WAYS OF USING THIS BOOK
I would like to offer some suggestions on how to use this book. It is not a travel guide, the kind of book you stuff into a tight space in your backpack and carry around the world. It is a reference book, useful for planning those world travels. It is a good idea to keep the book where you, your family, and your friends can see it often - it can provide a continuing stimulation to the wanderlust of many people. Since my intention has been to produce not a travel guide but a dream book, you will notice that I have not given information about traveling to and staying at the sites featured in the book. I can, however, suggest several excellent travel guides for each of the geographic regions I discuss. The best guides are generally the Lonely Planet Travel Survival Kits, the Rough Guides, the country handbooks from Moon Publications, and the Let's Go guides. Each of these companies publishes books on many different countries and regions of the world.
When I travel, I usually take along two or three guide books for each country or region I will visit. Some readers may find this a lot of weight to carry. Here's how I suggest you address this problem. First, if you are visiting only particular places or areas within a country, take along only the exact pages of each guide book that are specifically concerned with those areas. Then discard the pages when you have finished traveling in that area. Another good idea, especially if you are going on a multi-month, multi-country journey, is to send books to yourself in care of the main post office in the larger cities you will be passing through. Purchase the books before you depart on your journey, package them well, and them send them to yourself care of Poste Restante, General Post Office, in each country that you will visit. Most big post offices in the main cities around the world have entire departments devoted to the handling and storage of such travelers' mail. Mail will be held for you, at little or no charge, for up to a year. Another good way to have access to these guides without having to carry them around is to buy used copies at the small bookstores, hostels, and travelers' hangouts that you will find all over the world. When I am finished with a guidebook, I find one of these places and trade my used books for some other used books (such as novels, which are difficult to find in remote areas of the world).
This book can also be used for guided contemplation of beauty and sacred art. The geographic places illustrated are among the most beautiful in the entire world. To gaze upon these lovely sites is to awaken the soul and fill it with awe. The architectural structures built at these places represent the greatest art creations of human civilization. For example, while artists such as the painter Eduard Monet or the composer Ludwig von Beethoven created many stunning works of art, those works are the creation of single individuals, often made in a matter or weeks or months. The great pilgrimage shrines, on the other hand, took hundreds or thousands of craftsmen many hundreds of years to create (often with unlimited financial patronage from royalty and religious institutions). The magnificent temples, mosques, cathedrals and stone rings at the sacred sites are the quintessential examples of humanity's artistic genius.
I suggest you look at the photographs not simply as photographs but rather as window frames offering views onto the actual places. While composing and photographing each of these pictures (using two cameras and eight to ten lenses) I often made a prayer to the spirit of the place: "Spirit, please fill my photographs with such feeling and power that people may one day look upon them and be magically transported to the places." I personally consider these photographs to be telescopes through which you may peer across time and space into enchanted domains of sublime beauty.
The photographs in this book (and many of the structures they show) were created with something called sacred geometry. Sacred geometry is the geometry inherent in all natural forms from the nucleus of the atom to the arrangement of flower petals to the spiraling of vast galaxies. In ancient times people keenly observed nature, recognized its mathematical perfection, and sought to mirror that perfection in their own works of art. Many of the world's great sacred structures were designed and built using harmonious mathematical proportions that are deeply pleasing to the human eye. My photographs are likewise composed according to the proportions of sacred geometry. Independent of the subject matter of the image, the actual arrangement, or placement, of multiple elements within the image is designed to be alluring of itself. This book may be seen, then, as a collection of images for visual meditation. We find something similar in the more esoteric branches of Hinduism and Buddhism, where geometric designs and esoteric symbols, called yantras, mandalas and thankas, are used as objects of meditation for the awakening and enhancement of spiritual consciousness. To use this book's photographs in such a manner, gaze upon an image for some minutes, allowing the geometry, colors and feeling of the image to speak wordlessly to your heart and soul.
Finally, the photographs in this book may be used in the tradition of an oracle. Since ancient times human beings have sought answers to life's mysteries through many kinds of oracles. People have found spiritual direction in patterns in the natural world (for example, the famous Chinese oracle, the I Ching, had its origin with patterned markings upon the back of a turtle shell) and, in more recent times, with such oracular tools as the Tarot cards. Sacred sites function as repositories of wisdom teachings and transformational spiritual energies. Because each site has a different energy or feeling, people will resonate differently with various sites. This resonance can be determined in advance by using this book's photographs as oracular indicators. Ask the question: Which site or sites would be most beneficial for me to visit at this time in my life? The two keys to working with any oracle are the concentrated focusing of intent when asking for guidance and an openness to that guidance in whatever manner it may come. Sit quietly with the book on your lap with your eyes closed. Go within your heart/mind, and from that centered place request guidance and assistance with the next step to take in life. Then let spirit draw your fingers to open the book to a specific photograph. According to the focused intensity of your request, this place may be very important for you to visit. It may provide the catalyst for your further spiritual awakening.
When I was eight years old I began to have visions and dreams of things I might do when I grew to be an adult. Being a young child, I had not yet learned sufficient vocabulary to speak clearly with other people about the things I had seen in my visions and dreams. But I could pray. And my childhood prayers were that I might one day serve as a paintbrush in the hand of god, showering beauty and goodness upon the world. Such has been my prayer for many years, and it has also been the fundamental yearning guiding the creation of this book. I have held a conscious intention throughout the many years of traveling, photographing and writing. I wanted the photographs to somehow function as magical picture beams that would connect my readers with some place half the world away. More than carrying the homeopathic essence of the sites, this book, according to the power of your intention and imagination, may actually become the sites. Peter Lamborn Wilson, writing of pilgrimage in the Sufi tradition, explains:
In ordinary pilgrimage, the traveler receives baraka [spiritual energy] from a place, but the dervish reverses the flow and brings baraka to a place. The Sufi may think of himself or herself as a permanent pilgrim - but to the ordinary stay-at-home people of the mundane world, the Sufi is a kind of perambulatory shrine. (3)
Places of Peace and Power, is my bringing of baraka from the sacred sites to you. The book is itself a shrine. My purpose in creating this shrine has been to share the teachings I received as a wandering pilgrim passionately in love with the Earth. Perhaps these teachings will touch you. Perhaps they and the photographs that follow will compel you to travel, understand and listen to the Earth as only a pilgrim can. Perhaps they will inspire you to love and serve this wonderful Earth more than you have before. That is my hope and prayer.
References. (click here to go to Bibliography)
(1) Turnbull, Colin; Anthropology as Pilgrimage, Anthropologist as Pilgrim; from Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage; edited by Alan Morinis
(2) Jung, Carl; Man and His Symbols
(3) Wilson, Peter L.; The Caravan of Summer
