Pilgrimage. A Very Personal Journey

From the days of Geoffrey Chaucer, rich tales of people setting out upon pilgrimages abound. The pilgrimage tradition is, of course, an ancient one and many religions have it as a central dynamic. Christians look to Canterbury, Santiago de Compostela, Rome or Jerusalem; Muslims to Mecca, Hindus to Gangotri, Badrinath, Yamunotri and Kedarnath. Long before the civilisation-ending arrival of evangelising Christianity, there were established pilgrimage routes in the pre-Columbian Andes where people travelled to visit a regional Wa’ka of sacred significance. So what exactly do I mean by ‘pilgrimage’?

Dictionary definitions aside, a pilgrimage is a journey into the inner self enacted through an externalised journey in the outer world, one commonly outside of one’s usual cultural or geographical framework of reference; it is a journey into one’s own interior. Every stage of that journey, from the start to the end and key places and experiences along the way, serve to mark some point within the individual self, a kind of measuring device through which one can assess one’s self via personal experiences, feelings and reactions. Anything can assume the character of a pilgrimage if the external goal carries a sense of the sacred. Hence many modern pilgrimages are carried out by people wishing to connect with some person, event, or organisation that carries some special significance for them, be it a literary character, a celebrity, an historical event and so on.

I have written elsewhere of the ‘hall of mirrors’ nature of pilgrimage, be it the general journey of life, or a specific journey conforming more to the classic understanding of that word.  Whichever, there is one core feature that is at the heart of either: engagement with Truth. Every situation or experience, whether perceived as good, bad or indifferent has to be engaged with fully to extract from it all possible meanings and nuances. This might seem to many people excessive, obsessive even, yet it is only through this dynamic that real life progress and self insight will ever be gained. Hence there are no cherished illusions or comfort zones here. This is fundamentally what one of the three forms of Yoga – jnana yoga- is all about.

I would be hard put to it to come up with any straightforward account of how I envisaged my own pilgrimage, what its underlying purpose was or how it was to be carried out. Having long felt the need to do this journey, I took all my directives from that deep inner ‘calling’ that I have long identified as coming from the Self. Some things were completely clear, however: I was clear that it had to be in India for example, for both higher mystical reasons as well as personal ones. I was clear that it must be conducted within the overall framework of the Yogic/Hindu religions, built around or periodically commemorated by making visits to temples to conduct personal ceremonies, which later became more formalised pujas, sometimes under the aegis of a Brahmin priest.   I was clear that I had to stay completely clear of anything that might be formally identifiable with Christianity (the religion of my British cultural background) whilst never losing touch with a deeper connection to the teachings of Jesus, which have long been my principal life guide, together with the Bhagavad Gita. I was also clear that I would be alone upon the journey, itself unsurprising given that it is how I have travelled for much of my life anyway. My life pathway had across the years, and particularly more recently, been gradually coalescing towards this point, and the calling to do this was felt ever more strongly. I felt absolutely called to give myself completely, outwardly expressed by giving up all that had counted as my life to then, both in terms of personal identity, career/occupation, as well as personal possessions. When I went to India, I went with the deep seated conviction and certainly the preparedness never to return; effectively to die out there.

On the 18th November 2019, I left my home town and travelled to India to start the third and final phase of my pilgrimage. The first trip I ever made to India back in 2009, I wasn’t even aware would actually serve to prepare me for such a journey. By the time of the second trip made ten years later, I certainly knew that this is what it was. So when I left York, I knew, as did friends and family, that I was going away to India leaving everything behind me. 

I took nothing with me excepting one small backpack and a small cabin baggage size suitcase. Everything else representing all my worldly goods had been dispersed in the previous months. In former times I had been used to packing my stuff up and putting it into storage, not that it was ever a lot and had been dwindling progressively with time. But, little as it was, it always acted as a sort of wick, a gravitational force to pull me back, not just to the location of York and the UK, but to the life and person I’ve always been. This time I knew I had to be thorough and get rid of absolutely everything and just take with me a minimal of clothing and personal goods, only what could be packed into those two small containers. Friends, family and the charity Oxfam were beneficiaries of clothing, art work, jewellery and all the beautiful original ethnic craft work and textiles I had collected from Ecuador since the very first visit I made there in 1976. I kept none of this, as for me it represented the core person I was letting go of. This journey was to be a kind of death and I very much conceived of it as such. I didn’t plan on coming back, and there was a clear minded and focused part of me that took great care to sabotage any possibility of returning to the old status quo. If one is to discover and engage with one’s deeper self and aspects of self yet to be discovered, then you have to be prepared to divest yourself of everything that serves to bind you to the construct of the person you have grown into across your life. The clothing I took with me certainly defined much of the way I saw myself at the time, but I knew that I could always replace it with new things bought over there, as time and my journey advanced. 

I called this my ‘Pilgrimage of the Heart’, because, at heart, it was about Love. A Love that I have occasionally glimpsed through my life, but increasingly has taken over my life, that lured me to seek It, to give myself over to It completely. The Self is seductive, and once you engage with It, you are effectively lost to It. There is a beautiful line in a poem by the medieval Sufi mystic Rumi, where he says:

“Do not expect your heart to return;

When it dissolves in love,

It is gone for good.”[1]

I am making no disclaimers, apologies, nor diminishing what I say in order not to attract criticism, cynicism, disbelief or whatever. It doesn’t matter to me in any way if people reading this scoff at what I write, subject it to and dissect it with harsh rationalist scrutiny or whatever. As someone who spent their early life as a hard line atheist much in the way of Richard Dawkins, I fully comprehend that many folk are disinclined for all sorts of reasons to give any credence, sympathy or even tolerance to those who profess a belief in and direct experience of a non material dimension and attendant forces. The essay In Defence of Faith addresses much of this, so I will simply make that available for readers to draw whatever conclusions they will and not repeat things already said there.

 

[1] Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī. 2007. RUMI. Bridge to the Soul. Journeys into the Music and Silence of the Heart. ‘Gone for Good’. Poem 60, pp105. Translations by Coleman Barks, with A.J. Arberry and Nevit Ergin. Harper One/Harper Collins: New York, USA.

 

This page was first published in full at: In The Spirit. A Journey to Self