A Fuller Awakening of Love:
A Year of Pilgrimage in Latin America
Following my travels through Southeast Asia, China, Tibet and Nepal, I returned to the United States for the years of 1996 and 1997. During this time, living mostly in Sedona, Arizona, I added significantly to my writings, built the internet web site www.sacredsites.com, and presented a ten-city slide show tour in the states of New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. I also conducted extensive research into the pilgrimage traditions and sacred places of Central and South America, the next region I planned to visit. As with my previous journeys I would be gathering anthropological and mythological information about the sacred sites while photographically documenting them. Yet there was another, more personal, reason for my next pilgrimage. Years earlier in Japan, when I had experienced the amazing vision indicating the regions of the world I should visit on my sacred site journeys, I had been given a specific reason for my travels in Latin America. That region and its power places were to gift me with a Fuller Awakening of Love.
This matter of a fuller awakening of love within my being had been a central focus of my meditations, prayers and metaphysical reflections for several years before embarking on my Latin American travels. Ultimately, there was nothing of greater importance to me than a deeper experience of spiritual love and a clear understanding of how such love could be expressed in the world. Yet the nature and expression of love is a complex issue. I had several questions regarding love. How do we awaken and cultivate love in our own hearts? How do we express love in difficult situations and to people that are expressing the opposite sentiment towards us. What is the relationship (and the distinction) between love, compassion and tolerance?
Each of these questions came together in a simple prayer I found myself saying with increasing frequency as the time of my departure neared: Oh Great Spirit, during this long journey to the power places and sacred sites of Latin America, teach me to express love in a powerful way and power in a loving way. Essentially, what I was asking was how does a leader lead in a world gone crazy? Given the unprecedented environmental and socio-cultural decline in the world today, what is the frequency of leadership that will awaken and energize, inspire and encourage the heart of humanity to truly heal the world?
Similar to the method and pace of my previous pilgrimage journeys, I planned to wander through Latin America without a definite itinerary or schedule. I would start in Arizona, cross the border into Mexico and slowly make my way south to the distant end of the long continent of the Americas. Twenty-two thousand miles through jungles, mountains and cities of fourteen countries. For some years prior to beginning this journey I had considered doing the travels by motorcycle rather than on bicycle. With so many thousands of miles to traverse, often through highly mountainous terrain, I wanted to move quicker than a bicycle allowed. As my date of departure neared, however, it became clear that it was more logical to use a larger vehicle, a van or a truck, instead of a motorcycle. I need to carry more equipment than would fit inside the small luggage panniers carried on a motorcycle. This included a few dozen books on the archaeology of Latin America, trekking and mountain climbing gear, a laptop computer, all my cameras and lenses, and a slide projector for the many slide shows I planned to give at universities and museums along the way. Another deciding factor was that I could not sleep inside a motorcycle while traveling but could, quite comfortably, inside a travel-van.
Based on research and discussions with other adventurers who had driven the long route from Mexico to Argentina, the vehicle I choose to use was a Volkswagen van, to which I would make certain modifications in preparation for the rough roads and mountainous terrain of South America. The particular van I used was the Transporter Bus model, 1977 vintage, with 143,000 miles already on the original chassis and engine. Twenty-one years old, it was still considered the best overland van that VW had ever made. An added plus was that its previous owner, a professional mechanic, had kept it in near perfect condition inside and out. Shiny and beautiful with its original bright yellow paint, the van presented me with a curious dilemma. Should I keep the lovely color and thereby advertise my “rich American” presence to the bandits of Latin America or should I exercise my intelligence and repaint the van with a bland color that would not attract so much notice?
The yellow was just too lovely to paint over so I came up with the idea of decorating the sides of the van with several large painted images. Four different sign painters helped with the paintings. In addition to being beautiful paintings, these images were intended to function as magical talismans protecting the van (and me) from robberies and other problems. The twelve images, painted large and in full color along the sides of the van, were of religious symbols and sacred sites around the world. Among the paintings were Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe and St. Martin of Tours (the two main religious icons of Latin America), an ancient Peruvian dual-headed dragon, a Siberian shaman beating a drum, a beautiful winged angel holding the planet earth, moonrise at Stonehenge with a wizard, and the Great Pyramid with a UFO hovering nearby. Once the decorations were completed, I held a going away party in Sedona attended by 300 people, and there christened the van with the name THE MAGIC BUS. (Photographs of the van and its paintings may be seen on www.sacredsites.com, in the section entitled Latin American Pilgrimage Journal)
During the first few weeks of driving through the mountainous western region of Mexico I occasionally wondered how the prophesized ‘fuller awakening of love’ would manifest during my travels. Would I meet native shamans who would impart secret teachings to me? Would my on-going daily meditation practice finally catalyze a more profound awakening of love in my heart? Would the beauty of the lands I would explore and the kindness of the native people reflect the latent divinity within my own being? With such innocent imaginations I headed toward Guatemala and the first of many, decidedly unloving, border crossings.
Petty corruption and robbery are facts of life in much of Latin America. Border crossings are one of the places that travelers - especially those driving their own vehicles - will experience this most often. At nearly every border crossing between Mexico and Bolivia I encountered corruption and often not-so-subtle requests for bribes (called mordida or the ‘little bite’). Very soon I learned that a few ten-dollar bills casually distributed among the “officials” proved to be an effective way of shortening border crossing times from several hours to a few minutes. But this was by no means an end to the extortion I encountered. Upon crossing the borders there were equally corrupt local police and highway patrols to deal with. Using crafty and long practiced methods of intimidation these (government paid) scoundrels tried to extort more money from me, or items from my van, or both. Yet worst of all were the ever present thieves. Driving 22,000 miles through fourteen countries I experienced five robberies. Among the items stolen were three cameras, nine lenses, two tires, all my clothing, money and passport, and even the Magic Bus itself (by the Lima police, who returned it only after I paid a $100 bribe). Needless to say, such experiences were certainly not the peaceful variety I had been hoping for.
Yet, wonderfully, I gained sublime lessons from the hardships I encountered. In particular, I found within my being an essential solidarity with a wide variety of people that allowed me to live with them even if I did not like all that they were doing. I came to recognize a core truth that all people are always doing the best they can do. And I came to understand authentic compassion and how to exercise it in an impersonal, despairing and often dangerous world.
The solidarity came from being with so many different types of people in different countries in so many different situations and yet seeing the commonalities that we all share. Beneath all our differences we humans are so very similar in certain crucial ways. We each feel the difficulty of living in an insecure world. We do not know where we come from, what we are really doing here on earth, where we will go when we die, if there is a God, and if there is a grand purpose to the extraordinary panorama of human civilization. Additionally, we each have our individual human frailties. We sometimes have unkind thoughts. We have egos and desires, negative emotions, fears and guilt. And, for a huge percentage of people in the world, especially in the “developing” countries, there is also the massive difficulty of economic insecurity and limited food.
Difficult life situations, both inner/psychological and outer/physical often cause people to behave in ways that we (and they) do not like, in ways that go against social convention or that are harmful. In an unsure world, some of us do unwise things. We steal from others, we lie, we cause physical harm. Because of this, it is easy and convenient for those of us who consider ourselves “sane” and “moral” to say that some ‘other’ people are wrong, or evil, or incorrect in their thinking. But, crucially, each of these human characteristics must be seen to proceed from the situation that gave rise to it. What may be regarded as strange, immoral, dishonest or violent behavior is almost always – on the personal level of the individual perpetrating the ‘crime’ - a response to something else. Action – reaction. Two major examples would be an unfortunate personal situation such as individual poverty resulting in the robbery of another person or an unconscious behavioral conditioning received from a dysfunctional social situation (such as violent Peruvian street gangs agitated by Marxist guerillas).
A classic example, throughout Mexico and South America, is the problem of mugging and street robbery. I am quite familiar with this matter, having experienced several personal muggings in Latin America. Are these muggers and thieves “bad” or “wrong” or are they simply the result of dysfunctional social and political systems that could not feed the people, did not educate them, and knew not how to lead them. Additionally, so many people in the world today are philosophically and spiritually adrift; they have no firm moorings in anything certain, they are aimless and empty and desperate (hunger and poverty are powerful personal motivators!). Out of these subconscious anxieties and physical difficulties, pathological behaviors - focused inward to one’s self or outward to other people - very commonly manifest. Robbery, violence and various forms of manipulation are ultimately reactions to the inner pain, material lack, spiritual emptiness, and mental confusion in the life of the perpetrator of the crimes.
Therefore, ultimately, we cannot judge as wrong those persons that do us wrong. They do not really mean to do us harm for they are only passing on the harm that has been done to them. Dysfunctional cultures make dysfunctional humans who in turn perpetuate dysfunctional cultures. This has been the social history of the human race.
Knowing this gives us compassion. But let us cultivate a compassion that is distinct, at least in some cases, from tolerance. What I mean by this is that while we must have compassion for people and therefore, ultimately, for all the actions they do, we do not necessarily have to have tolerance for each of those actions. We can - and should in certain cases - express our intolerance. When someone tries to manipulate or rob or harm us, we must express our intolerance by resisting the violence or fleeing, but we must (even if not at that moment) still have compassion for the perpetrator of the violence. This was the simple yet profound teaching I received from crossing so many ‘third-world’ borders where I dealt with underpaid, uneducated, envious and often angry men with stripes on their uniforms and guns in their hands. These individuals weren’t stealing from Martin Gray, they held me no personal malice. Rather they were stealing from the generic, assumed-to-be ‘rich’ American traveler that I represented to them as an archetype.
When I finally understood this, I stopped reacting from my own ego and, clearly witnessing from the vantage point of deep compassion, began to consciously choose the degree of tolerance or intolerance that was suited to the situation at hand. I learned to exercise compassion even as I simultaneously exercised intolerance. I didn’t judge people or situations as wrong anymore; by exercising intolerance, I simply took whatever steps I could to avoid both individual and social dysfunction. This was the teaching of the fuller awakening of love. I gained an eminently practical love, a love that reconciled the essential goodness of each individual with the dysfunctional social conditioning obscuring their goodness. From this teaching I learned to accept and forgive the individual at the same time that I was intolerant of their learned dysfunctions.
This teaching about love came slowly during the twelve months of my pilgrimage. Basically my days were concerned with either traveling between different holy places or spending time at them. Contributing to the love awakening were the many hundreds of hours of meditation I practiced at the sacred sites and while driving through the countryside. Nearly always I was alone in my van with only my prayers and meditations as company. At the sacred sites I would first of all try to get a few good photographs and would then sit for hours in meditation. Because I had my own van and could sleep and eat where I choose, I often spent days alone at different places in the mountains, jungles and along the coastlines. In the evenings I would read by the faint light of the van or write of my experiences of the day (the 110 page journal of these experiences is included on www.sacredsites.com).
The power places and sacred sites that I visited along the way can be described in two categories: of pre-Colombian or Christian importance. Among pre-Colombian sites there are natural sacred places such as holy mountains, caves and springs, as well as the temples and pyramids of archaic native cultures like the Maya, Olmec and Inca. Many of the pre-Colombian sites with monumental architecture were regionally positioned according to different configurations of sacred geography based on celestial astrology, while the temples themselves were constructed with geomantic principles and the mathematics of sacred geometry. In Chapter Two of this book, I give detailed discussions of these subjects.
At different sacred places from Teotihuacan in Mexico to Tiahuanaco in Bolivia I found examples of myths, mathematics and astronomical knowledge that seemed to indicate the received influences from an extremely ancient and long-forgotten culture located in some, now unknown, land beneath the seas. Based on extensive readings in the fields of pre-Colombian myth, archaeoastronomy and paleoanthropology, I feel comfortable in asserting my belief that much of the astronomical and spiritual wisdom of the pre-Colombian archaic civilizations was derived from another, and far older, root civilization that occupied certain parts of the globe before the melting of the ice caps. With the ice caps melting between 13,000 and 8000 BC, the seas rose upwards of 200 meters around the world. All the continental coastlines were drastically altered and low elevation land masses and large islands in the oceans were completely submerged. I have written much about this matter in my Latin American Pilgrimage Journal, on my web site.
The Christian pilgrimage sites that I visited were mostly churches and cathedrals that had been built upon pagan sites or at places where apparitions of Mary and Christ had been seen in historical times. At many of these sites, for example the cathedral of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Mexico City, large numbers of pilgrims gather annually for exciting religious festivals. As I have noticed with the tropical latitude manifestations of other religions (Buddhism and Hinduism) the closer to the equator one comes, the more passionate is the religious behavior of the pilgrims. At dozens of Christian pilgrimage shrines, both small and large, I was invited to join joyous pilgrims in their prayers, celebrations and feasts. Observing these activities I found a fascinating synthesis of pagan and Catholic practices. Additionally, having read widely concerning the atrocities committed by the colonial-era Catholic Church throughout Latin America (worse even than the sins of Christianity in Europe during the early and medieval ages), I was able to gain greater understanding regarding the critical distinction between dysfunctional religious institutions and the beauty of the individual religious impulse, such as that so passionately displayed by Latin American Christians. This understanding contributed to the growth of love and compassion in my being that was the primary focus of my year of pilgrimage through Latin America. All in all, my travels were a time of wonder, magic and spiritual awakening. Yes, I was robbed five times and experienced a host of other problems but those experiences were wisdom teachings every bit as poignant as my milder lessons.
