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Saturday, January 31...........San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
A few days have passed since I departed San Juan de los Lagos. I have now had some time to think about that remarkable place. To be sure, I cannot precisely describe the nature of the spirit/power/energy of San Juan, yet I think I can hint at some of its qualities and how they may influence human beings. Perhaps I am predisposed to say the things that I will say. For many years prior to embarking on this Latin American pilgrimage I knew what would be the primary teaching of the journey. That information was given to me in Japan in1984. While sitting in meditation upon a sacred Shinto mountain at Izumo Taisha, I had an extensive vision that gave me instructions to visit a large number of sacred sites around the world. I was to travel to these sites in several distinct geographic regions, in a particular order. Additionally, I was told that each of these regions would have a specific teaching for me. The teaching for the Latin American pilgrimage was to be "the full awakening of Love."
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A line of walking
pilgrims, twenty miles long,
on its way to San Juan de los Lagos
San Juan de los Lagos emanated that frequency. There is a gentleness, a rich sweetness, a deeply accepting spirit at this place that brings ease and nurture to the heart and soul. I think the clearest picture I had of this was when I was driving away from the town. The main day of the pilgrimage was still three days in the future and thousands of pilgrims were pouring into town at all hours of the day and night. The two highways I drove along when leaving the area were lined - for nearly fifty miles - with a truly extraordinary number of slowly walking but loudly singing people. I saw and heard this on two roads and I know that it was also occurring on the other primary highways leading in from other directions. The thirty city blocks around the great pilgrimage church were already thickly crowded with teeming people when I left town. Three more days of countless thousands surging into the small area should produce one of the most intense, temporary concentrations of passionate spiritual love existing anywhere on the entire planet. No other rapid, mass gathering of people is like the power of a great pilgrimage - not a football game, a rock concert, or New York city’s Fifth Avenue on a beautiful spring day.
I drove away from that field of power, east and north to the artist town of San Miguel de Allende and the nearby small pilgrimage site of Atotonilco. Immediately upon entering San Miguel, magic started happening. I am referring to a particular type of magic that follows me around when I am doing things concerned with the sacred sites - either visiting the sites or presenting slide shows where I am talking about them. This magic manifests in the form of lots of people helping me in a variety of expected and unexpected ways. Perhaps they see the paintings on the sides of the van or I tell them a few sentences of information about the Latin American pilgrimage. Whatever the apparent cause, many people are responding to the fairy-tale beauty of my pilgrimage. They want to be a part of it by helping in some way.
The current magic concerned doing a slide show in San Miguel de Allende. Driving into town, the thought had gone come to mind that I would like to do a show for the large and multidisciplinary local artist community. I have for months been planning an extensive slide show tour of all of Latin America for the later months of 1998, when I have finally completed the research and photography part of my journey. Yet, I also wanted to do small, impromptu shows, as I traveled through the many villages, towns, and cities of the fourteen countries I will visit. In anticipation of this plan I had brought along a slide projector and a tray of 100 of my most beautiful images. I have not yet thought much about how I will present these small shows (for I am used to doing large scale shows in big auditoriums with multiple projectors for hundreds of people). Everything will probably be much simpler and the screen may be nothing more than a white bed-sheet.
Upon arrival in San Miguel, I rapidly met a number of local artists, computer wizards, and cool expatriates who are excited about my presenting a slide show in their town. They say it will be well attended and they have offered to help find an auditorium and spread the word through the artist community. With these new friends I stayed up well past midnight talking and drinking copious quantities of Tequila.
This morning a drive of less than an hour brought me to the small pilgrimage shrine of Atotonilco. This is one of the strangest sacred places I have ever visited. Some people come to this 18th century church to look at the "art" of the colorful murals painted all across the walls inside the chapel and its small surrounding rooms. These murals (sadly poorly cared-for and much degraded) are indeed exceptional works of folk art. Yet it is the style of the murals and their message that accounts for the great majority of visitors to Atotonilco. The murals are some of the most gruesome, somber, even macabre paintings in the world. The central image is of a horribly bleeding Christ. All around him are other tortured, bleeding, dying and decaying people. The murals are darkly painted, darkly lit, and the whole place has a terribly depressing energy.
Given this interior decor, it is interesting to learn something about the nature of the pilgrimage to the shrine of Atotonilco. Thousands of Christians come each year to engage in "religious exercises" such as sleeping in stone cells on hard, cold rock floors, crawling around the perimeter of the shrine on bare and bloody knees, wearing crowns of thorns, and flagellating themselves with sharp, seven-tailed whips. This is done for a variety of reasons. Many of the pilgrims feel they must experience some of the pain they imagine Christ felt during his carrying of the cross to hill of Golgatha, and his subsequent hanging on the cross. Other pilgrims feel they must strongly, even savagely, punish themselves for some wrong they have done. There are many people around the world who suffer this delusion of being self-abusively driven by such ideas and feelings. The gruesome shrine of Atotonilco provides Mexican sufferers of this psycho-spiritual disease with both powerful authentication of their delusion and an actual place where they can collectively suffer with other persons so deluded. (If Atotonilco did not exist, some manner of similarly functioning place would have been manufactured by this class of suffering people in order to fill their need.)
What I find particularly interesting at Atotonilco is so direct a link between the messages of the murals, the self-abusing actions of the pilgrims, and the continuing attraction of the church. The gruesome murals are interpreted, mostly unconsciously, as a permission or even an instruction to engage in equally gruesome behavior towards oneself. The place did not have this energy, this injunction before the Christian use of the site. It was simply another piece of land. But then a church was built and a self-tortured collection of ecclesiastical officials and painters got together and acted out their personal delusions through the medium of art. The psychic space created by these builders and their macabre murals then began to attract other persons suffering similar delusions. Like attracts like. Over a few centuries the church became reasonably well known in Mexico and more and more people began making "pilgrimages" to the site. As this occurred a place-specific psychic presence - a particular type of energy field - developed that resulted from the combined energies and intentions of all the suffering people who had come to Atotonilco. This human-caused field attracts still more visitors to the site who then, inturn, continue to amplify the attraction-power of the field.
What I wish to draw attention to here is that pilgrimage places, and particularly the powers of the places, result from different causes. I have written about this matter extensively in my Places of Peace and Power manuscript, where I discuss twenty distinct regions for the existence of energy fields at the sacred sites. The particular attractive power of Atotonilco may be explained by referring to one of these twenty reasons. This is the mysterious phenomena of human intention and action leaving a sort of psychic imprint on a place. By way of analogy, this is very similar to sound (an energy) leaving an imprint on magnetic tape (an energetic medium) or light (another energy) leaving its imprint on photographic film (another energetic medium). Place has memory and the memory of Atotonilco is the (self-imposed) suffering of thousands of penitent Christians who have visited over the past three centuries.
In a later section of these writings I will comment more extensively upon the foolishness and absolute non-necessity of "suffering for Christ." Here I want to state the value of visiting Atotonilco for people not deluded by this idea. This matter is important because there are very few sacred places where pilgrims torture themselves so brutally and correspondingly very few places where sane people may experience a sort of energetic inoculation protecting them from the philosophical delusions that give rise to religiously-motivated self-abusive behavior. The concept of inoculation is a perfect way to describe the matter. Just as we may be protected from certain harmful substances by the taking into our bodies (energetic fields) small amounts of those substances (particular energy signatures), we may also be protected from or inoculated against certain psychic imbalances by purposely entering into the concentrated field of those psychic energetic signatures. Through exposure to a harmful entity or substance, the natural intelligence of our bodies builds up a resistance to that thing. Let me sum up the matter succinctly. For people, who in any way and for any reason, suffer the deluded idea that self-punishment or suffering is necessary, Atotonilco is a very, very important place to visit. At this somber, depressing place we are inoculated against somber and depressing things. Most important, we are offered assistance in healing ourselves of self-abusing tendencies. If you are lucky enough to visit Atotonilco during a period of concentrated pilgrimage, church and town authorities offer extra assistance in this matter. Cannons blast loudly through the night in order to frighten away evil spirits and other bothersome things.
