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| Pilgrimage…What
is it? Why do it?
“A pilgrimage, or yatra,
to a sacred site is not a vacation. On a yatra, you forfeit tourism and
enter into a voyage of discovery of the Self. What's most important is not
where you go, but your attitude: your willingness to shed the crumpled skins
of your ego and open to the cosmic mysteries. Superficially, a pilgrimage
site may look like any other place in India - noisy, garbage-strewn, crowded
with picnickers carrying radios blaring Hindi film songs and peddlers harassing
you to buy virulently dyed soft drinks and plastic statues of unrecognizable
deities. What makes it mystical is your ability to look beyond the surface.”“Modern pilgrims often travel by bus and train instead of on foot, but the principle remains the same: to leave the familiar comforts and activities of home and surrender to the unknown. Everything that happens on a pilgrimage is grist for the spiritual mill, and all experiences have a single purpose: to awaken the soul. Ultimately, it doesn't matter so much where you go, as long as you stay awake for the journey.” Anne Cushman
and Jerry Jones,
“From Here to Nirvana: The Yoga Journal Guide to Spiritual India” “Life is a pilgrimage where man drags his feet along the rough and thorny road. With the name of God on his lips, he will have no thirst, with the form of God in his heart, he will feel no exhaustion. The company of the holy will inspire him to travel in hope and faith. The assurance that God is within call, that he is ever near, will lend strength to his limbs and courage to his eye.” “Remember that with every step, you are nearing God, and God, too, when you take one step towards Him, takes ten towards you. There is no stopping place in this pilgrimage, it is one continuous journey, through day and night, through valley and desert, through tears and smile, through death and birth, through tomb and womb. When the road ends and the Goal is gained, the pilgrim finds that he has traveled only from himself to himself, that the way was long and lonesome, but that the God whom he reached was all the while in him, around him, with him, and besides him! He Himself was always Divine. His yearning to merge in God was but the sea calling out to the ocean! Man loves, because he is love! He is melody and harmony. He seeks joy, for he is joy. He thirsts for God for he is composed of God and he cannot exist without Him.” Satya Sai
Baba Speaks, Vol III, p3
“India preserves the richest spiritual culture on earth. Thousands of power points are nodes of an intricate pilgrimage pattern which threads its way all over India. The pattern makes of the sub-continent a body-cosmos in which no local area is without its major and minor sources of power. The entire country is a sacred land, and one of the ancient pilgrimages described in the Mahabarata circumscribes almost the entirety of India as it is known politically today.” “Some places are more sacred than others, and this is what makes them a node on the pilgrimage pattern. They are called tirthas, meaning ford or crossing. A place of power is one in which you can cross over from ordinary reality to other dimensions. A tirtha makes this possible because it is a node, or a knot, in the web of creation through which an especially large number of threads are drawn. Each thread is another perspective upon the whole, so a sacred place can connect us to many levels of the one reality.” “The sacrality of the place is interior to the pilgrim, as well as being located in some physical space. Some pilgrims go here, some there, according not only to the prescriptions of tradition, but also to their own predilection. Actually, we do not choose the place, it chooses us; or rather it is a process that occurs both ways. Nothing more profound than tourism - seeing for seeings sake - will take place unless the imagination of the pilgrim is sensitized to the deeper realities abiding there.” Roger Housden,
“Travels Through Sacred India”
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