along the pilgrimage road, s/he is committing to a process of self-discovery that is difficult and demanding. In this way, pilgrimage is often an important tool in the spiritual search.
When people devote themselves to this search, most don’t experience the trances and visions that are so often a part of religious folklore. What some people begin to discover as they ground their spiritual longings in their own paths of self-discovery are the honest sources of discontent in their lives. Sometimes, this kind of discovery isn’t the least bit mystical or vague, but quite clear and graspable. Many people find that they are not living in a way that feels true to themselves, and often aren’t even sure what the alternatives are. Renowned psychologist Carol Gilligan discovered, in her research, a yearning for healing and authenticity in many men and women.
A search for truth was ... revealing the extent to which neither men or women felt authentic. How had this happened? Where had they split with their souls, their desires ... Led by an awareness of this disconnection, I began to explore the roots of what seemed a pervasive trauma ... our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel our feelings. (Gilligan 6)
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron continues the idea:
We are told from childhood that something is wrong with us, with the world, and with everything that comes along; it’s not perfect, it has rough edges, it has a bitter taste, it’s too loud, too soft, too sharp, too wishy-washy. We cultivate a sense of trying to make things better because something is bad here, something is a mistake here, something is a problem here. (Chodron 123)
Essentially, she identifies this as, “the dualistic struggle, our habitual tendency to struggle against what’s happening to us or in us” (Chodron 123). In day-to-day living people don’t often have the opportunity to ponder these kinds of feelings in great depth, and often go on for years feeling that something isn’t right, just below the surface, but unable to figure out what it’s all about.
When a person begins to pursue the spiritual search, s/he may begin to understand the ways that s/he feels less than whole. Many people have been told that they’re not okay, that the world isn’t okay, that everything has problems, that they should try to fix it. And yet many people don’t know where to begin since they feel broken themselves. People want to fix things, they want everything to be better, but they feel powerless to change anything. Faith or no faith, this is a difficult crisis to encounter, and even more difficult to heal. This healing is at the heart of the spiritual search as people follow the path of pilgrimage, where inner and outer worlds meet. Phil Cousineau poetically observes this connection: “Everywhere, the way of the pilgrim is twofold, exterior and interior, the simultaneous movement of the feet and the soul through time as well as space” (Cousineau 94). As people enter the spiritual journey, Maria Scaperlanda adds that it is the “pilgrim heart” that must be cultivated in order to gain healing and true knowledge (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 23). It is this “pilgrim heart” that brings the inner and outer worlds together, too, and guides the inner reflective process to ever-increasing depths.
One last idea must be presented in considering the search: what is the role of religion? To some people it is central, providing the worldview through which they approach the journey and the search itself. But beyond the personal and cultural attachment to tradition, does religion matter? Psychologist-turned-philosopher William James discussed this question in great depth in a series of lectures from 1901-1902, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. In his point of view, all thoughts and feelings that are perceived by religious devotees to be religious in nature are merely very ordinary, human thoughts and feelings perceived through the perspective of a religious mind.
There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is ... [the] natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast ... religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations ... and there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion, but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific and essential kind of religious act. (James 32-33)
It seems that James would suggest that religious seeking, too, is merely an extension of the deeply rooted human search for meaning. In his perspective, religion is simply the filter through which some individuals approach their longing, providing a format for approaching the search. In turn, the spiritual journey is not inextricably linked to any religious institution or motivation, but to the inherent religious impulse in humanity.
Structures
Now that I’ve begun to examine the spiritual search itself, it is important to take a closer look at the details of the process that unfolds as individuals carry their longing into the trials of self-discovery along the pilgrimage road. It is easy to become lost in the labyrinth of this subject matter, so a structure of some kind will be helpful Fortunately, some thought has already been given to the structure of the pilgrimage journey. Phil Cousineau has arranged the sections of his book, The Art of Pilgrimage, according to a traditional structure of pilgrimage: The Longing, The Call, Departure, The Pilgrim’s Way, The Labyrinth, Arrival, and Bringing Back the Boon (Cousineau). Cousineau offers several complimentary theories about the structure of journeys as well:
In Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey or monomyth, the sequence goes: separation, initiation, return. In William Melczer’s view, pilgrimage, like ritual processions to churches, synagogues, or mosques, is a progression that moves in a circle ... in this observation, the pilgrim’s cycle replays nature’s pattern of regeneration, a journey consisting of departure, arrival, and return. (Cousineau 82)
Cousineau continues, offering the research of the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep: “the universal rite of passage consists of three stages: separation, ordeal, and reintegration. The cycle suggests that each movement from one life stage to another demands a break from the past, the enduring of an ordeal, and then a return to ordinary life” (Cousineau 82). Joseph Turner illustrates van Gennep’s idea further:
The first phase comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group ... during the intervening liminal phase, the state of the ritual subject ... becomes ambiguous, he passes through a realm or dimension that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state, he is betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification; in the third phase the passage is consummated, and the subject returns to classified secular or mundane social life. (Turner & Turner 2)
While these three-part structures do capture the essential framework of the pilgrimage journey, I am left feeling that it is too simple, offering merely a superficial impression. Even Cousineau’s framework could be reduced to a similar structure, though fortunately his own structure includes more specific stages, which I believe are crucial in understanding the whole process of pilgrimage. Since I plan to venture into the “ambiguous” (as Turner puts it) realm of inner experience a more specific structure of the stages of the journey will be helpful, grounding the exploration a bit more clearly. I propose my own structure of the journey:
Stages of the Journey
Pre-pilgrimage
The Spark
Undeniable Knowing
Pilgrimage
Leaving Home Behind
On the Road
The Experience Intensifies
Arrival and/or Climax
Post-pilgrimage
The Return Home
These stages are inspired by the common threads of experience that I have observed in a variety of pilgrimage stories and memoirs, as well as my own journeys, and can be easily observed in most accounts of pilgrimage, which will be illustrated as Part II unfolds. In identifying the three primary stages, pre-pilgrimage, pilgrimage, and post-pilgrimage, I have followed the ideas of Campbell, van Gennep, and Melczer, orienting them toward pilgrimage.
Following each primary stage are a series of secondary stages which identify integral turning points along the way. These secondary stages offer the structure substance, and it is these that will be taken apart and explored in the chapters that follow. During the pre-pilgrimage stage, the spark refers to the initial inspiration that is the birth of the journey. Undeniable knowing is the moment when the journey is no longer merely an idea, when the musing becomes serious, and planning begins. This continues until the moment the pilgrim embarks on the journey. During the pilgrimage stage, leaving home behind is the moment of separation from all that is familiar, and on the road follows as the newness of the experience settles into a groove. The experience intensifies, bringing with it a variety of struggles, body, mind, and spirit, and the intensity escalates to the climax. While the climax is often synonymous with arrival at the sacred destination, it can also include moments of surrender or epiphany that leave the pilgrim utterly changed. Finally, Post-pilgrimage, where the return home brings the pilgrim both comfort following the difficult journey, as well as the space and time to reflect upon the experiences and lessons therein.
Forming a structure of the inner experiences of pilgrimage based in research has proven challenging. Due to the inherently complicated nature of exploring such arcane experiences, most researchers have chosen to delve more deeply into the history and culture of pilgrimage instead, keeping to subjects that can be studied in highly logical ways. However, it has been acknowledged that in order to fully research and understand some ideas, the logical, objective position of the outsider, the “Greek” mind Osho identified earlier, just doesn’t suffice. Victor Turner shares the findings of anthropologist Charles Laughlin: “like others who have experienced the nonordinary in their fieldwork, [Laughlin] argues that the full impact of religious material cannot be understood by an anthropologist without some kind of plunge into the experience of it” (Turner & Turner xix). I have done exactly that.
While in Paris in late September of 2006, I found myself deep in the throes of contemplating the inner experience of pilgrimage while in the midst of what was becoming a surprisingly journey. I carefully observed the process of transformation that was unfolding before my eyes. Over the course of a week, I fleshed out my own theory of what was happening during my journey in Paris, while also considering my previous pilgrimage journeys. In my research, I have found few ideas that approach the same kind of theory. At most there have been occasional hints of similar ideas, including a particularly helpful one offered by Huston Smith, religious historian: “four aspects to pilgrimage: singleness of purpose; freedom from distraction; ordeal or penance; and offerings” (Cousineau 107). These aspects were a good start, though not thorough enough to satisfy my own sense about what I had experienced. So, I gathered together all these perspectives on structures, and while also considering my own experiences from the four pilgrimages that I took between 2004 and 2006, I established an outline of the phases of inner experience:
Phases of Inner Experience & Transformation
Phase One: Awakening
The vacation of the mind, clearing, making room for the important,
yet neglected thoughts and feelings to surface
Solitude, aloneness, anonymity, and simplicity
The unknown, place, idealism, and sacred space
Present moment awareness
Phase Two: Exploration
Allowing the thoughts and feelings to surface, those that yearn
to be heard, dealt with, and acknowledged
Exploration: identity, authenticity, and idealism
Struggles, obstacles, tests, and challenges
Phase Three: The Point of No Return
Approaching the climax
Authenticity
Confrontation, conflict, and realization
Enlightenment, surrender, epiphany
Phase Four: The Return Home
Going on with life
Integration, reflection, change, and adaptation
New knowledge and understanding
These phases are deeply intertwined with the previously proposed stages of the journey. While the pre-pilgrimage stages, the spark and undeniable knowing, are essential in the overall process of the journey, it isn’t until the pilgrim departs that these phases of inner experience begin for most people. During the pilgrimage stage Phase One begins as the pilgrim leaves home behind and continues into the on the road stage, providing the setting for this phase of the journey to unfold. There are several elements provided by this new setting at the beginning of the journey, which include aloneness, anonymity, solitude, simplicity, the unknown, place, sacred space, and present moment awareness. These elements, which will be explored in more detail as I proceed, deliver the pilgrim into a new state of being. While the pilgrim is on the road, Phase One transitions into Phase Two, which is propelled forward by the process of inner and outer exploration, and continues as the experience intensifies, bringing a variety of struggles, obstacles, tests, and challenges. Phase Three enters toward the end of that stage of intensification, and with it come moments of confrontation, conflict, and realization, as well as enlightenment, surrender, and epiphanies, which peaks as the experience reaches the point of no return, the climax, and often the moment of arrival as well. As a result, the pilgrim receives new knowledge and understanding that are the gift of the transformation. The Post-pilgrimage stage then aligns with Phase Four as the pilgrim returns home, and begins the long process of integration, change, and adaptation, and going on with life.
These stages, phases, and elements occur in most journeys, in varying degrees, and are sometimes cyclical within a single journey as well, as the structure often occurs on both the greater level of the entire journey, as well as during smaller periods of several days, or sometimes even within a single day or a single intense experience. However, it is not my intention to delve into the micro/macro levels of this structure within this thesis. In the chapters that follow, I intend to illustrate the stages and phases of the journey as they unfold during pilgrimage. Occasionally there is some degree of overlap, as the pilgrim’s experiences during each stage of the journey are reflected into the inner phases. Often the two are so interconnected that it is difficult to separate them, and I have allowed some repetition to remain in order to illustrate these connections more thoroughly.
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Pre-Pilgrimage
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The Spark
There is inevitably a moment when the idea to make a pilgrimage appears. Whether to a familiar place that has called out to one’s imagination for a long time, or to a place that drifts through one’s mind in an unexpected moment of reverie, some people can trace the initial idea to make a journey back to a single point of knowing. For others, the idea slowly appears out of nowhere, and it is more difficult to trace it back to a single point in time. Sometimes subtle, and sometimes like a force, from the moment that the idea appears and a person begins to contemplate making the journey, in some small way it has already begun. This is the spark.
Behind the spark is the pilgrim’s unfulfilled longing, all of his/her deepest questions, spiritual and otherwise. As people go about their lives, this longing knocks occasionally, but it is easy to overlook. Often people long to know more, to know things deeper, to feel some greater connection with God or nature or some other vast, all-pervading source. But just as often, people long to escape the mundane drudgery of our daily existence. The spark itself is rooted in this everyday longing. It mysteriously visits some individuals, daring them to consider its proposition, and almost seems to tease them with the suggestion that they could actually take this longing more seriously. The spark stops people in their tracks, perhaps for the first time, as they begin to consider heeding its call. Maria Scaperlanda emphasizes that this call is much different from the common desire to escape: “it’s not a desire to run away from something ... but an awareness of being invited to go to something” (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 41).
The spark comes to individuals in a way that they are ready to receive. Sometimes the spark bubbles up from the depths of a person’s soul, and one day the idea emerges. Other times, outside forces seem to point a person in the direction of a journey, and if s/he is paying attention, the message becomes clear. John Brierley suggests that when the the spark appears, it is
a result of some deeper questioning of the purpose of our life, the classic existential crisis ... brought about by some external wake up call ... pilgrimage can be a way of breaking through resistances, releasing blocks and realising insights as to what prevents us being all that we are (Brierley, Camino Frances 35)
Phil Cousineau continues:
... when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun. At the crossroads moment, a voice calls to our pilgrim soul. The time has come to set out for the sacred ground - the mountain, the temple, the ancestral home - that will stir our heart and restore our sense of wonder. (Cousineau 9)
Though there are many variations of receiving the spark, a few clear variations have been recurring examples in my research.
For many people, the spark appears in the form of a “wake up call,” as Brierley previously suggested. American pastor Erwin McManus believes that while everyone yearns to live as if every day of their lives is an adventure and a journey,
... sometimes this yearning has been neglected or even rejected. The longing to be alive is drowned by lesser ambitions. We just want to make it through the day, survive, make ends meet, go through the routine, and then exist rather than live ... let me invite you to hear the roar inside your own soul. (McManus 5)
When a person’s soul can no longer stand this neglect, it shouts out “I want to live!” (McManus 5). In this moment, the spark can be ignited, urging a person to realign him/herself with the voice of his/her soul.
Though not always as dramatic as McManus suggests, the spark sometimes appears suddenly, surprising people when they least expect it. Thomas Moore shares Joseph Campbell’s thoughts on this: “The adventure may begin ... as a mere blunder ... or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths” (Moore 175-176). Though Campbell speaks primarily about the mythological hero’s journey, this is sometimes literally the case. The next thing a person knows, s/he has been lured into a journey.
For some people, the spark appears more gradually and as they begin to uncover their deepest longings, they remain at the edge of deeper knowing for an extended period of time. Eventually the spark is so ready to burst forth that the slightest yearning can trigger it. For writer Herman Hesse, as the spark began to emerge the longing to make a journey simmered at the edge of his consciousness.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home ... (Hesse 59)
As this kind of vague, yet deep longing begins to take shape, it is often when the spark appears that a clear idea to make a pilgrimage arises.
Henry David Thoreau, like Hesse, was often confronted by the seed of his own yearning, and followed the spark many times, most notably in his famous pilgrimage retreat to Walden Pond. Thoreau felt that “every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels” (Emerson & Thoreau 72). For Thoreau, the spark begged him to wander in order to reclaim himself, and his essay, “Walking” shares his thoughts as he followed that spark into the woods.
Peace Pilgrim experienced a strong connection between walking and spiritual practice, and it was during a meditative walk that her own spark appeared. She spent an entire night walking through the woods and eventually felt “ a complete willingness, without any reservations, to give my life to God and to service” (Pilgrim xiii). This feeling was the spark that inspired her inner pilgrimage, though several years of preparation were necessary before she embarked on her pilgrimage for peace.
For those people who are engaged in similar practices of meditation and prayer, the spark may visit during a period of silent contemplation. After many years of devoted spiritual practice and meditation, and many trips to India, during meditation American mystic Da Avabhasa was prompted to undertake a pilgrimage to the holy sites of Christianity. “I sat in meditation again. Our Lord’s Mother has moved me, and I have decided to leave the Ashram in order to make a pilgrimage” (Avabhasa 216). Though he was already well acquainted with the mysterious unfoldment of his own spiritual path, he experienced a flicker of doubt, as many people do when they receive the spark. “In meditation, I pleaded for guidance, so that I would not be tempted to uncertainty, so that I would certainly know the truth without fear that I am deluded” (Avabhasa 216). This doubt comes into consideration as a person begins to contemplate the idea presented by the spark.
Many saints and mystics, both ancient and modern, have been visited by the spark in the midst of their spiritually devoted lives. The Scaperlandas observe this:
There is no evidence that Abram needed to leave home for political or economic reasons ... his life was interrupted by a call to leave the familiar for the unknown ... God often comes as an annoyance in the night: Francis of Assisi, leave your privileged nobility, embrace a life of poverty ... Thomas More, leave your comfortable life at court as Henry VIII’s right-hand man and hold fast to the faith, even if it means imprisonment and beheading. Mother Teresa, leave your middle-class teaching assignment and follow me into the gutters of Calcutta, where you will spend your life picking up lepers with your bare hands and taking them home to care for them. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 68)
Though these men and women were already involved in their spiritual paths in varying degrees, the spark reached from beyond the present state of things, calling them to go deeper, learn more, and make tremendous sacrifices along the way.
While it is somewhat comforting to realize that even the world’s most advanced spiritual beings have received the spark, it can still seem intimidating for ordinary pilgrims to consider their own journey’s call alongside saints and gurus. The truth is that most people are not called to become spiritual heroes and save the world. They are simply asked to go deeper into themselves.
While the spark can appear during the brighter moments of their lives, it often appears during times of darkness. Sometimes a person feels like s/he has reached the end of the rope. S/he doesn’t know what to do with him/herself, or how to continue living his/her life. Sometimes, when life seems meaningless, a person enters into a state of unknowing that allows for a greater receptivity to the spark. “It arrives in various forms - an itch, a fever, an offer, a ringing, an inspiration, an idea, a voice, words in a book that seem to have been written just for us - or a knock” (Cousineau 36). Andrew Harvey experienced exactly this while a student at Oxford in the mid 1970s.
I drank too much, suffered bouts of insomnia and nervous hysteria, and despite the privilege and opulence that surrounded me, felt haunted by a longing to kill myself that I could confess to no one ... at twenty-five this sadness became so pervasive that I realized I was in real danger ... (Harvey 12)
In the midst of confusion and misery, an idea appeared: to return to the land of his birth, India. Having no better ideas, and nowhere else to turn, if a person listens to the spark, s/he will be guided into a journey that will change his/her life, refresh his/her spirit, and push him/her to depths of him/herself that s/he never knew was there.
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Undeniable Knowing
After a person is visited by the spark, s/he has a choice to make. The easier choice is to brush it off as mere fantasy and nonsense, which happens all too often when people are called to redefine themselves. The other option is listening closer, waiting to discover the path that s/he is being guided to follow. If a person chooses to pay attention to this longing, giving it energy and thought, s/he may begin to feel a larger idea emerging. At first it seems formless, but as a person approaches the idea with curiosity, more is revealed. This idea emerges from deep within an individual, from his/her highest self, or from God, or Spirit, whatever one may choose to call it. At first, it requires only a little attention, but as a person gives it his/her attention, it begins to grow. For a time, it continues to emerge as a novel idea, but eventually the time arrives for a person to decide whether or not to commit to the idea. Again, it is easy to brush it aside, though not as easy as before. However, if a person chooses to take the idea seriously, it will continue to grow until one day it explodes inside of him/her. This is undeniable knowing, and once a person has experienced it, there is no turning back. Undeniable knowing shows a person that the time has come to make a journey, to commit to his/her own spiritual growth, and to make whatever preparations are necessary for the journey to begin.
Sometimes, the voice of undeniable knowing approaches a person in a familiar way, asking him/her to listen to the simplest yearning of his/her spirit. Sometimes, this voice doesn’t lead him/her on an epic journey, but a much simpler one. Maria Scaperlanda has regularly experienced this feeling.
Every once in a while ... I need to go walk a beach somewhere. It’s hard to describe the yearning that calls to me ... It’s not so much that the ocean becomes a symbol for God or that being by the water is some kind of medicine for my spirit. It’s much bigger than that. As I am drawn by my hunger to sit by the sea, I am reminded that it is irrelevant how full or empty I feel from the details of my life ... walking a beach and allowing the wonder of the ocean to awaken reverence and humility within me is a pilgrimage, in the most sacred sense. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 41-42)
This kind of yearning isn’t uncommon, but people don’t always pay attention. Often when they do attempt to honor this longing, it manifests as a short vacation, not conducive in speed or atmosphere to attend to their deeper yearning in any significant way. But a lot of the time, this longing is simply ignored.
Undeniable knowing isn’t as simple as randomly deciding to take a trip to a captivating, sought-after destination. It is abstruse and intuitive, defying all of a person’s logic, and yet often brings more certainty than anything that most people have come to know in a logical way. Maria Scaperlanda shares her experience of undeniable knowing:
Some things, you just know. There really is no other way to explain it. Something inside you simply yearns to go. You feel invited, even summoned, to make this particular journey to this particular place. You can’t explain it to yourself, let alone to other people ... another way that you know you’re being invited on a particular pilgrimage is that amazing “coincidences” begin to happen. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 43-44)
These coincidences are often unbelievable and serendipitous encounters that far surpass any feelings of fascination or wanderlust, and when a person isn’t sure whether or not to follow the spark, it is these moments of coincidence that catch his/her attention more fully.
Many pilgrims experience “coincidences” as they are drawn to make a journey. Others can’t quite remember how or when the idea appeared, having experienced the spark in a more subtle way. Even when a person can’t locate a single moment when the spark appeared, the gradual process of undeniable knowing becomes, in time, a dull roar of certainty, urging the pilgrim onward. As he shares in his memoir Road of Stars to Santiago, Edward Stanton experienced an intuitive knowing that led him to walk the Camino de Santiago.
If you ask why I walked the Road, the Camino de Santiago, there is no simple answer. Try as I do, I cannot remember how the idea was born in my head. Like many of our most important decisions, this one was slow and deep in its working: all I know is that one day I had to walk to Compostela. My life was a shambles, I felt exhausted by work, my marriage was foundering. When I finally had the time to make the journey, I prepared my backpack, found a walking staff, flew to Spain and took the road. I knew what I was fleeing from, not what I was seeking. (Stanton 1)
My own first experience of undeniable knowing appeared in the months that led up to my first pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago. Just like Stanton, I couldn’t offer any clear, rational reason to support my decision to make the journey. I knew deep inside of myself that it was much different from the longings of wanderlust that had pulled me into a variety of previous adventures. It seemed clear that I was called to it as a result of months of intense meditation practice, and I felt sure that the journey would teach me things I had yet to imagine, but my list of logical reasons was slim. Even so, the intuitive feeling, undeniable knowing, assured me that I simply must walk the Camino.
In the wake of a period of debilitating depression, Andrew Harvey followed his spark and began to consider making a journey to India, where he was born: “the key to my destiny lay in the strange and bounding joy I always felt when I thought of India ... I knew only that I had to follow its signal” (Harvey 12). The inner certainty he felt as he followed this intuitive call may have seemed irrational to some, especially when considering his thoughts of suicide. Most of the time, though, once a person has experienced undeniable knowing, logical terms can no longer dissuade him/her. Harvey was clear and unshakable in his decision: “India is my mad mother, and I am returning to her to be made sane. I have no idea what will happen. All I know is there is nowhere and nothing else I can turn to” (Harvey 13). This degree of determination is often the case once undeniable knowing has taken root in the pilgrim’s heart and mind.
Peace Pilgrim experienced undeniable knowing about the pilgrim’s life she was being called to live many years before her formal pilgrimage began. Her undeniable knowing was far less mysterious and vague than most, as her inspiration to begin a pilgrimage for peace was rooted in a basic, yet powerful spiritual realization. “It was really the realization that money and things would not make me happy that got me started on my preparation for the pilgrimage” (Pilgrim 5). This realization in itself transformed Peace Pilgrim, giving her the courage to leave behind not only her home and material possessions, but her previous name and identity as well.
There is an inevitable sense of uncertainty and risk involved in following the calling of undeniable knowing. An individual will probably be questioned by those around him/her. A vacation makes sense, but a pilgrimage? Just as in ancient times, the risks are many, both real and imagined, especially in today’s world filled with so many fears. Looking past these risks requires great courage. Sam Keen declares, “It is reasonable to play it safe, not to leap - but it is not reasonable to always be reasonable ... faith, love, and flying all depend on a relationship that can be created only by an act of trust that involves taking the risk of falling into the void” (Keen 59-60). Before a person sets out on the journey, s/he must carefully consider the path that s/he is committing him/herself to. It will not be easy, and s/he will be changed by it. In the end, a person must search deep within him/herself to find the right course of action. Thoreau suggests that people consider making the same preparations that their medieval pilgrim ancestors made as they followed undeniable knowing and embarked on the journey: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister ... child and friends, and never see them again, - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs ... then you are ready for a walk” (Emerson & Thoreau 73).
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Pilgrimage
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Leaving Home Behind
The pilgrim received the spark from within him/herself, and followed the idea through as it became undeniable knowing. S/he followed his/her intuition and made a leap of faith as s/he planned the journey. Finally, the day arrives when s/he must leave his/her ordinary life behind and embark on the journey. The pilgrim must leave home behind. S/he bids farewell to home, family and friends (unless they are accompanying him/her), as well as the comforts, possessions, and all the familiarities of his/her life. Carrying only what is absolutely necessary, a pilgrim enters the world as an act of faith. Faith that s/he will be safe and taken care of, faith that s/he will learn new things that will enrich his/her life, and faith that s/he will return home once more, transformed.
Phil Cousineau shares his thoughts on the importance of this beginning:
Once prepared on the outside through packing and on the inside through prayers, songs, and blessings, you are ready to cross the threshold. The threshold is more than an architectural detail; it is a mythological image that evokes the spirit of resistance we must pass through on our risky journey from all we’ve known to all that’s unknown. It is the first step toward renewal. (Cousineau 83)
As pilgrims cross the “threshold,” they are invoking a process of change to begin in their lives as they move from the certainty of undeniable knowing to an experience of the unknown. As they leave home behind they are committing to an experience that will undoubtedly be filled with beauty and inspiration, as well as darkness and suffering. The journey begins.
Before each of my pilgrimages, I have experienced a moment, usually a day or two before departure, when I feel myself separating from my home, my friends, my ordinary life. It isn’t a process that I consciously initiate, it seems to happen of its own accord. It is difficult to articulate the qualities of the feeling, though it is a mixture of anticipation, excitement, fear, and joy. Sometimes it is an emotional moment, making me aware of the separation that I am preparing to enact. It is a process of cutting my ties, psychically, with the world to which I am accustomed. Essentially, along with packing my backpack, I am packing up myself, along with my energy and spirit, in preparation for the journey.
Sometimes pilgrims are called to travel to a faraway foreign land, and other times, they may journey closer to home. Either way, pilgrims enter a new world as they begin the journey. In his introduction to The Art of Pilgrimage, Huston Smith illustrates the sense of freshness that the pilgrim feels as s/he departs:
To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. Nothing matters now but this adventure. Travelers jostle each other to board the train where they crowd together ... after that there is a stony road to climb on foot - a rough, wild path in a landscape where everything is new. The naked glitter of the sacred mountain stirs the imagination; the adventure of self- conquest has begun ... (Cousineau xi)
As people embark on pilgrimage, they begin to awaken to a world that seems more alive, more colorful, and mythic in character.
Sometimes people are filled with joy and wonder as they set out on the journey. Everything around them beckons, and as they awaken to the experience, they discover a newfound freedom as a result of leaving everyday life behind. As writer Herman Hesse began a long walking journey, he expresses the joy he felt as he crossed “such a boundary” (Hesse 5-6) from ordinary life to that of the pilgrim-wanderer. Hesse suggests that the wanderer becomes “primitive” in many ways,
in the same way that the nomad is more primitive than the farmer ... Once again I love deeply everything at home, because I have to leave it. Tomorrow I will love other roofs, other cottages. I won’t leave my heart behind me, as they say in love letters. No, I am going to carry it with me over the mountains, because I need it, always. I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. I don’t care to secure my life to one bare place on this earth. (Hesse 5-6)
Even in the early hours of his journey, a sense of freedom seeps into his being, and a playful, yet slightly impish tone overtakes his wandering spirit.
In my pilgrimage to Peru, I experienced a tremendous sense of freedom in the early days of my journey. In realizing that I was alone with no agenda other than my own personal exploration, I joyfully spent my days walking along the desert coast, collecting stones and shells, taking photographs, writing, and splashing in the Pacific Ocean. With little self-consciousness, I stumbled my way through conversations in Spanish, and when communication was difficult, I played melodies on my flute as a way of connecting with people. From palm trees and pelicans to sand dunes and flirtatious young men, my early days in Peru were rich in worldly experience, but also rich in silence and space for contemplation.
Though the beginning of the journey is often filled with peaceful reveries and exciting discoveries, Pema Chodron acknowledges the courageous risk that people have taken in leaving home behind. After all, pilgrimage is more than a pleasant holiday, it is a journey of self-discovery and spiritual awakening. Chodron elaborates:
Embarking on the spiritual journey is like getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands ... for all we know, when we get to the horizon, we are going to drop off the edge of the world. Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what’s waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it. (Chodron 1)
As pilgrims take the leap of faith and embark on the journey, they are indeed embracing tremendous courage, yet their own sense of that courage is often lost in the newness of the experience.
Though pilgrims are leaving home behind, they will encounter many people who are in the midst of their ordinary lives. They will come into contact with other people and other cultures, and their presence there will make an impact. As the journey begins, it is important for pilgrims to consider their impact as they pass through strange new places. They are strangers and they represent the unknown. Phil Cousineau explains:
When you leave home, you are a stranger, and a stranger is always feared. That is why the wise traveller carries gifts. To make a peace offering at every stop of a pilgrimage is to recognize the sacred nature of the journey with a deep personal purpose. (Cousineau 85)
As they make sacred offerings, pilgrims are able to make a friendly connection with the people they meet along the way, and as they begin to feel less like an outsider they are gradually absorbed into the flow of the journey.
While being a stranger in a new place can be scary, it can also be exhilarating. When a pilgrimage takes a person through places that are vastly different from his/her home, s/he is awakened to new ways of life, and in the process, s/he is able to observe him/herself with greater objectivity. As she explores the ways that people know themselves, Carol Gilligan illustrates this idea, using Shakespeare’s character Viola, from the play Twelfth Night. She has just arrived in a foreign land, Illyria: “before the customs of that country have become her own - she speaks from the heart, says what she sees, keeps silent where she must, puts out riddles that are notoriously overlooked, and becomes the voice of emotional truth” (Gilligan 211-212). As Gilligan has discovered, immersion in a foreign culture can enliven a person’s awareness of the world around him/her with surprising acuity. She explains: “Since culture is what we do not completely see, because it is the lens through which we are seeing, an outsider’s eye is needed” (Gilligan 208). During pilgrimage, the pilgrim is the outsider, and in observing him/herself interacting with this new culture, s/he gains a greater understanding of his/her own culture, home, and self. The process of self-discovery begins.
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Phase One: Awakening
The longing, yearning, and seeking that leads people to make a spiritual journey is often related to the desire to transcend ordinary life. This has already been considered at some length earlier in contemplating the root of the search. This longing, however, doesn’t disappear once a person’s feet contact the ground in a new, faraway, unknown land. On the contrary, Osho suggests that this longing fuels the spiritual quest even further: “keep your longing burning, aflame ... your longing is the seed of your spirituality” (Osho 97). Phil Cousineau defines the same urge in a more worldly way.
Integral to the art of travel is the longing to break away from the stultifying habits of our lives at home, and to break away for however long it takes to once again truly see the world around us ... the art of pilgrimage is the art of reimagining how we walk, talk, listen, see, hear, write, and draw as we ready for the journey of our soul’s deep desire. (Cousineau 23)
Through pilgrimage, people enact a journey that breaks them away from all the comforts and habits of home, and they become a blank canvas for a while, free to recreate themselves a step at a time. As the pilgrimage begins, pilgrims begin the process of awakening to the world around them and the world within them. This is Phase One.
Phase One begins when the journey begins, from the time a person exits his/her normal life and takes his/her place among the ranks of fellow pilgrims. During this phase of the journey, pilgrims make the transition from their ordinary, mundane lives, into an intense period of living. All at once, the pilgrim is subjected to a variety of elements that influence his/her state of mind and being. First, the simplicity of the pilgrimage lifestyle is a great contrast to most people’s usual lifestyles. Solitude is perhaps one of the most crucial elements of Phase One. Even if a person is travelling with a companion or in the company of others, having been removed from his/her usual social community creates a sense of relative aloneness. This sense of solitude is often all-encompassing when a person is immersed in a sea of new faces and unfamiliar languages, especially if s/he is travelling alone. In their aloneness, pilgrims often experience a newfound sense of anonymity that results from being removed from the expectations and relationships of everyday life, and for many people, a deep sense of freedom results.
In addition to being immersed in new faces and unfamiliar languages, often pilgrims are fully immersed in a foreign culture and a totally unfamiliar landscape, whether natural or human-made. Essentially, the whole world in which they find themselves is the unknown. This new world entices them to venture deeper into their own unknown places. Pilgrims are increasingly awakened to their sensory perceptions and awareness of the new world around them, often out of sheer necessity. Back and forth it goes, external observation followed by internal reflection, calling the pilgrim into a heightened sense of awareness. Gradually, the pilgrim’s mind shifts into a sense of present moment awareness that is connected to slowing down and engaging with the world and him/herself more fully. As the pilgrim embraces this new awareness, s/he is creating sacred space within him/herself. This is an overview of the process that occurs during Phase One. I would like to emphasize, however, that not every pilgrim will experience all of these elements, and depending on the individual, some of these elements may become larger themes throughout the entire journey. Overall, though, I have found that in many accounts of pilgrimage, these elements play a significant role as the journey unfolds.
Simplicity
Phase One is a stage of transition. Pilgrims have chosen to interrupt their lives and engage in a journey that is unpredictable and will inevitably change them. As they leave home, they leave behind many comforts and conveniences and adopt a lifestyle rooted in simplicity. With simplicity comes a lighter satchel, carrying a minimal amount of clothing and necessities, as well as an inner lightness that results from leaving behind the burdens of everyday life and adopting the mindset that everything will work out as it should.
There are few things, to me, as freeing as the experience of strapping on a backpack and leaving home. In each of my pilgrimages, I have carried no more than a couple of changes of clothing, a sleeping bag, a basic first aid kit, soap, and the things I consider necessary for my creative happiness: my flute, my journal, and my camera. With the trappings of my life reduced to what I can comfortably carry on my back, my attention easily shifts to the world around me. I find that in journeying with simplicity, I am less self-conscious, more grounded, less distracted, and generally much more receptive to the lessons of the pilgrimage.
Peace Pilgrim, who spent thirty years of her life wandering America spreading her message about world peace, owned nothing but the clothes she wore, a toothbrush, and a comb. To her, an important stage of the journey is “the simplification of life, to bring inner and outer well-being, psychological and material well-being, into harmony in your life” (Pilgrim 12). When a pilgrim leaves home, s/he carries all of his/her necessary possessions with him/her. As Peace Pilgrim suggests, the less a person carries, the more of him/herself a person is able to offer to the journey itself. As pilgrims are freed from the burden of attending to material possessions, they are equally freed to attend to the burdens that they carry within themselves. As Phase One unfolds, pilgrims are able to confront these burdens that have, perhaps, been neglected for a long time.
Solitude
Though there are a variety of elements that contribute to Phase One, one of the most powerful elements that pilgrims encounter is solitude. Sometimes people choose to journey alone. Sometimes they choose the company of friends or family. Often, pilgrims share the path with others who are engaged in similar journeys. In spite of these companions, when pilgrims begin their journeys, they enter a state of relative solitude. In taking themselves out of the pattern of everyday existence, and they have removed themselves from their habitual responsibilities to others and there are fewer expectations of them. In this newfound solitude, especially when travelling alone, pilgrims also begin to discover a sense of anonymity. They aren’t required to act, think, or speak in any particular way, and are freed to fully be themselves instead of maintaining their personalities within society. The sense of freedom that results from this allows pilgrims to open up to the journey.
Behind the yearning to get away from it all, the yearning for solitude, the desire for anonymity occasionally lurks. This is not merely the desire to disappear from life, but to abandon the ideas that individuals and others hold about themselves, ideas that define them and occasionally trap them, too. Pilgrims often yearn to be free from these ideas in order to learn who they truly are. In the words of the French novelist Colette: “I am going away ... to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart” (Cousineau 11). While it sounds like an idealistic notion or mere reverie, when pilgrims leave their stable, comfortable lives behind and enter into a pilgrimage journey, this anonymity is possible, along with all of its blessings and challenges. Cousineau shares the perspective of Trish O’Reilly, a photographer and yoga teacher from California:
If my trip is going to be sacred, I need to see differently ... I need to think new thoughts, not just conditioned responses. That’s because I have a different relationship to time on the road, a freedom of thought I don’t have at home - or don’t allow myself at home where I’m encumbered with relationships and responsibility. (Cousineau 73)
At the root of all that O’Reilly seeks while travelling is anonymity, which clears the way for her to see and think with greater openness, and her own process of awakening is a result of this newfound freedom.
Solitude has been integral to the process of the spiritual or religious search throughout history. In her study of the psychology of solitude, Joanne Wieland-Burston addresses this tendency. “Buddha’s choice of solitude, his withdrawal from society, was a conscious choice, a search for something beyond, something more elevated, more worthy than the normal world of social intercourse” (Wieland-Burston 79). In every religion, retreat into solitude has been important for prayer, meditation, and contemplation, and it has frequently been tied to the practice of asceticism. Wieland-Burston makes an important observation about the nature of asceticism:
The retreat of these ascetics is not from one society to another, foreign society; it is to a place where people do not congregate - a place of wilderness, of wildness, far from civilization. These are places in which the echo of merely human voices is not to be heard. (Wieland-Burston 82)
Though pilgrimage is not always a retreat from society as a whole, there is a definite connection between asceticism and the solitary experience of pilgrimage. There is some mysterious, undeniable relatedness between the wild, untamed places in the world and the same wild, untamed regions within every person, and as pilgrims venture out into this environment, alone and vulnerable, an entirely new inner landscape is slowly revealed. Wieland-Burston has noted this connection between the external journey and the inner journey that moves within each person. “On an inner psychic level, the retreat means stepping into uninhabited regions, into the unknown in which there is no protection from the wilderness” (Wieland-Burston 83). During Phase One, the pilgrim begins to enter the “wilderness” within him/herself, and the process of awakening begins.
The tradition of pilgrimage and retreat in solitude has been prevalent in most religions. “From Jesus’ own retreat into the desert, to the retreat of medieval monks and nuns to cloisters ... the Christian church seems to have cultivated from the start a tradition of seeking transcendence in solitude” (Wieland-Burston 76). This desire for retreat into solitude, and “more holy spheres of existence” appears in every religious tradition. One of the most well-known examples is the story of the Buddha, “who left his life of luxury to seek enlightenment, wandering about like a hermit for six years until he finally sat down under a bodhi tree to await enlightenment” (Wieland-Burston 77). Osho further illustrates this tradition of the wandering ascetic: “A solitary, a sannyasin ... a solitary being, a wanderer” is happy alone, whether there is someone beside him/her or not. The sannyasin “never waits for anybody” and “never looks back.” S/he is fully content while alone. (Osho 194)
Beyond long-standing religious traditions, many people have chosen to retreat into solitude as a part of self-discovery or healing. “One major current which is very widespread today dates back to Jean-Jacques Rosseau, perhaps even to Petrarca. Both poets withdrew from society, seeking to discover and cultivate their individualism in retreat” (Wieland-Burston 104). More recently, Henry David Thoreau “retired to a solitary place in natural surroundings, Walden pond” (Wieland-Burston 108-109). Engaging in an intensive period of reflection, healing, and discovery is the heart of what many spiritual, yet not particularly religious people are enacting as they approach their own solitary journeys.
While pilgrimage has occasionally been considered an escape from the world, the yearning that draws a person to enter into solitude runs much deeper. Solitude is less escape and more retreat into a period of reflection and contemplation. “Solitude and silence brings to light that which is there: the product reflects the spirit of its creator, be it positive and full of light and joy, or negative and full of darkness and horror” (Wieland-Burston 169). In solitude, a person begins the journey of self-discovery. “In the silence of solitude one can hear one’s own heart beat; this can be soothing if one feels secure within oneself, not alone; or it can be terrifying and paralyzing” (Wieland-Burston 171). More than just a period of peaceful reverie, solitude can deliver the pilgrim into the heart of his/her own inner turbulence, which will be explored in more detail a little later.
Osho notes the absence of solitude and aloneness in ordinary life:
Man is born in a family among human beings. From the very first moment he is not alone; hence, he gets a certain psychology of always remaining with people. In aloneness he starts feeling scared ... he is not exactly aware of what is afraid of, but as he moves out of the crowd something inside him becomes uneasy ... the whole life experience is of being together with people. (Osho 171-172)
Having spent most of their lives immersed in society, many people feel intense fear when they are truly alone, but perhaps this fear of aloneness pushes them toward transcendence. When a person is alone, the identities that have been built around him/her disappear, and s/he is free to learn who s/he really is. Osho continues:
Aloneness seems almost like a death ... it is the death of the personality that you have created in the crowd ... the moment you move out of the crowd you also move out of your personality ... what is your identity, who are you? Suddenly you become aware that you are not your name ... you are not your face ... your consciousness is not part of any organization or church ... suddenly your personality starts dispersing ... Now you will have to discover freshly, you will have to ask for the first time who you are. (Osho 171-172)
Solitude becomes a key element in the pilgrim’s awakening and self-discovery during Phase One, since the familiarities of home and personality, as well as the pilgrim’s identity in relation to those things is temporarily removed.
In my first pilgrimage, solitude was quite welcome, though also strange. In my first day’s walk along the Camino, I struggled along in the rain under the fifty pounds of my backpack, tapping my walking stick into the muddy path. Though I have always appreciated my time alone, during this demanding day, there were times that the chattering of my mind were overwhelming. Unaccustomed to such an extensive period of silence and solitude, I often felt inspired to burst into song. I sang familiar tunes, including the themes from The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz, as well as making up songs of my own, including one that attempted to convince myself that This is as Hard as it Gets. In subsequent journeys, I felt more familiar with the joys of solitude. While in Paris, I spent my early days without having any significant conversation at all, which was a welcome, refreshing experience following a great deal of personal difficulty at home, and allowed me to begin to get in touch with myself once more.
Artist Tobias Schneebaum entered into a most intense period of solitude during his journey in Peru, as he trekked deep into the Amazon jungle. “There followed eight days of a strange and inexpressible solitude. Not quite loneliness, which I’d understood throughout my life, but a feeling of apartness, a disconnection from life” (Schneebaum 10). He was utterly alone, having completely separated himself from the familiar world of humans and civilization, and spent days deeply immersed in the natural world.
Satish Kumar, who began wandering as a monk while still a child, offers insight into his experience of solitude during the walking pilgrimage he took in honor of his fiftieth birthday. While wandering through the English countryside,
I experienced an intensity of emptiness ... It was an experience of exile, away from my home, my wife and my children, my friends and my colleagues, my neighbours and my village, the security of known and familiar surroundings, the cushion of set patterns, milking the cow and digging the garden and answering the phone. Here, I was all alone on the road, with no particular place to go ... the world is transitory and I am just passing through, searching for my real home. (Kumar 190)
His words are haunting, a perfect illustration of the complexity of thought and emotion that occur during Phase One, and through the entire journey.
Roger Housden experienced the process of awakening through solitude as he began his long walk toward the Monastery of St. Catherine’s in the Sinai, Egypt.
For the first time since we had set out, there was no intermediary between me and the surrounding stillness. As I walked on through the day it entered my pores, settled my mind, and returned me to an instinctual intimacy with the earth beneath my feet, the world of color, light, space, heat, and the wind at my back. Loneliness is an ache in the gut; it cows the human frame, withers our sense of worth. But solitude is food, and I was grateful for it now. Solitude was rejoining me to life, the life in all things, and I ambled on for hours across the sand plains, content to have nothing more to do than place one foot in front of the other. (Housden 22)
Here, Housden illustrates that during Phase One of the pilgrimage, a person is stripped of the burdens that weigh him/her down and is freed to act in the necessity or pleasure of the moment. The subtle changes that pilgrims often experience in the midst of this newfound simplicity and solitude is the beginning of a much deeper awakening that ripens as they continue the journey. Housden captures this awakening beautifully.
While aloneness itself may allow the time and space for a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings to erupt inside of a person, the journey allows him/her the freedom to follow these thoughts and feelings and acknowledge them, whereas in everyday life s/he may feel too busy or too distracted and often try to avoid them. During pilgrimage, pilgrims are no longer able to avoid these thoughts and feelings in the same way, since pilgrimage is a kind of moving meditation. Osho observes that the ordinary person tries to forget his/her loneliness, and “the meditator starts getting more and more acquainted” with this aloneness because s/he wants to know who s/he is. “In the crowd, it is difficult; there are so many disturbances” (Osho 178-179). Osho continues, acknowledging the value of solitude in the spiritual search: “Become more centered in your deep aloneness ... the moment your aloneness is complete, your experience of it will become your enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something that comes from outside; it is something that grows within you” (Osho 198). And enlightenment grows by degrees along the pilgrimage road, beginning with its foundation in Phase One.
The Unknown
Another important element that contributes to Phase One is the unknown. Pilgrimage suspends a person’s habitual ways of living, and as a person begins the journey, his/her fledgeling state of awareness is absorbed into the newness of his/her experiences. S/he moves through foreign territory, new places, and often foreign cultures. The pilgrim encounters curious customs, unknown languages, and as s/he is immersed in an unfamiliar landscape, this sense of newness can be overwhelming. S/he doesn’t know his/her way around, and it’s essential to pay closer attention to his/her surroundings. In addition, what a person observes is often dependent upon the quality and degree of his/her inner mental and emotional activity, and with nothing but the journey requiring his/her attention, s/he is free to observe his/her surroundings more fully. In the process of making sense of this new environment, the pilgrim’s attention is focused in a much different way than in everyday life, and as his/her mind becomes less scattered, his/her attention is free to move inward.
The unknown elements in the world around a person often prompt the leap from the external to the internal. Different from an ordinary visit to a shrine, temple, or church at home, when pilgrims embark on a journey, they are making a journey of faith and inevitably enter unfamiliar territory. During pilgrimage, the pilgrim’s environment acts as a mirror for the world within him/her, and a variety of thoughts and feelings prompt him/her into similar unknown or unfamiliar dark, shadowy places within him/herself.
As devout Catholics, the Scaperlandas have gone on pilgrimage throughout America and Europe many times in their lives. Through these journeys, they have cultivated a thorough understanding of the process of entering the unknown, suggesting that
... all travel, precisely because it disturbs our daily routines, presents great opportunities for heightened awareness of God and his universe ... the pilgrim ... absorbs the experience, attuned to the people, culture, food, and geography of the place. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 144-145)
According to some traditional, almost ascetic perspectives, these are all elements that can distract the pilgrim from his/her ultimate purpose of union with God, but as the Scaperlandas have pointed out, it is often through these worldly factors that pilgrims begin to find that the divine is all around them.
Unlike the comfort and entertainment of a vacation, the intensity of pilgrimage brings a person into contact with the hidden parts of him/herself. As this happens, a series of shocks and fears may appear. This is an essential part of the awakening process during the journey, and an important part of the spiritual search. In the words of Osho, “You have to recognize, howsoever painful it appears in the beginning, that “I am alone and in a strange land.” This recognition, for the first time, is painful. It takes away all our illusions” (Osho 199). As a person’s illusions are shattered, little by little his/her eyes are opened, along with the rest of his/her senses, and s/he is able to approach the journey with keen awareness.
Roger Housden, pilgrim, journalist, and guide, has explored his spirituality through making journeys all over the world for many years. He speaks about his desire to enter the unknown, especially in the wilderness. He shares:
My personal and instinctive response to this hunger has been to move my body into unfamiliar territory, especially those parts of the world where the primordial wilderness still survives. The wilderness, I have found, stops my mind and returns me to that dimension of being which is also untamed and stripped to essentials ... the desert reveals the desert in me; the river, the living stream (Housden 2)
Similar to the idea presented earlier by Joanne Wieland-Burston, by entering the wilderness, Housden also finds a deeper connection to his own “untamed” self. As pilgrims enter the wild, untamed lands in the natural world, they are able to approach those parts of themselves that are also wild and untamed. This yearning to enter the wilderness is a common one. As he wandered deep into the Amazon, alone and with no map, Tobias Schneebaum began to slip into a state of reverie as he entered the unknown.
There was an unreality to everything around me, and to myself as well. I felt like another person, not like myself at all, and though the world and my walking through it was always hazy and undefined, it never had the shape of a dream. It was as if I were off in another dimension, and I and the things around me were slightly out of focus. And mixed with these sensations was the curious feeling of being more alive, of a oneness with this sensuous and quivering world, of moving with it, rather than within it. (Schneebaum 11)
Along with the awakening of his senses, he experienced a loosening of the grip that people’s minds usually hold over the reality of themselves and the world. It is also clear, from the tone present in Schneebaum’s words, that he felt joy and freedom along with this shift in awareness.
It has begun to emerge in these examples that the place a person chooses as the destination of his/her pilgrimage is important. The land, the culture, and the environments a person travels through will invariably influence him/her. Place is an integral element throughout the journey, but plays a major role in the gradual shift that occurs in a person’s state of mind as s/he attunes to the unknown territory through which s/he is travelling.
As Schneebaum has already shown, pilgrims often experience great joy as they stumble through new, unfamiliar places. Edith Wharton illustrates the joy of being awakened by a new place, unfamiliar and full of possibilities. “Above all these recovered pleasures ... must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares, stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time” (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 4-5). Early in the journey, pilgrims are often captivated by the world around them, awakened by the fresh unfamiliarity of it all. When he first arrived in India, Andrew Harvey shared a meaningful conversation with a friend about the enchantment that many people experience upon arriving there: “Do you know what this country does to you? It makes you believe against your will that at any moment the curtain of what you have called reality can part and reveal something amazing” (Harvey 13). This has been the experience of many pilgrims during Phase One of the journey, not only in India, but in sacred places around the world.
Sometimes pilgrims approach the journey with a whole series of preconceived ideas, whether based in research or idealism. This was the case as Phil Cousineau journeyed to Angkor Wat, as he was absorbed into a state of reverie as his imagination was allowed to roam free in a place he had long dreamed about. Cousineau shares his experience:
Though neither Buddhist or Hindu, wandering through the site I was more than smitten by the romancing of old stones. In the uncanny way of spiritually magnetized centers of pilgrimage, I felt a wonderful calm exploring the derelict pavilions, abandoned libraries, and looted monasteries. My imagination was animated by the strange and wonderful challenge to fill in what time had destroyed, thrilling to the knowledge that tigers, panthers, and elephants still roamed over the flagstones of these shrines when Angkor was rediscovered in the 1860s. (Cousineau 5)
The excitement and anticipation that many pilgrims feel as they begin their journeys does indeed color their experience with idealism, but also carries them forward into experiencing the truth of the sacred destination.
Idealism has been an issue that I have had to face many times in my own pilgrimages, for sure. I had idealized China, picturing pastoral landscapes and peaceful temples, images from stories and times gone by. I was stunned to find the encroachment of industry upon the rice paddies and banana plantations, and Buddhist monks talking on cell phones inside of temples. Much of my pilgrimage in China was filled with the struggle between the image of China I had hoped to find and the reality of modern China, with its pollution, commotion, and technological advancements. My journey to Machu Picchu in Peru was also filled with similar conflict, as my idealized image didn’t fit with the reality of the place. Whereas I had expected to find peaceful stone temples perched atop a lush, green mountain, surrounded in the silence of the ages, Machu Picchu was a tourist haven. Guides led hordes of people around, shouting basic information about the place into bullhorns in a variety of languages. I was overwhelmed by the chaos, and became angry and frustrated when it seemed impossible to find any small corner in which to sit silently and meditate. I had never considered that the Machu Picchu in books and postcards, which seemed to be a remote sanctuary, was in reality one of South America’s busiest tourist destinations.
While it is exciting and magical for a person to finally experience a place that s/he has dreamed about, his/her expectations are not always fulfilled. The truth that is revealed to him/her as s/he experiences the reality of the place can often be surprising, sometimes shocking, and always serves to awaken the pilgrim to a greater awareness of the world around him/her. As this happens, the first response is often fear. Pema Chodron elaborates:
It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown ... fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth ... in fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That’s when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place ... what we’re talking about is getting to know fear, becoming familiar with fear, looking it right in the eye - not as a way to solve problems, but as a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking. (Chodron 2-3)
The pilgrim’s true awakening begins as these habitual reactions are undone, and are replaced by an awareness that is keen and more responsive to the moment.
Being immersed in the unknown can threaten to overwhelm the pilgrim as much as it can expand his/her awareness, and one of the essential challenges of pilgrimage is how s/he negotiates this response. People often become caught up in a variety of emotional reactions as all that is familiar slips away from them. In The Art of Pilgrimage, Huston Smith offers his thoughts on this matter:
from the spiritual point of view a journey is always something of a two-edged sword because of the dispersion which can result from contact with so much that is new ... if the newness threatens to overwhelm us, it can occasion periodic hardenings of the ego ... we find it necessary to shore up our identities...[which is] certain to bring suffering ... beginning with feelings of impatience and annoyance. The art is to learn to master today’s unavoidable situation with as much equanimity as we can muster (Cousineau xiii-xiv)
During Phase One, pilgrims begin to encounter a variety of emotional and mental states and reactions, having freed themselves from the distractions of their daily lives. In these early days of the journey, instability often reigns as the unknown world around them brings completely new challenges to their habitual ways of thinking and being.
Perhaps the most important thing pilgrims must consider is choosing to journey to a place that draws them into a raw discovery of the sacred within themselves, wherever that may be. In the words of Joan Halifax, a Buddhist anthropologist and ecologist, “whether we know it or not, we need to renew ourselves in territories that are fresh and wild. We need to come home through the body of alien lands. For some ... journeys of change are taken intentionally and mindfully. They are pilgrimages, occasions when Earth heals us directly” (Cousineau 104). Whether pilgrims journey to a place with temples and churches and sacred history, a natural setting that awakens them with its splendor, or anything inbetween, when they choose their destination appropriately, they are able to attune more deeply to the connections between themselves and the place, and they awaken to the lessons of their surroundings more and more.
Awakening
In the midst of day-to-day existence, people are often so absorbed into the routines and patterns of daily life that their minds are numbed and their senses are dulled. While there are those individuals who practice living mindfully, choosing to counteract the ordinariness of daily life with a disciplined and inspired spiritual practice, a great majority of people feel caught up in the mundane, bored. Osho observes:
People are living unconsciously. They are not aware of what they are saying, what they are doing - they are not watchful. People go on guessing, not seeing; they don’t have any insight, they can’t have. Insight arises only through great watchfulness; then you can see even with closed eyes. (Osho 14)
On the eve of the journey, a person’s mind is often spinning with thoughts of his/her ordinary life, his/her work, his/her family and friends, and the details of preparation for the journey itself. In Phase One, this spin is interrupted and many of these thoughts gradually fall away, at least temporarily.
Pilgrims are soon affected by their newfound solitude and the unknown landscape through which they wander, and the mind falls quiet. The days become freer, and the pilgrim’s mind becomes freer, making way for deeper thoughts and feelings to surface. As pilgrims spend a comparatively large amount of time in contemplation and getting to know themselves as they wander, a greater sense of awareness begins to emerge. Pilgrims become increasingly attuned to their senses, cultivating a fuller awareness of the world around them, a different sense of spaciousness, a different sense of time, and increased contact with their own feelings and thoughts in the moment. Psychologist Carol Gilligan discovered an entirely different perspective in herself when “I made a real commitment to my own experience, staying with my sense of what was happening within and around me” (Gilligan 164). With the distractions of everyday life removed, many pilgrims find the opportunity to commit to their own experiences, too, and with an increasing sense of awareness, pilgrims awaken to the journey and its lessons.
Reconnecting to the fullness of sensory experience is an important part of this process of awakening. Pema Chodron emphasizes the importance of not only sensory awareness, but also connection to the present moment. “There really is no better time than right now; there is no higher state of consciousness than this one” (Chodron 128). As a pilgrim’s sensory awareness meets his/her attentiveness to the present moment, present moment awareness is cultivated. Entering this state of mind is one of the most important steps in the process of awakening during pilgrimage. As this new sense of spaciousness fills the pilgrim’s being, s/he slows down as s/he moves through and responds to the world and him/herself. Chodron continues: “Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain. It becomes a way of life to stay awake, slow down, and notice” (Chodron 37). Pilgrims begin to cultivate patience and learn to observe what they experience with new presence of mind. In several of his own pilgrimages, and most notably his retreat to Walden Pond, Thoreau discovered the importance of staying present to the moment of experience. “There is ... a newer testament, - the gospel according to this moment” and being where one is “is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time” (Emerson & Thoreau 120). Both Thoreau and Chodron have captured the essence of present moment awareness, which is the essence of the awakened pilgrim’s mind.
Michael Guillen, who has led groups to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, has often experienced this shift into present moment awareness: “mostly, I just pay closer attention. A departing pilgrim has to be attentive to the change he’s going through” (Cousineau 74). This attentiveness is one of the defining elements in the inner experience of pilgrimage. Cousineau agrees: “If there is a trick to soulful travel, it is learning to see for yourself. To do this takes practice and a belief that it matters. The difference between a pilgrim and tourist is the intention of attention, the quality of the curiosity” (Cousineau 99). When pilgrims enter into this state of mind, they are no longer merely seeing what they want to see, caught in their ideals and illusions, they are more receptive to the truth of the world around them.
Present moment awareness is not easy to cultivate. In ordinary life there are endless distractions, and even as pilgrims leave daily life behind, they must contend with the endless chatter of the mind. Henri Nouwen recognizes the difficulties in shifting to this state of mind:
It’s hard to live in the present. The past and the future keep harassing us. The past with guilt, the future with worries. So many things have happened in our lives about which we feel uneasy, regretful, angry, confused, or at least ambivalent ... we become blind to the flowers in the garden and the smiling children on the streets, or deaf to the grateful voice of a friend ... but real life takes place in the here and now ... God is always in the moment, be that hard or easy, joyful or painful...” (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 138)
The Scaperlandas acknowledge the importance of present moment awareness, and share the words of Wayne Muller, writer and minister, who believes that by engaging in the discipline of mindfulness, pilgrims can:
... cultivate a deep love and affection for paying attention to the daily, precious moments of our lives, allowing us to receive and experience each new moment in a fresh way ... when we touch all we feel and all we are with mindful, loving attention in the present moment, we are able to be set free from the demons of our remembered smallness, free to grow and change, and to blossom in ways we never dreamed possible. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 35)
Sometimes mindfulness doesn’t come naturally, and the pilgrim needs more than an intuitive encounter to begin the awakening process. As an experienced pilgrim and having already experienced the shift into present moment awareness while in India, Andrew Harvey’s companion Jean-Marc declares: “Look around you. Feel this night, its sweetness, the softness of the sand where we are walking. You’ve been running from your spirit for years. You must stop. You must sit down, shut up, open, listen, and wait. Give your soul a chance to breathe” (Harvey 16). Though not every pilgrim hears these words from a clear-minded companion, the same message is delivered in a variety of ways during Phase One.
As pilgrims cultivate present moment awareness, stopping the feverish activity of the mind and allowing the senses to fully open, one of the primary things that happens is that they begin to enter into sacred space within themselves. The long winding path, the temple, the church, the culture with a long standing history of spiritual or religious awakening, all become reminders that sacred space is everywhere. It is merely up to each person to enter into it consciously. Sam Keen experienced this truth in the midst of his own journey of awakening as he began to practice the flying trapeze:
... any church, woods, bedroom, boardroom, or playing field may become consecrated ground ... the body is a sacramental site, a place of revelation. The apocalypse is here and now. Flesh is a sacred text that must be deciphered. Our metaphoric practice, our personal sacrament, is the place of apocalypse, metamorphosis, and revolution. (Keen 238-239)
Keen’s discovery is much the same as that of many pilgrims, that all space becomes sacred when the pilgrim carries sacred space within him/herself.
In the midst of his first journey to Peru, Alberto Villoldo’s primary interest was to study the ritual use of ayahuasca, a hallucinogen used in sacred ceremonies in the Amazon. His shaman-teacher chose to introduce him instead to a series of rituals involving the creation of sacred space, believing it was of great importance in any sacred ritual. Villoldo shares what he learned:
Shamans always begin healing ceremonies by opening sacred space. In this space we leave behind the affairs of ordinary life, the bustling world of meetings and schedules, and prepare to meet the divine. Sacred space allows us to enter our quiet inner world where healing takes place. Here the mundane cannot distract us, and every act is hallowed and deliberate ... sacred space is a healing sphere that is pure, holy, and safe. (Villoldo 136-137)
Villoldo observed that without sacred space, no deeper experience of awakening or transcendence is possible.
Much of our fear and pain derives from the feeling that the world is not a safe place for us. When the world is dangerous and predatory we raise our defenses. Our psychological armor goes on. Sacred space creates an environment where our defenses can be lowered, where we can explore our soft, tender underbelly. (Villoldo 137)
Shedding one’s armor is crucial in Phase One, as well as relaxing one’s defenses in order to open one’s receptivity to his/her experiences. Along with the cultivation of present moment awareness, when pilgrims create sacred space around themselves, they feel protected as they begin to probe more deeply into the core of their spiritual quest.
***
On the Road
Once the journey is underway, the pilgrim settles into a groove. During this stage, the elements that began to affect the pilgrim during Phase One deepen in their influence, and start to become a way of life on the road. Though his/her surroundings are always changing and s/he never knows what will be around the next turn, a sense of freedom and spaciousness abounds. The pilgrim accepts the unknown, embraces change, and allows him/herself to slow down and embrace the world around him/her. In the words of Herman Hesse, “in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering” (Hesse 25). Here Hesse has captured the essence of the pilgrim’s days while on the road.
In his book Wandering, Herman Hesse reveals the carefree attitude that permeates his journey, as he is clearly overcome by a newfound sense of freedom:
Where am I going to sleep tonight? Who cares! What is the world doing? Have new gods been discovered, new laws, new freedoms? Who cares! But up here a primrose is blossoming and bearing silver fuzz on its leaves, and the light sweet wind is singing below me in the poplars, and between my eyes and heaven a dark golden bee is hovering and humming - I care about that. It is humming the song of happiness, humming the song of eternity. Its song is my history of the world. (Hesse 51)
As pilgrims continue to awaken to their surroundings, a new appreciation for the beauty and rhythm of the world grows within them. They wander along in a state of reverie, free from the burdens of their daily lives.
Hesse captures the exact feeling I experienced when landing in Lima, Peru at the beginning of my Peruvian pilgrimage: “Where am I going to sleep tonight? Who cares!” I had deliberately chosen to plan as little as possible before leaving home, in order to allow myself to respond intuitively. Once in Lima, I decided spontaneously to take the bus to Paracas, home to the secluded Paracas Nature Reserve. In the early morning hours of that journey along the Pan-American Highway, I observed the passing landscape with great care, noting what I saw in my journal, and longing for the moment when I’d be able to wander freely among those stark, pale dunes along the coast.
Though speaking in metaphor about the spiritual journey, Pema Chodron aptly captures the quality of present moment awareness as it continues during this stage of the journey.
The path that we’re talking about is the moment-by-moment evolution of our experience, he moment-by-moment evolution of the world of phenomena, the moment-by-moment evolution of our thoughts and emotions ... the path is uncharted. It comes into existence moment by moment and at the same time drops away behind us. It’s like riding in a train sitting backwards. We can’t see where we’re headed, only where we’ve been ... now is the only time ... what we do accumulates; the future is a result of what we do right now. (Chodron 143-144)
While on the road, pilgrims follow their own uncharted paths, surrendering to Phase One more and more fully as they become adjusted to the elements of simplicity, solitude, and the unknown.
As Peace Pilgrim wandered across the highways of America, quite literally on the road, she looked past the asphalt and traffic and discovered the beauty and comfort that was right there, by the side of the road. “When the temperature gets high and the sun gets hot there is nothing so welcome as shade. There is a special coolness about the shade of a tree ... clouds provide shade as they drift across the sun ... sometimes even the shade of a bush is appreciated” (Pilgrim 57). The pilgrim’s days on the road are filled with simplicity, and s/he has the luxurious opportunity to find pleasure in something as seemingly ordinary as shade. As s/he wanders on, the pilgrim’s awakened state of mind deepens, and inner peace grows.
During these early days of the journey, pilgrims experience more than just the beauty of the world. They gradually release their boundaries and are absorbed into their surroundings, no longer feeling so separate. As pilgrims become part of the landscape, their attention naturally shifts into exploring their inner world. Thoreau knew this to be the value of wandering for its own sake, as a moving meditation: “the walking of which I speak ... is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day ... you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking” (Emerson & Thoreau 77). Like the camel, pilgrims enter into a state of stream-of-consciousness pondering as the cares of the world recede.
If the pilgrim is alone, his/her days pass in a new rhythm that naturally emerges as s/he comes into a deeper relationship with him/herself. No deadlines, no goals, no one to please or keep up with. However, if a person shares the journey with a friend or with family, or even fellow pilgrims along the way, s/he may be swept away in the momentum of the group. Claudio, a pilgrim that Edward Stanton meets in the early days on the Camino de Santiago, encourages him to embrace his personal rhythm.
It’s important to find your own pace and to follow it. Trying to keep up with someone else is no good. When you find your own rhythm in walking and breathing, you tire less, you calm the restlessness of the mind, your senses become more receptive to the scenery and you begin to see, not only to look at things, you are a part of nature. (Stanton 108)
While walking the Camino, I found it difficult at first to find my own pace. It seemed that everyone, even those three times my age, walked faster than me. As pilgrim after pilgrim passed me by, my own competitive nature surfaced, and I felt pulled by some vicious inner force to keep up at all costs. Fortunately, by the end of my first week, I had found a pace that felt natural, and I was able to flow with my own rhythm, happy and alone. Throughout the journey, though, this same issue resurfaced as I sought to keep pace with the group of pilgrims that I had fallen into step with. I pushed myself past sickness, aches, and pains to keep up with them, and became increasingly angry and frustrated as I ignored my body’s own desire to slow down. Eventually, the Camino itself taught me the essence of this lesson: my friends and I were separated for the final ten days of the journey, and I was forced, once more, to fall into my own pace.
As pilgrims wander along the path, clearing their minds and pushing the limits of their bodies, difficulties may begin to emerge. Pastor Erwin McManus acknowledges the value of these quandaries in the pursuit of wisdom.
The path to wisdom is less journey and more quest. It doesn’t come simply by travelling. You have to pursue it ... much learning will come to you as you travail down the hard roads ... when you extract it from your experience ... wisdom and experience are uniquely interconnected. (McManus 226)
At this point in the journey, the difficulties are usually minor, but must be dealt with as they arise. For many people, spending a great deal of time alone is a daunting proposition. Though the pilgrim has been in the midst of the journey for a while, s/he may approach a new level of discomfort with solitude, as time alone has allowed the mind to roam into challenging, disturbing, and long-forgotten realms of thought that have been neglected during ordinary life. This is often an uncomfortable experience during the awakening process. Osho observes the fear that many people experience in solitude: “There are very few people who would like to sleep under the sky with all the stars - the fear of vastness, aloneness, darkness” (Osho 26). In aloneness, the pilgrim is more vulnerable, more silent, and more receptive to the inner struggles and obstacles begin to emerge.
Sometimes these struggles are presented as obstacles that physically block the pilgrim’s path, slowing him/her down and forcing him/her to confront them and persevere. Peace Pilgrim recalled one such encounter.
There was an occasion when I felt that I was indeed battling with the elements. It was my experience of walking through a dust storm which sometimes blew with such force I could scarcely stand against it, while sometimes the dust was so thick I could not see ahead and could only guide myself by the edge of a road. A policeman stopped alongside me, threw open his car door ... I told him I was walking a pilgrimage and did not accept rides ... that God was my shield and there was nothing to fear. At that moment the winds died down, the dust settled and the sun broke from the clouds. I continued to walk. But the wonderful thing was that I felt spiritually lifted above the hardship. (Pilgrim 37)
Through confronting the obstacles that challenge them, pilgrims feel stronger and their commitment to the journey deepens, as does their faith that they are being guided by their highest self, by Spirit, by God.
As pilgrims are increasingly absorbed into the journey, pilgrims may experience overwhelming physical exhaustion, and are often vulnerable to the forces of nature in ways that seem easily escapable in their usual lives. Roger Housden felt this vulnerability as he trekked through the Egyptian desert toward the Monastery of Saint Catherine with his two guides, Sliman and Selman.
We pushed on for hours until we finally reached the far side of the plain and caught sight of Selman crouched by a fire among some rocks below us. He had already made camp ... we clambered down to join him, my legs barely holding. I threw all the clothes in the bag on my back and lay down by the flames like a child, teeth chattering, vital force gone. Sliman took his only blanket and covered me with it gently. “Thank you, thank you,” I mumbled. “We are all brothers in the desert,” he said without affectation. I felt tears well up as I took in the simple human kinship that survived here still. Ordinary fellowship. No great emotion, the passing of a blanket and a cup of tea. Our shared circumstance not just the desert wind but the common lot of human frailty and kinship, the ceaseless wandering together on the road from birth to death, and maybe beyond. (Housden 21)
Housden’s experience acknowledges yet another vitally important element of pilgrimage: the pilgrim does not have to endure these struggles alone. In the midst of exhaustion and vulnerability, as Housden shows us here, pilgrims are often graced by new friends who help them along the way.
I, too, have been graced by the unexpected kindness of strangers in the midst of my pilgrimages. During my first days in Cusco, I spent much of my time wandering around the heart of the city, watching people, listening to conversations, and writing my observations. One afternoon I ended up in the midst of a political demonstration, with crowds of indigenous Peruvians posting handmade signs about anti-globalization along one of the corridors facing the Plaza de Armas. After watching for a while, I was pleasantly surprised to hear the joyful, energetic music of an Andean folk band, and I was particularly drawn to the incredible flutist. I joined the crowd for the concert, and following the performance, I waited for the audience to disperse. Finally I caught sight of the flutist, and went over to him, introducing myself as a fellow flautista in my mediocre Spanish. Before I knew it, I was swept away by the entire group, was introduced to everyone, and was taken along to their next performance. During my two weeks in Cusco, I joined Cesar and Max each evening for their performances in Cusco’s tourist district, and they shared with me their music, thoughts about the state of their country and culture, as well as the rights of indigenous people, and I was embraced by them as if I was the newest member of their family, not merely a gringa tourist.
Later during the same journey, following my horrific experience of being assaulted in LaPaz, Bolivia, I was again graced by the kindness of strangers. When I arrived at the airport with only a photocopy of my passport, a mere eight hours following the incident, I was denied entry to the plane. Still in a state of shock, I began to sob and wail, declaring that I could not go back to the city. Mariella, the kind-eyed woman behind the flight desk, comforted me, telling me not to worry, that I could come home with her, that she and her husband would take care of me and assist in all the arrangements I needed to make in order to get a new passport so that I could return home. For those two days, Mariella and her husband showed me the city, shared their home with me, and did everything they could to make me feel comfortable and safe. Without their kindness and generosity, I’m not sure how I could have handled the situation.
Phil Cousineau reflects upon a defining moment from his pilgrimage in Egypt, a moment of companionship that emerged in the midst of his solitary exploration.
Alone, I stumbled through the tumbledown ruins of unnamed temples until I came across a group of Bedouins sitting in the shade of towering date trees. With supreme grace, they invited me to sit with them. They poured the finest mint tea I ever hope to drink... Something ancient and holy was unfolding all around me. It was what the wandering pilgrim-poet Basho called “a glimpse of the under-glimmer,” an experience of the deeply real that lurks everywhere beneath centuries of stereotypes and false images that prevent us from truly seeing other people, other places, other times. An enormous gratitude welled up in me for the ritual kindness accorded the stranger. Me. During those hours I was never more a stranger and, uncannily enough, never more at home. That encounter was the first of many in my life that drove home the unsettling but inescapable fact that we are all strangers in this world ... during those moments far away from all that is familiar, we are forced to face that truth ... toward twilight, a stillness came over the Bedouins. The sun was setting below the long red line of the desert horizon. Silently, we watched while the tea simmered and the smell of cinnamon lingered in the air. It was a stillness that was there before the pyramids, a timelessness I hadn’t known until then that I had longed for. I felt utterly happy. (Cousineau xviii-xx)
The moments of timelessness and connection that Cousineau experienced in Egypt, at home though a stranger, are what many pilgrims long for, often without knowing it or even being able to describe it in any clear way until it has been experienced.
While the Scaperlandas often journeyed as a family in their pilgrimages, they acknowledge that even when people journey alone, they are blessed by companionship along the path: “pilgrimage gives us ample opportunity to love and be loved. Although pilgrimage is often lonely travel, it is never unaccompanied. Whether we see them or not, or know them or not, others journey with us” (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 91). Whether local people, fellow pilgrims, friends and family from home, or the felt connection to those who have gone before,while on the road pilgrims are blessed by relationships that enrich the journey, help them in times of need, and encourage their growth.
***
Phase Two: Exploration
During Phase One, pilgrims cleared the space within themselves to allow important, yet neglected thoughts and feelings to surface. In beginning the journey, they also cleared the space in their lives, leaving their homes and comfortable lives behind for a while. As these two elements come together, a completely new frame of mind emerges. Osho suggests “The moment you feel you are no longer dependent on anyone, a deep coolness and a deep silence settles inside” (Osho 53). Content in their solitude and in a heightened state of awareness, pilgrims are free to enter the exploration that characterizes the next phase of the journey as Phase One gives way to the more grounded Phase Two, bringing with it the feeling of settledness about which Osho is speaking. During Phase Two an array of thoughts and feelings start to surface, thoughts that yearn to be heard, acknowledged, and dealt with. Some of these thoughts and feelings may be surprising, while others are familiar. As pilgrims explore their paths with ever-increasing awareness, they are often prompted to explore the depths of themselves in contemplation. Pilgrims enter into an ongoing dialogue with themselves, and the path brings them to discover self-knowledge. Exploration is often the element that propels the journey forward. The pilgrim will certainly encounter great beauty and inspiration along the way, but s/he will most likely also encounter darkness. As has already been mentioned during the parallel on the road stage of the journey, the struggle ensues, and pilgrims meet obstacles, tests and challenges that threaten their existence, little by little. This is Phase Two, often the longest phase of the journey.
Many of a person’s early explorations are filled with joy and awe, resulting from the freshness of the adventure that characterizes Phase One. Pilgrims have become more tuned in to nature and their environment and as they drink it in with all of their senses, their explorations are reveries. During the many years of her pilgrimage, Peace Pilgrim wandered peacefully in a state of awakened exploration. “I used to walk amid the beauties of nature, just receptive and silent, and wonderful insights would come to me” (Pilgrim 11). It is during Phase Two that many pilgrims similarly begin to feel the connection between “the beauties of nature” and their own inner receptivity.
In his collection of sketches and writings about one of his journeys through the mountains, writer Herman Hesse shares the joys he felt as his senses were awakened to the natural world, relating his own phase of exploration with awareness and wonder:
I smile, and not only with my mouth. I smile with my soul, my eyes, with my whole skin, and I offer these countrysides, whose fragrances drift up to me, different senses than those I had before, more delicate, more silent, more finely honed, better practiced, and more grateful ... My yearning no longer paints dreamy colors across the veiled distances, my eyes are satisfied with what exists, because they have learned to see. The world has become lovelier than before ... I am alone and I don’t suffer from my loneliness. I don’t want life to be anything other than what it is. I am ready to let myself be baked in the sun until I am done. I am eager to ripen. I am ready to die, ready to be born again. (Hesse 16-17)
Hesse’s eloquent words share his reverie as he settles into the rhythm of Phase Two of his journey.
My own early pilgrimage experiences have been filled with “my yearning” painting “dreamy colors across the veiled distances,” and I am an admitted idealist. Following the initial reverie of each journey’s beginning, though, I have also settled into a more grounded sense of my surroundings. Though in China, this initial reverie was thoroughly dashed, and much of my subsequent experience was filled with anger and being overwhelmed in a culture that was shocking to me, my other journeys have offered a much gentler process of awakening to my senses. While wandering across Spain, there were many days when I joyfully walked in the coolness provided by the shadow of a slowly passing cloud. Other days, I spent hours contemplating my shadow as it stretched out before me. In Tibet, I became sensitive to the stunning spectrum of shades of brown in the dry, inhospitable Himalayas, from reds to greens to yellows and oranges to shades of white and even blue. The scent of roses in Paris stopped my mind in its spinning, and brought me back to the present moment, time and time again. Along with each of these sensory awakenings, my mind fell quieter, and I felt more and more free to experience the fullness of the world around me.
The reverie of Phase Two is not merely a state of mind, but for many it includes feeling more alive as a whole. Journeying deeper and deeper into the Amazon, Tobias Schneebaum luxuriated in his own skin as his mind relaxed its attachment to time.
I no longer thought about time or delay. There was no need to hurry on. At times, when the sun was hot and my clothes wet only with perspiration, I stopped to ... bathe, more for pleasure than in need ... I skipped up and down the beach to dry myself, my arms stretched out, breathing deeply the warm, dizzying air, my flesh tingling under the intoxicating stimulation ... I luxuriated in it. The days seemed to have neither beginning or end. They floated one into the other ... All my body needs were attended to. I could have gone on endlessly, roaming through that incredible forest I was coming to understand. (Schneebaum 13-14)
The early part of Phase Two is often filled with elation and pleasure as the pilgrim has discovered a new way of living in the world, as well as greater personal authenticity. With awakened senses and a freer mind, the pilgrim feels his/her connection to the world with greater sensitivity, and surrenders to the flow of life. Schneebaum continues: “There is a fullness to the days, a delight in everything around, that forces patience and ease” (Schneebaum 19). Along with patience and ease come days that are more meaningful than the hurried days of ordinary life.
As pilgrims luxuriate in the beauty of their surroundings, they occasionally become more aware of their own presence in the world. With heightened senses, Andrew Harvey
spent the next days walking in the snowy hills and woods above the village, walking for hours, sitting in the watchtowers watching in the silence the deer come timidly out. I felt my body lighter, more transparent; every sound I heard in the woods I heard with new, sharp, ecstatic ears; the most ordinary sights ... became sources of a deep happiness ... I began to walk in a different way - more slowly, from a higher balance in the body (Harvey 106)
As he became more grounded in himself, his perception of the world around him became clearer, and he experienced states of euphoria.
Each of my senses was becoming sharper. The way the morning light fell on the rough stones in my courtyard could send me into ecstasy ... the sacredness of every face, every body, made walking in the streets almost intolerably intense ... Ma was slowly removing all the screens between me and the world around me (Harvey 119)
As Harvey’s senses were sharpened, he experienced an increased sense of harmony with all that surrounded him. In an extended state of present moment awareness, his reverie deepened:
... the dullness of the days built up slowly a sensitivity to things I would not have noticed, a gratitude for the smallest details of life ... the events in my day are fresh winter light falling on my blankets, or a fly resting on my hand, or witting by the window and watching the wind move in the trees ... (Harvey 96)
This sensitivity might seem dull to the outside observer, but to a pilgrim such as Harvey, to achieve this state of awareness is often an excruciating process of slowing down and waking up, not to be taken lightly.
As Edward Stanton wandered across Spain along the Camino de Santiago, he entered into a similar state of reverie as he communed with nature. He shares one such experience:
From the path of mud, rocks and manure rises a cloud of butterflies, then another, hundreds of them. They fly around us with brown, orange-spotted wings. It’s as if the earth were sprouting them. The trees and bushes envelop us, drawing us into their recesses. I feel a closeness, an intimacy with this world where nothing is foreign to me. I’m pulled into the corredoira, absorbed, no longer an outsider but a part of it, inside, the landscape becoming me. (Stanton 169)
This is an excellent illustration of the felt experience of the dissolution of the everyday boundaries that people often experience during pilgrimage, especially during Phase Two as pilgrims enter into a simultaneous exploration of themselves and the journey’s path.
During his pilgrimage in celebration of his fiftieth birthday, Satish Kumar experienced a greater connection to trees, and he was filled with insight as he reflected upon them. While wandering across the English countryside, Kumar sometimes
... came across a tree which seemed like a Buddha or a Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim, shade to a cow, berries to a bird, beauty to its surroundings, health to its neighbours, branches for the fire, leaves to the soil, asking nothing in return, in total harmony with the wind and the rain. How much can I learn from a tree! The tree is my church, the tree is my temple, the tree is my mantra, the tree is my poem and my prayer. Standing under a tree by the Gapping River, I realised that the law of nature is to create energy and life by uniting. A seed united with the soil creates the tree ... wherever there is unity, sacred and positive energy is generated. How absurd that our modern materialistic mind is more accustomed to divide, to analyse, to split and separate. (Kumar 182)
This is a perfect example of the kind of powerful thought that pilgrims are often prompted to contemplate during Phase Two, as they find deeper meaning in things and ideas that previously seemed ordinary. It is this sort of profound idea that, when considered for many days during a journey, ushers in transformation, little by little.
As the pilgrim’s exploration evolves, his/her reverie settles into a state of deep receptivity. In continuing to observe the world around him/her, s/he is often reflected inward, where the exploration becomes intensely personal. It is likely that pilgrims will discover a great deal about home and their lives, and their personal identities. This identity, which may seem so clearly defined while in the midst of their ordinary lives, may be experienced as fluid, malleable, and ever-changing while in the midst of a journey. Sam Keen comments on his own understanding of identity: “If I get stuck in who I am now, I will never blossom into who I might yet become. Today’s identity is tomorrow’s prison. I need to practice the gentle art of surrendering and letting go” (Keen 18). While on pilgrimage, people are increasingly able to embrace the truth that our identity changes from day to day, and by surrendering to present moment awareness, they are able to continue to learn who we are over and over again.
It is during Phase Two that the journey becomes more clearly differentiated from ordinary travel. Having wandered extensively before his Amazon jaunt, Tobias Schneebaum compares an earlier journey with his current one: “when I walked across the Yucatan peninsula ... too much of my time and energy were taken up with looking at things, with trying to record them ... for something that had nothing to do with living in the present” (Schneebaum 42-43). Here he recognizes the difference between the superficial appeal of travel and the transformative experience of pilgrimage, as he was engaged in a journey that fully absorbed him. “I should have simply existed there in that world, absorbing whatever was around me ... It was different here ... walking day after day with barely a sign that people other than myself were anywhere on earth. This was my joy” (Schneebaum 42-43). He also clearly distinguishes the quality of the exploration that is being discussed here, an exploration not merely for the sake of fascination, but one that is rooted in deep awareness.
Cousineau lightheartedly suggests that “All our journeys are rhapsodies on the theme of discovery. We travel as seekers after answers we cannot find at home, and soon find that a change of climate is easier than a change of heart” (Cousineau 8-9). Hidden in his words is a hint of the struggle that frequently appears once the journey is well underway. Indeed, it is much easier to set off in search of answers than to actually wrestle the truth out of our deepest questions. Longing to find this “change of heart,” seventeenth century Japanese Buddhist poet Matsuo Basho sold his house and followed the pilgrim’s path. His own inner exploration brought him into “agonizing stages of self-scrutiny” and, “he achieved a rare depth of wisdom by concentrating on the eternals, what is constant and stands against the vicissitudes of time” (Cousineau 177). For most pilgrims, the journey’s gifts of wisdom are the result of agony, suffering, and hardship.
As the days wear on, the newness and reverie begin to wear thin. After beginning a new venture in everyday life, people sometimes enter into a period of dullness or boredom as they go about their lives; during pilgrimage, the constantly changing world around them doesn’t allow for the same kind of response. Instead of dullness or boredom, the pilgrim’s attention begins to fall heavily on his/her thoughts. In the Buddhist perspective, Pema Chodron relates, “the point is not to try to get rid of thoughts, but rather to see their true nature. Thoughts will run us around in circles if we buy into them” (Chodron 22). Day after day as pilgrims observe their thoughts, they become aware of patterns that emerge and repeat themselves. Having little to distract them from these thoughts, pilgrims become increasingly familiar with their own minds, with all their neuroses, obsessions, negativity, and judgment. Pilgrims begin to see a side of themselves that is not very nice, a side of themselves that they’d often rather not know about. This, however, is essential in the process of spiritual awakening. Chodron, as a spiritual teacher, acknowledges the importance of this inner revelation: “It is said that we can’t attain enlightenment, let alone feel contentment and joy, without seeing who we are and what we do, without seeing our patterns and habits” (Chodron 26). For many pilgrims, the latter half of Phase Two is a gradual uncovering of these patterns and habits, along with the mental and emotional reactivity that often accompanies them.
Sometimes pilgrims struggle with conflicting images of their own identities, between who they’re supposed to be, who they think they are, and who they actually feel themselves to be. Other times, the struggle is between inner and external worlds. John Brierley offers the thoughts of poet Ted Hughes in considering this latter conflict.
The real problem comes from the fact that outer world and inner world are interdependent at every moment. Two worlds, with mutually contradictory laws, or laws that seem to us to be so, colliding afresh every second, struggling for peaceful coexistence. And whether we like it or not our life is what we are able to make of that collision and struggle (Brierley, Camino Fisterra 9)
As the journey goes on, pilgrims are increasingly caught up in these conflicts of self, world, and the meeting of the two.
As the journey continues, more is revealed to pilgrims when they are ready to receive it. The journey acts like a mirror, showing each person not only who s/he is, but also the layers of his/her personality that are shown to the world but aren’t necessarily authentic parts of him/herself. As he journeyed deeper into the Amazon, Tobias Schneebaum found himself in the midst of this process of discovering the truth of who he was. “I was cutting away all that I knew about myself, I was removing my own reflection, and as I walked on, I walked into an incarnation of myself that had always been there, so hidden it had never reached the outer layers of my soul” (Schneebaum 65). As he contemplated this process of inner discovery he became increasingly aware of these layers of personality.
I learn only now, or maybe I always knew it but only now can I sense its truth in everyday reality, I learn that my self is made of all my selves, not only of the parts I wish to show, the parts that can be seen from the outside, but there is also that interior that so often cries my agony and denies me all my rights, denies me all the things I also am, the same interior that forces me along these paths (Schneebaum 181)
Discovering these layers of separation and division in oneself is tremendously enlightening and at times can be fascinating.
I experienced a similar process of unmasking toward the end of my pilgrimage in Paris. While I believe that all of my pilgrimages have contributed to my self-knowledge, it was in Paris that I began to deeply understand what pilgrimage was really about for me, and I explored the multifaceted nature of my personality in my writing while there. Though I had attempted this same process following my return from China, it was in Paris that the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. After I returned from Paris, I began to assemble the pieces of my own personality puzzle in all its layers, my “masks,” and I completed a map of the personality of Angela, including the parts of myself that felt most authentic and those that are worn for the sake of others, the polarities of each of those manifestations, both bold and subtle, and the qualities that seemed to appear alongside each manifestation. When complete, my personality map felt like a significant revelation, as if I had finally discovered everything within my own bag of tricks. I have since realized that when I choose to pay careful attention, I can identify which part of my personality is reacting or speaking in any given moment, and though at first this sometimes felt strange, it also felt tremendously freeing to know that I could see through my own masks and not be controlled by them. I believe that this has significantly influenced my ability to remain rooted in my own most authentic voice, as well.
The process of unmasking was fascinating and even thrilling for me, but for some people it is more difficult, and can even be a torturous experience. Andrew Harvey’s pilgrimage ran the gamut of experiences in his many trips to India to spend time in the presence of his beloved guru, Mother Meera. In turn, the phase of exploration of his pilgrimages continued in waves over an extended period of time. His revelations about himself in the process of his awakening were many and profound. “My life was never more repetitive and empty than when I pretended I was the master of it, filling it with diversion ... while deploying all the gorgeous vocabulary of spiritual transformation” (Harvey 84). Following a deeply transformative encounter at Mother Meera’s ashram, Andrew Harvey is reassured about the powerful, yet difficult inner process of awakening that had begun. “The Struggle is necessary and it will go on ... and that will mean a complete unmasking of yourself to yourself” (Harvey 39). For Harvey, this unmasking became an increasingly difficult experience, setting him on the course of completely unravelling all his ideas about who he was, ushering in a painful, yet profound process of transformation.
In each of these examples, each pilgrim has entered into the process of facing an unknown part of himself. Basho experienced “agonizing stages of self-scrutiny.” Schneebaum removed layers of his personality and “walked into an incarnation of myself that had always been there.” Harvey struggled through a “complete unmasking” of himself. While this soul-searching is an essential stage of spiritual development, the field of psychology has frequently studied these very processes. In her research, Carol Gilligan has explored the disconnection that people often feel from their authentic voices, occurring at various developmental stages, and her findings seem to ground the longing that has been explored here previously, the longing that has led people to venture into this process of self-discovery as pilgrims. While her own work involves a psychotherapeutic approach toward healing this rift, there is a clear parallel between her work and the work that is enacted through contemporary pilgrimage.
It has already been said that when pilgrims begin the journey, they empty their minds of external influences, approaching a simpler, more peaceful state of mind. It seems important to consider whose voices besides the pilgrims’ own were lurking within them: those of the people in their lives, their partners, families, coworkers, neighbors, friends, and even strangers who have crossed their path. After a lifetime of shared conversations, gossip, criticism, advice, and gathering information from the world around them, it is no surprise that there comes a time when most people feel like their own inner voice is buried and they have become a stranger to themselves. Carol Gilligan found that many people yearn to connect with “a voice that was free from second thoughts and instant revision, a voice that was at once familiar and surprising” (Gilligan 11). She refers to this voice as “the natural voice,” which is “the voice that carries rather than covers a person’s inner world” (Gilligan 8). This “natural voice” is the clear inner voice that emerges during the journey. As the “natural voice” is discovered and freed, Gilligan suggests that individuals come into contact with their authenticity and gain self-knowledge. The “natural voice” begins to emerge toward the end of Phase One, and becomes the predominant one during Phase Two. It is possible that the reverie that many pilgrims experience during this phase can be attributed to the newfound sense of freedom that they experience when they are in touch with their authenticity. And as the inner exploration continues, pilgrims often experience an increasing sense of discomfort as they struggle to uncover their authentic identities, free of “second thoughts and instant revision.” With this authenticity comes facing the perceived good and bad elements of the pilgrim’s personality, which stand unedited and unavoided.
As I have already begun to demonstrated, during the exploration phase, pilgrims becomes attuned to the voices inside of them that are yearning to be heard and acknowledged. After the initial reverie has settled, sometimes people discover new interests or neglected feelings. Other times, they encounter a vague sense of darkness, an unclear emotion or sensation that leaves a lasting impression and begs them to explore more deeply. The Scaperlandas have felt this darkness as
... a disconcerting, and largely unwelcome, presence. Sometimes it is ... that nagging little doubt ... other times ... the fear that keeps reappearing on the path ... and then sometimes ... this fear is so big that it makes us doubt that there is any path at all ... (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 184)
Confronting this inner darkness becomes necessary as the journey continues.
As exploration deepens, the pilgrim’s understanding of him/herself and the world are shaken, often dramatically. Things aren’t as they seem, business as usual is suspended indefinitely, and there are no guarantees. When a person’s fundamental knowledge about the world begins to shatter, one of two things tends to happen: s/he either falls apart or surrenders to the experience, trusting that everything will work out along the way. Wayne Muller comments on this defining experience:
A physical pilgrimage through unfamiliar territory is an excellent lesson in trust - one reason that physical journeys can help us spiritually and that pilgrimage itself remains so relevant and popular. When I have traveled to other places ... I have had to accept whatever the road had to offer ... being out of my normal environment teaches me trust in very concrete ways... (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 27)
Trust and acceptance must be consciously cultivated, though, as the habitual fearfulness, often the usual state of mind of many people, threatens to overwhelm the openness they have grown into during the course of the journey.
At some point during Phase Two, pilgrims invariably drift (or leap) into a question or problem that threatens them or presses their buttons. Beneath this response is fear. Sam Keen looks into fear a bit more deeply: “Beneath our fear of high places and things that go bump in the night, there is a primal fear, what the existentialists called ontological anxiety - the fear of extinction, of the void, of nothingness, of death - that is an abiding climate in the bottom of the psyche” (Keen 38). As individuals shed the layers of their personalities and come closer to the truth of who they are, there is a small part of them that feels threatened. Most people are deeply tied to their identities, and during pilgrimage, the very essence of a pilgrim’s identity is questioned. While uncomfortable, these periods of intense difficulty can benefit the pilgrim’s spiritual growth. Cousineau offers the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama: “If you utilize obstacles properly, then they strengthen your courage, and they also give you more intelligence, more wisdom” (Cousineau 153).
Humans are creatures of symbols and forms, and as pilgrims continue the journey, they often experience situations and places as symbolic of their own inner questions and dilemmas. For Edward Stanton, the highway was a powerful symbol.
Since I crossed the turnpike everything seems to remind me of mortality. Death has taken its time in making its inevitable appearance on the Camino de Santiago - a road whose destination is a tomb, after all. It’s a journey from east to west with the sun, a reminder every day that what rises must fall, like that sickle moon ahead of me on its way to setting. (Stanton 69-70)
Here, Stanton courageously acknowledges his own “ontological anxiety,” the human conceptual struggle with death. This is likely to surface for most pilgrims during the tumultuous inner journey, lending its reminders about the fragility of life.
Inner struggles are often dramatized during pilgrimage, and Peace Pilgrim considers this a normal part of spiritual life.
During the spiritual growing up period the inner conflict can be more or less stormy ... the self-centered nature is a very formidable enemy and it struggles fiercely to retain its identity. It defends itself in a cunning manner and should not be regarded lightly ... (Pilgrim 8)
As pilgrims struggle to find the essence of themselves, beyond all masks and appearances, the conflict continues. Osho explains the necessity of this process:
Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new. The old is familiar, secure, safe, the new is absolutely unknown. You will be moving in an uncharted ocean ... fear arises. And leaving the old, comfortable, safe world, the world of convenience, pain arises. (Osho 32-33)
During Phase Two of the journey, the pilgrim’s worldview is reconfigured, as well as his/her self-knowledge, and this process of transfiguration can be agonizing.
In the midst of these moments of conflict, pilgrims can often find comfort in the world around them. During pilgrimage, nature can soothe their turmoil like a balm. In the words of Osho, “Whenever you feel sad, sit by the side of a tree, by the side of the river, by the side of a rock, and just relax into your sadness without any fear. The more you relax, the more you will become acquainted with the beauties of sadness. Then sadness will start changing its form” (Osho 209). Not only will a person’s communion with the natural world quiet his/her troubles, but it can also return pilgrims to their sense of perspective and guide them to greater insight.
While in the midst of personal troubles and conflict, pilgrims are often consumed by confronting issues that arise and dealing with them, literally, step by step. In some cases, the comfort of nature or a companion is welcome and sufficient. At other times, the pilgrim’s struggles run much deeper, bringing on a full-blown identity crisis. Transpersonal philosopher Dane Rudhyar suggests that the essence of the identity crisis is rooted in the evolution of human society. “This is the great issue” which humanity has had to face, “the problem of how to become an individual free from generic nature and the collective patterns imposed by society and culture upon every newborn human being” (Rudhyar 14). This is the struggle toward authenticity, the yearning of each person to know who s/he truly is, beyond the labels and expectations of society. Rudhyar continues to outline the struggle:
... the person who feels bound at first may struggle against his or her bonds, even though he or she has neither a clear picture of what produced and originally imposed such a bondage nor a positive vision of liberation. Such a struggle remains blind and totally emotional until one realizes ... what it is that binds and what can be expected if one wins the struggle and becomes free. (Rudhyar 14)
To carry Rudhyar’s ideas a bit further, as pilgrims explore this identity crisis during pilgrimage, they are attempting to wrestle themselves free from the constraints of a society that has trapped them in a state of inauthenticity. In accepting Rudhyar’s theory, it is entirely possible that the struggle that pilgrims enact during pilgrimage is part of the process of an evolution much larger than the individual.
In the midst of inner conflict, many people are not only sorting through their loftiest questions about God and the meaning of life. Many people are wading through the trenches of raw, everyday emotion and the basest of human thoughts. Through coming into repeated contact with the guts of their personal struggles, not merely their noblest aspirations, their spiritual practice is tested. Pema Chodron recognizes this: “Our personal demons come in many guises. We experience them as shame, as jealousy, as abandonment, as rage. They are anything that makes us so uncomfortable that we continually run away” (Chodron 29). As a pilgrim’s feet pound the earth during his/her pilgrimage, his/her spirit is increasingly grounded in his/her very human existence. This is not easy or glamorous, it is not part of the idealistic reveries s/he may have envisioned as s/he began the journey, but it is honest, and it is an integral step along the path to greater enlightenment. Chodron elaborates:
we don’t hear much about how painful it is to go from being completely stuck to becoming unstuck. The process of becoming unstuck requires tremendous bravery, because basically we are completely changing our way of perceiving reality ... we are undoing a pattern that is not just our pattern. It’s the human pattern. (Chodron 54)
What Chodron suggests here is quite similar to Rudhyar’s theory, too, that this process of personal evolution transcends the individual, and is essentially the human struggle to to transcend and evolve.
For those pilgrims whose journey involves an arduous physical element, the struggles of the spirit are often aligned with the struggles of the body. In the midst of a pilgrimage with her family, Maria Scaperlanda approached her own inner demons as the path became demanding.
We continued for another long trek. But with every heavy step on the now steep terrain, I began to feel very old ... I began to proclaim very demeaning things to myself in my head: What were you thinking ... you are never going to make it ... I now began to voice my demeaning and negative thoughts with my also- tired family ... I stopped walking and sat down on the ground, with my backpack still on my back ... I was too tired, and so I gave up. I wanted to walk, for once, without carrying what now felt like the weight of the world on my back. I wanted to know where we were, exactly, and where we were going ... I also wanted it all to happen instantly, immediately, and before it got dark. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 28-29)
It is frequently during intense periods of physical challenge, as Maria illustrates, that pilgrims encounter their fiercest bouts of inner conflict. This happened to me many times along the Camino de Santiago, for sure.
While wandering along the Camino, Edward Stanton experiences a similar convergence of struggles. The path was a struggle, his body was a struggle, and his mind entered the struggle too.
The sickle moon sets and the sun sinks below the trees. Somehow I feel that I may be headed in the wrong direction. I turn around and begin to retrace my steps ... when the sky turns a glowing red on my right, I realize that I’ve been walking north instead of west, who knows for how long, how many miles I’ve added to what is already the lengthiest stage of my trip. I sit on the ground and loosen my boots, feeling the heat on my soles and toes where new blisters must have formed. As in the early days of the trip, my two feet seem to be the center of my body and the whole world ... to hell with pain too because my hip hurts again. To hell with all of it, I say to myself ... maybe you’re not strong enough to reach Compostela, the sores on your feet are also signs of the disease inside you (Stanton 87-88)
And yet, in this moment of pain and near abandonment of his path, a small, strong voice emerged, giving him perspective and encouraging him onward: “to hell with blisters I say, tie your boots, get up, move ... how easy it is to complain of your small discomforts while you forget the pain of others, the pain that does not go away like a blister but gnaws, lingering - poverty, hunger, disease” (Stanton 87-88). A similar voice carries pilgrims past many challenges, from physical discomfort to mental anguish, and as the days roll by, their courage and commitment to the journey grows stronger.
When pilgrims explore sacred places steeped in religious or spiritual tradition, they often approach those places with preconceived ideas, and this inevitably affects their experiences. Often these ideas are rooted in ancient history or mythology, and it is difficult to avoid being influenced by this knowledge. While these ideas are important, and are sometimes the source of inspiration that leads pilgrims to their journeys, at some point along the way pilgrims may find it necessary to confront some of the ideas they carry about the history or mythology of their sacred destination, and even their own personal idealism surrounding that place. This can lead to greater self-knowledge, and along with it, shattering the pilgrim’s illusions, and even creating a new, more real sense of the place as well. Perhaps one of the most idealized places of pilgrimage is Jerusalem, with its rich history as one of the holiest cities in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. During his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Da Avabhasa was overcome by feelings of empathy with the ancient spaces and their connection with the end of Christ’s life.
We stayed in the ancient sector of Jerusalem, within the old walls ... our dwelling was built on the Via Dolorosa, the road of Christ’s last walk. Our convent itself was built on the ground where Pilate interviewed Christ ... One night I was awakened to feel a tremendous force straining my body. My whole being seemed concentrated beyond and above my physical form, and it seemed as if the head were about to explode. I got up and began to wander in the convent. It was all in shadowy darkness. I felt drunken and possessed. I swayed through the halls. I felt surrounded with ancient spirits and the air of a terrible holocaust. I went into the Chapel where Christ was judged, and then I went into the cellar where he was scourged ... the strangeness and fear in the atmosphere quickened me, and I returned to my room. But I was unable to sleep for some time. (Avabhasa 219)
Avabhasa’s experience is rather interesting, illustrating the connection between his historical knowledge and his own felt experience of the place. For some pilgrims, including Avabhasa, the inner struggle isn’t always easily articulated in a series of clear thoughts or feelings, but is sometimes experienced as an unusual set of physical sensations or reactions that deeply affect the pilgrim. Though more rare, these experiences transcend thought and feeling, and are experienced as an indescribable force. During Andrew Harvey’s extended process of awakening, he went through an unusual period of physical experiences that grew increasingly intense. For him, Phase Two was an almost completely internal experience, resulting from his continued process of spiritual initiation with his guru, Mother Meera. “The Process continued. Each day it became fiercer, so fierce sometimes that my body felt shredded, and I had to lie down for long periods on my bed in my room, waiting for the new strength that always followed” (Harvey 199). As the experience progressed, his entire existence was shaken to the very core.
As the journey continues, pilgrims become strained and exhausted by the whole process. There often comes a time when they begin to feel lost. Having explored so deeply into themselves and into the passing scene, going back and forth between inner and outer struggles and challenges, pilgrims eventually begin to break down and wear out. The highs and lows are more frequent and intense and pilgrims are thrown ever more off-balance. While arriving at this point may often feel like a failure, and some pilgrims may contemplate giving up, this experience is actually quite important in the deepening of a person’s understanding and compassion, leading the way to a moment of breakthrough. In the moment, however, the pilgrim may feel stuck and not know how to proceed. Cousineau considers this:
you “hit the wall” on your journey. You’re tired, you’ve lost track of your original purpose for taking the pilgrimage. Your feet hurt, your eyes smart, you are feeling angry ... what to do? ... Take your good old time, by yourself, and sit on it ... chances are that the frustration you are feeling comes from what you’re missing more than from what you’re seeing. (Cousineau 145)
In moments like these, when the pilgrim does remain centered in his/her purpose, it becomes easier to return to a greater sense of perspective instead of being swept away in an onslaught of struggles.
During Phase Two, pilgrims experience constant change, and as they continue down the path, they are absorbed into the flow of it, alternately surrendering and struggling in varying degrees of grace and ease. The intensity of the journey is unrelenting. Chodron shares her ideas about this: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh” (Chodron 71-72). The same constant change that brings refreshment to the early days of the journey wears the pilgrim down into a state that the Buddhists call groundlessness, which is exciting, vulnerable, and exhausting all at the same time. She continues, suggesting that as people begin to explore themselves in the midst of constant change, the state of awareness that they experience is most authentic: “the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land” (Chodron 9). As the pilgrim continues along the path, s/he is constantly entering unfamiliar territory, in a state of groundlessness. Pilgrimage, itself, is a conscious choice of entering into the unknown, and is always within the realm of uncertainty. Chodron suggests that “To stay with that shakiness ... is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic - this is the spiritual path” (Chodron 10). It is also one of the most challenging and inescapable lessons offered on the pilgrimage road.
***
The Experience Intensifies
By now, the pilgrim has been on the road for a while. The newness and reverie have worn off, and s/he has begun to encounter obstacles and struggles, both on the path and inside of him/herself. The pilgrim’s body has begun to tire after many long days of travel, and as s/he continues, s/he is more and more affected by the splendor and difficulties of the world. The pilgrim’s mind has investigated his/her inner landscape and begun to encounter the deeper issues within him/her. The experience intensifies.
It is during this stage of the journey that pilgrims can be thrown off course. Pastor Erwin McManus warns of this risk: “Like an odyssey, this quest is filled with danger and difficult challenges ... you will find yourself pulled in many directions that always invite you to leave the path of wisdom” (McManus 244). McManus encourages people to bravely confront these difficulties. “In those moments you must push yourself free from all the distractions ... and hear the voice that calls you to live far beyond where the echoes stop” (McManus 244). It is crucial in the most difficult moments that pilgrims remember the purpose of the journey, and allow that wisdom to keep them on track. McManus brings the lost seeker back to this point. “If the journey draws you to it, but you find yourself overwhelmed with its weightiness, then do just two things: Look to the end and see the promise of enlightenment, then look straight ahead and focus on taking one step at a time” (McManus 197). While the final result or arrival may beckon the pilgrim onward past many difficulties, it is each step of the path, taken in present moment awareness, that delivers the pilgrim to that goal.
I had read that after a while, pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago settled into a groove, and along with that, the struggles of the body and mind receded into the experience of walking in contentment. Weeks went by, and it seemed that this moment would never come. In Sahagun, the town that marks the halfway point to Santiago, I finally burst into maniacal laughter as I listed the physical, mental, and emotional struggles that had appeared in my experience, day after day. From blisters and pulled muscles to cramps and sunburn, to stomach ailments, dry, cracked feet, anger and frustration, and in addition, the fears, sorrows, and mental turmoil of a lifetime, it seemed that walking in contentment would never come for me.
For some people, the experience intensifies in a more intentional, ceremonious way. During his pilgrimage in Peru, Alberto Villoldo was initiated into the path of the shaman. Though his journey was filled with a variety of intense encounters that challenged his very perception of reality, he was ushered into a defining moment of the journey when his teacher, Don Antonio, chose to bring about an intensification of the experience in the form of an initiation ritual. Villoldo shares his story:
We went to Mt. Ausangate and he gave me his hatun karpay, or great transmission. And then he told me to go jump into Otorongo Warmi Cocha, the female-jaguar lagoon ... “I’ve brought you to the holy mountain. I’m giving you my karpay. Let’s see if the apu gives you your life.” And then he explained that I would have to touch my lips to the ice at the bottom of the pool. Although the blue ice was only six or seven feet under the water, I doubted I could hold my breath long enough to touch bottom ... I found myself stripping down ... the cold was biting through my skin. I hovered on a boulder above the icy water, clasping my arms tightly over my chest, my skin all goose bumps ... I dove into the pool and had the breath knocked out of me by the frigid water. I managed to swim to the center of the pool but couldn’t hold my breath long enough to dive. Then I went under, as if in a dream, and kissed the glacier. (Villoldo 33-34)
By completing this symbolic ritual, Villoldo was assured that he had been embraced by the path of his journey, and his faith in himself was renewed. While not every pilgrimage holds rituals of initiation, pilgrimage itself becomes a true process of initiation as the experience intensifies.
One step at a time, the pilgrim journeys farther along the path and deeper into the mysteries of his/her own soul. Often these mysteries lead him/her into dark parts of him/herself, parts that are negative, small-minded, and filled with judgment and anger. Like many others, Edward Stanton sank into this darkness in the heart of his Camino.
Somewhere in the fog and clouds we miss the turnoff for the old pilgrim’s road, leaving it far away and inaccessible on the other side of the steep valley. I try to persuade the women to get off the highway and go back. Berna pays no attention, refusing to miss a beat of her mechanical rhythm ... she’s too obsessed with arriving, Michele too passive to care if we’re missing what’s supposed to be a spectacular stretch of the ancient Camino de Santiago. In favor of what? This asphalt highway where we’re buffeted by the wind of passing trucks, trailers, cars, splashed with water, mud and grease, swallowing gas and diesel fumes. Of course I know it’s hard to turn around and retrace your steps when your back, legs and feet are aching from miles of climbing uphill in the rain. I know it’s my fault for not insisting, for wanting to reach the goal too much, after all what’s keeping me from turning around, I’m a free person, a pilgrim, why not go back myself, meet them at the pass? But I do nothing, glued to the wet highway, plodding on with the wind and rain in my face, cursing them ... now getting angry at myself, bringing down insults on my own wet head (Stanton 155)
As he literally veered from the pilgrim’s path, pounded by rain and assaulted by the traffic on the highway, Stanton also momentarily lost his sense of purpose as well as his faith in the journey, unable to find any good at all in the experience. He, like many pilgrims as the journey advances, was trapped in negativity. This is often the case as the experience intensifies, as the conditions of the outer world prompt a similar inner experience. Fortunately, his bitterness was quickly washed away as he shared a defining moment of the journey with his companions.
almost at the top of the pass now, Berna standing ahead of us on the shoulder, jumping up and down and laughing, pointing to the roadmarker for the province of Lugo, we’re hugging each other in the rain, I forgive them for everything, forgive myself, we’re in Galicia. (Stanton 155)
The obstacles that confront pilgrims during this stage of the journey feel all too real, whether small or great. As the experience intensifies, pilgrims are tossed back and forth between love and loathing, between reverie and misery, and between understanding and judgment. Sometimes there is an external factor that initiates these drastic shifts, as in Stanton’s experience, and sometimes it is entirely internal. The Scaperlandas describe this process:
Pilgrimage is not an easy road. External foes present many challenges and obstacles along the way, and an internal voice constantly raises doubts, making the pilgrim question the wisdom of leaving the known for the unknown. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 76-77)
The outer struggle prompts an inner struggle that meets another outer struggle, and as the process continues, pilgrims are thoroughly worn down, body, mind, and spirit. Their unshakable faith and idealism weaken, and in that weakness, doubt grows. Phil Cousineau identifies the range of stressors that accumulate and overwhelm pilgrims by this stage of the journey:
Fear, sacrifice, confusion, betrayal, theft, even death are the invariables travelers are loathe to think about. The sheer physical exertion of the thousand-mile walk to a saint’s tomb can evoke strong emotions of resentment and doubt; the loss of money, passport, or a travel companion can threaten a long-planned journey. You may have been given wrong directions, or perhaps were deliberately entrapped by con artists. Your baggage may have been misdirected ... unaccustomed loneliness, unfamiliar food, unexpectedly kitschy architecture at the shrine you have dreamed of visiting all your life - all these disappointments can result in the confusion, frustration, and chaos that have been symbolized for centuries in the image of the labyrinth. (Cousineau 131- 132)
As Cousineau illustrates, everything that pilgrims fear will haunt them, everything that could possibly frustrate them will, and at times it may seem like the whole journey was pointless. As the experience intensifies, pilgrims often fear that they may be lost.
***
Phase Three:
The Point of No Return & Arrival
Phase Three is the most difficult inner phase. After the stable, peaceful beginning of Phase Two, things were stirred up. Internal and external struggles and conflicts have appeared, and there has been a series of ups and downs, building in intensity. Finally, a moment comes when pilgrims don’t know how to go on. In fact, they know that they can’t go on in the same way as before. This is different from the struggles of the early days. During Phase Three the struggle tends to get really rough, emotional, tumultuous, and approaches a climax. This is the point of no return. After enduring struggles that have pushed them to the very limit of their endurance and repeatedly tested their faith, the moment of truth arrives. This is the moment when the pilgrim is transformed by the journey. Phase Three isn’t always synonymous with suffering, though. It can also be the moment in a person’s spiritual search when s/he finally breaks through into a new level of awareness or understanding, and can be marked by a moment of incomparable surrender, a life-changing epiphany, or the attainment of enlightenment. This is the turning point of the journey, and often a major turning point in the pilgrim’s life. In the words of Phil Cousineau, “For the pilgrim, the traveler with a deep purpose, this is the moment of truth, when the search for the real takes you to a place that pierces your heart” (Cousineau 134). Once the pilgrim’s heart is pierced by this experience, there is no turning back. S/he is forever changed in reaching the point of no return. This is Phase Three.
If pilgrimage is a ritual of initiation, the turning point comes during Phase Three. Thomas Moore explains:
In initiation rites around the world, the neophyte is profoundly stirred by some kind of pain, perhaps from ritual incisions or sleeplessness and fasting, and out of that experience a new level of awareness dawns. Religion recognizes pain and failure as important in the soul’s deepening and sophistication. (Moore xiv)
As pilgrims are stirred by struggles and conflicts as they reach the point of no return, they are surrendering to a higher state of awareness. Many religious traditions have sought to bring about a shift in the awareness of the individual by engaging in rituals involving both sensory deprivation or mortification of the flesh. It is believed that in achieving this new state of awareness individuals are open to greater receptivity to God or Spirit or their deepest selves. Though not always an enactment of these kinds of rituals, pilgrimage does tend to usher in great personal transformation through the difficulties and challenges that escalate to the point of no return during Phase Three.
During one journey to India, Andrew Harvey visited Thuksey Rinpoche, a holy man who was dying. Among his disciples a conversation arose regarding the difficulties of the journey toward enlightenment, and in this conversation, the struggle toward the point of no return was wisely explained by Rinpoche:
One life has to end for another to begin. The ego has to die for awareness to be born. The ego does not die fast ... the misery you will endure in realizing enlightenment is nothing to the misery you will endure in life after life if you do not realize it. To get an arrow out of the flesh, you have to probe the wound. That hurts” (Harvey 87)
Though many people may not achieve the ultimate state of enlightenment during their journeys or their lives, enlightenment does grow by degrees, and as pilgrims approach the point of no return and all its accompanying struggles, they are surrendering to their own process of enlightenment.
Most of the mystics and saints have agreed that suffering is a necessary part of the struggle toward enlightenment. Osho joyfully declares, “Let there be pain, let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes” (Osho 37). During the spiritual struggle, the pain and suffering wear down those parts of an individual’s personality that are not authentic, gradually breaking down the ego. In enduring the pain, the pilgrim is transformed.
In The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau compares approaching the point of no return to the experience of walking the labyrinth. He offers the thoughts of Mircea Eliade:
... the purpose of the labyrinthine journey is exactly an initiation to a higher plane of consciousness. Reaching the center reorients us through a revelation of the sacred, however disturbing ... disturbing as it was to see into the horror of the labyrinth, the heart of darkness, it was also illuminating. This is the religious aspect of the dark stretch of the pilgrimage. (Cousineau 134)
By coming face to face with “the heart of darkness,” the pilgrim is finally no longer able to deny his/her darkest self. This is the peak of the process of initiation, the point of no return. This, it would seem, is the ultimate result of pilgrimage beyond any declared reasons, goals, or sacred destinations. All of the pilgrim’s motivations lead to this singular defining moment of transformation.
Pema Chodron explores this process further: “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us” (Chodron 7). As pilgrims approach the point of no return, their images of themselves are broken apart, and in the process they see the darkest parts of themselves, which are often parts that they don’t want to see and have pushed away many times. Spiritual seekers learn that they often aren’t who they thought they were, but they’re not quite sure who they really are either. With this comes a lot of uncertainty. “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing ... the healing comes from letting there be room for all this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy” (Chodron 8). This “falling apart” is the point of no return. It is also the mystical moment of rebirth.
As pilgrims approach the point of no return, they begin to lose their sense of control in the journey. One thing happens, then the next, then the next. Their reactions build in intensity, but often they can’t keep up with the pace of things changing all around them. As their thoughts and emotions are triggered again and again, pilgrims begin to feel overwhelmed. Pilgrims “experience egolessness when we don’t know what’s happening, when we’ve lost our reference point, when we get a shock and our mind is stopped ... sometimes we open further; sometimes we quickly shut down” (Chodron 64). And when pilgrims choose to open further, they are rewarded with great wisdom and insight about the journey, about their lives, and about themselves.
What is happening in the point of no return? Thomas Moore speaks of surrender. “Soul appears in the opening made when a person finally gives up the effort, or when logic has finally exploded away, or when frustration has reached a level where the attempt to gain control gives way. Soul appears when we shift to a different level of perception altogether” (Moore 147). What Moore refers to as “soul” seems to be the much the same as what Carol Gilligan called the “natural voice,” and what I would call authenticity. When pilgrims reach the point of no return, they are surrendering to the purest, most fundamental version of themselves, freed from the constraints of personality, transformed.
Carol Gilligan offers her perspective regarding this transformation from the field of psychology: “disarray, the breaking apart of old forms, is part of the process of transformation” (Gilligan 35). As pilgrims wander down the pilgrimage road, this process is engaged, and when they approach the point of no return, their old way of life, patterns of thinking and worldview starts to “break apart.” Gilligan recognizes both the value and the volatility
... of the moment in the process of transformation when a person envisions the new, the moment of stepping out of an old frame. Suddenly there is no frame, no way to hold past and present together; it is the place where we find ourselves without a map ... (Gilligan 159)
Gilligan is speaking, here, about her interpretation of psychological breakthrough, and as many people do, she has chosen the metaphoric language of the journey to elucidate her ideas. While she doesn’t discuss the potential of a sacred journey in ushering forth this process of transformation, her words seem to echo those of Pema Chodron, as she speaks about groundlessness. It seems clear that both women, in their respective fields, are describing the same process, the apex of the pilgrimage.
In his study of religious experiences, Henry James considers these moments of transcendence and epiphany to be tremendously important to the individual. “There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience ... that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone” (James 19). In his work, James doesn’t judge the validity of these moments, instead presenting individual examples of such experience. In his published lectures he acknowledges that these experiences are life-changing, and offers his extensive research into a variety of sacred experiences. In these lectures, he provides an intellectual perspective into experiences that are often regarded with little seriousness, and even now, a century later, his ideas are bold and timely.
Andrew Harvey’s spiritual transformation is one such example of mystical experience. For years he visited his guru in India, and during one journey, Harvey experienced a series of intense meetings with Mother Meera. He describes the period of climax following these meetings:
The next few days were difficult. I was unable to think, work, or meditate; my dreams were violent; I felt trapped and longed to return to a life in my control. My mind attacked everything, mocked everything. I tried to remember all that had happened, all the visions and moments of grace, but the derision continued ... My old life had been smashed beyond repair - but the new life I had been so confident of only two days before now seemed absolutely beyond reach ... the pain became extreme ... Am I dying? I thought. If this is death, I don’t care! Get it over and done with. (Harvey 138-139)
The intensity continued, breaking apart any remainder of the life that Harvey had known. Nothing in his life or within him was immune to his spiritual transformation.
The wound I had thought healed opened, and the pus of hatred and atrocious anger with which it was filled boiled out in an hour of madness. Alone on the beach, I screamed and howled. But even as I screamed and the howls broke out of me, I was lucid, at once ravaged and calm; the Self, the Spectator, and the destroyed ego, raging and sobbing. (Harvey 163)
Following this long period of inner turmoil, the experience peaked, and he experienced a sense of complete surrender to the world around him. He was deeply changed.
I walked under the trees and knew that my walking beneath them was part of their lives also, for their sympathy and patience communicated themselves to me in my silence and found me out and sustained me. Late one afternoon about ten days after I had arrived, I knelt to her in a clearing and said inwardly: You have brought me here; I am here at last; I have arrived on earth; I know now that the creation is rooted in bliss. As I knelt, a wave of brazen power swept my body and mind, and I heard from all the trees and grasses and hidden animals around me a soft cry of welcome, of blessing. (Harvey 183)
While many people desire this depth of connection in their lives, it is only through the process of deep soul searching and the breaking apart of the old self that brings about this level of transformation. Harvey and many others, primarily those following Hindu spiritual traditions, believe that the guru is an important guide in this process.
The point of no return has appeared in each of my journeys in vastly different ways. While walking the Camino, it was the moment I realized that I had been separated from the community of pilgrims that I had been walking with for weeks. I awoke at O’Cebreiro, realizing that my friends had attempted to awaken me before dawn, but I had been so exhausted that I had continued to sleep for many more hours. I knew that I couldn’t catch up with them, and that I might not see them again. I was devastated. In China, it was the moment when I gave up all my attempts to find a spiritual connection there, and began to buy incredibly cheap bootleg DVD movies. During my journey in Peru and Bolivia, I honestly began to wonder if there would be a defining moment at all, since the entire experience was filled with wonderful realizations and incredible connections. Indeed, the moment came on the final night of my journey in LaPaz, when I was assaulted and robbed by three men at the entrance of my hostel. In Paris, the moment was far more subtle, when I realized, in a moment of epiphany, what pilgrimage was really about, for me, as I sketched the structure that has become Part II of this thesis.
For some pilgrims and seekers, the point of no return comes as a singular mystical moment that reconfigures their entire perspective, and is often expansive, blissful, and timeless. Sam Keen experienced the point of no return in a moment of epiphany that resulted from a long period of intense challenges as he practiced the trapeze.
I ceased to be a human doing and became a human happening within a myriad of other happenings, a being within Being. I suppose that the mystical moment, by clock time, lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough to give me a vacation from the urgency of time, fill me with a sense of gratitude, and change the rhythm of my day... (Keen 196)
Following this mystical moment, Keen gained a deeper understanding of his journey. “My quest is not to arrive at some definitive knowledge of the complexities of who I am, but to cherish the mystery of my inspired flesh. It is to remember that I ... am a paradoxical, hyphenated, quantum being” (Keen 238). In interpreting his experience, Keen identifies that the kind of knowledge gained cannot be explained by the mind, but felt in a way that defies logic and ordinary understanding. This is much the same as Pema Chodron’s observation that “our mind is stopped” (Chodron 64) and is yet another reminder that pilgrimage, from the first steps to the point of no return, is intuitive and mystical.
Alberto Villoldo offers his interpretation of the transformation that was the heart of his mystical journey in Peru, which, like Keen’s, involved the suspension of time:
In infinity you exit linear time and move into the sacred. Because you no longer identify yourself within time exclusively, and with a physical form that ages and perishes, death no longer threatens the end of your days. This state of liberation is at the heart of many of the world’s mystical traditions ... (Villoldo 23)
Epiphanies, mystical moments, infinity, the point of no return. All are barely adequate attempts to communicate an experience of transcendence that is so extraordinary that a person’s entire perspective is changed permanently.
Though it is nearly impossible to wrap words around the ineffable, Osho attempts to explain this incomparable moment of transformation.
When your consciousness is not crowded by anything, by anybody, when your consciousness is utterly empty - in that emptiness, in that nothingness, a miracle happens. And that miracle is the foundation of all religiousness. The miracle is that when there is nothing else for your consciousness to be conscious of, the consciousness turns upon itself ... Finding no obstacle, finding no object, it comes back to the source. And the moment the circle is complete, you are no longer just an ordinary human being ... you are no longer yourself, you have become part of the whole universe ... this is the experience mystics have been searching for all their lives, down the ages. There is no other experience that is more ecstatic, more blissful. This experience transforms your whole outlook (Osho 195-196)
Osho is essentially describing the ultimate moment of enlightenment, and while many spiritual seekers have a variety of ideas about the experience of being enlightened, Osho, a fully realized being, provides insight into the process of actually becoming enlightened. And enlightenment flourishes during pilgrimage.
Peace Pilgrim’s own spiritual journey of enlightenment precluded her peace pilgrimage. She acknowledges that she experienced inner struggle, though she withholds the intimate details, she shares her own mystical moment of enlightenment:
I was out walking in the early morning. All of a sudden I felt very uplifted, more uplifted than I had ever been. I remember I knew timelessness and spacelessness and lightness. I did not seem to be walking on the earth. There were no people or even animals around, but every flower, every bush, every tree seemed to wear a halo ... this experience is sometimes called the illumination period. (Pilgrim 21)
She realized that she had reached the point of no return. “I knew that for me the struggle was over, that finally I had succeeded in giving my life or finding inner peace. Again this is a point of no return. You can never go back into the struggle” (Pilgrim 22). Like Peace Pilgrim, most pilgrims understand that once they have reached this new understanding, there is no turning back. The journey has irrevocably changed them, and some degree of the struggle has permanently come to an end.
Pema Chodron describes this experience of enlightenment without any of the poetic, mystical language that is so often used in spiritual literature:
When we’ve seen ourselves completely, there’s a stillness of body that is like a mountain. We no longer get jumpy and have to scratch our noses, pull our ears, punch somebody, go running from the room, or drink ourselves into oblivion ... we don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm ... we’re at home in the world because we’re at home with ourselves, so we don’t feel that out of nervousness, out of our habitual pattern, we have to run at the mouth. (Chodron 36-37)
While so many people have fantastic notions about the idea of being enlightened, here Chodron shares that the experience of enlightenment that many people have imagined is, in fact, grounded in very ordinary human life. After pilgrims have reached the point of no return, their lives are transformed not only in mystical ways, but in very human ways as well. This is essential to acknowledge, too, as it encourages ordinary spiritual seekers and pilgrims to pursue their own personal enlightenment, in whatever form it appears, and with whatever process it involves. Chodron boldly declares that spiritual enlightenment is just as much rooted in practical, human life as it is in the mystical, otherworldly, and divine. In this way, seekers and pilgrims are reminded that the goal of the path is not to escape ordinary human life, but to embrace a heightened state of awareness that becomes their predominant state of mind far beyond the end of the journey.
Pema Chodron looks honestly at the point of no return, identifying it as the point when a person has reached the end of his/her rope: “ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say “totally fed up.” It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning” (Chodron 38). Carol Gilligan has also described this moment, though in terms of psychological transformation. “In moments of epiphany - moments of sudden, radical illumination - we see through the categories that have blinded our vision. These are the moments when we step out of a frame” (Gilligan 207). Whether pilgrims are “totally fed up” with their old lives, or they experience an “epiphany” or an experience of “infinity,” the point of no return is the climax of the journey, and they are never the same again.
Roger Housden illustrates Chodron’s idea of “ye tang che.” As he trekked through the Egyptian desert, he reflected on the idealistic vision with which he began his journey.
Was this what I wanted? My feet were sore, my legs were aching, the wind was whipping through me. What price my lust for the wilderness now? This was masochism, pure and simple. Plodding head down through a bare and featureless land for no other reason than for the sake of it. Fear was already at my elbow; it filtered in with the awareness of my limited resources and how easily I could be swept from existence. I imagined Saint Catherine’s suddenly, a jewel in the heart of this barren land. I found myself moving toward it now - and me not an orthodox Christian - with the old prayer on my lips, “Lord, have mercy,” and meaning it. (Housden 21)
As the negative voices in his mind began to unite with his physical exhaustion, pulling him into a state of despair, the original purpose of his journey reappeared, surprising him as it inspired him to chant a sincere prayer. This was indeed a moment of surrender to the spirit that had guided him to wander through the desert in the first place.
Sometimes the point of no return occurs as a single intense experience that startles the pilgrim into an irrevocable sense of greater understanding. American pastor Erwin McManus and his wife embarked on a rafting trip, planning it as a fun adventure. Little did they know that it would become symbolic of their spiritual journey as well.
The water at the point of entry was so calm and peaceful ... for the first hour or so it seemed like the journey was anything but a challenge ... funny how a sleepy little river can lull you into virtual unconsciousness. But the roar woke us all up ... we looked ahead and saw a giant boulder protruding out of the river’s center ... we flipped ... before I knew it I had exhausted myself as I fought the rapids, and I felt it overtake me - not just the water, but surrender ... was it simply better to calmly accept my fate and give myself over to the river? It was a surreal moment ... I could hear a voice inside of me... “I want to live!” (McManus 3-4)
For McManus, the climax was aligned with his realization at the moment the raft flipped and he experienced a renewed feeling of gratitude for his life following this experience of great danger.
As has been shown previously, the climax of the pilgrim’s journey is often an intense experience of deeper connection or awareness, of grasping new meaning in his/her life, or of coming to understand him/herself in a totally new way. Many times, though, the climax of the journey is synonymous with arrival at the sacred temple or church, the holy city, or the end of the path at the top of a mountain or the edge of the sea. Victor Turner observes this impending arrival within a traditional religious framework. “Toward the end of a pilgrimage, the pilgrim’s newfound freedom from mundane or profane structures is increasingly circumscribed by symbolic structures” (Turner & Turner 10). While these symbolic structures are sometimes clearly religious and carefully placed along the path, they are, at times, also the perception of an increasingly awakened mind, as pilgrims seek symbolic imagery to provide their experience a greater sense of form. Either way, these symbols help to deliver them to the climax of the journey, and help them to understand the inner transformation that has been taking place all along the way.
Edward Stanton’s point of no return occurs as he observes the city of Santiago de Compostela from the Mount of Joy. In one sense, his experience exemplifies Turner’s observation, as the distant image of the cathedral spurs Stanton to experience a final revelation, but it becomes clear that his revelation extends far beyond any religious tradition or sacred imagery, and is deeply rooted in the journey itself. As Stanton nears the holy city, he contemplates his entire pilgrimage, acknowledging the struggles of his body and mind, and thoughts of the journey flash through his mind, offering him insight as he feels the end drawing near. In an epiphany, he begins to understand the greater impact of his pilgrimage.
As we begin the final descent through a grove of pine trees, I take a final look at Santiago ... I’ve spent my last night on the road before reaching Compostela; that moon has completed one revolution around the earth in the time it’s taken me to walk the Camino, more or less. Is it possible that only thirty days have passed ... how much have I changed in thirty days? My feet are like leather instead of being soft and covered by blisters. I still have some small pains ... but I’ve overcome my ailments ... the heat, sweat, dust, mud, rain, fog have weathered this body, broken it down, made it supple and uncomplaining. I’ve seen so much land, met so many people, had so many thoughts during this month that I feel overwhelmed by it all. Too much has happened in such a concentrated time. I may have to wait before understanding; perhaps I’ll never grasp it fully. This much I know: most of my companions and I have been uprooted from our former lives. To make the pilgrimage has been a way of proving that we could free ourselves from our daily existence, from all those small routines and obligations that mean nothing by themselves but together can prevent us from doing the things that really matter to us, can prevent us in fact from being ourselves. If we hadn’t been driven by a need to overcome the banality of our everyday lives, we wouldn’t be here. If we hadn’t looked into the world and seen great wounds there, we never would have taken to the road ... now we know the change must begin inside ourselves because the Camino has calmed the war in our own hearts. We saw the haste, the greed and solitude in ourselves and others; on the Road we’ve exchanged them for a growing peace, unselfishness and the solidarity between pilgrims. Walking, eating, sleeping, suffering side by side we’ve forgotten the boundaries between ourselves, between sexes, countries, classes, ages. This is part of what we were seeking, the measure of our hopes. At any rate this is what I’m thinking as we go down the hill, the last oasis on the Road to Santiago. When we cross the huge Autopista del Atlantico, the turnpike that joins Galicia to Portugal, nothing seems as clear as it did up there on the Mount of Joy. (Stanton 187)
In Stanton’s words, I recognize the truth of my own journey, and walking the Camino offered me a similar set of experiences and revelations. I, too, found that the journey, in its simplicity and difficulty, pushed me beyond the small challenges of my daily life into a deep contemplation of the meaning of my life on every level. Honestly, I couldn’t describe by own revelations any better or more clearly than Stanton has done here.
Sometimes these revelations or epiphanies persist beyond any skepticism or lack of faith, and the moment of arrival is equally powerful. In The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau shares the story of one skeptical woman’s pilgrimage to Santiago.
Bettina Selby began in London as an unbeliever, an agnostic, and pedaled her bicycle a thousand miles along the old pilgrim’s trail to ... the shrine at Santiago de Compostela. She arrived transformed. “The journey was not something outside time and reality ... but an opportunity to look at the same reality from a different angle and in a different context.” She candidly admits that she did not “for a moment believe that St. James had ever set foot in Spain, dead or alive ... but there are strange powers attached to places that cannot be rationally explained.” ... she heard the traditional request ... “pray for us,” again and again from people along the road. There was an unspoken belief that she would gain a certain power by completing her journey. Her biggest fear, however, was that the end of her journey would be anticlimactic. But as she pedaled her bicycle down the final blocks and into Santiago, she realized that it was “the jewel in the crown” of her pilgrimage. It thrilled her to shift her months-long solitude into a sense of communion with the thousands of fellow pilgrims ... near the cathedral ... (Cousineau 168-169)
For Selby, the climax was indeed aligned with her arrival in Santiago, though for her the point of no return was more about connecting with her fellow pilgrims than with the spiritual powers of Saint James or any religious significance. Perhaps this feeling is linked to the Christian metaphor of arriving in heaven to meet all those people one has loved and lost during life, a joyful union for all eternity. Arriving in Santiago was like this for me, as well. I don’t believe that I have ever experienced greater joy than in being reunited, one by one, with my family of pilgrims from all along the way in the sprawling plaza in front of the Santiago cathedral.
Though not the predominant experience, there are times when the arrival at the holy destination of the journey is anticlimactic. This occurs when pilgrims have strong preconceived ideas about the sacred destination of the journey, and for whatever reason, the journey didn’t wake them up or wear them down sufficiently to break through their idealistic notions. This can be disappointing. Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis discusses this occurrence in an essay comparing the written accounts of three pilgrimages in diverse time periods and cultures. In her essay, she shares the belief that the occurrence of an anticlimactic arrival is considered a failure. One pilgrim, Pierre Loti, was disappointed because of “the failure of the real pilgrimage to Angkor to match the imaginary one” (Coleman & Elsner / Petsalis-Diomidis 98-99). This failure was the result of Loti’s idealism being in conflict with his actual experience of arriving at Angkor Wat. Petsalis-Diomidis shares the experience of another pilgrim, Friar Felix Fabri, who was also disappointed in his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, claiming it was “a literal failure of viewing related to the light” (Coleman & Elsner / Petsalis-Diomidis 98-99). Whatever the pilgrim’s complaint, “the disjunction between the imaginary and the real pilgrimage ... describes the pilgrim’s process of responding to the reality of the landscape” (Coleman & Elsner / Petsalis-Diomidis 98-99). When pilgrims fail to fully experience the previous inner phases of pilgrimage, never becoming fully freed to experience the truth of the path and themselves, the process of inner transformation may be incomplete. This can be attributed to a variety of things, including a rigid set of preconceived ideas that block the pilgrim from really being opened to the experience.
As previously mentioned, in journeying to holy places, arriving with preconceived ideas seems unavoidable. Pilgrims have learned about the holy site through their religions or their cultures, through research and mythology, and often through their own imaginations. In the midst of an extended period of contemplation, pilgrims are likely to have fantasized about their arrival now and then. It is also likely that as pilgrims approach the end of the journey, some of their earlier patterns of living may reemerge, and they may experience a resurgence of the mind trying to figure everything out instead of simply being attentive to the journey as it unfolds.
In addition to shattered illusions regarding the sacred destination, occasionally the pilgrim is disappointed by a less-than-joyful reception upon arrival. After his exhausting trek through the Egyptian desert, Roger Housden arrived at the Monastery of Saint Catherine’s on the back of a Coca-Cola truck, far from his imagined way of approaching the holy destination. Not yet disheartened, he observed the place with careful attention:
... the grim walls, at least forty feet high ... next to the ancient gate, now sealed, was another, smaller entrance, its iron door closed. I banged on the knocker. I knocked again, more loudly. The blackened door creaked open; a wizened character with straggly white hair peered out. I speak no Greek, no Arabic. I asked in English to see the guestmaster. “Closed,” the apparition rasped. “Tomorrow.” The door slammed shut. So much for the time-honored monastic welcome. Tomorrow it was. (Housden 25)
If his arrival at Saint Catherine’s on the back of a Coca-Cola truck hadn’t dampened his spirit, being turned away from his destination was yet one final challenge to overcome. Both were likely to be frustrating, but comparatively minor beside the efforts of trekking through the bleak landscape of the Sinai peninsula.
During his pilgrimage from India to Europe, Da Avabhasa arrived in Jerusalem, one of his primary destinations, and one that is ensconced in thousands of years of sacred history that has been idealized to a degree that seems inescapable. He shares his response:
I was standing on the porches of the roof, photographing the “Holy City,” Jerusalem. The life of the city had made a strange impression on me. There is an absence “created” in all of those commemorations of Christ. There is no spiritual force in any of the holy places, and no feeling of higher life, aspiration, and consciousness in the people. There is no unusual Presence here ... Jerusalem has been strangely emptied, if only by force of the symbol of Christ’s resurrection ... as I stood to photograph the city ... I was blessed to recall Christ’s words: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” (Avabhasa 221- 222)
It is likely that in many holy destinations, and certainly Jerusalem, the sheer impact of centuries of infamous stories and unbelievable miracles have created an image of such otherworldliness that the actual place could never live up to such expectations, and this disappointment is one final difficulty during the journey that pilgrims must sometimes contend with. While for some pilgrims, as Petsalis-Diomidis suggested previously, this disappointment is interpreted as a failure of the journey. For others, it can be perceived as yet another lesson of the pilgrimage, ultimately in alignment with the deeper purpose of the journey.
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Post-Pilgrimage
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Phase Four:
The Return Home
John Brierley captures the essence of Phase Four as he asks “Is the journey over or just beginning” (Brierley, Camino Fisterra 91)? Though the other phases may cycle repeatedly during a single journey, Phase Four begins in its fullness once the journey is complete and pilgrims return home. During this phase, as pilgrims re-enter their ordinary lives, they also enter a period of reflection, integration, change, and adaptation. Pilgrims have gained new knowledge and understanding as a result of the journey, and they return to their lives refreshed, inspired, and filled with a broader sense of perspective. Phase Four is often the most challenging step. The world expects pilgrims back, and they go back. All the demands of the world return. The reverie ends. But the degree of difficulty pilgrims experience as they return home depends on the changes that have occurred inside of them. Phase Four may continue indefinitely as pilgrims readjust to the lives they left behind and integrate the lessons of the journey.
Though at times it might seem tempting to continue the journey indefinitely, one of the primary differences between choosing the lifestyle of a wandering ascetic and choosing to make a pilgrimage is that pilgrims must return home from a pilgrimage. They can’t stay in the midst of the journey forever, or it threatens to become its own ordinary daily life. There are certainly exceptions, including Anonymous and Peace Pilgrim; however, their journeys were embraced as an ascetic lifestyle that mirrors the religious life of those people who choose to live monastically. For most people who choose to make pilgrimage journeys, returning home is a fundamental step.
There comes a time toward the end of the journey when pilgrims know that what they set out to experience has been fulfilled. Though this is sometimes a difficult realization, many times they are ready to return home and re-enter their lives once more. The Scaperlandas note this important transition:
No matter how meaningful or how inspiring our pilgrimage experience has been, there is a moment when we are eager to go home. We have humbly given ourselves to God and opened ourselves to the pilgrimage experience. And now our hearts overflow ... our spirits feel renewed and strengthened in ways we can’t even name yet. We feel different, and we know at some deep level that we are different. It is time, and we know it. We are ready to go home. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 200)
Filled with life-changing lessons and realizations, incredible stories, and rich experiences, pilgrims return to their homes, families, and ordinary lives.
Though the joy that many pilgrims feel upon being reunited with their homes and friends and families is often great, some people experience a touch of sadness, too. Maria Scaperlanda shares her feelings about this.
Returning home from a pilgrimage is a bittersweet experience for me. I am aware that in many ways, I am leaving behind a better world, an ultimately more real world than my daily, “real” life. But it is a world I was allowed to dwell in temporarily - in order to experience it, not to remain in it. It was a gift meant to teach me and help me grow. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 201)
Often, too, it isn’t until pilgrims return to ordinary life once more that the full scope of their journey’s transformation becomes clear.
Though he, too, felt that the community of indigenous friends and their way of life was far more real than his ordinary American existence, eventually Tobias Schneebaum chose to leave the Amazon and made his way back into the “civilized” world of humans. While he doesn’t share his experience of returning to his home outside of Peru, the transition of returning to the “civilized” world was significant. Perhaps for him, returning to civilization was so drastic a change that returning to a home in his own culture seemed to pale by comparison.
I took a walk alone and I carried with me all my back would take of food, and here I am now back at my beginning in Pasniquti, sitting on a hard bed as soft as softest feathers, writing under netting made for mosquitos and vampire bats, having eaten a piece of homegrown cow I cut with knife and fork, and bread spread with cold butter, beer I drank that came from Holland, and I sat on a chair and leaned my elbows on a table. Here there are unfamiliar noises ... all bringing me back so slowly, but so surely. I walked alone, and naked I walked inside this door that has a handle, works on hinges, has a key to turn a lock. I did not blush and hide myself when men in clothes stared ... when I told them who I was, there was a shock of recognition and a fear of me at first, a strange wild man with faded paint on his nude body, looking like any savage (Schneebaum 183)
His initial observations of what had previously been his ordinary life were keen in those first few hours of returning to civilization. I can only imagine returning to his home in America was an equally shocking experience, especially considering the fact that he had been declared dead as a result of his extended retreat from civilization.
Once the pilgrim returns home, the long process of reflection begins. Phil Cousineau offers the the thoughts of Father Stephen Canny, an Irish priest who made several pilgrimages to Croagh Patrick in Ireland. “You are more alive after you have overcome something difficult ... you’re changed by the mountain and the fact that you have confirmed your faith. It’s a remarkably effective way to answer the question, What is my purpose?” (Cousineau 173). Like Father Canny, many pilgrims experience renewed faith and a greater understanding of their life’s purpose as they return from pilgrimage and reenter ordinary life.
Writer Herman Hesse continued to experience a great sense of freedom as he returned home from his extended wandering journey. He observes that “The returned traveler is different” from a person who remained home. S/he “loves more intimately ... [and] is freer from the demands of justice and delusion” (Hesse 75). Though this is true for many people, it is important to note that this sense of freedom is often similar to the joyful reverie the pilgrim experienced during the early stages of the journey. It is essentially a honeymoon phase, but gradually the reality of adapting to life at home shifts into focus. The difficulty of this process of integration and adaptation depends on the degree of personal change the pilgrim experienced during the journey itself.
Satish Kumar’s pilgrimage in celebration of his fiftieth birthday was the latest of many walking pilgrimages made during his life. He shares his thoughts on the changes he felt as he returned from that journey.
Walking around Britain, experiencing the freedom of the road, being out under the open sky and in touch with the vast earth beneath, gave me a new lease of life and new burst of energy ... I felt as if I had gone over a hump. Before going on my pilgrimage, I was feeling physically and emotionally at a low ebb ... walking to the holy sites did it. (Kumar 265)
Whether there is something intrinsic in holy places that enables people to feel renewed, or there is something about choosing to make a journey as an act of faith, Kumar is one of many who feel the same “new lease of life” as they return home from pilgrimage.
Maria Scaperlanda reflects on the lasting impact that her many pilgrimages have had on her life:
... a change - surrender, growth - must take place inside me, and that transformation is what turns a mere journey into a pilgrimage. In each one of my experiences, the actual physical journey, the people, and even the situation that I encountered, all became conduits for a transformation of some sort with me ... Obviously, we cannot make a transformation happen within us, no matter how much we want it or how hard we try. The pilgrimage journey is about surrendering our will, fears, desires, and hopes to the one whom we claim as the center of life. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 114)
Scaperlanda suggests that independent of what the pilgrim identifies as “the center of life,” be it God, Spirit, or the true self, the pilgrim’s transformation is rooted within his/her experiences during the journey and the perspective s/he brings to interpreting and understanding those experiences.
The process of returning home and integrating new knowledge and understanding into the pilgrim’s ordinary life can sometimes feel as challenging as the journey itself. Pastor Erwin McManus acknowledges this: “It is much easier to escape to Thoreau’s Walden Pond and contemplate life than it is to return from it and really live” (McManus 240). This is what pilgrims must do when they return, though. They must adorn their new courage and wisdom and bravely embrace the transformation that they have experienced, bringing it into their daily lives. In this way, pilgrimage is not merely an escape from life, but a conscious invocation of the change that pilgrims invite into their ordinary lives when they return from the journey.
Indeed, coming home from pilgrimage is far more challenging than simply returning from a vacation, tanned and relaxed. Though pilgrims, too, may be tanned and relaxed, their awareness has shifted so dramatically that they often lose their bearing in a world that once felt familiar. The Scaperlandas offer the words of Leonard J. Biallas in considering the many layers of this challenge:
We find it difficult to fit our “new” selves into our old environments. We feel the stress of not knowing how to adapt personal changes into our former lifestyles. We are discouraged when we compare our travel adventures with the pedestrian nature of our reentry life. We feel the dissonance that is caused by the incompatibility of our previous views of the world with our new experiences and perspectives. Our homecoming often involves disruptions of the social order, as we feel that family and friends are pressuring us into being the “same person” as before we went away. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 202)
From feeling out of place and out of sync, to feeling utterly alien in a place once called home, this transition is deeply challenging. The pilgrim is never the “same person” and this can create confusion and conflict.
A pilgrim himself, John Brierley is all too familiar with the assortment of shocks pilgrims often feel when returning home.
It is likely that your outer appearance might have changed ... it is also possible that the way you perceive the world has also gone through some metamorphosis. This inner transformation may well deepen as the lessons we opened up to along the way become more fully integrated. While an obvious purpose of pilgrimage is to bring about an inner shift, it is also possible that our familiar world will no longer support this inner change ... whatever our individual experiences it is likely that we will be in a heightened state of consciousness and sensitivity. (Brierley, Camino Fisterra 87)
While it is true that life may beckon the pilgrim to return to normal, it may not be possible. The pilgrim is not the same person that s/he was when s/he left home. It is important at this point to allow the reintegration process to happen slowly. Brierley offers suggestions for negotiating reentry:
do not squeeze your itinerary so you feel you have to rush back into your usual pattern of work and general lifestyle. This is a crucial moment ... recall the original purpose and intention of your pilgrimage ... don’t be surprised if anything and everything that could get in the way of that high invocation is removed from your life (Brierley, Camino Fisterra 87)
Even though the journey itself enacted many changes in the pilgrim’s life, changes may continue as s/he recreates his/her life and integrates his/her new perspective. What fits this new vision will remain in the pilgrim’s life, but whatever doesn’t fit will fall away.
In ancient times, the process of integrating the lessons of pilgrimage and reintegration into ordinary life was expected to be just as slow, since returning home took as long as the journey itself. People set out on foot, and by foot they would return. Today, due to the wonders of fast, convenient transportation, pilgrims are frequently deposited back into their ordinary lives with great speed. Sometimes this is too sudden, and many people often wish for a slower transition. One of the blessings of the Camino de Santiago is the extension path that leads past Santiago to Finisterre, a tiny sliver of land on the Atlantic coast. Following the climax of arriving in Santiago, this final three day walk allows the pilgrim a period of transition and reflection before making the difficult journey home. With fewer pilgrims along the way to Finisterre, as well as fewer towns and villages, “extended periods of silence will allow time for reflection and to integrate change” (Brierley, Camino Fisterra 8). Most pilgrimages today don’t include such a slow-paced opportunity to reflect and integrate the journey, which is left up to the pilgrim to deal with back at home instead.
Edward Stanton followed the insight from his epiphany on the Mount of Joy and continued walking beyond Santiago. Over the three day walk to Finisterre, he began to contemplate the lessons of his pilgrimage and also started to prepare himself for the difficult transition back to regular life. During these three days he allows the wisdom of his journey to settle into his being.
I left that city of stone to follow the path toward the sea and setting sun at the end of the world. I was happy to be on the road again, alone for the first time since ... nearly two weeks ago ... now my body seemed to walk itself, the road walking my body. I realized that I could go on walking around the world if only the land did not end ... my old body has died; in many ways I have also died to my old self. Thirty days are enough for many deaths and resurrections, as are these final three days from Santiago to Finisterre ... the change has only begun ... the end of my trip is also a beginning. All that has gone before has been a preparation, all that comes after will be its unfolding ... though the future is uncertain, the present is not: this month, these days, this moment will always shine out among the ashes of my life, full of grace and freedom. (Stanton 192)
As pilgrims return to their lives, it is this lingering sense of grace and freedom that is palpable to those around them, a felt sense of the changes that have occurred deep within them. It is also this sense of grace and freedom that keeps pilgrims grounded as they reenter their old lives, integrating significant personal changes.
In his final arrival at Finisterre, Stanton spontaneously creates a ritual of baptism, symbolically marking the end of his pilgrimage and the beginning of his journey home.
I walked across the final stretch of land where the coast juts into the Atlantic: Finisterre, end of the earth, known for centuries as the dark waters, mansion of the dead who await the resurrection of the body. I saw a scallop shell in the dark sand at my feet, picked it up and placed it in my backpack. Peeling off my wet clothes, I ran into the surf. After the shock of the first cold, the sea felt warmer than the air. I dove under a wave and swam beyond the breakers, the water slipping along my arms, sides and legs, stinging my pores, soothing my limbs. I rolled over on my back, floating, the drizzle caressing my face, the swells rocking me back and forth as I looked up at the sky. I felt the pull of an approaching wave, swam in, waited for the crest, pushed off and was carried to shore in the foam. And I walked out of the water hearing the wind and crashing waves, the mighty rhythm of the world. (Stanton 193)
As in many other accounts of pilgrimage, by the time Stanton reaches the end of the journey, there is no final victorious moment of celebration, but a silent, poetic moment of acknowledgment of the journey’s end, deeply personal and meaningful, yet perhaps barely noticeable to others.
Sometimes returning home can be intense and difficult. Part of the challenge many pilgrims face in returning from a deeply transformative journey is in trying to reconnect with their friends, families, and communities. The people in their lives may find it hard to understand the changes that pilgrims have experienced, and this can lead them to feel isolated. Following his first journey to India, Andrew Harvey returned home to England and experienced a difficult transition. “I could tell no one what had happened without sounding ridiculous” (Harvey 29). Sometimes the place pilgrims once called home no longer makes any sense to them. Shortly following his return to England, Harvey moved to America for a fellowship, and that transition continued to challenge him. “After India, America seemed a wasteland animated only by joggers and structuralists, where any talk of the spirit rang not merely absurd but comic” (Harvey 30). His pilgrimage to India had sufficiently undone his mind and way of life, bringing him to question the authenticity of every place he encountered in the context of secular, ordinary life.
While sometimes returning home can feel frustrating or confusing, sometimes it can seem almost debilitating to pilgrims who have been deeply transformed. Following another journey to India, Andrew Harvey returned home to Paris in a fragile state of mind.
I felt like a child left on his own in a city he had never been to before, compelled to improvise everything afresh ... I seemed to be doing everything in slow motion ... I looked at my hands for the first time as if they belonged to something foreign to me, and I felt a kindness toward them, a gratitude for their having stayed connected to me for so long and so uncomplainingly. After three or four days I realized I would not be able to leave my room. My mind, my nervous system as I had known it, was not working anymore. (Harvey 115- 116)
Whereas in returning from India the first time brought him to experience an ideological conflict with the places he called home, after this journey, Harvey’s full sensory awareness was overwhelmed during the transition. This suggests that during his second pilgrimage, he was transformed in a much more fundamental way, though both experiences were valid and significant. Though Harvey’s experience of returning home in this case was more extreme than most, it is clear that all pilgrims must take their time to reintegrate themselves into ordinary life and give themselves the time to slowly adapt to the changes that have occurred.
Thoreau was all too familiar with the challenge of reentering ordinary world and shares the experience of pilgrims returning from wandering in the vast spaciousness of central Asia in his essay “Walking:”
They who have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say: “On reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia.” (Emerson & Thoreau 100)
During the journey pilgrims gradually shift into a state of inner spaciousness, peace, and freedom while wandering in wide open spaces, and the return to living in the confines of society, both physically and mentally, can be shocking, if not devastating.
As pilgrims return home, they are often compelled to share their stories with friends and family. Sometimes they are disappointed to learn that many people who haven’t experienced such a powerful transformation find it hard to understand what they’re talking about. Phil Cousineau relates: “the bitter truth about coming home from a long journey is that we soon learn that one man’s mystery can be another man’s superstition” (Cousineau 216). While their friends and families are often fascinated by stories of their adventures, and of people and places, what pilgrims often seek to communicate is an accurate sense of the depth to which they were changed by the whole experience. These experiences, though, are ephemeral by nature and difficult, if not impossible to communicate using the language of ordinary life. This yearning to communicate is often one of the greatest struggles. Again, Maria Scaperlanda shares:
... as much as I want to communicate, I don’t have words to accurately or fully describe this experience. And though I feel so “full” from it that I can’t take it into my system even one more drop, I don’t even know where to start letting it pour out. So, often, I simply say nothing. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 202)
While many pilgrims find that they can hardly communicate the fullness of their experiences, it is through the written word that many of them, myself included, begin to find a way to understand the journey and communicate that to others. This is likely to explain why so many memoirs of pilgrimage exist today, as pilgrims struggle to find the right words,as well as the company to share their experiences. This, for sure, has been my own inspiration for this entire thesis project.
When is Phase Four complete? It’s hard to know for sure. But the more difficult and transformative the journey, the more time it takes and the greater the challenge pilgrims experience when they return home. Phil Cousineau elaborates:
Our world will appear changed and strangified in proportion to how much we changed on our journey. If indeed it was a soulful journey, our former life may be nearly unrecognizable. Old friends may be genuinely interested in the tale- telling and not just the clichés of the journey, or they may react with envy, jealousy, or resentment. (Cousineau 226)
The Scaperlandas, being seasoned pilgrims, concur:
the bigger the pilgrimage experience - in length or personal impact - the longer it will take you to adjust. As much as you desire to connect with the people closest to you, you are worn down from your pilgrimage experience - physically, mentally, and spiritually. And only time and grace will rejuvenate you. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 202-203)
Truly, there is no way to know how long this process will take; it cannot be hurried, nor can it be overlooked. Phase Four unfolds in the same mysterious way as the rest of the pilgrimage, beyond the expectations and control of the pilgrim.
The Scaperlandas offer insight regarding the lingering influence of pilgrimage on their lives:
Because we make an act of faith to set out on the pilgrimage, when we go and see, we touch a piece of this truth - and we are transformed, renewed, and strengthened to continue in our everyday pilgrimage. A pilgrimage ultimately teaches us that the meaning of life is found not at the end of the journey but in the very journey itself. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 54)
And though the pilgrim has reached the end of the pilgrimage, the journey of living in a new way, inspired by this deep transformation, continues indefinitely. To those initiated into the life of the pilgrim, there is no true return.
On the Camino I was told “once a pilgrim, always a pilgrim.” Both in my research and my personal experience, this has proven to be absolutely true. The Scaperlandas have expressed this same idea:
You may be home, but you are still a pilgrim ... While the journey itself may have been the most intense part of the pilgrimage, the coming home is its most significant part. It is at home that you will unpack the impact of the experience on your personal life. As consequential as the pilgrimage journey itself was, the most important journey you make is the one that begins when you walk into your home and begin to struggle with internalizing the experience. This particular pilgrimage experience will not conclude until you as pilgrim have discovered a new way to live ... If the gift of the journey itself is to go and see with new eyes, then the grace of coming home is to continue walking. It is in your daily living that the graces of your pilgrimage will manifest themselves fully. (Scaperlanda & Scaperlanda 203)
As pilgrims reflect upon the revelations of the journey, from deep spiritual epiphanies to thoughts about ordinary life, they often discover that during the journey, they learned a new way of living that makes more sense. It requires great courage and commitment to bring those changes into daily life, but for pilgrims who have been deeply transformed, this lasting lifestyle change may bring a greater sense of wholeness and authenticity to their lives. This, indeed, can be the greatest gift of pilgrimage.
My own process of internalizing, adapting, changing, and going on with life has been extensive and continues still. Returning from my first pilgrimage along the Camino was incredibly difficult. I felt as if my entire life and way of living had been reconstructed, and I felt lost as I returned to my old life. No one I knew had experienced anything comparable to my pilgrimage, and though some people were good listeners, most of them were much more interested in stories of adventure than in my rambling attempts to piece together an experience that had utterly changed my life.
I began reading books written by other pilgrims. They were my companions in the process. I, too, began writing, and over the course of thousands of pages, I began to grasp the meaning of my experiences, of the lessons of the journey, the importance of a variety of encounters. Interpreting my experience along the Camino was as valuable as the experience itself, undoubtedly, and in the process of interpreting that pilgrimage, I was inspired to take other pilgrimages as well. This thesis, in fact, is the accumulated work of my own extended Phase Four, and has allowed me the opportunity to connect my own experiences to a larger realm of experiences in the Process Paper, and then to share the story of my own journeys in Awakening to Awakening: Journeys along the Pilgrimage Road.
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Conclusion
When a pilgrim’s consciousness becomes centered around the idea that everything is sacred, it’s much easier to remain aware of his/her impact on the world. While that may have once felt like a challenge much too great for the ordinary individual, and may have seemed especially intimidating as everyday, ordinary pilgrims contemplate their journeys and intentions beside pilgrim-heroes like Hsuan Tsang and Anonymous, during pilgrimage many people realize that the realm of heroes isn’t separate from the lives of ordinary people. The mythology of the hero is a realm of stories, but the truth of living heroically is living with authenticity, paying attention, and making a commitment to following the path of life with awareness, wonder, and courage. Joseph Campbell offers encouragement:
We have not to even risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find abomination, we shall find a god, and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. Where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. (Campbell).
It seems appropriate to close with one final eloquent idea thought by Herman Hesse: “But all the waters of the world find one another again, and the Arctic seas and the Nile gather together in the moist flight of clouds. The old beautiful image makes my hour holy. Every road leads us wanderers too back home” (Hesse 15).
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