Earth Pilgrims:　A documentary film blog

Earth Pilgrims A year on

2011-02-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

In February 2011 this beautiful image was taken by a chap in Norway I believe. The Earth is a wondrous planet indeed when we can receive magnetic gifts like this in our skies. She is also quite likely close to having a fit of energetic renewal methinks.

Since the last entry I have moved to Canada, changed my name, lost everything I had in terms of possessions and been humbled in a lovely variety of ways by the powers of life, transformation and love.

Earth Pilgrims in a sense has demanded it of me. Though commercially a complete and utter flop
the film was and still is a source of great joy in my heart. And never before has its message been more cogent-as the systems of our secure folly now discombobulate at ever faster speeds. For those with eyes to see, and ears to hear that is..

Earth Pilgrims Radio will continue to send out the EP message so do stay tuned!

Interview with the director

2010-01-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

Recently I have been on US radio a couple of times and also interviewed for a magazine in Texas.
Links to these can be found below:

Just Energy Radio

Holistic Networker Magazine Interview

Avatar 2012

2010-01-30T20:39:00.000-08:00

An Alchemical Afterword: The 2012 Avatar

by Echan Deravy

I had discovered, early in my researches, that their doctrine was no mere chemical fantasy, but a philosophy they applied to the world, to the elements, and to man himself.

W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica

A woman and a man. A scientist/healer and a layman/heretic spend two days together. Neither had met the other before yet they began with a spontaneous, warm embrace. Surrounded by interpreters/publishers they shared visions, evoked memories, reconfirmed central concepts related to our near future, drank coffee and laughed quite a bit. Remember the English definition of a heretic is: a person who holds unorthodox opinions in any field

Having interviewed dozens of scientists as well as several outrageous heretics over the last two decades, nearly all of them for Japanese publications, I have a rather unique sense of where a dialogue will go. Since I am a writer and particularly because my life has been largely spent here in Japan, I have an idea of how a book should flow. I therefore set out to guide this dialogue in such a way that the reader could get the most out of the distinctly bright mind of Dr. Jude Currivan. What you have read was then, a very open ended interview in effect. I would provide Jude with some starting ideas and with no hesitation she would immediately develop the themes. The publisher never once told us what to do. We never had a list of silly questions. Like the silliest question of all time: “What will happen in 2012?” As if mere mortals could tell you how any system undergoing accelerated chaos will end up! What we shared was our vision of a possible future.

I say that with deep respect for how humanity will realistically navigate the currents that once seemed so stable but, like our Earth's own ocean conveyor belts, now might change direction at any time. We are certainly no prophets. If anything we are perhaps more acutely aware than the public of how little we know. That is because we have studied a lot-not simply with a view to getting credits and furthering careers but because we have both felt the powerful need to cross reference our intuitive hunches with real science. That is why the word alchemy is so appropriate to this discussion. I may just have re-defined alchemy: the art of taking heavenly hints and grounding them in physical reality. Do not forget that science indisputably evolved out of alchemy as surely as a new alchemy will evolve out of our current science. The alchemical symbol of ouroboros, the snake that bites its own tail symbolizes that perfectly.

Stanley Kubrick was also an alchemist though he is best known as the film director of '2001 A Space Odyssey.' That was truly the first film about 2012 and it was released in 1968. Key scenes in the film, like when the monkeys first learn how to use bones as weapons, are accompanied by the mysterious monolith and one other phenomenon. An eclipse. As above, so below. Great signs in the heavens are significant to us here on Earth. I wonder if the reader is aware of just how many solar and lunar eclipses have occurred in the last year and how many more await that breathtaking date of Dec 21, 2012? Or is all this eclipse and Mayan folklore just, you know, coincidence-like any well trained parrot will tell you who has sat through hundreds of hours of reductionist training in any modern, materialistic science program?

As I approach the age of sixty in 2012 I have little patience with any science that divorces and isolates its findings from all other sciences. Archaeologist do not talk to chaos theorists in our current educational system-not unless they are at the pub and have had a few. But in the real world when you stub your toe (one scientific field) on a sharp rock your entire being knows all about it. Everything is connected. Then why do so very many scientists simply not realize this as the fundamental beginning and ending statement about the universe and everything else??

Jude Currivan does realize this. And she is willing to stand up for that awareness and join ranks with other forward thinking scholars and lay people alike. Bravo! There is still hope in the suffocating halls of academia where our cleverness betrays a gigantic pomposity: we know in those enclosed spaces, that 2012 is surely just a load of millenial rubbish. Ah, the comforting glow of scientific certainty. The new religion is here!

Remember I am a heretic. Though I deeply respect true scientific endeavour I am vigorously opposed to science-as-new-religion and am well prepared to be burned at the stake for it. Kubrick was 45 years before his time with that alchemical masterpiece. On a Japanese TV program recently I was part of a panel looking at Nasa photos of Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. Retired US astronaut Buzz Aldrin was interviewed for this show and asked to comment on the presence on that moon, the clear and obvious presence of...a monolith. Its unmistakably rectangular shadow thrown across the utterly barren surface of an alien world was indisputable.

What put it there you can now perhaps better guess, having read our dialogue! We did not forget to mention Kubrick on the program either, of course. Kubrick's moon set was almost definitely hired by Nasa to shoot backup scenes in case Apollo crashed into the moon.(his wife revealed this in an interview) Luckily it did not. Either way America had to be number one even as its current president shamefully announced in his 2010 State of the Union. What a state we are all in, when a war mongering nation declares it has to be number one. And this is democracy? Thank God I am still a heretic at the core!

Yet other films have not been so sophisticated in their scenarios of future chaos. The Hollywood movie disaster, sorry, the Hollywood disaster movie '2012' is one such example. With ne'er a hair out of place its heroes miss exploding mountains, falling freeways, tsunami obliteration and volcanic rage as continents buckle and bend. The heroine looks like she has just popped out to the local supermarket to fetch some goodies as she battles through the end of the world on her way to rescue. No blood. No guts. No pain and no sense of hopelessness whatsoever since her man is going to get her and the kid through it. With a few lucky others from the elite oligarchy for our DNA gene-pool future , they get enveloped in steel arks (just as our current civilization is already metaphorically stuck inside) and ride the tsunami to safety.

Whoopee, the human race survives as maudlin housewives and anal retentive globalists who will just start the same sorry story all over again. It goes: we want to carry on just as always. We will lie and cheat, control and plunder, we will rape and pillage our environment in order to be happy. We will conveniently forget that millions of others will pay the price for it, including finally ourselves. But through an astonishing genetic fault called fatal anal denial we shall never evolve highly enough to actually see the error of our ways, even as we justify them with quotes from God, Jesus and the prophets of old. Hey, we're humans!

James Cameron would have enjoyed a dialogue with Stanley Kubrick. Cameron is another alchemist who takes a vision of another world, the planet Pandora, and he gives us a truer reflection of ourselves as pathetic, war addicted imperialists who will do anything for new resources, for money. Even if we have to be in hibernation for five years to cross vast distances in space, (as did the 2001 astronauts long before the concept had arisen of putting people in suspended animation) even if we have to infiltrate a proud and beautiful people to usurp them from the inside, (as all Caucasian history in particular will show happened to indigenous populations) we will simply not give up that most insidious habit that threatens our very survival. In a word: ME

I have been in jungles like the ones on Pandora. I have shared glasses of priceless plant elixirs with indigenous chiefs like those proud bird-riding warriors, the Na'vi of Pandora. I have seen that world just like the iridescent forest glows at night on the Na'vi's home planet. I have known the sense of being connected to every last molecule of every last living being. What I do to them I do to myself. As above so below. We return full circle to the great cosmic art and science of alchemy. But the message of Avatar goes further. We actually straddle both worlds. Our consciousness can take us into any future. We can return to our old ways in shame and defeat, a ruined species that has gorged itself to extinction. Or we can transfer our hearts and minds to a higher being, the next level of ourselves, stronger, wiser, in humble harmony with every being. We, and we only, are what links the above and the below. You will not be saved by steel arks but rather by hearts of gold. The alchemical transmutation is eminently possible. I hope this dialogue helps you to sharpen that possible link to our own species' evolution.

Echan Deravy

Sanda Jan. 30 2010

The dolphin Connection

2009-06-17T00:57:00.000-07:00

Maasa Craig, a member of the Earth Pilgrims team is a regular swimmer with these wondrous creatures. She was introduced to dolphins in her teens by Echan Deravy and since then has swum with whales and dolphins all over the world. Once you have looked a cetacean in the eye there is no looking back.

Trailer for Earth Pilgrims

2009-06-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

Synchronicity with Nassim Haramein

2008-12-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

To learn more about this man's unique research please visit
his official website at:

http://www.theresonanceproject.org

Satish Kumar Interview

2008-12-01T16:51:00.001-08:00

Pachakutec friends

2008-08-10T03:04:00.000-07:00

Ruben,Theo and Echan at work as Pachakutec allies

Latin America fascinates me. It is a diverse mix of corrupt politicians like the great charlatan Alberto
Fujimori , who I saw in Tokyo give a speech in very poor Japanese, and the tremendously vital energy of its peoples. It was he who was responsible for the murders of thousands of indigenous Peruvians who supported the Shining Path guerrilla movement. Fujimori was thus the father of Peru's lost decade and ended up living the good life in Tokyo for several years as an exile before his political ego got the better of him. He became convinced like so many other politicians (who are just priests in politicians clothes as far as I can see because they preach, they convert and they pretend to have answers that they do not possess) that only he, the omnipotent Fujimori, could solve Peru's ongoing woes. The poor fool returned to South America where he has been wanted for years, to face trial for his crimes. Holing up in neighbouring Chile, one of the few South American states to have really solved the corruption problem, Fujimori wrongly believed that his lawyers would get him off the hook and that he would return triumphant to Peru. That was not the case as we all know-he now faces trial in Lima.

He is one of the last great dictators like Robert Mugabe and George Bush, and Pakistan's president Musharref who stay in force (not power) far too long for anybody's good. South America has been supported by a CIA operation for decades, by an ongoing social manipulation project called Condor which basically keeps right wing leaders in power and stamps out leftist ideologies like the shining path. South America is a phenomenal mix then of huge and ugly cities, full to the brim with peasants who want to drive a Mercedes one day, and for whom the dream of success is a new religion. Huge billboards in Lima for example show the good life with famous models driving smart cars with their white glittering teeth, their tight bums and their chic clothes -promising an impossibility since most Peruvians can barely pay the rent and most women over thirty there certainly do not have tight bums.

Here in Peru advertising is where it was in Europe in the seventies. People actually believe that such an absurdity as endless consumer evolution is possible. I have seen shoe shine boys sleeping on pavements in Cusco in their bare feet, people sleeping in sewer pipes on the way into Lima and watched native porters get enlarged hearts carrying my group's baggage in the Andes.

Latin America includes for me Costa Rica where I was a founder of a radical experiment in free capitalism called Laissez Faire City. We attempted to live outside of all government controls of our finances (just like the best years of the USA) by creating a cyber city but we were too early. Others have now partly succeeded in our dream with systems like another life. In Panama I was involved with offshore banking specialists and discovered that thousands of Canadians and Americans now retire in Panama because their money lasts longer, the weather is better and the banks give much better returns. I once brought a leading Panamanian businessman to Tokyo and personally introduced him to the vice minister of finance at the time resulting in great fame for him back in Panama. Even the President of Panama had not met such high level Japanese government ministers. When the minister (who I shall not name for reasons soon to be obvious) asked me incredulously how I had been able to pull this off at his office in the finance ministry, I joked that I was working for MI6. Neither he, nor the Panamanian were amused. I just wanted to break the tension as I was interpreting between two very powerful men. Suddenly Senor Morales hugged the minister, I got the photograph and the next day it was on the front business page of Panama's leading daily newspaper La Republique. Morales almost made a hugely serious blunder that I had to help avoid for him. At my house in Hiro, where I was living in high style for a couple of years, I threw a party for Morales. In attendance were people including the president of APA hotels, the Panamanian consular officer, the minister's personal secretary and most importantly a woman who ran a ryoriya in Akasaka where I had taken Morales. She had slept with every Japanese prime minister since the war she claimed, and had been the number five of prime minister Miki. It was her who got us the interview with the minister, since her ryoriya was where the finance ministry held its informal meetings to decide your future. I mean that respectfully as well as facetiously. These men work very hard and play very hard. Anyway of his many secretaries the finance vice minister had a fluent Spanish speaking beauty. It was her he sent to the party at my apartment. Morales fell head over heels in lust for her. A typical machismo energy he had as a typical central American rich man meant he was always chasing women. There was only one problem. The one man he definitely did not want to annoy was her lover, the aforementioned minister. She was much more than a secretary. I stopped that fatal attraction by telling him to back off. He did.

I was also an old hand in the Yucatan where I had often spent many sunny days traveling from one pyramid to another in search of Mayan ghosts who might teach me something about our times from their cosmic philosophy. I had been in villages where Zapatista rebels and local peasants had been massacred by government troops in Chiapas state. Just about anywhere you go in Central or South america there will you find such a dichotomy-very passionate people living full on, tough lives and periodically the victims of massive injustices caused by right wing governments all trained and supported by the CIA. Even Wikipedia recognizes this, so it is not just a conspiracy theory.

Operation Condor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor, Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repressions involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate left-wing influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the usually conservative governments. Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor will likely never be known, but it is reported to have caused thousands of victims, possibly even more. Condor's key members were the right-wing military governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, with Ecuador and Peru joining later in more peripheral roles. These nations were ruled by dictators such as Jorge Rafael Videla, Augusto Pinochet, Ernesto Geisel, Hugo Banzer, and Alfredo Stroessner. The operation was jointly conducted by the intelligence and security services of these nations during the mid-1970s with support provided by the United States of America[5].

I recommend John Malkovitch's excellent first directorial movie The Dancer Upstairs to familiarize yourself with that world.

The expedition to Peru in 2008 to film the sacred festival at Qoylluriti was preceded by seven trips which began with that shaman, anthropologist and gifted teacher Alberto Villoldo in 1995. That seemed to set the pattern for who I was going to be dealing with over the next dozen years as I took group after group of Japanese participants to experience with me the sheer magic, literally that, of this ancient culture. How ancient? We cannot know, but I have my suspicions that if the monuments at Sacsayhuaman in Cusco which are impossibly huge megaliths, or at the temple of the sun in neighbouring Bolivia at Tiahuanaco are anything to go by I am inclined to believe Incan myths more than archaeologists who claim it is all quite recent. The Bolivian monument is an important Pre-Columbian archaeological site in western Bolivia. Tiahuanaco, also spelled Tiwanaku according to Wikipedia :

is recognized by Andean scholars as one of the most important precursors to the Inca Empire, flourishing as the ritual and administrative capital of a major state power for approximately five hundred years. The ruins of the ancient city state are near the south-eastern shore of Lake Titicaca, about 72 km (44 miles) west of La Paz, Bolivia. Some have hypothesized that Tiwanaku's modern name is related to the Aymara term taypiqala, meaning "stone in the center", alluding to the belief that it lay at the center of the world.However, the name by which Tiwanaku was known to its inhabitants has been lost, as the people of Tiwanaku had no written language.

It is clear to any acute observer in Peru that two entirely different civilizations are expressed almost everywhere. The Inca and its related cultures are definitely not that old but inside Inca sites like at Ollantaytambo you can seee very primitive stonework next to truly amazing megaliths that weigh hundreds of tons, cut to exact specifications by who knows what kind of technology. The Inca themeselves failed to replace one of those giagantic stones that had fallen from its place at Sacsayhuaman despite using hundreds of slaves with ropes. Many were killed as the stone rolled free of their grasp. It is not my intention to disparage the work of archaeologists but like Graham Hancock I have seen far too many sophisticated monuments around the world that simply beg the question, Who really did this and how? My participants were therefore always given the local, government trained guide explanation and my research too so they could make up their own mind. The problem is simple. If the Egyptians did not build the pyramids, if it was proven one day that a previously unknown race of people built them all over the world based on similar principles and sciences then the monument ceases to belong to Egypt and becomes ours. Peruvian monuments belong no more to the Peruvian state as my body belongs to my parents.

Their myths have been passed down to the Incas and the Spanish who in turn took that part of South America. They worshipped many gods, and one of the most important gods was Viracocha, the god of action, shaper of many worlds, and destroyer of many worlds. He created people, with two servants, on a great piece of rock. Then he drew sections on the rock and sent his servants to name the tribes in those areas. In Tiwanaku he created the people out of rock and brought life to them through the earth. The Tiwanaku believed that Viracocha created giants to move the massive stones that comprise much of their archeology, but then grew unhappy with the giants and created a flood to destroy them.

Peru appears to me as a profoundly shamanized culture. Even the president has been known to consult with shamans like my old friend Theo. Theo paredes is an archaeologist, anthropologist and practising shaman. A cultured background in both North and South hemispheres has taken him to the highest levels of the Peruvian state as 'advisor'. He currently holds healing seminars and expeditions to meet aboriginal elders and shamans in Peru, Chile and North america. He has a wonderful healing/teaching centre just South of Cusco called the Poqen Kanchay Foundation.My small group of Japanese were its first clients back in the nineties.

Ruben Orellana lives in Cusco and has taught archaeology at its fine university. A one time resident archaeologist at Machu Pichu he is currently teaching shamanism theory and practise around the world as well as leading expeditions in Peru to sacred sites. He too stands in the above photo at a thermal spring a few hours outside Cusco. We drank the milk of magnesium-like waters in large quantities forcing us all to 'purge' for hours in the adjoining toilets. We left, clean as whistles to continue our washuma ceremony at the temple of Viracocha. His songs, accompanied by his rythmic rattle, are a great help in the healing work he does with plants. He often works with Theo Paredes. He found a hitherto unknown road into Machu Pichu while in a visionary state during ayahuasca ceremony. He became an eagle and flew over the fabled ruins where he was the chief archaeologist. From high above he noticed a track that was later confirmed as an ancient road subsequently putting him on the cover of Time. He is a rascal. He is a highly gifted healer too and like Theo has created his own healing centre in the sacred valley. I hosted him and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna for a seminar on shamanism on the island of Kauai and he brought a Condor feather for me as a gift. In return I gave him an eagle wing I had received from a Canadian native Indian. Strangely enough there is a prophecy which states that the eagle will once again fly with the condor meaning the native traditions of North and South America will once again be in a co-creative relationship with each other.

Then there is the Peruvian shaman Don Ignacio who is an ayahuasquero healer who held ceremony with my groups in the jungle of Madre de Dios, East Peru. A beautiful guy who keeps you from splattering all over the multidimensional fan in deep ayahuasca trance, with his lilting icaros (sacred ayahuasca songs) he lives in a village the Spaniards called Infierno=Hell. That is what they brought is it not? Don Ignacio has been a healer for half a century and is now the mayor of hell village. He presided over 20 ceremonies with me and my Japanese participants where we all entered the strange and terrifyingly beautiful world of the magical plants, the world of the visionary soul, the vine of the dead. Some people I took were healed of diseases, some fell asleep, some had life changing experiences and some preferred to drink beer instead of ayahuasca. To each man his own. Personally some of the most beautiful and terrifying moments of my life have been in that jungle. One night I decided to walk in the jungle alone and switch off the flashlight. It was most memorable indeed. I also fondly remember doing ceremonies that included my wife , my daughter and my son. My daughter will never forget the sublime and precious experience she had of literally meeting the Egyptian goddess Isis (goddess of art amongst other titles) who sang celestial songs through Maasa for hours. The sounds were so unearthly, so ecstatically beautiful that all who were there begged for her never to stop singing. The result was that my then 17 year old daughter decided to and did become a singer songwriter. But that song, that ethereal voice, has never returned like that. It was a miracle. I have dozens of stories like that but will not bore the reader with any more. Suffice to say that at the end of that ceremony I crawled over to her and she got on my back to ride on me. She saw me as a jaguar....

Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (or Pachacutec; Quechua Pachakutiq, whose name means "He who remakes the world" was the ninth Sapa Inca (1438-1471/1472) of the Kingdom of Cuzco, which he transformed into an empire, Tawantinsuyu. He began the era of conquest that, within three generations, expanded the Inca dominion from the valley of Cuzco to nearly the whole of civilized South America. He was the fourth of the Hanan dynasty, and his wife's name is given as Mama Anawarkhi or Coya Anahurque. Their son was Tupac Inca Yupanqui. Their other son was Prince Yupanqui, who married Coya Chimpu Cello, the parents of Prince Inca Tupac Yupanki, who married Mama Cello, the parents of Princess Beatriz Tupac Yupanqui, wife of Conquistador Pedro Alvarez de Holguín, son of Pedro Alvarez de Golfín and wife Constanza de Aldana, and had female issue (ancestors of José Gervasio Artigas and Gabriel Antonio Pereira and three times ancestors of Princess Máxima of the Netherlands).

His given name was Cusi Yupanqui and he was not supposed to succeed his father Inca Viracocha who had appointed his brother Urco as crown prince. However in the midst of an invasion of Cuzco by the Chankas, the Incas' traditional tribal archenemies, Pachacuti had a real opportunity to demonstrate his talent. While his father and brother fled the scene Pachacuti rallied the army and prepared for a desperate defense of his homeland. In the resulting battle the Chankas were defeated so severely that legend tells even the stones rose up to fight on Pachacuti's side. Thus "The Earth Shaker" won the support of his people and the recognition of his father as crown prince and joint ruler.

To remake the world? That is our job now, not the rulers and the kings of Earth but we, the Earth Pilgrims.

After I had decided to do the pilgrimage to Qoylluriti in 2007 Winter I was sure that it would be a documentary first. However to my astonishment I saw two documentaries on it within two consecutive days. The first was on a Japanese TV channel, and it focussed on the lives of one family who were sending their man to the festival to represent their village. He and his wife and two children eked a meagre living from the tending of llamas and the cultivating of potatoes. The money required to get him in costume and with a flute player to make the journey from his isolated farm was significant, and so half of the documentary very clearly showed how important such a pilgrimage is for each community and also how difficult it is to make it happen. I think it is difficult for everybody whether they have money or not since every pilgrimage brings every pilgrim through a process that inevitably involves some suffering. In a world of perfect relativity he lived a much simpler life externally, was very poor and had to work really hard physically to keep body and soul together. But he had an ancient tradition behind him, a community of support, and a simple faith that left his life relatively calm. I was without such a community of support, lived a far more complex life, had access to much more money than he and though not so much involved in menial labour my brain muscles were just as tired as his arms. I find it very offensive when experts tell us that we do not understand indigenous people or that we are spoiling them with our gifts, our presence and our money. Years ago the Qoylluriti had not allowed foreigners but it was inevitable. What I am getting at is the facile distinction some people make between us and them. As if we did not all have hearts that can ache, muscles that can hurt and pride that can be worked for. I was no less of a pilgrim than he because I went through the process. Though our worlds may be totally different there is no objective way you can say mine is better or easier than his. We are men. We have souls. We suffer and we die. The form of our suffering may be different but the feeling of it is the same. Ouch.

The other documentary was a National geographic special on sacred geography by Wade Davis. This was after I had contacted him to be part of the Earth Pilgrims movie. There he was on camera interviewing Nilda Callañaupa, a well known weaver from the village of Chinchero who I had met in 1997. She had taken the simple art of weaving in the traditional Andean style to the world, and she had been invited to later lecture at prestigious American universities. In 1996, she helped establish the Center for Traditional Textiles of Cusco (CTTC), whose mission is to preserve and promote the indigenous Andean weaving traditions. Now director of CTTC, Callañaupa has organized collectives in nine towns, which support about 400 weavers, and helps to market their works for a fair price. CTTC has also established a permanent exhibit and gallery to represent the weavers in Cuzco. Callanaupa was born in Chinchero, Peru in 1960 and received her Master’s degree in Tourism from the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Del Cusco in 1997. She speaks her native Quechua along with Spanish and English. She has taught numerous Andean weaving workshops, given lectures and participated in many conferences in the United States since 1970. The Interweave Press book Weaving in the Peruvian Andes: Dreaming Patterns, Weaving Memories explains how the textiles of Perú reflect the heritage of the Inca and represent the geography and history of their mountain birthplaces.

She had basically told Wade on camera that asking questions like where do Christian beliefs and Andean shamanism begin and end, with a quip that for them the Peruvians, "There is no division.." So there I was re-thinking doing a 'first' documentary. For a while I considered other options but there something about that mountain, about that pilgrimage that just would not go away. Getting there was full of problems though. Just like the simple peasant traveling from his shack to Qoylluriti, I would also discover that all things being equal I would go through just as much as he would, including (as he did) an injury to the most important part of a pilgrim's body, the foot, organizational problems -he would have to attend village meetings to debate the wisdom of raising money to send him as their representative, I would have to ask private investors to back me with money to pay for an expedition, and also there was the difficulty of getting the right people to help. In his case he would have to find a good flautist to accompany him. In my case I needed a local co-ordinator for tents, horses, sleeping bags and ground transportation. It might be argued that my problems were luxury problems and his were much more basic and real. Nonsense, I would reply, for all things are indeed equal and the experience of the individual is pretty much the same since it all revolves around those feelings. Pilgrimage is a great leveler of social distinctions. That is why it is so important.

Gateway to the Inka mind

2008-07-31T18:45:00.000-07:00

Alberto (left) gestures to Echan in summer 1995 during interview

We are in the Rainbow Jaguar Temple of PUMAMARKA at almost 4,000 metres, overlooking tranquil Peruvian farmland below. Twelve of us sit in a semicircle around the shamans as they chew coca leaves, incant in the Quechuan (kechwan) language and spread out their sacred MESA-altars composed of cloth and stones used in all ceremonies. Five of the shamans are from the legendary Quero tribe, the last pure descendants of the Inka. They have maintained their culture at high altitude in the Andes but are extremely poor ( having no money economy at all ) Their 600 or so remaining members represent the world's last living link with the high spiritual Empire which the Spanish almost totally destroyed during the 'Conquest of the Inka'. Night is falling as we silently wait for them to complete preparations for a TRANSMISSION ceremony during which they will directly pass on their shamanic knowledge to we westerners via a symbolic blessing (touching our heads, trunks and limbs) from their Mesa.

But one of the shamans is not short and dark skinned, with that typical strong hooked nose, like the others. He is tall and obviously Caucasian. He is the one responsible for this unequalled meeting of minds and cultures. He is the man who has been studying Inka shamanism for over 20 years and who forged this historical contact with a dying tribe of proud and beautiful people. When the transmission ceremony begins and the Quero bless us all by pressing their Mesa to our heads, hearts and limbs, he blesses us too. And then something unprecedented happens. The Quero ask the white man to bless them! This means he has become their equal, though he considers himself a humble student. He is certainly the leading western student of what they have to share as well as being our much respected teacher on this Inka Trail. His name? Dr. Alberto Villoldo-anthropologist, psychologist and vital bridge to the magical world of the INKA.

Previous to meeting with the Quero we had hiked for four days through high Andean landscapes on the INKA trail -an ancient pilgrimage route leading into the fabled city of Machu Pichu. While most visitors take the bus UP to Machu Pichu we had walked Down into the stone citadel from a maximum high point of 4,200 meters. After completing shamanic ceremonies there at night ( he received special permission just for our group to be there in the moonlight! ) in the temples within Machu Pichu, we had gone down to the ramshackle town which exists around the train station at the foot of the mountain. It was here that I did an exclusive interview with this esteemed and very funny student/teacher of shamanism. Like all good teachers he considers himself a student!

Just as I asked the first question about the Inka trail a nearby rooster started to crow at full volume as if in answer, and repeated the feat as I asked the question again! Alberto quipped," Next question?" Our entire group was roaring with laughter because this type of synchronicity was quite common during our trip. It was a sign perhaps for us not to think too seriously for this was shamanic work we were doing-not intellectual work.

However in the interview that follows Alberto gives some excellent pointers to assist us in understanding the powerful processes that our medicine journey involved and which are still very active in all of our lives after our return.

ECHAN: What is the Inka Trail to you?

ALBERTO: There are 4 trails into Machu Pichu but only one is now accessible-the ceremonial part of the trail about 60 kilometres long and divided into 4 parts. These represent the four directions of the medicine wheel. Between them are three Inka temples.

ECHAN: What is the first direction and what does it represent?

ALBERTO: It is the South where we engage the work of the serpent. It is about shedding the past-just like the snake sheds its skin-all at once-not little by little like we westerners do. In this tradition shedding the past is an act of power and an act of love. We call on heaven and earth to bear witness to us not just shedding the painful elements but also the joys and the wonderful elements too. Things that happened when we were 12 or 35-we have made them into addictions and hobbies. The task is to shed the underlying mythic structure that makes up our self. This structure is shaped by a modern mythology that denies the feminine, denies the Earth, the magical and the mysterious.

ECHAN: Yes but people will say it's not that easy to shed the past-some have been in therapy for years trying to deal with that! I am interested in finding out what makes our way-walking the trail and using Inka shamanism-different and powerful as compared to a psychological or therapeutic way.

ALBERTO: Medicine people work with 4 levels of reality: The Somatic or literal level, the Symbolic, the Mythic and the Energetic (essential). For us in the modern world all our processes are INTRA PSYCHIC
( they happen in the mind only) but in shamanism you also have EXTRA PSYCHIC ( outside of the mind) processes too. You can engage these processes and they will stalk you and work with you!

ECHAN: Give an example of one that will stalk you.

ALBERTO: You call the spirit of Sachamama-the serpent-and you have a mythic engagement with an archetype, a LIVING luminous being that has been known by many names in many cultures ( in the East it is the Dragon of course) Or you call the jaguar and it follows you and challenges you when you go up the mountain. This is what makes the medicine person different-an ability to have a dialogue with the archetypal forms in Nature.

ECHAN: What happens to people who invoke this energy without knowing about shamanism?

ALBERTO: It would backfire and perhaps create physical or emotional illness. The mot dangerous person at Machu Pichu is one who comes with a little knowledge. It is the same at any Native American power spot. In Hopi canyon lands one participant picked up a skull from an old burial area and began to do Hamlet jokes. This healthy guy had Lymphatic cancer 2 months later and it took us 4 years of healing to get him back! You must have respect and honour the four directions when you do ceremony at these places.

ECHAN: So it's like we are opening dimensional doors then.

ALBERTO: Doorways, yes. Many people just walk the physical Inka Trail and sure they can feel the energy of it, but we are after the Knowledge content of that energy. We tap into an ancient structure of knowledge and it transforms us, it brings us face to face with the Mystery.

ECHAN: Where did we go after the South?

ALBERTO: When we got to the circular temple of Runkurakay we engaged the work of the West-the work of the JAGUAR. The work there has to do with stepping beyond violence, beyond anger. It is also about facing fear, which is the warrior archetype. But our model of the shamanic warrior is one who has no enemies in this world or the next. The work of the jaguar is to step beyond death.

ECHAN: Tell us why the animal is a jaguar.

ALBERTO: The city of Cusco is actually built in the shape of a jaguar. It is an animal representing the primal energy of the rain forest and one who leaps between the worlds.

ECHAN: That's the image I was looking for-leaping between the worlds!

ALBERTO: He can gracefully leap from one world to the next. Our task is to leap gracefully into who we are becoming-without fear. The jaguar is also connected to the rainbow-you walk across its back to the world of the spirit.

ECHAN: We each took a stone from each temple on our way and left it at the next. What does that symbolize?

ALBERTO: In Inka tradition this is called SEKAYS-they were irrigation canals but the shamanic meaning is energy lines that connect temples. By carrying stones we have the continuity of energy building up on itself. We create energy pathways all leading to Machu Pichu and these pathways keep our work strong at the energetic or essential level earlier mentioned.

ECHAN: So we could continue to walk the Inka Trail for months at that deep level, because our stones maintain the energy?

ALBERTO: Absolutely yes!

ECHAN: What about the work of the North?

ALBERTO: That is where we must step beyond power. You have to have power first though, before you can shed it! To embody power is to know that you can create a world in which Nature answers you. For the shaman, information and knowledge are different-to know that water is H2O is information, but to be able to create rain is knowledge. We engaged the North work at Sayaqmarka temple and there we stepped into a different relationship with life-a more synchronistic one. This means stepping outside of ordinary time into sacred time, that turns like a wheel. Doing the work of the North means you can find yourself in a situation today that is caused by something that will happen two months from now-you can summon destiny from the future. By stepping through the portals of time you call who you are becoming.

ECHAN: As our perception of Time rapidly changes and it appears that Time is speeding up the work of the North seems even more important. What animal represents the North?

ALBERTO: The Hummingbird and also the (South American) Dragon-flying beings that you can see on the Nasca plains. This is the symbol of emergence, of transformation. In the teachings of the North there are three key elements:
1) invisibility-you go through life without leaving a gigantic wake! In this way the shaman steps beyond power.
2) mastery of time-stepping into synchronicity you align your vision and your intent. The universe then actively conspires on your behalf!
3) the ability to keep a secret even from yourself

ECHAN: What does that mean?

ALBERTO: That took me a long time and still I do not fully understand! It means that if you can step outside of time and taste your destiny you will be able to know things that will happen. You have to hold that knowledge as a secret from yourself so it does not spoil your actions.

ECHAN: It is like you know the entire story of your book of life but you still have to write it?

ALBERTO: Yes, absolutely. In the work of the North what you do is tap into the collective memory of our species-and the body of ancient knowledge becomes directly available to you. The stones tell you, the APU ( sacred mountain guardians ) tell you, Pachamama ( the sacred Earth ) tells you and the Stars tell you.

ECHAN: We began the East work at Phuyupatamarka ( temple of the clouds ) What is the symbol of this direction?

ALBERTO: The Condor. In North America it is the Eagle. The Maya tradition has Quetzacoatl-the feathered serpent. These all represent the way of VISION. Some medicine people in the Andes as well as Hopi sit in council envisioning possibilities for the entire planet. They summon the highest possibilities from the 'future' through doorways in time. They are miracle workers

ECHAN: What about us at the individual level on the Inca Trail. Is it about finding our own vision and connecting it to a communal vision too?

ALBERTO: It is about planting seeds (visions) -we can choose to tend them or not. If we let them grow our connection to the archetypal motifs continues to unfold. You are vision driven. This means you have the opportunuty to create a new body-one that ages differently, heals differently, dies differently-or maybe even one that does not die!

ECHAN: What is the connection with these new bodies, who we are becoming on this medicine wheel, to the INKA?

ALBERTO: INKA means 'child of the SUN'. That is someone who recognises their nature as a luminous being. The seeds we planted are ultimately seeds of becoming INKA. They believed our species has come to an end already. The next species to evolve is HOMO LUMINI-that is what an INKA is-a luminous being. We are being influenced now by forces that are far beyond our ordinary comprehension. They transform us from the inside out. Spontaneous change will occur.

ECHAN: What changes can our group expect from now?

ALBERTO: Your sense of humour will improve!

This was to be the first of many trips to Peru. I am very thankful to Alberto for properly connecting me to this culture.

The Sons of Light and Darkness

2008-07-27T23:29:00.003-07:00

Lord, how does he who sees the vision see it, through the soul or through the spirit?

Mary Magdalene

We are about one hour's drive from Jerusalem and it is clear that this city was forged out of a desert. Abrahamic religions i.e. Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all connected to this desert surrounding the pilgrimage centre. Though there may only be sand and rock, from within this bare simplicity of environment, literally Earth shaking events have occurred. So if we really want to know what is going on in the world today, a world still dominated by these Abrahamic religions whether you like it or not, it behooves us to inspect that desert with a little more than casual interest. And we must not forget that this desert stretches all the way to Egypt. The desert is borderless. Long before we had these three faiths there was the god of the sky looking over the Earth and the Earth was a desert. In front of us stretches the lowest point on Earth, the Dead Sea. It is impossible to sink in its salt rich waters and the extraction of highly mineral rich water from it to make cosmetics has had serious ecological ramifications as I was later to see at sinkholes around its edge. The controversial book about prophecy being encoded in our scriptures entitled The Bible Code had predicted that the tip of a metal cylinder, one that had been left there containing the secrets of our DNA , would be visible in the future as the surface level of the Dead Sea fell. Christine mentioned how even in her lifetime the beaches used to be far nearer the road than they are now. The Dead Sea is dying. I doubt stories like those portrayed in the Bible Code but I am also seriously intrigued at the same time.

Amnon, Christine and myself arrive at the Qumran archaeological site at ten a.m. We hope to get some filming done before the tourists arrive. On my first trip here the year previously a disaster had occurred. Just one day before that fateful Qumran visit in 2007 I had been in El Karim, just outside Jerusalem, and had witnessed the worst sudden rainstorm of my life. The coffee shop we were in was well protected but the amount of rain we saw fall in a couple of hours was staggering. From that area the water forms torrents that then flow towards the Dead Sea and end up tumbling over a cliff. That cliff is right where an historic discovery was made just as Israel was being born as a new state. It was also where sudden death descended on youth. I remember being astonished the following day when we visited, to see parts of the road next to Qumran had been washed away by the force of that torrent. But it had not only been the road that suffered. The Jerusalem Post carried the following headlines:

May 12, 2007 17:53 | Updated May 13, 2007 0:03
Torrential rains kill four young hikers
Four young rappelers were swept away and drowned Saturday afternoon after ignoring warnings that a flash flood was rushing toward them through the narrow walls of Nahal Qumran. The bodies of Dror Koren, Noa Shapira, Tal Alon, and Amit Gottlieb, were only recovered hours after the floodwaters slammed into them while their horrified friends looked on. Police said that the group of 11 rappelers had set out on a hike in the hills near Qumran above the northern Dead Sea early Saturday morning. The adventurers told police that when they had set out, the weather was pleasant, but changed dramatically around noon. Meteorologists had forecast rain for the weekend.

These people were repeatedly warned by rangers to evacuate but ignored them. Israelis are a people who have got used to not listening to a world that constantly tells them they should not be in Palestine. I can understand that. It is part of their defiant national character and has kept them where they are for over half a century. These young people unfortunately assumed the rangers were overreacting. But they themselves were under-reacting. The result was death by deluge.

The desert is harsh. Right there, as I stood within the archaeological site at Qumran being filmed by Amnon I could still see a pool of water in the gully below from that fateful day before. Above it was a cliff face where there was obviously a large cave entrance.(see above photo) This is where the dead sea scrolls were discovered. We managed to film a few sequences before having to deal with bureaucracy and the inevitable request for money that a large camera invokes wherever you go. So what was this cave that had been the scene of deaths?

The desert and the cave discoveries

Just before my doubts about religion were forming in the early nineteen fifties two peasants were going to make history in two separate desert locations. One was in this desert near Qumran where I now found myself and the other was at a place called Nag Hammadi in Egypt. That would at first appear to be a stunning coincidence given what we now know about the ancient relationship of these two countries, now separated because of Allah and Abraham. The peasants both discovered something very powerful and thus very dangerous too. They discovered information that the dominator system would have, and still does have, a hard time dealing with. They both discovered information that was the data equivalent of the two bombs that had been dropped around the same time in Japan. Nothing would be the same after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so too in the world of Jews and Christians nothing will ever be the way it was before the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered.

Since the Israeli scrolls are better known than the less known, but I believe even more important Egyptian discovery, let’s briefly take a look at what happened in that cave in the desert by the Dead Sea. In doing so we will get a much clearer picture of the real lives of Jesus and his closest disciple Mary Magdalene, lives that went beyond the allegorical and mythic lives that have been given to them by centuries of religious domination. They were real people just like you and me. Our modern world has closely come to resemble the Imperial Roman empire which had a dream of a world empire based on its own superior political system. And now, for those with eyes to see what is really going on behind the Pax Americana ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ propaganda of today, we need to re-examine the incredible intelligence and spiritual vitality of men and women who had no fear of the enormous forces around them. Though it seems at first that the Roman empire’s force won and their message was lost, this is not the case. It was not yet the right time or the right place for that message to be understood. Humanity would need two thousand years of history under its collective belt, and a massive environmental emergency to finally get the point. That brings us back to the cave near Qumran.

Khirbet Qumran

The Dead Sea scrolls consist of roughly 850 documents including texts from the Hebrew Bible (Talmud), discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves. These caves were in the area I now gazed around called the Wadi Qumran, near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran . The texts are of great religious and historical significance since they are practically the only known surviving Biblical documents written before AD 100. Read that again and try to put it in a Japanese cultural perspective. Imagine a document being found today that is two thousand years old. What it says will forever change the way you look at the ‘history’ you were taught in school-most of which is based on oral transmission from earlier sources. When I took a group of Japanese up the Amazon on a canoe in 2005 it was unexpectedly very cold. Remember that was at the time Hurricane Katrina struck the USA and the weather was very bizarre, very chilly indeed. We decided to play a game onboard the open boat to cheer us all up. One person would start the game and whisper a message to the next person and then we continued around the boat until all twenty or so had whispered the message. We then compared the original message that the first person had whispered with the last message. It was hilarious! The message got completely and utterly changed despite the fact that the rule was to exactly repeat the same message. Now multiply that factor of information ‘infection’ by thousands and you will understand why finding an actual written document from two thousand years ago is so very important. It means what it says rather than what people have been saying about it for millennia. It is a frozen section of time containing understandable and clear information written by intelligent people who were the ancient equivalent of our modern blog writers. They wrote about real life.

The Wolf’s Discovery

It is now generally accepted that a Bedouin sheep-herder by the name of Mohammed Ahmed el-Hamed (nicknamed “the wolf”) made the first discovery of the scrolls toward the beginning of 1947. The shepherd threw a rock into a cave to drive out a missing animal under his care. The shattering sound of pottery drew him into the cave, where he found several ancient jars containing scrolls wrapped in linen. The scrolls were first brought to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer named Ibrahim ‘Ijha, who returned them after being warned that they may have been stolen from a synagogue and so they fell into the hands of Khalil Eskander Shahin. He was nicknamed “Kando”, and he was a cobbler and antiques dealer. The Bedouin ‘wolf’ removed only three scrolls at first but, later he revisited the site to gather more. That was because he was apparently encouraged by Kando who himself possessed at least four scrolls. Arrangements were then made with the Bedouins so that the scrolls would remain in the hands of a third party until a sale of them could be negotiated. That third party was named George Isha’ya. He was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, who soon contacted the nearby St. Mark’s Monastery in the hope of getting an appraisal of the texts. News of the find then reached a man by the name of Mar Samuel. The wheels were now set in motion for the scrolls discovery to reach beyond the sleepy little world of Bedouins.

At least one document has a carbon date range of from 21 BC–61 AD. That is exactly the period that Christ was alive during. The Nash Papyrus from Egypt containing a copy of the Ten Commandments is the only other Hebrew document of comparable antiquity. Similar written materials have been recovered from nearby sites, including the fortress of Masada where the Jews made a valiant last stand against the Roman army and where we went to film after this stop at Qumran. While some of the scrolls were written on papyrus, many were written on a brown animal hide .The scrolls were written with feathers from a bird and the ink used was made from carbon black and white pigments. One scroll however, appropriately named the Copper Scroll, consisted of thin copper sheets that were inscribed with text. It was later analysed at Manchester University and incredibly it contained information about treasure from the temple in Jerusalem that had been hidden before its destruction. That led to many treasure hunts which in general failed to lead to actual discovery. By leaving information inscribed on copper the writers obviously wanted to make sure the message would not be lost in time as even leather, or papyrus will eventually wear out. Copper will not-so the message must have been extremely important. It was, being a way of making sure that the temple treasure would never be forgotten. Laurence Gardner, a British researcher tells us that the Copper Scroll , “gives an inventory and the locations for the treasures of Jerusalem and the Kedron valley cemetery” in his excellent analysis of this period in his masterful book The Magdalene Legacy . The single most important aspect of these diverse writings that I consider to be central to the story of Jesus and John, and thus the only aspect I will comment on, is their connection with this mysterious group called the Essenes. It is my strong suspicion that Jesus was a member of their very elite, yet simplicity loving society. After much research I see that their influence stretched far back into history and was connected geographically to, yes of course Egypt again. If he was a member then his baptiser most certainly was too. When you realize that The Lord’s Prayer, now used by Christians all over the world, was found to be very similar to a much older Essene prayer then it would seem likely that Jesus would have used it growing up among them. And so would John the Baptist. They learned that prayer from earlier Egyptian sources. Once again we are squarely faced with the enormous presence of Egypt, far beyond the superficial archaeology the Tv shows us. It is superficial because it in no way gives the Egyptians the huge credit they deserve for having created human spiritual systems that later took on multiple forms. The Essenes would later be followed by the templars for example.

The Essenes

According to a belief almost universally held until the 1990s, the Dead Sea scrolls were written by a sect known as the Essenes who lived here at Kirbet Qumran. They hid the scrolls in these nearby caves during the Jewish Revolt in C.E. 66 before being massacred by the Roman troops it is thought. Water cisterns were discovered which may have been used for ritual bathing. This would have been an important part of Jewish (and Essene) religious life. A description by Pliny the Elder (a geographer who was writing after the fall of Jerusalem in C.E. 70) of a group of Essenes living in a desert community close to the ruined town of Ein Gedi was seen by some scholars as evidence that Kirbet Qumran was in fact an Essene settlement. Although many scholars are now somehow doubtful even about the existence of the Essenes and appear to have good reasons from an archaeological point of view my feeling is that the Essenes and their role in the creation of the Dead Sea scrolls is a big embarrassment to the church. Archaeologists do splendid work at deducing certain things based on what is left behind but we must never forget that what is left is only a tiny percentage of what was there originally. Stephen Pfann as I mentioned earlier in another essay, has been steeped in the Dead Sea scrolls lore for decades.

The Essenes were definitely a Jewish ascetic sect, about which there is a lot of historical controversy because they are linked to the scrolls. This sect which was originally based upon sun-worshipping of Persian anchorites eventually developed into a sect based mainly in Palestine claiming to be able to perform miracles by living separately from the world and practicing extreme self-denial. One large Essenic community was here in the Qumran region from 110 BC to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was vacant during the reign of Herod, 31 - 4 BC and especially after a large earthquake in 31 BC.

It is believed among their prominent members were John the Baptist, Jesus and Simon Magus the founder of Gnosticism. One indication that Christ may have been an Essene was that He criticized the Scribes and Pharisees, but never the Essenes. It is also speculated that those following Christ were called Essenes before they were known as Christians. Now for Japanese readers this may be a great surprise but it would be an even greater shock to contemporary American fundamentalists of course who still believe the Earth was created a few thousand years ago.

The Essenes possessed a hierarchy. The chief priest was known as Christos (Anointed One), "head of the whole Congregation of israel." The ordinary priests were called "sons of Aaron," and there was another functionary known as the Messiah of Israel. He also was known as the Teacher of Righteousness and was to undergo and suffer physical abuse in atonement for the sins of the whole community, enduring "vindictive sentences of scourging and the terrors of painful sicknesses, and vengeance on his fleshly body." This is precisely what happened to Jesus was it not?

The Essenic view of the world seemed to be one of predeterminism. Their eternal and omnipotent God not only knew everything that would occur in the world but also arranged for it to happen. Within this predestined arrangement there were two ways that involve a macrocosm and a microcosm. In God's plan the two ways are the ways of light and darkness, or the ways of good and evilness. Quantities of light and darkness exist in the entire universe, angels and men. The opposite quantities are in constant battle. This battle between the two is macrocosmic, universal, as well as microcosmic, in men. God holds the duality in constant control and knows the eventual outcome. Here we have one of the clear origins of what is now called duality.
Much of the matrix movie theme was based on this ancient world view.

It was believed that after the final battle in this war of light against darkness that each angel and man would be judged according to his actions. The preferred explanation as to how sin entered the world for the Essenes at Qumran seemed not to be the sin of Adam (see Gen. 6:1- 4) but the acts of the fallen angels as recorded in the Book of Enoch. Heavenly angels saw daughters of men and mated with them. They and their offspring, the giants, introduced a superhuman quality of evil into human society. This, the Watcher, myth seemed to be more important in Qumran thought because it presupposes that evil existed in the heavenly realm before hand. I have commented on these watchers in my long introduction to the Japanese translation of Zecharia Sitchin's Lost book of Enki. The watchers were the nefilim, or otherwise as they were known in Sumeria, the Annunaki.

Descriptions of Essenic life come from very credible ancient writers such as Josephus, Pliny and others. They described how the Essenes viewed pleasures as evil, and saw continence and conquest of passions to be virtuous. Their writings have led to confusion concerning marriage, sex and children within the communities. They implied the Essenes abstained from marriage and sex but in many of the excavations of the Dead Sea Scrolls skeletons of women and children have been founds at almost all of the communities, even Qumran, leading investigators to speculate that the communities were not devoid of women and sex. The Qumran documents, the Rule of Congregation and Manual of Discipline, refer to women and children as part of the group. The Damascus Document specifies how children of members should be admitted by training them in the ways of the sect. Other theories are there were married members when the communities were formed, but marriage was abandoned when either partner died. Or, the women and children might have been visiting relatives in the communities and/or were travelers who died in the arid region.

The Essenes called themselves Therapeutae, "healers," claiming that their austere lifestyle gave them the power to cast out demons of sickness and even to restore life of the dead. Considering this, Christ raising Lazarus from the dead seems a typical Essenic miracle. Others have wondered if such an event could not have occurred after Christ was lain in the tomb following his crucifixion. Essenes might have been waiting in the tomb to revive him. Due to the various spellings of "Essene" the word could also mean "pious one," or "doers," or "doers of the Torah" All of these meanings seem to have been derived from the word. It seems that Christ used the Essenic method of exorcism when driving out demons, especially in the Gadarene swine. Christ like the Essenes demanded the leading demon tell his name. Knowing the name had magical significance and gave control over the demons. Christ gave his sacred name only to his apostles by which they practiced exorcism, meaning only a few of the early Christians were given this power.

Perhaps this shocks many Christians that claim their religion is the true religion and the Bible is the word of God. But when examining the Essenic teachings one sees established the foundation of Christianity. Within these teachings are the identical concepts of sin, the evilness of wordily and fleshly pleasures, the denial of self and sex, the war between the forces of good and evil, the powers of healing and exorcism, and finally the sacrifice of one in atonement for the sins of many. In brief, the entire Christian religion was laid out or foreshadowed within the doctrines of the Essenes, men who saw nature and life as inherently evil and thus there being a great need for a saviour.

The Egyptian God named by who I believe was the the original Essene Ahkenaton, was Aton and the Jewish God was Adonai. Both these mid-east cultures stressed a monotheistic system=only one God. The famous Ark of the Covenant of the Jews bears a striking similarity to the Ark of Tutankhamen. In my discussions with Graham Hancock on this theme we basically concluded that the ark was of Egyptian origin. Wearing earrings was common in Egypt and in a Royal family this meant the wearer was a prince who was not in the bloodline. He could not become pharaoh. Many Israelites also wore earrings and were told not to wear them when they reached Jerusalem. In other words earrings had a rather negative meaning in both cultures. Egyptian priests, just like their Jewish counterparts, had very strict dietary rules about what they could not eat. They also had shaved heads. The high priest of Heliopolis in Egypt had long, curled side locks of hair just like orthodox Jews do today. The heresy of Jewish, Egyptian and Celtic connection is of course hotly denied by historians who thrive on the core idea that we were all so primitive and separate in the past NO connections could possibly have existed between these disparate cultures. But as a word of warning to such reductionists: it is now very clear for example that all Polynesians were in connection with each other over vast areas of the Pacific, spread over thousands of islands, simply because they had a method of navigation it has taken us this long to discover.
A recent voyage by a boat (The Halakula?) built according to their ancient ways and piloted by modern men who can still discriminate scores of different sea currents by placing their testicles on the floor of the lower deck has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the ancient Polynesians were not island bound primitives who could only sail close to shore. An entire historical fallacy has thus been exposed. Until now we were confounded by the simple opinion that they could not do what they actually did. Likewise the Egyptians sailed the world undoubtedly.

The symbol of the Celtic cross comes from the Ankh which was promoted by Ahkenaton (Moses?) to mean resurrection or life. Ireland and Scotland are now thus full of slightly altered ankhs. Celtic churches face the East as do those of Akenaton’s historical period called the Amarna dynasty. Jewish tabernacles also face East. Circumcision is an Egyptian custom originally and was certainly as we all know Jewish, much later. Even in established religion the modern custom of the Pope appearing at his window in front of thousands at St. Peter’s square (where there is a giant Egyptian obelisk!) goes back to Ahkenaton and Nefertiti doing the same in front of their subjects. It was also a custom among the Israelites at the time of Queen Jezebel for example. Naturally the eggheads being produced at universities will all scream at you this is pure fantasy. But remember the ultimate scientific tool? Occam's Razor states that all things being equal the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Ancient man was super interconnected and not at all separated. All these different empires and rulers we were taught about at school all went to the same two schools. One was in Mesopotamian Sumeria, the other in Egypt. The rest, as they say, is history.

This very strange community of people, the Essenes, for example appeared to be a lot like a group that formed more than a thousand years later in Europe called the Cathars. The Cathars were treated as heretics by the Church, naturally, and many were burned to death. All of this connects to those scrolls. There has always been a ‘conspiracy theory’ around the Dead Sea scrolls because it has taken far too long for them to be released to the public. I find it very interesting that only a few days after the 9/11 events in New York detailed information was available about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and yet it takes 20 years for a potentially enormous story about the Essenes to be revealed, and only because a few key people thought it important. It then takes 50 years for the dead sea scrolls to really make it to our attention-as if we are not clever enough, or not interested enough in ‘old’ things which by the way might totally upset our religious beliefs. Personally I do think there is a strong case for the idea that the release of information about the scrolls was deliberately delayed. It is easy to see why as we will find out that once you can figure out the Essenes then you can figure out the gnostics. Think of these two discoveries as being ‘The Essenes and the Gnostics’ and remember that they are relatives from the same family-one we are not really supposed to be so interested in. Remember they are the ones who the church really does not like because they were always clear about one thing: ‘Know Thyself’. It was their motto whereas the church dogma was and always will be, ‘We know you better than you do yourself’. Hundreds of years of Church authority naturally leads the Church to think that it knows best because we are, after all is said and done, poor sinners!

Allegations that the Vatican suppressed the publication of the scrolls were published in the 1990s. Notably, Michael Baigent's and Richard Leigh's book ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception’ claims that several key scrolls were deliberately kept under wraps for decades to suppress unwelcome theories about the early history of Christianity; in particular, Eisenman's speculation that the life of Jesus was deliberately mythicized by Paul. Upon publication of most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, many of these concerns have been resolved however, there are still large portions of the scrolls which have not been allowed outside Jordan, or have been allowed only for rare displays or research at the Brigham Young University museum , due to their "sensitive nature." This museum is of course a mormon museum in Utah.

We shall simply say at this point that the scrolls show us a world that is very much more complex than we Westerners were taught about concerning the Holy Land. There were many sects. There were all kinds of Jewish sects in fact and one of them was later to be called Christianity. In school we basically learned that the Jews and the Christians were totally different in their beliefs, that the Jews were pretty much all the same and the Christians were a whole new and different breed. The scrolls show us more than anything else perhaps that this idea is clearly false. The early Christians were of course Jews who were influenced totally by Egyptians and only later did the Greek speaking and Latin speaking believers appear on the scene. One of the things that the scrolls did was to show us how solid dogma had become. Theologians do not like it when you get new evidence about old Gods. Theologians like to think that the Christians were unique to Christ and his disciples. In short, Christ was not the first Christian!

The Gnostic world of Mary Magdalene, Thomas and Philip

The first essential characteristic of Gnosticism is that "direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings," and that the attainment of such knowledge is the supreme achievement of human life. Gnosis is not a rational, or logical understanding, but a knowing acquired by experience. This is entirely different from Christian dogma, or Islamic dogma or Jewish dogma because these religious systems all rely upon scriptures which are the foundation of a life in faith. Your experience really is secondary and in fact is seen to be suspicious. Since the devil is so clever he can trick people into having experiences which may seem really spiritual but which are in fact all illusions! For people who have no wish to explore their own lives a life of simple faith in scriptures can be undoubtedly very satisfying-of that I have no doubt. But we must remember that challenges to the scriptures such faith is built upon simply did not exist in the past to any degree like they do now. Knowing acquired by experience is seen as being very irreligious since especially in Christian belief we are all seen as sinners. How could a born sinner have an experience of reality, of God without the supernatural help of the church? It simply cannot be done, therefore we need the church. Of course for many modern atheists this entire discussion is simply meaningless. Or is it? If you could really know yourself, who you really are beyond all the masks of your conscious personality (persona=mask) and know that you are a powerful spiritual being would that not be the greatest knowledge of all? But who can believe they are spiritual when there is no evidence? Who can imagine that they are food for machines and not really living a daily life as the movie the Matrix suggested?

Gnostics have existed in every age and in every culture because there will always be people who simply cannot be governed by anybody’s rules. There will always be doubters. There was a famous doubter in the Bible called Thomas who wanted to see the holes in the resurrected Christ’s body remember? Even today in the English language we can say that there are generally three categories of people when it comes to belief:

Religious people who adhere to the faith of their religion=believers in God. People who do not believe in God are called atheists in English. People who do not believe in any one specific religion but who are open minded are called agnostic. By separating the ‘a’ from the ‘g’ this reads: a Gnostic showing us today the importance of the term. Very few native speakers of English know about this connection with the Gnostics when they use that term by the way and it was only recently that the lights went on in my head!

So much has been forgotten about the Gnostics that finding a good definition is always hard. However in the past decade a huge amount of interest has been reborn and shows us that people like William Blake the great English poet and the Italian genius Da Vinci were themselves most definitely Gnostics. The Gnostics were not much interested in dogma or rational theology, a fact that makes the study of Gnosticism particularly difficult for individuals with logical mentalities. Carl Gustav Jung, the great Swiss psychologist and a life-long student of Gnosticism in its various historical appearances said, “We find in Gnosticism what was lacking in the centuries that followed: a belief in the efficacy of individual revelation and individual knowledge. This belief was rooted in the proud feeling of man's affinity with the gods”. Well said, Mr. Jung!

The eminent scholar of Gnosticism, Elaine Pagels also comments, "to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis. Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the real self and the divine are identical." That is I believe a very succinct definition of the world that Jesus and Mary came from and was never intended to become a systemized world of religion but rather a community of ‘knowers’ who respected each other’s right to find themselves in their own way at their own time and at their own speed. Yet there was a ‘tradition’ that supported all of this and that tradition had its roots in Egypt, spread to Israel and became the Essenes. Of this I have little doubt yet the scholars will no doubt keep arguing for centuries. The organized world of religion thrives on separation, on what makes each religion unique but the bare truth is that the three major religions of the middle East all sprang out of the same source in Egypt and later conveniently forgot their benefactor lest it become known that they lacked originality!

Doubting Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas was one of the Gnostic texts found preserved in the Nag Hammadi Library and is really much more like a zen mondo than a religious text. It gives us these words of the living Jesus, in his own words:

Jesus said, I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out. He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.

This clearly means that once you realize who you are, as I have, then you will be just like me and we will realize that we are both part of a great mystery. But we can find out. We can know. It is possible. This says nothing about belief. Drink means to actually take the knowledge into your body, to experience it. It is a metaphor for ‘getting’ the message. Even today friends who want to get close and share experiences go have a ‘drink’ together! Where is the saviour God here? He was never interested in being a master though he obviously was one. This is the mark of a true master. He has so much power that he needs no status, no ego bolstering. He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am! What a totally heretical image! The Gospel of Thomas in its entirety is an extraordinary scripture I have read with great delight as it reminds me of so many Sufi stories and zen riddles. Professor Helmut Koester of Harvard University notes that though ultimately this Gospel was condemned and destroyed by the evolving orthodox church, it may be as old or older than the four canonical gospels preserved, and even have served as a source document to them. That information alone shows us that Magdalene's world and the world of the four gospels is almost like a parallel world. We shall find out that it was and that was all part of an amazing series of synchronicities that would result in the Gnostic Mary and Jesus going underground and the gospel saviour going out to the world as a state religion. No blame here at all. But to only know one part of this story deprives modern people who might rightly have a strong distaste for religion of a very powerful source of knowledge and support in these difficult times. Most importantly without knowing the Gnostic story we are in fact deprived of a message that I consider to be tremendously fresh, unique and realistic. It is the message of hope in a world beyond this one-a real world which modern science does not call a world but a dimension. Jesus and Mary were very possibly the two most powerful communicators from a spiritual point of view that understood life beyond the material realm. In modern day movie terms they were Neo and Trinity in the Matrix. They fought for truth. They died for love. They lived for freedom.

What about the answer to Mary Magdalen's question quoted at the start of this essay? here it is:

He does not see through the soul nor through the spirit, but the mind that is between the two that is what sees the vision

This is surely the reply of a master. If we use our computer analogy where the laptop unit is the body, the software systems are the soul and the internet is the spirit then what can the mind be? Surely it is the keyboard without which we cannot connect the software to the internet. The conscious use of those keys is what allows us to ‘see’ the visions coming from other times and places, from other dimensions. Thus consciousness is what sees the vision. This relationship then between Mary and Jesus shows us via their dialogue a sophisticated understanding of reality that most of us, like those disciples are still far from seeing. We need to ask better questions and to do so we need better information. We need to know more about the heretical message of this male and female team that the above quote has hinted at. If it seems to you that the world is involved in a real battle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, and it appears to you therefore that duality is not something easy to fully comprehend at all, then the Essenes, the Gnostics, The Cathars and the Templars might have a lot to teach you. If you however feel that simple faith is enough and that such questions are irrelevant then there is no question that established religion with its belief in a monotheistic God might work for you. As an atheist you would basically be denying a spiritual dimension to humanity outright. Eat, drink and be merry would be your religion perhaps. Oh, and lots of sex. Though Japan undoubtedly did possess a vibrant shamanistic culture before the great philosophy of Buddhism arrived here and to some extent still has these influences popular Japanese culture has an extremely adolescent understanding of spirituality, as does my own culture in the Uk. It is my hope in reviving these profound messages in a bottle found in a cave that we will as Earth Pilgrims reconnect with the great tradition of Know Thyself and actually make the great efforts required of us to become sons and daughters of the most high.

We escaped having to pay an exorbitant price for filming with a big camera at Qumran. Myself and Amnon then took the footpath up the massive cliff at Masada. Most people that day sailed over our heads in the cablecar to the mountain top palace of Herod where 900 or so Jewish patriots holed up when the Romans came to destroy the last vestiges of rebellion against their rule. Some were zealots. Some may have been Essenes who had hidden the scrolls knowing their time was up. One thing is for sure. You would have to have a very strong belief in another world, a world of spiritual light beyond this one, to do what they did. I would like to imagine a group of atheists confronted by an encroaching Roman army of eight thousand, camped below near where we started our climb up. For many months the Jews held out but the sheer organizational power and will of the Roman empire was against their tiny community. I sat in the remains of their synagogue up there and listened to a Jewish tour guide explain that their leader, one Elazar ben Ya'ir had told the people to prepare to die by drawing lots. They were in fact choosing lots to decide who would kill whom in a mass murder of each other. Not suicide. They killed each other!
Rather than be enslaved and raped they chose another way, one that only a monumental faith would allow. It is for this reason that even today all army recruits are taken here to show them what it means to be a Jew, and what sacrifice is sometimes required.

After filming sink holes by the shores of the Dead Sea, massive cave ins of the floor of the Earth that had almost swallowed a bus a few years earlier we drove back into Jerusalem. I felt the weight of history on me but at the same time the pure magic of this desert , an ancient sacred place.

Mountains of Peace and War

2008-07-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.

General Douglas MacArthur

It is early february now and I am back in Israel , coming from the Celtic county of Cornwall, through London. I had gone there to rest for a few days after the intense learning period with Hancock and Kumar. Its many Celtic legends include the very plausible story that Joseph of Arimathea used to come there by boat to access the tin mines Cornwall had in abundance. As a wealthy trader he would have plied the Mediterranean sea and sailed up the coast of Spain to England's Southernmost tip in Cornwall to load his cargo of tin to take back to the Holy land. It was he who got permission to bury the body of Jesus that the last essay about Israel was based on. This gives us further reason to suspect that the Celts and the Israeli/Egyptians have a lot more in common than we have ever been told. Cornish, the language still spoken by some there is of course a Celtic language, being a form of Gaelic.

Cornwall is full of quaint little villages and seaports and it is rumored that the castle of Arthur in his birthplace at Tintagel near Lands End, is the most important site connected with this legendary King. This is not the place to talk about the Grail tradition of the Celts, and that most intensive search for the Holy Grail that Arthur's knights were so intent upon. But I have been in a sea cave at the base of Tintagel castle. While doing a lone meditation there the thought of Merlin alone seemed to whip the sea up into an instant froth. There is magic and living myth still there in Cornwall but by the time I had driven back up through Devon on the way to the airport the magic had started to recede.

Back in Heathrow it was like the matrix movie all over again. A dark and divided land where there has been no soul for a long time. I fly over the Alps and it is past midnight when I see Israel below.

Ben Gurion airport has the most sophisticated security system on the planet. Arriving there reminded me of the scene in Schwartzenneger's movie Total Recall when he lands on Mars and goes through the stringent security check. When you are surrounded by enemies this is what you have to do. You have to be consciously suspicious of absolutely everyone. The Israeli government try hard to make it as easy as possible by using a lot of young people at the checkpoints, especially women. This time, getting in was easier.

By the time I arrived at the hotel it was 02:30 and this time, not being with my wife, I was in an old, rather beat up joint near the bus station. I rolled a cigarette and looked out the window. Snow was still on the ground. A week earlier the worst snow in decades had ground the city of Jerusalem to a halt. Time to sleep, because tomorrow I have an early appointment to drive up to Galilee. I shift dimensions once again. Dreams have no fear of physical locations.

Christine Sakakibara is proud to call herself a Jerusalemite, the term properly used for a resident of this extreme city, that is so full of love and hate. Born in Australia she was destined to be a nun all her life but a meeting with a young Japanese man changed everything. We just call him Bara san and he is unquestionably the best Japanese guide in all of Israel. Together for over 35 years in Jerusalem they have built a life, raised five children and know just about every inch of the country. Their sons are in the Israeli military protecting their parents' right to live there with their very lives. She is the driver, he is the tour guide. This time, since he is busy with a group led by the archbishop of Osaka (who I later met and interviewed about pilgrims) she will be my driver and interpreter for the film shoot I have come for. You cannot make a movie about pilgrimage and not include Jerusalem. This may be the only city in the world which makes a living completely from pilgrims. And now that the suicide bombings of the intifada period have dropped off, the tourists are indeed returning so the Baras can get back the life they used to enjoy with plenty of customers, especially from Japan.

Christine is a middle aged Christian who has to deal with three religions on an everyday basis. She drives and shops and guides people through Jewish, Islamic and Christian worlds. So before we go any further I think this would be a good time to give an overview of Jerusalem. Here, I turn to my new friend Martin Gray, the world's foremost authority on pilgrimage and sacred sites and guest photographer for our movie. This is what his highly informative website sacredsites.com has to say concerning Jerusalem:

Jerusalem, Israel: General Facts about

Jerusalem, by virtue of the number and diversity of people who have held it sacred, may be considered the most holy city in the world.
Jerusalem is important to the Jewish people because it is Ir Ha-Kodesh (the Holy City), the Biblical Zion, the City of David, the site of Solomon's Temple, and the eternal capital of the Israelite nation.
Jerusalem is important to Christians because it is where the young Jesus impressed the sages at the Jewish Temple, where he spent the last days of his ministry, and where the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection took place.
Jerusalem is important to Muslims because it is where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. After the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the third most sacred place of Islam.
While highly charged with intense religious devotion and visited by countless pilgrims and sages, Jerusalem has also been ravaged by thirty centuries of warfare and strife.
Jerusalem is a holy place with a rich and ancient history.

Bara san would teach you about that rich and ancient history in English, Japanese, Arabic or even Hebrew. He would stop at a spot anywhere in the country and tell you that this was the place where a prophet had said the following, or that here was the exact location where Jesus was arrested and the precise spot where the cock crowed three times just as Jesus had told his frightened disciple Peter would happen. It is amazing to think that the Catholic church was founded by a coward who denied his master three times after that famous arrest in the garden of Gethsemane. If it was all a made up story why not at least have heroic followers? It makes no sense unless it is true of course. Truth is far, far stranger than fiction as any pilgrim will tell you...

I jumped in Christine's car and told her to head straight for Galilee. We took the desert road and passed by the ancient town of Jericho, whose walls were once destroyed by trumpets. She told me it is now a squalid Palestinian controlled area and definitely not worth a visit. Local people have very strong opinions since there are those aforementioned three faiths. Christine had lived within this fragile, high stress zone for most of her adult life and she had no illusions. As a Christian she had seen on a daily basis how the Jews and the Arabs live. She was a minority group member. She had a very low opinion of the Muslims and told me often that the only thing they respect is brute force, so being nice to them was a total waste of time. In their world you have to take action with a fist or a gun. It was sad to hear that for me.

Her husband Bara had worked in a Kibbutz when he arrived and was the only oriental man around. He suffered abuse daily, from the Arabs in particular. As a Christian he was taught to turn the other cheek and forgive but in the real world it was only after he had punched out an Arab that the situation improved. Now he is well loved and respected by Jews and Arabs alike. Christine was never openly abrasive with local people but I felt that she had a clear distinction in her mind that separated her from the religion of Allah and of Moses. Without such a division her identity would probably melt to pieces in a place like this. Palestinian areas, Israeli areas.The map is confusing as both areas sem to bleed into each other, sometimes literally.

Peace and war. Your God and my God. I had returned to a country whose desert beauty is sublime as you head up the banks of the Jordan river and gaze over the palm trees to neighboring Jordan on the way North. It was also a powder keg that could blow up at any moment, sparked off by a seemingly insignificant incident. Israel is not a good place from where to look at the concept of co-operation. Coercion is the operative word here, and it all hangs together using military force and political muscle. Though Christine would extoll the virtues of how the Israeli government had improved the lives of all through democracy and social welfare, the Arabs in most parts certainly did not share in that opinion. They were the victims of an illegal occupation by foreigners. That is surely how the majority must see it there.

But then so is just about every other country in the world at one point or another. If you are a North American Indian today you may have access to welfare and you may have the ability to vote, but there are no plains Indian candidates to choose from. Your country was occupied by white men about four hundred years ago. So before people start pointing fingers at Israel maybe they better look in their own back yard, In Tibet, In Russia's Chechnya to name but one of many independent areas, and in just about the entire continents of Africa and South America to name but a few the same story has unfolded. From an aboriginal standpoint, a Maori or Amazonian perspective you are a victim of occupation. Israel being one of the world's most recent examples of the oldest trend in human history, land grabbing, therefore gets a lot of bad press.

But the Indians picking up welfare checks in Arizona, the Arabs going to Israeli hospitals in Tel Aviv and the Aboriginees living in government sponsored housing tend to forget that a lot. Quit whining about Israel. It is what it is. No doubt it will not be resolved for a very long time. My feeling is that it will be wiped out in that mother of all wars that Armageddon suggests. All of this is going on even as the hot desert winds make poetry out of date palms by the arid roadsides on the way to Galilee. Nothing but deep peace fills me in Galilee when we arrive a few hours later.

During the trip with sonia the previous year we had taken the western route up here bringing us through Nazareth and on to Cana where we got re-married for the fifth or sixth time in the church where the marriage at Cana described in the New Testament happened. Some believe it was the marriage of Jesus and Magdalene that happened there. Again, we will never know until time travel is invented and because of the cumulative observer effect more and more TTT's (Time Travel Tourists) would show up at this famous place where he changed water to wine, thus completely changing the event. There would be Jesus about to do his first miracle and a bunch of Korean TTT's would be jostling for the best video angle. So we must always use the words 'who knows'.

Right now there are so many things happening around you, in the entire environment, in your body, in the ground beneath your feet, in the minds of people around you who might later write histories. Even what happened an hour ago will be recorded as a minute fraction of all that did occur. You have absolutely no idea what happened to you a year ago on this day unless you write notes every day. I do, for that reason. If you do not record your life yourself, then what is the point of all those experiences? That is why I said in an earlier essay that memory holds the key to everything. Everything is an interpretation of a memory. There is no such thing as 'objective events'. Everything is a point of view. Once you understand that you begin to live a powerful life. Like Jesus. Like Mohammed. Like Moses. Like Buddha. Yet, bizarrely not one single word about this ultimate fact of life is ever uttered in any educational institution in this land. We are hypnotized into thinking there is a real world out there. But Quantum physics tells us there is only a chaos out of which the brain holographically tunes into a self-programmed order. And again, as Shakespeare said so well, there is no good or bad, only thinking makes it so. Substitute interpretation for thinking and you have it in a nutshell.

Jesus wrote not one word. But he said a lot on the low mountain I was now heading towards to film from. I wanted a panorama shot of the Sea of Galilee and so was on my way up the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus had addressed a large group of people over several days it is said. We know that because somebody recorded those words and they are now known as The Sermon on the Mount.There are many words ascribed to Mohammed in the Koran. Buddha's sutras run into hundreds, even thousands. The Jews have the words of the prophets and Moses himself in abundance. But if you actually dissect the Bible's new testament and extract what Jesus said the amount of words is pathetically low in number. An easy way to see that fact is to choose a new testament with red highlighted text that belongs to Jesus. It is very limited. So of all the famous men in history Jesus said the least, or more accurately had the least recorded. And of all he said, the centrally most important words were spoken here, in seminar-like style to a crowd of people, some of whom recorded it. You do not have to be a believer in the religion that came from his title, Christ. His name would then be spoken Ben Joshua, or Yeshua. So a man called Yeshua wants to communicate the absolute essence of his message to a large crowd of largely illiterate people. It is the middle East. Allegories are used a lot there. Simple stories. Many of them are in the book I translated with my wife called Master of Masters, an analysis of the intelligence of Christ. As I filmed that Panorama shot on top of the mount, Christine spontaneously took out her Bible and started to quote some of the very potent words spoken there two thousand years ago.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

These simple lines describe the ideal attitude of an Earth Pilgrim. It is simply purity of heart, or humility. There is no theology in this. It is advice about how to be. And like all really good advice it is both simple and very difficult to actually practise. I have been working on that sermon over a decade and it stuns me how I can fail with perfect regularity, every single day, to embody its straightforward advice.

We drove near Migdal on our way due West to ascend the other mountain in this story. If the Mount of Beatitudes had a key to living in peace, then the view from the top of the next mountain held the prophecy of war. It was Mount Carmel we now drove towards and I wanted to film a particular place from its history laden summit. Here is a mountain famous for the Essenes using it a sanctuary and also for mainstream Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. They all believe it is Elijah that is indelibly associated with the mountain, and he is regarded as having sometimes resided in a grotto on its top. Now the Bahai too have a major centre up there. From its top over three thousand five hundred years ago could be seen a terrible battle between the Cananites and the Egyptians-the oldest recorded war in human history. Wikipedia tells us that:

The Battle of Megiddo (15th century BC) was fought between Egyptian forces under the command of pharaoh Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh. It is the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail. Various precise dates have been suggested for the battle. The date is April 16, 1457 BC (according to the accepted Middle Chronology), although other publications place the battle in 1482 BC or 1479 BC. The Battle of Megiddo was an Egyptian victory and resulted in a rout of the Canaanite forces, which fled to safety in the city of Megiddo. Their action resulted in the subsequent lengthy Siege of Megiddo. Megiddo is the first battle of which there is a detailed historical account. It is also the first recorded use of the composite bow and the first body count. All details of the battle come from Egyptian sources -- primarily the hieroglyphic writings on the Hall of Annals in the Temple of Amun at Karnak, Thebes (now Luxor), by the military scribe Tjaneni. By reestablishing Egyptian dominance in Palestine, Pharaoh Thutmose III began a reign in which Egyptian Empire reached its greatest expanse.

You might know the place that I was looking down at from within the confines of a Carmelite monastery by a different name. As I filmed down into the valley where huge roads crossed, roads that have since the Egyptian era been central to trade in this area and thus the scene of countless wars, including the Battle of Megiddo in the first world war, I saw a military base, an Israeli military base right smack in the centre of it all. What I was looking at has otherwise been called Armageddon.

The word Armageddon in Scripture is known only from a single verse in the Greek New Testament where it is said to be Hebrew and is thought to represent the Hebrew words Har Megido, meaning Mountain of Megiddo. Will we go the way of Megiddo or will we somehow manage to awaken a humility in our hearts that is surely the only realistic answer to thousands of years of planned, reciprocal destruction of human life i.e. war? My guess is the chances are almost non existent. It is only after we have been destroyed that we may finally gain the humility to start a new civilization, the one I have termed synchronicity civilization.

As Earth Pilgrims we need to grow beyond the safe confines of our little gods and begin to see the planet on which we are having our arguments as the most important God we have. Or Goddess, for her name is Gaia, remember? I smoke a cigarette outside the monastery. It was time to head back to Jerusalem. Christine had got a call for me on her cellphone. It was Amnon Zalait, my Israeli cinematographer. We were going to meet up and head out into the pure desert of the Dead Sea shores. For now, Armageddon was on pause.

Thanks to Martin Gray at sacredsites.com for this stunning shot of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem

The lost tomb

2008-07-23T02:16:00.000-07:00

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

William Shakespeare

I had just had lunch in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem with Professor Stephen Pfann and his wife, both extremely knowledgeable people teaching at the University of the Holy Land and probably in the top ten scholars of the Dead Sea scrolls on the planet. Stephen J. Pfann is President of the Board of Directors of the University of the Holy Land as well as Chair of the University’s Department of Qumran Studies. Pfann holds an M.A. from the Graduate Theological Union and a Ph.D. from the Department of Ancient Semitic Languages at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His areas of specialization in his teaching and research are Qumran studies, ancient languages and cultural geography.Stephen had even recreated a village in Nazareth that looked just like it had in Christ's time.

Both in their fifties they sat next to myself and my wife Sonia in the crowded bar at the hotel where lunch was served. He was rather stiff upper lip and cagey about this talk of a lost tomb of Jesus. He wasn't sure about me at all. I had been introduced via their good friends the Baras, our guides for this journey.

Stephen had suddenly become very high profile on the internet for his brilliantly written counter-argument to a Discovery channel special claiming that Christ's family tomb had been discovered at Talpiot, just outside Jerusalem. He was one of the few people who could find the weak spots in that program's claims and had actually been in the documentary briefly. At this point I myself was rather unconvinced (but not totally) that the tomb was that of Jesus and Mary Magdalene amongst others. However the story was so big I had to hear both sides. Pfann might have thought I was simply a reporter hungry for some media worthy material and already knew that the story was being misreported all over the net. Here was a very well researched scholar talking to a layman who had come all the way from Japan to check out this story but who was neither a theologian nor a scholar from his point of view. So. he took a while to warm up but gave me several good reasons for why the director of that documentary, Simcha Jacobovici was completely fantasizing a story.

What he did not know was that I was going to meet the director of that same documentary two hours after our lunch was over. I liked the Pfanns. They were very committed Christians and as such they saw it as their duty to protect the image of their Lord as well as stand up for a rigid scientific scrutiny of the documentary. To put this into a Japanese perspective imagine a TV show in Japan telling you that the Imperial family grave just discovered in Nara was full of Korean royal insignia and that the emperor was married to a Chinese concubine whose skeletal remains lay next to his. Their names were clearly inscribed on the coffin and their love for each other declared. All children from this most ancient of emperors to have been discovered were thus Korean/Chinese in DNA origin. Everything we know about the imperial family suddenly is wrong. History was thus created by very clever manipulators who took over Japan. That is the kind of impact the Christians felt when the TV show was aired. All their treasured beliefs were being spat on under the banner of 'research' and 'history'. My view was like that of Leonardo Da Vinci. He called it Dimostrazione and he meant that one should check out both sides of any issue, including your own belief system, and rigorously examine them both. Only then could a true synthesis of ideas happen, leading, in his case to genius invention for example.

Sonia and I hopped a taxi to a hotel nearer the wailing wall where Jacobovici was staying. Since he is an orthodox Jew he likes to stay at a hotel where the food is kosher and I had spent months getting this interview arranged so I was there in time. He is an award winning documentary film maker in Canada and had received many accolades for his recent series called the Naked Archaeologist. He would take a Bible story and then research it from a different perspective and make an interesting TV show out of it. His story on the Jewish Exodus for example was very different from the accepted one. He speaks English, French, Hebrew and also Czech. A man of considerable intellectual agility he was also very charming as we sat down to do the following brief interview which my wife filmed with our small camera. There was no business involved in this at all. I was not working for any media company or newspaper and he knew it. All he thought perhaps was that this interview might promote the book he had co-written about the tomb discovery. It has since been published in Japanese. The original English book had at one point been number six on the New York Times bestseller list. Though slightly bemused at my very unusual way of getting an interview and my persistence in following through, not really knowing anything about me and not sure what my position was on the tomb story, he proved a most amiable interviewee. No doubt he was surprised to hear me immediately interpret into Japanese everything he said on camera:

Echan: Nice to have you with us. Please tell me the correct pronunciation of your second name.

Simcha: YAKOBOVITCH (spelled Jacobovici)

Echan: YAKOBOVITCH. We know that you are getting a lot of attention right now, some people might consider you an enfant terrible of course because of the contents of the documentary but as you told me earlier during our brief meeting you give a fairly airtight case here that people should consider seriously and not just discount because of religious feelings of 'It can't be true'. Your work will probably come out in Japan in the near future, your book will be coming out and perhaps Discovery will be aired in the next couple of months. If that is the case what would you like to say to the Japanese public before all of this becomes known in Japan?

Simcha: I want to make something very clear about the work we have done. We are not against people of faith, we are not against religion. In fact I do not address that . I am not a Christian, not a theologian. What I am doing is, I am a film maker and a journalist and we are reporting several facts that have huge implications. A tomb has been discovered betwen Jerusalem and Bethlehem. There are six inscriptions in it. One of them says Jesus son of Joseph, there are two Marys, one Josie - which is the nickname of one of the brothers of Jesus. It seems when you look at the archaeology, at the statistics and at the DNA tests, that this is the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth and his family. So my job is to report these facts and to become a catalyst to this discussion which is now happening around the world and let the facts take us wherever the facts want to take us.

Echan: Thank you very much, I hope that your work will be appreciated in Japan.

A few days previously right after our arrival we had stumbled into a church in the old city. Here are my notes of that time;

Jerusalem, May 11th.　2007: It was not immediately clear to me what the church represented since I had barely been in Jerusalem for a few hours. It was obviously of some importance judging from the throngs of pilgrims milling around its large, quadrangle-like courtyard. Franciscan monks with their characteristic hooded robes and rope belts moved amongst tourists and black garbed, Greek Orthodox priests with bushy beards. My wife and I had just walked through the Arab quarter of this most ancient of cities and having no map and no clear route in mind we had stumbled into the adjoining Armenian quarter and thus to this church. It turned out to be exactly the place we needed to visit at the start of what was to become a very powerful week in the Holy Land.

We did have a clear objective to this visit though. It was to do research for the book you now hold in your hands. We had gone to Jerusalem to find out if there really was any truth to the clearly contentious claims set forth in a documentary that had been released to the world two months previously. That documentary and its accompanying book had been entitled, ‘The Jesus Family Tomb. In the two months since its release the reaction against its proposal, that Christ was buried with family members and his wife Mary Magdalene, had been vigorous. The fact that a child apparently born to this couple was also interred at the Talpiot tomb just between Bethlehem, birthpace of Christ, and Jerusalem where he died was surely the last straw on the heavily burdened back of orthodox Christianity. It was not enough that the Da Vinci Code book and movie had stirred up so many doubts about the world’s most famous man, or that the Pope could apparently only amass large audiences in Latin America any more. Now the world was being informed that the most revered man in history had literally left his bones on Earth, thus totally challenging the root Christian belief in his bodily resurrection unto heaven.

Though by no means an orthodox Christian I have a deep interest in and a profound respect for the teachings of Christ. I am also as a writer and researcher based in a non Christian culture (Japan) often the focus of public attention through many years of public speaking and media appearances. It is thus no secret that I am also a student of gnostic ideas including templarism and ancient Egyptian cosmologies. If this story turned out to be true, that Christ was interred at Talpiot alongside his legendary wife and spiritual partner, then it had to be investigated right away. Of course that meant traveling to Israel. We therefore lost no time in making the trip despite the obvious tensions the region was undergoing. By the time we left Israel on May 17th such tensions had resulted in Israeli air strikes of Gaza due to savage infighting between the Fatah and Hamaas factions of the Palestinian governement itself. I had been alerted to the story in March 2007. This is what I had read:

‘Titanic director James Cameron and Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici say they aren't trying to undermine Christianity in their documentary that claims the remains of Jesus, his wife, Mary Magdalene, and their child have been found. Oscar-winner Cameron and Gemini documentary award winner Jacobovici unveiled two limestone boxes they believe once contained the remains of Jesus and Mary Magdalene during a news conference one Monday in February 2007 at the New York Public Library. Cameron, best-known for producing the blockbuster movie Titanic, said the $4-million documentary represents the biggest archaeology story of the century.

It continued:

"It's very far from the case, we are not undermining Christianity" said Cameron. "What this does is to celebrate the real-life existence of a man, who, 2,000 years ago, had a vision and communicated it to people."　The claim that the bones of Jesus have been found could challenge the Christian belief that Jesus died and was resurrected three days later. Many Christians believe Jesus' body was kept at the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City. The burial site identified in the documentary is in a southern Jerusalem neighbourhood nowhere near the church.’

The entrance at the edge of the courtyard we now stood in front of, unknown to us both, was to that very same Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Our zigzag course through the aroma laden streets of the Arab quarter had taken us on a fairly direct route to the most venerated Church in all of Christendom. Here was where Jesus had been crucified. This was Golgotha and it was nothing like I had imagined it as a young Catholic forced to go to a Church I did not understand in Scotland. The crowds of people within its enormous domed body were all headed for a central chamber into which only three or four could pass at a time. Thus the queue was long. Since we still did not understand where we were some photographs were taken, I smoked a hand rolled cigarette in the courtyard and off we went again into the much more exciting Arab quarter. Later I would realise that the queue we had seen was to enter the holy of holies, the exact location of Jesus Christ’s tomb. This logistically meant of course that the Talpyot tomb had to a mistake, a fake or at worst a deliberately created hoax. I was intrigued because if this was a hoax then it had been masterfully created and some very talented and apparently sincere people had been involved. The reactions to the documentary which was aired in March via channel 4 in the UK, Vision TV in Canada and Discovery in the US had been anticipated by many including myself. We were not disappointed. A veritable fury of unrest amongst the Christians in particular was a result that no Sherlock was necessary to foresee. Try telling fans of Elvis that he was a sad, egomaniacal psycho, a drug addict and a vastly overrated musician to get a hint of the reaction this documentary has unleashed amongst the faithful-most of whom I suspect are residents of the world’s fundamentalist capital, the USA.

It was suggesting that Jesus was just a man and that he as such he had a wife and at least a son as family. The film makers do not claim that Christ’s body did not get taken to the Holy Sepulchre. We must remember here that Jewish burial customs two millenia ago often involved a double burial. The first burial, as in Christ’s case was frequently in a rock grotto, or cave since diggable land was scarce. The body was left to decompose for a couple of years after which time the remains were then interred in an ossuary for lasting burial in a tomb-just like the one discovered. If resurrection can be thought of as a spiritual process whereby the soul of an individual manifests in an astral type of body, and not a flesh and blood zombie like restart of a dead body, then Christ’s physical body like all others left bones which would need re-interring.

By the time I met the somewhat haggard looking yet charming Jacobovici, who had already been through two months of sometimes vicious rebuttals predominantly by Christians , the experts had dismissed the entire story as a money making venture. It was totally discounted so quickly that the book which had instantly risen to #6 on the New York Times bestselling list had, as Jacobivici told me directly before the interview began, just quietly plummeted. It appeared to many that this story had been effectively buried in its own tomb-a tomb of perfect denial. It was to me, a keen outside observer, a tomb of unholy rejection without doubt. There had to be more to this story than such an open and closed affair. The Israeli-born, Canadian-raised Jacobovici has often said that the documentary is not trying to answer any questions, but is intended to "bring the story to the world and do a thorough check ourselves of what is being presented and to then ask the true experts to continue." To us, the recipients of such information to do such a thorough check ourselves is obviously not at all an easy thing to accomplish. It is also difficult for us to employ experts who are not already employed by culture bound government agencies, educational institutions with an axe to grind or specific ethnocentric religious groups who therefore have a clearly existing bias.

The Pfaans had argued just as persuasively as Jacobovici by taking apart the inscriptions and showing how the most important of them, Mariamne, did not mean Mary Magdalene at all. The DNA tests were full of problematic issues being the mitochondrial DNA and the statistics used in the documentary to show that the likelihood of this not being the tomb of jesus was only 1 in 600. My first pilgrimage to israel then was immediately full of controversy and finally the violence of Gaza. But I had done my job, heard both sides of the story, and had made up my own mind what the truth was. Listening to both sides of any story is fundamental not just to good journalism but also to healthy living. But then the Japanese people have always known that...

For close to ten years I had made a fairly comprehensive review of arguments on both sides of the resurrection fence and saw no reason yet to firmly plant my spiritual life in either camp. I even reasoned that with a figure as obviously important as Christ there was room for both views to somehow be of immense relevance to our twenty first century lives-an obviously heretical and surely somewhat outlandish concept. But if light can behave as both a wave and a particle why cannot a key religious concept be both true and yet not quite completely so? After all it is well known that every religious background includes both esoteric and exoteric points of view as I had discovered in my studies of Mahayana and Theraveda Buddhism. And surely I was not alone in this bizarre desire to pierce beyond the veil of yes or no to a position where the value of both can be appreciated and accommodated with a largess of spirit. This is not and probably never will be an acceptable attitude in any orthodox religion where specific and very serious beliefs must be adhered to at any cost. However it is clear especially in modern day Europe that fewer and fewer numbers of people can accept the astonishing story that a man not only survives physical death, but actually ascends bodily to heaven.

Israel was going to be a pilgrimage into duality, a complete paradox at every level. This story of a holy man in holy land who might just have been an ordinary married Jew went well in a culture where God is mentioned about as often as bullets or rockets fly somewhere. It might be Allah, or Moses or Jesus that was intoned but here, in the ultimate pilgrim city on Earth, all was not well. I needed to get out of it for a while despite its tremendous allure, like a genie that had leaked out of a great magician's vase I needed the simpilcity of the desert. Was that where all the duality had begun, in that place where heaven and Earth are so clearly delineated?

Schumacher Philosophy

2008-07-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self balancing, self adjusting and self cleansing. Not so with technology

E. F. Schumacher

Graham's son Luke Hancock was visiting his father when I arrived. He was already a key member of my fledgling film crew because of his considerable abilities with computers, designing and editing. We both jumped in the rental car that evening of our interview with Graham. He was to be cameraman for the Satish Kumar dialogues and had been given a video camera Graham had used in the Underworld documentary shown first on BBC. This was yet another example of synchronicity- in- action since we had been looking at rental shops for video cameras but were suddenly offered this camera. The energy of a vast body of research involving underwater artifacts around the world, highly suggestive of a literally lost civilization was now to be part of our documentary through this camera. Unlike the predominantly materialistic Western view of things (literally) I think the Japanese have a keener sense of the inherent power of objects. Objects do seem to contain a kind of memory of their previous users and locations. Lyall Watson, the British biologist had documented this in his seminal book The Nature of Things back in the eighties. He had researched stories about how objects actually do affect their new owners.

The positive examples he gave of cars that were much loved by their owners were close to unbelievable. Running on almost no gas their owner would sweetly beg the car to keep on going despite the fact that it was impossible. Talking to the car! It worked, and on many occasions. Conversely, owners who would curse their cars for being too slow, too greedy on gas or simply not pretty at all would find themselves in situations that even included death. One driver, well known for daily cursing his car, was rolled over as he stood behind it with the engine switched off and out of gear. I realize that sounds totally ridiculous but he gave literally scores of similar examples.

When it comes to computers many readers will recognize this phenomenon. When we get angry at our computers they sometimes freeze or even crash. As a throw away culture now, Japan has largely forgotten this peculiar reality. But if we look back even a hundred years we will see how tea ceremony bowls once owned by grand masters were highly prized, or, closer to my experience Japanese long bows once pulled by high ranking teachers were known to help the practitioner to shoot better. In one of his best short stories the Argentinian writer Jorges Luis Borges had portrayed a dignified dinner party turning quickly into a homicide case. Two male guests were commenting on how well made the knives in a display glass case looked. Unknown to these men who ten took them out to look at and feel, those knives had all once belonged to famous knife fighters in Argentina, a culture where such weapons have a long tradition. Within minutes they were locked in deadly combat and the result was of course the death of one of them. I can just see the science buffs all chanting in unison 'coincidence' but that word is surely doomed as we learn more about holistic reality in the, well the end days of our civilization. I was soon to see how quickly Luke learned how to use that camera and get some really good shots for our movie despite having absolutely no experience at all.

Objects contain memories as do parts of our bodies. I had once given a talk in Japan called The Mystery of the Heart. It is now common knowledge that heart transplant patients often have a sudden change of character after receiving someone else's heart. Some of the examples were hilarious. A woman who had received the heart of a young hooker who was killed in an accident, had become a literal sex maniac and her husband was delighted with her recovery. A white man, prejudiced against all blacks suddenly took to social activism for equal rights and better race relations after he received the heart of a black man. Memory is surely the last frontier we need to understand for us to move ahead in our evolution as a species. Why? It determines everything, obviously.

But the facts are this: There is no duality between mind and matter. Ask any electron if it is conscious! I have not got that far I must admit but I did have an amazing conversation with an oxygen molecule whilst doing a shamanic ceremony deep in the Amazon. Even better, ask Karl Pribram the retired professor of brain science par excellence who formulated a holographic theory of the brain. He did that after trying to dissect rat brains so he would erase their memories. He couldn't erase them, for the simple reason that memory is not stored in the brain. It is stored in an invisible field, along with all other information in the universe. The brain, much like a TV picks up the broadcasts from memory. Imagine storing all TV shows in a TV! That amazing discovery by Pribram, and an equally eloquent holist David Bohm (who coincidentally had a superb dialogue with Krishnamurti) is why I asked the translator of this book Masaru Kawase, to translate The Holographic Universe many moons ago. Yet even today, with so much solid evidence that our consciousness creates the physical world, the die hard materialists still behave as if they know all about 'reality'. They need a good dose of humility and maybe even a computer to sneeze in their faces. Shamanic plants would help out a lot too. We need all the help we can get in an age where mad primates like George Bush happily bludgeon freedom and democracy to death with their disaster economics.

Our journey destination was a beautiful old building in Devon, that most organically rich of England's many counties with its fecund fields and pastures literally bursting with life. It was an old manor type of property called Dartington Hall but was now used in a totally different way from the bygone days of English gentry and their servants. Now it was the world's most advanced centre of learning in a new field that is paradoxically truly ancient:ecospirituality. Or put another way, learning how ecology and spirituality are just two sides of the same coin. Nature is a spiritual being. Or is it just a random and chaotic mess of genetic material with no memory, no mind and no soul? That is what the globalists would want you to believe when they talk about the decimation of the Amazonian rainforest as being a necessary part of us all getting a better life. You could call this the progress- through -death rationale of most of the world's policy makers these days. It reminds me of a truly funny movie title, Murder by Death. Or, the best way to secure peace for all, is to go to war with everybody, just like the good old USA. It still astonishes me that Harvard and Yale produce brilliant minds that have almost no relationship to their hearts. Talking about 'peace" being preserved through a strong military is like saying we should add cowshit to every meal to make it more delicious. It is the height of absurdity but since Gandhi and Tolstoy have died we have almost no prominent human on Earth who is talking horse sense about peace. Tolstoy was a great influence on the young Gandhi by the way.

But I did manage to find a man who does talk horse sense about peace, about reverential ecology (as opposed to shallow or deep ecology) and sure enough he had been a student of Ghandi, and more specifically was strongly influenced by Gandhi's spiritual successor, Vinoba Bhave. Bhave walked as a poor pilgrim all over India for decades doing something astonishing. He simply asked rich landowners to give one sixth of their land in trust (not give away ownership rights but rights to use) to landless peasants so it would be revitalized. Everybody wins with ideas like that. The land produces crops and brings income for both the landowner and the trustees. Bhave got hundreds of thousands of hectares of land into the hands of the poor. He had no money, no political clout, no religious teaching, no press and yet he did the impossible. So did Ghandi. Apart from Nelson Mandela, the Western world has not produced a single man of influence like this since I was born. Yet we think we are so smart.

I had come to the now renamed Shumacher College to spend two days with Satish Kumar, the UK's leading prophet of the environment but more than that, a real Earth Pilgrim. Very, very strangely, when I first emailed him about a movie called Earth Pilgrims (plural in English) I had no idea that he was about to be featured on BBC on a one hour documentary called Earth Pilgrim! Maybe that is why he instantly agreed to my request for a meeting and an interview at both Shumacher and at his home office where he produces the world class magazine of art and spirituality, Resurgence. So where did Schumacher come from?

I quote here from Wikipedia;

Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher (16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977) was an internationally influential economic thinker with a professional background as a statistician and economist in Britain. He served as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became well-known in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s. He is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, centralized and appropriate technologies. According to The Times Literary Supplement, his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful is among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. It was soon translated into many languages and brought international fame to Schumacher, after which Schumacher was invited to many international conferences, university guest speaker lectures and consultations. Schumacher's basic development theories have been summed up in the catch-phrases Intermediate Size and Intermediate Technology. Schumacher's other notable work is the 1977 A Guide For The Perplexed, which is a critique of materialist scientism a.nd an exploration of the nature and organization of knowledge. Together with long-time friends and associates like Professor Mansur Hoda, Schumacher founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) in 1966

Satish had been strongly influenced by this pioneer of the small is beautiful movement and thus the name of his considerably powerful, yet small, university of the ecospiriitual. Luke and I arrived at night and met up with Satish in the bar where he had one whisky and water, Luke had water and I had ginger ale I think. Satish immediately reminded me of my spiritual mentor Krishnamurti whose works I had devoured in my teens and twenties. That same nobility of face that the Brahminic Indians are so famous for was how he struck me right away. I later found out these two men had met and walked by the sacred Ganges in Varanasi when Satish was in his twenties. I got to see Krishnamurti on my 1975 trip to the US and will never forget the profound simplicity and eloquence of his speech that day. A true master of the non dual, Krishnamurti always said, "The observer and the observed are one.."

Satish sat opposite me in the meditation room and the dialogue started to flow, perfectly naturally as one would expect from a man who understands the meaning of natural, in every cell of his being.

Echan; Well you really had a wonderful mother.

Satish; Absolutely! She was a truly spiritual being, and a pilgrim. And so, mother would say that when you touch the Earth, you are touching a sacred space, a divine space, and God is present in the Earth. And everything upon this Earth is a manifestation of the divine spirit in physical form. Every physical form has an invisible dimension. And that invisible dimension is the divine dimension, the spiritual dimension, the dimension of imagination. You have to imagine that this flower is not just a physical flower, it has divine spirit in it. And that can only come with the power of imagination. And that was teaching I got from my mother at age four and five.

Echan; Well this is a very important point Satish – imagination. The way that the word is currently used is severely limited to the idea of artistic imagination, or writing, of painting, or of creating. The true purpose of imagination according to Thomas Aquinas, for example, in the Western tradition was exactly what you’re describing. It was so that we could actually visualise the impossible to visualise, which is the invisible, untouchable, unreachable, ungettable. However, by using the powers of our imagination we can get closer to the divine presence, therefore we should use our imaginations in such a way. But you were given a mother that taught you this from four. You’re part of probably 0.0001% of all humans who’ve ever lived, and came in with a very big lucky break.

Satish; That’s right. My mother’s teaching was that the physical form is a vehicle to carry the invisible reality. Now, for example words. Words are only a vehicle to carry the meaning. So the body is only a vehicle to carry the love. If you have no body, then how do you embrace somebody? How do you look at somebody? How do you kiss somebody? So body is a vehicle to carry that compassion, that generosity, that love.

So in the same way, the flower is carrying something. The flower has a physical form, but it will also have an invisible dimension, and that invisible dimension can only be realised through imagination, and through the third eye, which is the eye of the imagination. The two eyes are the physical eyes, can see the physical form, but in order to see the non-physical form – the invisible reality, you have to have another dimension in your self. And that other dimension is metaphorically spoken of as the third eye. And what is that third eye?

The third eye is the eye of the eye of the heart, the eye of imagination, the eye of the spirit. So imagination, from a spiritual point of view, from an Indian perspective, is much bigger than just artistic or poetic imagination. Of course that’s a part of it, because true art and true poetry can reach the divine. William Blake, and his imagination, was reaching the divine.

Echan; Tagore was of course reaching the divine.

Satish; Exactly. Tagore was reaching through his poetry, though his music, though his paintings. But he was reaching that invisible reality of the divine. And the divine word, sometimes we are a little bit confused, and we don’t know what it means. The Divine simply means the eternal reality of blissfulness. Eternal reality, which is implicit every moment, in every thing, here and now. Divine is not in the next life. Divine is not in the next life. Divine is not in the book. Divine is not in the church. Divine is not in any kind of exterior reality. Its interior reality is present every moment in every thing in every second of time, in every word we speak, in every atom we touch, the divine presence is there.

But what is lacking is imagination. Without imagination we cannot experience it. And you have to experience divine. You have to imagine that there is bigger reality in that flower, in that tree, in that river, in that butterfly, in that human being, in that bell, in that sound. In everything there are two dimensions – the visible dimension and the invisible dimension, and the invisible dimension is the divine dimension.

Echan; That’s a very important point; you’re talking about two dimensions – the visible dimension and the invisible dimension. But you are not talking about duality, as far as I can feel. You’re talking about a unity of two dimensions at all times. They are not separate, they are not different dimensions, they are coexisting immanent dimensions, I believe is what you’re saying. As opposed to the ancient Western idea, the Gnostic idea, that there is a real world – a physical world – but it’s not as real as we think it is. It’s like a Matrix, like in the movie.

But there’s a separate spiritual world above and beyond that is almost untouchable and unconnectable, and therefore we are in a prison here; we are far from heaven and we have been cut off. This is an idea that seemed to have some possibilities, however what you’re describing now is not duality. It is the coexistence of two dimensions.

Satish; Yeah absolutely. It’s not duality because the spirit and the matter are two aspects of one single existence. Without spirit, matter cannot exist. And without matter, spirit cannot manifest itself. So matter needs spirit, and spirit needs matter. Without each other there is no existence. So it’s a completely one, single, complete whole, called Purnam in Sanskrit, meaning a complete and whole reality.

But in order to understand it, in order to make sense of it in our language, in our intellect, in our communication, we sometimes explain it. So this is only a way of explaining that there is a visible and invisible reality, but they are one and the same and there is no separation.

Echan; We all have the ability to use our imaginations to appreciate the divine presence in every moment because we’re all born the same, we all have bodies, we all have brains. However the great tragedy, especially of modern times I think – I don’t know too much about if this happened in historical times, if we completely lost our imagination before – but it seems to me that we have utterly and completely lost our divine imagination, almost totally today, resulting in the manifestation around us that you’ve been such a great campaigner for, of a return to a more spiritual, ecological outlook that is not limited to any one perspective.

Let me get back to your mother, because the problem is we don’t have the imagination now. I see that as a challenge, as a problem. We’ve lost that imagination. You were gifted with a mother who taught you that imagination. Perhaps you can let us know how she taught you in more practical terms in a more day to day basis; how she brought you to being a pilgrim, and how you related back to her your experiences, and how that helped you to grow, because I think you had a unique upbringing.

Satish; Yes, I was very fortunate to have a mother who was extremely wise. She saw nature as the divine manifestation. So in practical terms, she taught me to connect with nature; to rediscover, to always rediscover our connection with nature. Because we are nature, and therefore we are related to everything around us.

When we would walk she would always give examples.

She would see that as a child I would see what was going on, and she would point things out; for example the honeybee. My mother would point out “look at the honey bee. The honeybee can teach us the lessons of transformation.” Now that is the divine dimension that you can only learn from imagination. The honeybee is in a physical reality, doing a physical action, but there is an invisible reality of transformation. Now the honeybee goes from flower to flower, collecting nectar from here and there. Little from here, little from there – never too much. And once it has collected nectar, it transforms; it transforms nectar into sweet, delicious, healthy honey.

That’s the divine dimension. Now also the honeybee is a pollinator. The honeybee is the key to our existence. If there is no honeybee, there is no pollination; if there’s no pollination, there are no plants; if there are no plants, there is no food; if there’s no food, there’s no life. So in this extremely simple way, this is how my mother taught me to be a pilgrim of nature, and a pilgrim of the divine at the same time; and by connecting with nature we realise that everything is completely and intricately, and in a subtle way totally interdependent. Life will not exist if there is no honeybee, this is just one example. This was the practical way my mother taught me to be a pilgrim.

Walking was one of the most beautiful ways, because when you are walking you have time – you are going slowly. And when you are going slowly then you are looking around. If you are on a horseback, or worse in a car or a train, or worse of all an airplane, you see nothing. You don’t connect – you are disconnected. But when you are walking you are connected with the earth, you are connected with the air, you are connected with the trees, you are connected with the sunshine, you are connected with the flowers, you are connected with fungi, you are connected with birds, you are connected with the entire universe.

You are one. There is no dualism there, you are completely one.

Shamanic Pilgrims: Part 2

2008-07-17T01:32:00.001-07:00

They are not figments of the imagination

Hancock on so called altered states experiences

GRAHAM: Well we have to let go. This is really one of the lessons that shamanism teaches if you want to explore those invisible dimensions that surround us, you actually have to let go of this one and you have to embrace the mystery entirely. This is where the visionary plants are incredibly helpful allies in that process. I am not saying there are not other ways to let go. But the visonary plants seem to have been provided to us in a process of co-evolution precisely to allow us to let go of this physical realm and enter deeply into other realms. The wonderful thing about shamanic travel in a sense is the absolute simplicity of it. The experiences you have may be incredibly complex and challenging but to enter into those experiences can be a relatively simple process with the aid of power plants like ayahuasca for example. You do not need an aeroplane or a motor car or a motor bike. You don't even need a back pack. You don't need any supplies. You don't need any physical object whatsoever. All you need is to release your consciousness from its captivity to this realm and it is immediately plunged into a whole other area of experience which is utterly bewildering and strange and terrifying when first encountered. But if you allow yourself to continue to explore that journey it becomes more and more familiar and you begin to be able to understand how what was at first disorienting and terrifying, can become an experience that allows you to learn and grow.

ECHAN:All you need to enter that realm as you said is the assistance of the plant and an ability to let go, which is a very big thing to do, it is very hard for people to let go especially we Westerners who are fixated on being in a space time location. That is the only place we can operate. The shaman thus has a lot to teach us about that. You yourself have been through a lot of very challenging situations over the past few years, suddenly being confronted by this new reality which I think we have to make very clear is real. It is not a world that is somehow imagination generated. It is a real world, as real as this one we are in now.

GRAHAM: I believe absolutely that the realms of experience into which we enter in shamanic states of consciousness are absolutely and totally real. They are not figments of the imagination. What we are doing is opening up our senses to a wider reality that is always there that we normally shut ourelves off from. Initially it can be extremely terrifying and disturbing to enter into these other realms but this has always been the mission of pilgrims, to be willing to accept terror, to accept whatever the road throws at you. This is not however a physical road and so you are not going to encounter bandits with guns, in that other world who are going to rob you of your posesions because you do not have any possssions! But you may actually encounter something more terrifying than that, being confronted with the possible loss of your own soul. These are the true dangers you encounter on the shamanic quest and so you must strengthen your resilience when you enter it.

ECHAN: Yes, pilgrimage is definitely a dangerous business but I think as many people will soon realise, being on Earth these days itself is a pretty dangerous business! With our depleting resources situation, climate changes and so many other things it is indeed dangerous. This is all hard enough but we do not yet have the attitude of a pilgrim which in fact would help us the most to deal with all this.

GRAHAM: What our society is teaching us to do is to value material possessions above all else, to try to accumulate those things in some way to make ourselves safe. But we are never safe, and we never will be safe in that sense. There is no amount of material accumulation that can make us safe. This physical life is only a temporary part of our overall experience as human beings and to me this is one of the great gifts that the shamanic journey gives us; it teaches you through direct experience that this physical realm with all its threats and challenges is a kind of illusion. It isn' permanent, it doesn't last, it changes constantly. When you begin to realise that it becomes easier to let it go.

ECHAN: Well this is how I see your role as being very important. Somehow, all around the world the ayahuasca message, the plant message is being communicated at an ever increasing rate. We have mentioned the 13 grandmothers council for example. They are moving around the world talking about native wisdom and the role of plants in our evolution. You yourself, who have been known to talk about more left brained aspects of our history until now, have made a big change in your direction. Other spokespeople have come forward and made us aware through documentaries, television and through books that this other world does in fact exist. I am looking at the fact that the shaman was a very small part of Earth culture even in the past, and so was the pilgrim. They were both still in the minority whereas the masses have always prepared themselves for safety and wanted to live that way. However why is it now that people like yourself are getting a very strong message from the shamanic world, from that multidimensional world that the shamans access, saying that we do need to know about this? It is happening globally. My theory is that we really need this information now because we are perhaps as a culture making a transition during which time that information will be the most valuable information we could possibly have.

GRAHAM: Yes, I agree with you on that.

ECHAN: I am thinking about the timing of all this. What is this about?

Shamanic Pilgrims: Part 1

2008-07-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.

Carlos Castaneda

ECHAN: Last night we were talking about Earth Pilgrims, that the image of a pilgrim is an ancient idea, that it predates the birth of religions and also that there is the biological aspect of pilgrimage too as we all get born and go on a life journey, and of course many of us feel that there is also a spiritual journey , since we move through space and time to learn and to evolve. So evolution itself can be seen as a pilgrimage, an ongoing development of characters in a story leading to higher evolution. Another idea we talked about was the pilgrimage of the solar system through the galaxy, the sun is moving with the planets round the centre of the galaxy and of course the Milky Way itself is moving through the larger universe of multiple galaxies. Then we took the idea a step further to where it connects more with your current work, especially Supernatural and the idea was that the shaman is moving from this world to other worlds. What I would like to ask you today, as you have moved on to a different stage of your own personal pilgrimage which began with ancient civilizations and on to supernatural themes, is how do you see the idea of a pilgrim relating to that of a shaman. The shaman moves between worlds and I think that could be a precursor to our future situation on Earth. In other words, we are already moving towards the realms that the shamans have always been teaching us about.

GRAHAM: If I look back on my life I have been travelling all my life, since I was four years old. I have travelled to many different lands, first with my parents as a child and later as an adult travelling and exploring, I always felt restless. I didn't feel that enough of what I needed to know was right here in front of me. I felt that I had to get out and explore, to test my own limits and to learn in every way I could from the experiences and the encounters that I had. A large part of my life as a writer and as a researcher was spent travelling to far off lands and when you go into a new culture that you know very little about you are immediately challenged if you are going to function in that culture.

I confronted myself with that kind of challenge again and again in many different cultures and sometimes I found a culture that I wanted to explore in greater depth and spend more time journeying in. Now what is the point of all this? Why not just sit at home? The point was to learn and to develop and to hopefully at the end of the process to be a better, perhaps more evolved person than I was at the beginning. What I have discovered as I have gone along, is that there is an inward journey that we need to pursue which is part of the pilgrimage process. In latter years, in the last five or six years of my life when I encountered the visionary plants that shamans use, literally to send their consciousness into other dimensions, other realms, and explore those realms I have realized that this whole lifetime of travelling the Earth has only been a preparation for the journey into other dimensions and other realms.

To enter those realms it is imperative to enter a deeply altered state of consciousness because if our state of consciousness is focussed only on this realm, it is very hard to attend to other realms, and that is what the visionary plants do; they allow us to change the receiver wavelength of our consciousness and tune in to another realm. And then as we enter that other realm, curiously enough many of the challenges and difficulties and learning experiences that we face in this world travelling to other cultures, you also face in that other realm too. It is a totally alien and unknown realm in which you have had no experience whatsoever.

You suddenly find yourself plunged in to it and so you must make do, you must survive and you must hopefully learn from the experience. I think that is where shamans and particularly shamans of hunter gatherer cultures who have been doing this all their lives and who are descended from people doing this for thousands of years really do have a lot to teach us in the West. We have almost no experience of other realms. We have to learn to find our feet in those realms.

But the process is the same. It is a process of learning, of growing and of developing and of the preparation of oneself. I think the ancient Egyptians called it the perfection of the soul. It is like you are seeking to take a rough hewn object and gradually, in the process of your life to end up perfecting and improving on that object as best as you possibly can. Rather like as you might work on a carving or a piece of sculpture or even writing for very long periods of time and finally look at it and say, 'This is as good as it gets, as good as I can get it.' In a way that is what you want to do with the whole story of your life. You should be able to say at the end that you started off with something roughly formed but that you ended up with something good, something that had meaning and purpose to it. I have just come to the conclusion that the inner journey, which in the shamanic context becomes a journey to other realms and other dimensions, is an essential and absolutely vital part of the pilgrimage process. If we deny ourselves access to those other realms for whatever ideological reasons or preconceptions that our society may impose on us then we are denying ourselves our birthright as human beings.

ECHAN: Absolutely. The reason I bring up the pilgrim motif at this point in our history is because everything you say is of course true. In our daily lives we have come here to learn, we have got seventy years or maybe eighty years or whatever, but when we look at the global situation right now do we really have a whole lot of time to prepare ourselves for what may be really difficult transitions, from one stage of our culture to another stage of our our culture where we might not have the energy that we have now, we might not have the oil or the electricity we have now? We might have to live on a much more moment to moment basis, even within two or three years in the future. Who knows? Most of the predictions are not very rosy, we all know that.

We are all aware of the situation here, so the pilgrim stands out as somebody who is very able to adjust to the conditions that exist, no matter how extreme they may be, because he or she has an attitude of moving through a sacred landscape with a sacred
sense of purpose which is to spiritually evolve, to become a better person, to become more integrated with the environment, to become more holistically present. This is what you have already talked about and the shaman in a sense is the epitome of that because he goes into completely wild and unexplored territory with only his consciousness as his tool, his only guide.

GRAHAM: It teaches you to master the vehicle of your consciousness, this is really what shamans and the whole tradition of shamanism are about. The nature of reality is much more complex, much deeper, much more scary in a way than if you limit your horizon to the physical realm and I think that there are huge learning experiences to be had in the exploration of other realms and other dimensions. None of us know what happens for sure when this physical body dies. There are those who believe that nothing happens and who believe that our consciousness is generated by this physical body and therefore when the physical body dies the consciousness blinks out like a light that has been turned off. That is a belief system, it is not a fact . It is equally valid to say that your body and your brain are vehicles for your consciousness.

ECHAN: That the journey does in fact continue..

GRAHAM: The journey does in fact continue and therefore you would like to be as well prepared as possible for the experiences you are going to have after death and it seems to me that this is one of the things that shamanism is about. It is about familiarizing you with that other realm that lies just beyond our touch and just beyond our sight in this realm. And certainly if you go back to the ancient Egyptian religious tradition their whole concern really was in preparation for the afterlife. This involved intense spiritual journeys which had to be undertaken so that you would be prepared for those mysterious realms that lie beyond life. But ancient Egypt is gone, though we may have the books the living experience of the exploration of those realms, that tradition is gone. So who can we turn to in our day? Only the shamans, who do that as part of their daily life, as part of everyday exploration of those realms . I often feel that we in the West, in the industrialized and technological countries, our situation is like being children. We are taught that our cultures are so superior because of their technology, but they are incredibly inferior in my view in terms of spiritual exploration. If we really want to be pilgrims in the truest of senses then we need to listen to what the shamans have to teach us.

ECHAN: That's right. But why is it that we can't listen to them? We originally started off aware of the fact that we are all spiritual travelers, since all of the ancient traditions were aware of the spiritual journey. You mentioned Egypt but all of them shared that. The spiritual journey always has been there and always will be but somehow in the last 200-300 years of our scientific culture the idea of location has become very important, that is the idea of stopping, the idea of owning, and the idea of exploiting all came with our stopping . As soon as we stopped the fluid motion of a pilgrim who is always moving stopped. But the pilgrim never stops because there is no end to the journey, it continues. When we stopped all our problems seemed to start. Now the entire world is enveloped in this 'we have stopped' mode of opertion and only the shamans seem to have any fluidity left.

Our religions have frozen and become fossilized and evn the pilgrimages which exist within our religious traditions, for example the Camino in Spain, or even the Buddhist one that I did are still only very pale reminders of what a true pilgrim's spirit is all about. In my experience as perhaps with yours also, the shamans represent a much more dynamic and courageous leap into the unknown, as cosmic pilgrims, as multidimensional pilgrims so I think we both agree here that we need to learn from them. There are however a huge number of problems when we Westerners learn from them because we have decided to stop!

Beautiful minds

2008-07-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

We have created a kind of monstrous society which has almost completely severed its connections to the spiritual roots of all being

Graham Hancock

I had long missed the boat that was to take me back to the world outside of Iona's monastic fortress, battered by gale force winds for the two days I was there. The rental car I had picked up at Edinburgh airport was still on the neighbouring island of Mull, waiting for its pilgrim to return. Driving across Mull was always a deeply savoured experience for me, one of being graced by the wild Scottish landscape with its naked hills and scattered, bleating sheep in a largely untouched and lowly populated wilderness. It is solitude personified in heather and granite.

I was in a hurry, in a rush actually which is definitely not the way a pilgrim moves best through any landscape. I did not stop at the church at Dervaig on Mull's other end from Iona with that controversial paining of a pregnant Mary Magdalene and Jesus cradling her because I knew by now as a researcher that we will never actually know the truth about that historical drama, no matter how many 'pieces of evidence' we claim to possess. History, as a pursuit of objective fact finding was now literally behind me, as it should be for any pilgrim. You do not find truth in the past, though you certainly find visions that light the way on your current journey through this world. Those visions, like the ones from Egypt always come through individuals who we have personally immortalised. Now, we really need to immortalise ourselves.But how?

The road in front of me was what counted. Actually it was being right here on Mull that counted but I had already lost myself. It was too late. The world had gobbled me again. Though I knew where I was going, I was already lost in an impossible schedule to meet beautiful minds.

It was here crossing Mull that you must drive a one track road with lay bys at the right or left every 500 metres so that you, or the car coming towards you, could stop long enough for the other to pass. It is quite stressful if you drive fast, and I was. You had to mentally guess whether you should pull over and wait or if the other should, and with some drivers it is like the old car race game of chicken...who would yield first? I had to get on that ferry to Oban on the mainland. I had already lost a hotel booking and one flight to London and both Graham Hancock and Satish Kumar had set aside valuable time for pivotal interviews I could not miss. And yet I was in my better moments a pilgrim and had fully accepted the delay on Iona, the lack of hot food and the poor quality of filming I had done there alone. I had to get my priorities straight. Yes I was on a mission to document on film about what a pilgrimage is and therefore I really had to be one. I had to belong to an ancient world of step by step progress, the archetypal pilgrim's progress. But at the same time I also had to keep up with email communication, flight schedules and car hires. The result was often highly frustrating but I resisted the strong temptation to indulge in feeling a victim. It was my chosen journey after all. As Ken Wilber, the American philosopher once very adroitly put it, "The Buddha couldn't drive a jeep or work a computer". What he meant of course is that we live far more complex lives than the spiritual heroes of our past. To pray at 100 kph bumping over a rough road trying to catch a ferry is a kind of pilgrimage the Buddha and Jesus could scarcely have imagined. We have in our face temptations and distractions far more hallucinatory in their power over the mind than surely even Mara had cooked up for Gautama.

Being a pilgrim now really is a super heroic journey, even if it is just for a few miles through any modern city landscape as our senses are assaulted with hundreds of good reasons to give up the inner quest and spiritually sell out for an erection, a salary raise, a new biped transportation device or a totally amazing taste experience. Jesus had his challenges to be sure, but in our world one second of concentration lapse on this road just a bit wider than my car and I would end up potentially with my head lodged up a sheep's ass, with a broken neck. Would my prayer hold as I slow motioned my painful way through the windscreen and into the huddle of quiet quadrupeds ahead? Could we really be pilgrims when there is no escape, even here, from the relentless barrage of data flow through the brain? It is easily sparked for example by a poster for a Sunday newspaper, its half naked bimbo drooling at me, as I slow down to get through the village in the middle of Mull. We are tough people, we really are heroic when you realise we are already in hell. It is a done deal. Not in the afterlife, but here and now. To remember one's spiritual identity in the 21st century is as hard as an amnesiac trying to find his way back from the hospital to the house he lived in when he was a child, in a different country with new street names. How badly would he have to want to get home for that to succeed? Buddha and Jesus had temptations in a machineless and close to imageless world when time flowed far, far slower than now and the air was much, much sweeter.

Snow had fallen in the pass that must be navigated on the main road from Oban to Edinburgh, creating more delays for me by a road diversion. I was driving now dangerously fast on a much smaller road to make up the lost distance to Edinburgh airport. I had completely lost the balance I had temporarily regained during some magical moments on Iona and was now back in the infamous matrix. Time and adrelanin rules here. But thanks to a security alert at Edinburgh airport my London flight was delayed over an hour and I arrived at Heathrow close to 8 p.m. Exhausted already from the whole nerve wracking ride I had to rent another car to drive down to Bath, where lives Graham and his wife Santha. Disgusted by the poor service at the car rental agency and clearly expressing my anger and displeasure to the staff I had a brief return to balance as I spoke about Hindu philosophy with the Indian bus driver taking me from the terminal to the car pickup point. I thought it strange that there is perhaps now more living culture in the UK thanks to immigration than with the low consciousness white consumers whose only interest is themselves.

The Heathrow environment is a dark and dirty world like many airport zones. High tension, noise and highway junctions all over. Grimy, gritty streets and fearful people abounding. On the M25 motorway I suddenly realised looking at my speedometer that the average speed of drivers there is 140 kph. I was doing 160. The Brits drive very, very fast. No wonder. This was a stress infested culture for sure and I was by now completely engulfed in its force of presence, mentally timing my arrival at Graham's house at 10 p.m. minimum. Sirius shone brightly in the cool English night. That was my sole spiritual consolation. On entering Bath city, an ancient Roman town that did once have a spa unrivalled in the UK anywhere, I realised how much of a police state, a violent country this had become. Just as I navigated the small roads to get to the Hancock residence the pubs were spewing out their human contents on to the streets at closing time. Many of the people were completely and riotously drunk, and a menacing air pervaded the night. Police were on patrol because of course they know what happens when people get outside, especially young men. They look for anybody to attack, without any reason other than to vent their innate rage at having to live a life devoid of any underlying meaning at all. Serious assaults are common. Deaths are increasing. A young man walks into a shop drunk, pulls out a knife and viciously slams it into the teenage body of a boy he does not know. Later, he will confess he did not know what he was doing. Of course he didn't. He was out of his mind at the time. And yet the holy nation state, with all its highly trained psychology professionals never thinks to connect an ever growing dependence on alcohol as the national stress relief treatment, with the unbridled violence of its nights. Britain of course is no different from anywhere else in the pathetically named developed world. We are drunken monkeys by night and caged animals by day with no sense of connection to the land or to the other people who share it with us.

My nerves by now completely frazzled, I hugged Graham and his wife Santha at their front door close to 11 p.m. A respite at last. I was with people who were beyond the matrix, people with big hearts and open minds. We had not seen each other for more than a year and it was time to catch up. The filmed interview could happen tomorrow. Still vibrating from the effects of driving in two different countries, flying in an aluminium pipe with wings and leaving the profoundly peaceful sanctuary of the holy island to then arrive in an air conditioned nightmare of freedom and democracy, merry pubs and terminal angst I was ready to put the pilgrim into a deep and healing sleep before I could interview my shamanic ally Graham with any measure of intelligence. Sleep, as the Dalai Lama has said, is really the best meditation.

The Stone of destiny

2008-07-12T16:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve

Albert Schweitzer

On the way to Iona I had to pass through Scotland's elegant capital city Edinburgh, one of the best designed capitals in the world with its castle sitting atop a huge rock fortress in the centre. Its Scots nickname is Auld (old) Reekie (to reek=to smell a lot) because it used to smell a lot, from the smoke coming from thousands of coal fired houses. Aberdeen was in the past just as bad as we had plentiful coal , it was cheap, and we were always cold. So imagine every house had a chimney from which black smoke emitted for a lot of the year. That, combined with other industrial pollution gave Scotland the highest lung cancer rate in the world at the time when my own father was struck. His right lung was completely cuto out from his body when I was 12. Thanks to good whisky and a tough mind he survived until I was 24. In that castle on top of that hill there is a very peculiar object in a large glass case. Or at least there was the last time I saw it previous to this pilgrimage to Iona, back in the mid nineties, before Scotland received limited independence from the Uk. It is called the Stone of Destiny.

It was in 1998 that I drove into the Scottish highlands from Rosslyn Chapel, now made world famous by that movie. So famous is it now in fact, that the car park at the chapel (where the heroine of the movie discovers the documents that prove her descent from the bloodline of Christ) has been expanded to three times its original size. I had been researching a truly heretical concept. The Rosslyn Chapel had undoubtedly been a Templar ‘shrine’, disguised as a Church. No reasonable doubt exists in my mind that this is no ordinary ‘church’. Beneath its stone floors there is rumoured to be a great treasure. I had also concluded that the possibility is very high that this is indeed very possibly true. In fact scientific tests using a fiber optic cable type of camera were conducted at some expense to find out exactly what is down there in a massive underground vault.Alas, unfortunately the amount of debris was so great that the camera lens was blocked just when it looked like it was getting interesting. We must ask ourselves if anyone in the 15th century in Scotland, with churches galore, would spend a fortune and over 45 years building a small church that interestingly has the same floor plan as the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Just to add another place of worship to the Scottish landscape? Fat chance.

My many visits there, including research journeys with Japanese that allowed me full access and private use of its facilities for over two days, convince me that this is not really a church at all but a repository of something very important. At that time, in 1998 my research pointed to the inescapable possibility that beneath Rosslyn lay the preserved head or skull of either Jesus Christ or John the Baptist. The interior sculptures at Rosslyn Chapel are literally full of, heads! We may never know unless we dig up the floor but permission for that will not likely come from the private owner who is a police chief now in London. So after having spent two days at the Rosslyn Glen Hotel, near to the Chapel and having spent much time silently meditating inside the grounds and under the chapel in that crypt made famous by Tom Hanks, I headed off in a rented Ford towards the wild and mainly uninhabited central highlands. This time it was to find a rather large, rectangular stone.

My destination was a tiny village near A (cannot reveal the location here due to a promise I made)about two hours from Rosslyn. This is the highland location where the true stone of destiny still lay according to a contemporary Scottish templar who had informed me. Of course the one I had already seen on display in Edinburgh castle was a fake, he and others had assured me and recommended therefore that I make the journey to see the real one, which the templars (of course, the grail guardians) have always guarded with their lives. I arrived after several hours driving full of anticipation to find an old church for sure, but it was all locked up so that story ends in nothing more than speculation. Did he know it would be a wild goose chase? It could have been a wild goose chase yes, but the templar had nothing to gain by telling me lies and since I never met him again he received no satisfaction from seeing my disappointed face. Perhaps the real stone really is kept in that church which is no longer used, the local population having decreased with more and more people heading for the cities to find work. But the stone of destiny is definitely real-whether it is the original Egyptian/Israeli one, or the apparently fake one in an ancient fortress castle in Edinburgh. Or was it perhaps that other stone? Before the reader gets too confused let me share with you the stories of two real stones and a fake one that really do seem connected to a very important destiny-one that is historically traceable too.

The Lia Fáil in Ireland is one of those two historical stones named the Stone of Destiny. The other 'Stone of Destiny' is sometimes known as the Stone of Scone and was removed from the coronation chair of the British monarchs in Westminster Abbey and returned on loan to Scotland. Now that one is the suspicious one I mentioned earlier, the one that can be seen in Edinburgh castle but many local Scots also suggest that the one on display is indeed a replica. That makes pragmatic sense when we consider the immense value in its significance a coronation staone. Naturally the real kings' stone is of course hidden somewhere.

The Irish one now standing at the Hill of Tara is a phallic shaped obelisk-stone. I had already been to Tara and seen the big Lia Fail with my own eyes and I know for sure that nobody could sit on that to become a king! In Celtic mythology the Lia Fáil is said to have been brought to Ireland in antiquity by the semi-divine race known as the Tuatha Dé Danann.

This semi-divine race who legend tells brought it is so steeped in mythic shrouds that just about any idea can be attached to them; they were a kind of faery race (the Celts have always communicated with faeries), they were survivors of Atlantis or that the highly artistic Celts just ‘made them up. However the stone is real and is clearly very important to Irish history since the Irish descendants of Scota, as we saw earlier, were to become the Scots thus it also continued to be centrally important to their royalty. It was principally used as the stone on which Kings sat to become annointed monarchs and that is a ceremony that clearly has its origin in Pharaonic Egypt. It is thus highly likely that this stone was first carried to the distant shores of Spain and Ireland from Egypt, and then on to Scotland by Scota's descendants. The problem is the phallic one is stuck in the ground!

Researchers have long assumed that there were actually four stones representing the four cardinal points of the compass. A kind of Egyptian/Celtic medicine wheel if you will. And if that is in fact true then the phallic symbol in Tara probably represents the actual location where the kings were coronated but that other stone was used to be sat upon.

Traditionally, the stone of destiny is also supposed to have been the ‘pillow stone' used by the Biblical Jacob. Just as Akhenaten is potentially the same character as Moses, a recent and very detailed study of Biblical prophets by the aforementioned Ralph Ellis suggests that many of the the Bible heros were in fact Egyptians. Jacob might therefore be no exception to this very amazing possibility. He was very probably the last pharaoh of the 16th dynasty (the so called Hyskos period) whose name was Yacobaam. The Hyskos were known as foreigners in Egypt. Ellis has now written a very well researched set of 6 books and has done extensive field work in the middle East and Europe to back up his genealogies of Biblical characters who are in fact all, Egyptians.

According to the legend, this same‘pillow’ stone was as we said the Coronation Stone of the early Dál Riata Gaels (who I believe were the Egyptian descendants of Scota) when they lived in Ireland, which they brought with them when settling in Caledoni. Certainly we know that since the time of Kenneth Mac Alpin who was the first recorded King of Scots in 847 A.D., all Scottish monarchs were seated upon the stone during their coronation ceremony. At that time in history the stone was situated at Scone, a few miles north of Perth.

In 1296 the Stone was captured by the English King Edward the first (the bane of Mel Gibson's Braveheart) as spoils of war, then taken to Westminster Abbey where it was fitted into the old wooden chair known as St. Edward's Chair. Sure enough it was the chair on which English sovereigns were then crowned. Mmmm...

Doubtless by this act Edward intended to powerfully symbolize his claim to be "Lord" of Scotland, with the right to have power over its Scots king. Remember that at this time both countries were separate kingdoms but England was far bigger and richer than Scotland, which had a much smaller population . However, there is some doubt whether Edward I captured the real stone and it has been suggested that monks hid the real Stone in the River Tay or, alternatively that they buried it on Dunsinane Hill. This is interestingly the famous location of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’drama. If so, it is possible that the English troops were fooled into taking the wrong stone which would make it the third stone in our story so far.

Some forensic experts have claimed that historic descriptions of the destiny stone do fit the present stone. If the monks did indeed hide the real stone, they hid it well. No other stone fitting its description has ever been found, although rumors are occasionally heard of Knights Templar claiming to have the original stone in their possession, which is exactly what I discovered even though I had never been told such rumours previous to that time, not by anybody.The plot thickens like Scottish porridge on a freezing winter morn..It is generally true that anywhere that you discover a valid treasure story, whether it be the ark of the covenant or the stone of destiny you will undoubtedly find the knights templar involved. In much the same way if you get behind any major agitation of small countries in the last 50 years you will definitely find traces of the CIA.

Their original ‘temple’ from which we get the term templar was of course very likely to have been Egyptian in origin . Why is that? It was Solomon's temple of course that they venerated and as we have already considered through name changing in the Bible there is the difficult to resolve issue of a very famous king (0nly in the Bible) who unfortunately never was as far as history is concerned. There really is no historical proof, not even a mention of an Israelite King called Solomon. But an Egyptian with a different name? He would know a great deal more about building a great temple since Egypt is original home of many gigantic stone temples like Karnak for example in Thebes.

Back to Europe: In 1328 at the peace talks between the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England, Edward III is said to have agreed to return the captured Stone to Scotland. However, this did not form part of the Treaty of Northampton and so the Stone was to remain in England for another six centuries. In the long course of time James VI of Scotland came to the English throne as James I of England but the stone still remained in London. For the next century, the Stuart Kings and Queens of Scotland once again sat on the stone but only at their coronation as Kings and Queens of England and Scotland performed in London. Since the Act of Union of 1707, the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey has applied to the whole of Great Britain so actually the stone may well be said to have returned to its ancient use.

In 1996 the British Government decided that the Stone should be kept in Scotland when not in use at coronations. Finally on November 15, 1996 after Tony Blair announced the semi independence of Scotland (called devolution) andit was finally returned to Scotland and transported to Edinburgh Castle where it still remains. Or does it? An agreement has been made to transport the stone to Westminster Abbey when it is required there for future coronation ceremonies. So a fake stone is used to enthrone our monrachs. No wonder the monarchy is going down the drain! Fake kings and queens sit on a fake stone. It is all a fake! But I knew that anyway....

This stealing of the real stone of destiny is highly symbolic of many things. It shows that people who want power understand the importance of ancient myths and objects associated with them. Sacred talismans of the sacred bloodline exert a profound influence on the collective unconscious of the poor saps who believe in the so calle divine rights of people who end up being silly humans like the rest of us, getting divorced and being petty, small and mean a lot of the time.Just as the US clearly stole many priceless artifacts from Iraqi museums in Baghdad through the very powerful Carlysle Group after the invasion, so the English stole a power object from its rightful owners in order to legitimatize their claim to authority. But why did the templars hide the stone in a poor kirk? They have a strong belief it seems in keeping the real stone out of the hands of a usurped monarchy who claim to be the king and queen of the land, rather than of the people. The Queen of Britain, not the Britons. She owns more real estate than any other woman on Earth, including vast areas of 'crown land' in Canada. Think about that. Is that a queen of the people? No wonder they made a movie about her. She is anomaly of nature so far removed from the people she might as well be an alien anthropolgist. The templars want to maintain the so called grail code which simply understands that only people with instrinsic values of real love to their fellow humans and an ability to die for that love, have any place sitting on any stone of destiny, real or false.

So an ancient Egyptian ceremony which is based on the idea that only blood related heirs become successive monarchs through sitting on a stone is still part of modern British society yet almost nobody knows this story I have shared. It is simply a quaint old ‘stone of destiny’ to most people. But my view is that the ancient Egyptian message, the heretical and rather more realistic one is returning at last. The destiny of that stone will be fulfilled through the correct interpretation of the spiritual message that has existed for thousands of years. It is a message of great importance because it will free our minds from the dogma of established, organizational religion in every corner of the globe. Whether you are a Christian or Jew, Muslim or a Buddhist or a modern day non-believer is not the point I am making here. Dogma is rapidly being eroded in all fields whether religious, political or historical. Dogma is what keeps us in chains and prevents us from seeing a totally new and evolved possibility for our future. Dogma, interestingly is in English spelled with DOG and symbolically thus keeps us chained to an unseen master who ends up living in our minds.

Whether we like it or not religion and politics set the course for our future on Earth right now. So it is our 'grail' responsibility to see how necessary it is to transcend both these systems of powerful psychological manipulation. Only then will we have the necessary intelligence to face our highly stressful future on Earth. This information is not about criticizing religion at all, this is about pointing out our almost total lack of awareness just when we need to be most aware. We absolutely must become aware that history is based on versions of events that really happened, so the more accurate versions we are also aware of, the better. The literal interpretation of the Bible clearly controls the policy of the current Bush regime. Meetings at the White House are often preceded by fundamental Christian Bible study and prayer ceremonies and that Bible used is as we now know one version, and a very biased one if I may suggest, of really incredible events that involved some of the greatest magicians, scientists and thinkers of any age. They began as the so called instant civilization of the Sumerians and then flowered into the genius of the Egyptians. All roads lead to Egypt.

The pilgrimage to Iona and thus my birth country of Scotland has led to a very deep rabbit hole. In the labyrinthine world of the pejoratively coined 'alternative history' movement, so alive and viable these days thanks to cross cultural research and the internet, it is close to impossible to know what exactly happened, when or where despite the apparent bedrock certainty of archaeologists. Archaeologists are humans too with a massive trove of built in mental assumptions that severely limit the images of the past and thus potentially impinge upon the future. A good example is that Egyptians could not have built the pyramids or sphinx previous to five thousand years ago. Why not? And we must not forget that the huge influence of European 'historians' like the infamous Italian Scaligeri, father of all history, who gave us most of what we know as a chronology of 'ancient' times has been largely shown (by an extremely erudite member of the Russian Academy of Science, Anatoly T. Fomenko to be Catholic-centric propaganda generated intentionally from the tiny collection of manuscripts available in the16th century. In short, previous to that we had no 'world history' at all, anywhere on Earth. we had local legends and stories that later, European-centric intellectuals developed with relish with Greece and Rome at the centre of all. So as a Scottish pilgrim I am very happy to hear that my great, great, great and so on grandpa may well have been an EgyptoIsraeliCeltic pilgrim priest who believed in the concept of what can only be called the Great Spirit. And it went way further than that, the pilgrimage went beyond the gates of the seen and onwards to the place where your heart has been finally weighed (to ascertain your true state after a life on Earth)and Anubis guides you to the place where the starshine never stops. Now that is a place fit for kings.

Warrior monks

2008-07-11T17:58:00.001-07:00

...for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

From the declaration of Arbroath

I am standing on top of a church. It is 1973 and the tall Ethiopian women walk past me with their copious jewelry adorning arms, legs and head. I have not fallen sick yet and have no idea about the history of these incredible structures, churches literally hewn out of the rock itself, or even that these Coptic Christians have the slightest connection with the land of my birth and the Celtic monks of Iona. I do not yet know that this church may be strongly connected to a group of medieval knights who helped build them as part of their plan to recover the most precious object in the world, the ultimate treasure, the ark of the covenant. Many years later I would become friends with a man who would write the following about that ark:

"The greatest treasure of all, however, was saved: moved out of Axum by the priests only days before that city was burnt in 1535, the Ark had been taken to one of the many island-monasteries on Lake Tana. there it was kept in safety until long after Gragn's death. Then, in the mid 1600's, Emperor Fasilidas (described by Bruce as 'the greatest king that ever sat upon the Abyssinian throne') built a new cathedral of Saint Mary of Zion over the gutted ruins of the old - and there, with due ceremony, the sacred relic was at last re-installed in all its former glory."

Graham Hancock is here describing places that were all within a day's travel of where I now stand, a young traveler irresistibly drawn here by an invisible magic that shows first and tells later. It shows me that many of our pilgrimages on Earth are actually guided by an unseen spirit and it is often only after an entire lifetime has been lived that we recognize the presence of an astonishing intelligence moving through the circumstances of our lives. I had no books like Hancock's The Sign and The Seal to guide me and had absolutely no interest in Christianity at all. If anything at this point I was dedicated to Zen and Sufi paradigms, both of which had a great emphasis on a direct experience of God that would leave you in no doubt at all that your existence has a spiritual foundation.The year after this near fatal journey in Africa (I was very close to dying I now realise in that mud hut, thus the powerful out of body experience of complete exhiliration even as the body shivered spastically below) I would make it to Japan and start zen training and the Sufi love has never really left.

I have always had an unusually strong connection with an archetypal figure that is the warrior monk, best exemplified in the Knights Templar perhaps, but actually it is there in so many other traditions. Without warriors, the religions which the monks adhered to would never have lasted and thus we can imagine how a Janus like face, with one side pointed towards the inner world, the monk, and one side pointed towards the enemies, best expresses that archetype. Even the very pacifistic Buddhists had their warrior monks on Mt. Hie in Kyoto where I lived for many years, and in nearby China the Shaolin monks were of course highly expert martial artists who meditated a lot. The Muslims had the assassins, who when being prepared for deadly duty would use hashish to give them a taste of the heaven to come complete with an excess of willing virgins.

If the warrior is about action, literally the doing of powerful deeds to protect a spiritual tradition and perhaps to deepen it, then the monk is about being, focused in the tranquil depths of a spirit out of which such action must spring if it is to be effective. Naturally women may well scoff at such an elaborate system and rightfully so. None of the shamanic traditions I have encountered have warrior monks because the shamans themselves have nothing to protect and those aboriginal, earth friendly societies which produce shamans are definitely more feminine in nature. Living in the jungle in harmony with the environment the sensation of control is anathema to any sane shaman. It is only now as oil companies descend upon the Amazon with a ferocious greed that the shamans are using bows and arrows not for hunting but for warning. So Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and of course Judaism all have their warrior monk archetypes and it is those archetypes that still run the world whether you like it or not. The modern American military machine is soundly connected to Bible ceremonies in the White House and most of the generals consider themselves good Christians no doubt.It is my contention that the age of warrior monks not only is coming to a close, it must. Killing in the name of God simply is not a useful evolutionary concept when the stakes for humanity are so high.

But again let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater as we actually owe a lot to previous warrior monk incarnations. In their day, they were necessary. The true warrior is after all really principally interested in overcoming one opponent, himself. The same can be said of the monk. He must quench all desire save that for the sacred. The intention of both is to produce a grounded and aware human being who is capable of taking actions that may endanger life i.e. taking ultimate risks. We do need people like that now because life will inevitably get much riskier on Earth as our complex and oil addicted cultures all hit the wall. But if we are to look for a synthesis of the warrior-monk's best qualities I believe we can find a truly peaceful co-existence in the archetypical pilgrim. The true pilgrim must have the strength and endurance of a warrior and the internal attitude of a monk in order to keep pushing forward no matter what the obstacle, against even death itself. But back to Lalibela..

James Bruce (December 14, 1730 – April 27, 1794) was a Scottish traveller and travel writer who spent more than a dozen years in North Africa and Ethiopia, where he traced the origins of the Blue Nile. According to Andrew Collins, "James Bruce was a member of the Canongate Kilwinning No. 2 lodge of Edinburgh, known to be one of the oldest in Scotland, with side-orders and mystical teachings entrenched in Judaeo-Christian myth and ritual."

Well strangely enough I was in Kilwinning looking at gravestones many years later. I was doing research on the freemasons at Rosslyn, only a thirty minute drive from this location of the first freemason lodge in Scotland, and indeed in the world. Though the modern Lions Club or Rotary Club level of social freemasons may insist it all began in England in the 18th century there is simply far too much written in stone evidence to the contrary. The Scotish rite freemasonry upon which the United States of America was solidly created by Washington et al, (all Scottish rite trained masons) goes back inevitably to the Knights Templar and to this part of Scotland. And contary to a plethora of poorly researched and sensationalist Japanese writers the world is not controlled by freemasons who all help each other get jobs. I know a 32 degree British mason living in Japan who has been out of work for a long time despite being a member of the Tokyo lodge under Tokyo Tower.

Basically, modern masons are a tiny shadow of the once great warrior monks who forged the system of knowledge transmission that was their aim. I am by no means suggesting that just like every other organization, just like the US governement or the Japanese for that matter that they did not have their problems. But it is high time we gave up infantile stories about freemasons controlling the world. Modern America may be trying to do the same under its blithe banner of democracy but even with hundreds of times more powerful tools like computers they can barely control a patheticically foiled attempt to control the oil fields of Iraq. No one group can alone control the world. The fact is that hundreds of groups are always in competition to do just that and it aways has and always will be impossible no matter how much you supposedly control the money. Life is just too unpredictable. As our national poet Burns said so poignantly the best laid schemes O' mice an men gang aft aglay, meaning that even our best laid plans go awry, then as now.

The unfortunate love affair that some sections of Japanese conspiracy theorists have with the idea that the Jews control the world is surely the height of such absurdity. How come they cannot even control the dirt poor Palestinians who lob home made rockets at them from Gaza? These Jews control the world?? Think again. Life is always far more complex even though conspiracies have always, and will always exist. I have always used conspiracy theory in my lecture work as a way of making people think outside the box.

My birth name is John Craig, a fairly comon name in Scotland it is true, but I was later to find a statue in the Kilwinning graveyard, full of templar crosses and thus of dead templars, of a charitable man who had created an orphanage in the area. His name? John Craig..but remember I do not believe in reincarnation!

Some historical researchers believe that much of the motivation behind James Bruce's epic travels in Ethiopia centred around his desire to recover sacred objects connected with Solomon's Temple. As a leading Freemason, Bruce may have also been interested in verifying legends associating the medieval Knights Templar with old Christian churches in Ethiopia. Like this one I was standing on at Lalibela, completely and blissfully unaware. Bruce had a plan, whereas I was imply drifting South to Cape Town and inevitably had to cross Abyssinia, or what is now Ethiopia.

Bruce was particularly interested in obtaining examples of Ethiopian books, such as the "Kebra Nagast" and the "Book of Enoch," both of which were written in Ge'ez, the classical language of Ethiopia. According to Hancock, Bruce began studying this obscure language as early as 1759. In going to remote Ethiopia, Bruce risked numberless dangers and sufferings, purportedly just in order to discover the source of the Nile.

What Bruce did find, though the ark evaded his grasp as it had his warrior monk brother masons before him, was a treasure in writing. It was written in Ethiopian from a time far back in their history when the falasha, the black Jews had been recipients of it from their own Jewish brethren who travelled out of Israel to establish a new Jerusalem in Ethiopia. Written in it are many truly strange passages dealing with the astronomy of our solar system and a shadowy group of people called 'The Watchers'.

Prior to the eighteenth century, scholars had believed the Book of Enoch to be irretrievably lost. It was originally composed long before the birth of Christ, and was considered to be one of the most important pieces of Jewish mystical literature, it was only known from fragments and from references to it in other texts. James Bruce changed all this by procuring several copies of the missing work during his stay in Ethiopia. These were the first complete editions of the Book of Enoch ever to be seen in Europe.

Graham Hancock, from the Sign and the Seal

Hancock believes, as I do, that the Templars had to know the possibility of the Ark being in Ethiopia. If there was even a slight chance it was there they would have used all their knowledge and financial clout to fully investigate that possibility and try to get it for themselves. Part of that long quest was to slowly win the friendship of the local people by building churches that only they had the architectural skill to literally carve out of the mountain face. And if the ark is still in Ethiopia, as Hancock has made a really excellent case for in his landmark book, then that country, though ravaged with disease and civil war still now as it was when I was there is surely important. Hancock and I were later to create a book together and a DVD entitled, Secrets of the Lost Ark. Another synchronicity here worth noting is that Hancock was born in Edinburgh, just north of the templars original base at Rosslyn. Neither Hancock nor I has ever been a freemason nor ever will. They have no secrets to teach us, in fact I think the reverse might be closer to the truth in all honesty. Modern day masons are so obsessed with a history that is in no way secret in the slightest anymore, and thus their entire system of secret handshakes and silly initiations is doomed to enter the dust bin of history. Enough said then, about the rulers of the world!

As I drove from Edinburgh to Oban on my way to Iona I passed the impressive Wallace Monument on my left, and saw on my right the medieval fortress of Stirling Castle. In there Mel Gibson was to be greatly honoured by the community for his part in showing the world how Wallace had created a new Scotland and a new king of Scots. Not king of Scotland, not of the country, but of the people. This egalitarian approach to kingship where the people decide who shall be king, not the divine right rule any more, was to deeply influence the creating of a republic across the sea hundreds of years later. The declaration of Arbroath quoted above was a model for the declaration of US independence from Britain and is still considered one of the greatest documents ever written by man.

All this was made possible by warrior monks like William Wallace (Braveheart) and his successor Robert the Bruce. Bruce was himself a man intimately connected to the templars of his time and may well be a relative of the man who discovered in Ethiopia a book of the Bible later considered too risky to be included in the Old Testament. It may seem very noble to fight in the name of a God but neither Buddha nor Jesus ever said one word about adopting such tactics as a way of life. The Bible and the Koran are great books no doubt, but to attempt to live by them in the 21st century when the warrior monk has become the Pentagon and the CIA is clearly not an intelligent option any more. Not for humanity. Not for evolution. Just say, NO!

Everything has been connected in my life. And in yours too, whether you see it or not, or believe it or not. There are absolutely no coincidences and no mistakes. Fighting for freedom must now involve a non-violent approach, one that I believe is best expressed in the perennial philosophy of the archetypal pilgrim. The warrior monk must give way to the Earth Pilgrim if we are to survive the next few years on the planet of the apes.

Explorers at the edge of independence

2008-07-10T23:32:00.000-07:00

If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don't want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.

David Livingstone

Iona tends to attract the rugged individualist that Scotland is archetypically full of. Well, was full of. The nanny welfare state of the 20th century has pretty much driven that spirit completely out of this world by providing people with the ludicrous idea that a life guaranteed by the state is a good life. Ask that to the people of the most successful nanny state in the world, in Sweden, where you can work 35 hours a week for a part of your life and live the rest completely guaranteed by the government. The suicide rate is astronomical. I am reminded that, man does not live by bread alone...

Actually most of the truly unique individuals from my country of birth, well known for their contributions to science, exploration or art did not stay long in it. The dour weather and the bleak landscape drove many away in search of better times as well of course as lack of money. Great Britain was great because it expected people to carve out their own lives in the great 19th century, when I should have been born. When I checked in at the reincarnation office I must have been drunk, because I got the century of my rebirth completely wrong. Actually I have never thought reincarnation a very smart idea at all. It may seem easy to believe to many but for me it is just a lame idea, even if the Druids did take it seriously. To be born into a world of crazed shoppers in small percentage, balanced by starving millions scraping the Earth who squat under luxury aircraft high above in which wealthy humans complain about the wine and watch movies has always struck me as, well, insane. As a pilgrim on the road it always used to get to me that even in dirt poor communities in Mexico for example, massive trucks transporting Coca Cola drove into villages where people could barely get by and unload their sugar drink on unsuspicious locals. They would all soon get addicted..

One day in a far off land I saw the humerus of a man who had turned that absurd economic equation on its head. He had left wealthy Great Britain and stayed in dirt poor villages most of his life, eventually dying in one. He too saw the rampant injustice of an insane world but was born in the right century, in 1813 actually. In those days slaves were still a very big part of the world's economic equation. And they came mostly from Africa-where I was looking at the gnawed arm bone of David Livingstone in a museum in a town named after him, in Zambia. Standing there with only a small bag as my total possessions at the age of 21 I read the story displayed under the glass case in which his obviously damaged upper arm bone hung, a terrible reminder that the work of a missionary can come with great cost.

It was at Mabotsa that Livingstone had his famous encounter with the lion. Lions were numerous in this locality, and the villagers were terrified because, as they said, "The lion, the lord of the night, kills our cattle and sheep even in the daytime." Livingstone knew that if he could kill one of the lions, the others would flee. So, taking his gun and telling the people to bring their spears, he led the villagers on a lion hunt in which he almost lost his life. Seeing an enormous lion behind a bush, he aimed and fired both barrels. While he was reloading, the lion suddenly sprang toward him. He says of this attack, "The lion caught me by the shoulder and we both came to the ground together. Growling horribly, he shook me as a terrier dog does a rat." Seeing several natives approaching to attack him, the lion sprang upon two of them, biting one in the thigh and the other in the shoulder. But at that moment the bullets the great beast had received took effect and he fell dead. Livingstone had eleven tooth marks as permanent scars and the bone at the top of his left arm was crunched into splinters. The imperfect setting of this bone produced a stiff arm and caused much suffering the rest of his life.

Though I was a penniless pilgrim on my way from Cairo to Capetown, and now in the fifth month of my journey, the world I was born into had produced less and less men like Livingstone and more and more like George Bush, i.e. cowards who pontificate about freedom and courage but who hide behind speech writers and wealthy patrons from Texas who buy elections. How many truly great men have been born in my troubled generation? One. And he was from Africa. Nelson Mandela, who had 400,000 people recently attend his 90th birthday in London. Now I wonder why they all showed up? The world's most bankable movie star, another black guy called Will Smith, was by Nelson's side because he knew that even if your movies sell out every independence day in the US, it is no substitute for having a real character.

The reason I was in Africa in the first place was that I had realised at the age of three (really!) that I had been born a hundred years too late and that all the great adventures had already been accomplished, all the lost worlds already discovered, and all the best stories already told. It is something like being offered sex by a woman who has just been in bed with all of your friends. Why bother? I was a good deal more jaded as a young man then in 1973 than I am now, because at that tender age of 20 when I set out to conquer Africa without money I still did not know that the outside world is not what matters at all. It is the invisible world of the human soul that does. Change that and everything changes..

David Livingstone (19 March 1813 – 1 May 1873) was a Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and explorer in central Africa. He was the first European to see Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls), to which he gave the English name in honour of his monarch, Queen Victoria. He is the subject of the meeting with H. M. Stanley, which gave rise to the popular quotation, "Dr Livingstone, I presume?"

I pulled into Livingstone after I had left my trusty Indian shawl draped over a piece of string tied between two trees. Behind those trees was a constant roar and a huge cloud of vapour hanging in the sky because I had decided to camp right next to the spot where the Zambezi river hurtled downwards at Victoria falls. I figured that nobody would steal something so slight as that shawl and in a location a little too close to the edge for comfort. Amazingly, unlike Niagara falls for example, there are no walls or barriers at Victoria falls so you could easily fall over the falls. That was what attracted my hungry young soul. I wanted to sleep listening to that roar and to actually feel the earth tremble inside my makeshift tent.

It was lonely there for sure but then I was used to the loneliness by now having slept in the bush alone for very many of the nights I had been walking and hitchhiking from Egypt where I had stared at the sphinx for hours, Sudan (Oh Darfur! The shame of humanity as the nanny world government, the UN and all the kings men are powerless to save women and children from daily rape and murder!), Ethiopia, where I had an epiphany under duress of near death with Typhus, Kenya, where a black beauty and her five year old son had slept with me on the ground surrounded by hyenas barking that hysterical laugh of theirs, (thankfully her son Omundi went to sleep early that night...) Tanzania, where driving the land rover of a man injured in an attack with a steel pipe to his head and who needed me to help him continue South through safari parks, where hitting elephants or scared running giraffes was the main danger on the road, into a jail in Malawi where I was held for being a suspicious foreigner on the day the president came through the town I was innocently walking through, into no man's land of three hundred yards between Malawi and Zambia having been deported by one and refused, of course by the other, and now finally after many explanations and interrogations and feeling pretty hungry I walked into Livingstone to sell a French Bible somebody had given me.

A French Bible in Zambia? I might as well try to sell bikinis to Islamic fundamentalist women in Yemen! But I had to try, and so I used my wits as usual and headed for a bookstore.

African women have astonishingly beautiful teeth. I did not have a toothbrush in my little bag because I used the local equivalent, the branch of a particular tree that when chewed at its end becomes an excellent tooth whitener too. She looked at the unkempt and skinny Scotsman ask her sheepishly if the shop might buy this Bible. I explained I had no money and needed to eat. She told her assistant to look after the shop and immediately took me to the local market where she bought me a brown bag full of food and gave me back my French Bible. At first she had thought about taking me home to cook me dinner but I guess it was just too risky. I would definitely have loved to go home with that black beauty. Instead I ate by the roaring falls with a candle to see by, alone but happy at least that I was exercising my independent spirit in the best way I could figure out at that age. In Ethiopia I had been inspired by the tales of another great Victorian, Sir Richard Francis Burton who had actually discovered the source of the Blue Nile that Livingstone was also looking for. I had been deeply fascinated with the peculiar idea of entering a Coptic Christian Monastery on the island in Lake Tana. Strange isn't it? At that time I did not know that the Copts, those Egyptians who had embraced Christianity from Egypt and Ethiopia were to become a huge historical influence on both the Celtic christians who ended up in Iona, as well as a much more economically powerful and revolutionary group of men called the Knights Templar. But that is another story.

Druid pilgrims

2008-07-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

With regard to their actual course of studies, the main object of all education is, in their opinion, to imbue their scholars with a firm belief in the indestructability of the human soul, which, according to their belief, merely passes at death from one tenement to another; for by such doctrine alone, they say, which robs death of all its terrors, can the highest form of human courage be developed. Subsidiary to the teachings of this main principle, they hold various lectures and discussions on astronomy, on the extent and geographical distribution of the globe, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion.

Julius Caesar on the Druids

At Aberdeen grammar school, that ancient (13th century founding) centre of learning I unwillingly walked to every day in my late teens they taught us about everything except ourselves. There we were in a celtic land and all they wanted to talk about were the Greeks and the Romans. This tells us that the Greek/Roman publicity engine worked a lot better than the Celtic. After all a lot of our early knowledge was never written down, not because we were stupid but because we knew the danger of freezing ideas in writing. We sang, danced and prayed our beliefs to the four winds, the mountains and the stars. The word druid never came up once in my entire school career! And yet in their time the Druids were the most learned and incredibly sophisticated people in all of Europe. Let's see what the magic of the computer age, Wikipedia, has to say about them to a modern enquirer.

A druid was a member of the priestly and learned class in the ancient Celtic societies of Western Europe, Britain and Ireland. They were suppressed by the Roman government and, later, the arrival of Christianity. Druids combined the duties of priest, arbitrator, healer, scholar, and magistrate.

Wow! So just consider that if the druids had not been suppressed we might still have people who could not only assist you with psychosomatic diseases but could also be your lawyer, even judge, and perhaps give you spiritual advice and teach you more about the unseen energies of nature and the multidimensions. Now in the 21st century you need a doctor, a lawyer, a psychologist, a judge and a priest! That is why I used the word sophisticated. You might like the word holistic better. If you are having legal problems it will affect your mind and thus your body will it not? Anybody who has been through a long court case will agree with that. A priest cannot help you much if your body is so sick that only a change of diet and herbal remedies will help. Go ask a Druid! As you can see from the title image they still exist and gather regularly at Stonehenge to celebrate.

Over the years what little information I got about them suggested a primitive group of shamans living close to nature. Nothing could be further from the truth:

From what little we know of late druidic practices, it appears deeply traditional and conservative, in the sense that druids were conserving repositories of culture and lore for their communities. It is impossible now to judge whether this continuity had deep historical roots and originated in the social transformations of the late La Tène culture, or whether there had been a discontinuity and then a religious innovation.

Druidic lore consisted of a large number of verses learned by heart, and Caesar remarked that it could take up to twenty years to complete the course of study. There was a very advanced druidic teaching centre on Anglesey , an island off the northwest coast of Wales. Druids are said to have journeyed there from all over Europe to learn their secrets, but what was taught there, or at other centres, is conjecture.

Actually there have been several serious scholars of Druidism and since I was in Iona on my pilgrimage I needed to find out more about its peculiar energy. I had heard from a Scots freemason when studying at Rosslyn chapel with a Japanese group that his friend was an RAF pilot. He had told the mason that every time they flew over Iona the compass would completely spin around and be useless. That suggests that the island itself had unusual geomagnetic properties. Since the druids were very aware of Earth energies it would be logical to assume that they knew about Iona, long before Columba went there with his pilgrim monks in the sixth century. It turns out that the actual Gaelic name of the island (Innisnam Druidbneach) had been Druid's Isle! Though I had never taken the boat from Iona to the world famous Fingal's cave on the adjoining island of staffa I had always felt a deep attraction. The howling gales of January had thwarted my attempt to go there by boat during this pilgrimage, in fact I could not even leave the harbour of Iona. I found some interesting information though:

There is a remarkable geological difference on Iona from the Island of Mull, a mere two miles across the Iona Sound. I was astonished to learn that the Island of Iona is a rare upthrust of one of the oldest rock formation on earth. The 2900 million year old Lewisian granitic Gneiss dominates three quarters of the island.(The earth is approximated at 4,400 million years old). Interestingly it does not appear on the Island of Mull, which is dominated by a relatively young, 300 million-year-old pink granite formation. This is in part an explanation for the differentiating vibration that led both Druids and St Columba to recognize Iona (and not Mull), as a sacred place for worship.

Of course I have always been aware of such geophysical connections to pilgrimage sites around the world. You definitely feel different in such places. The local energy seems highly conducive to connecting with deeper levels of oneself and the universe. I also knew that many famous European churches were build on top of sacred sites the Druids had created as places of worship. In South America that was easily recognizable at the Coricancha temple of the sun in Cusco which is now a massive church. Pilgrims have always instinctively known this on their routes across the world and so though the names of the belief systems may change, the essential qualities of sacred zones can easily be perceived whether you believe in the current religion or not. Later you will read a world authority on sacred places, Martin Gray, give us his opinion on this very important point. Just as you need a socket to access electricity in a room (you cannot plug in just anywhere) you need a specific combination of energies at a sacred site to merit creating a structure there whether it is Stonehenge or a cathedral or a shrine. Though many people may have heard Mendelsson's haunting music almost all of us are ignorant of the following aspects of the place his most famous composition is named after. The Druids occupied Iona and used nearby Staffa Island (known for its massive crystallized pillars of hexagonal basalt) as a point of mystical initiation rites for high priests. As I researched the magnetic anomaly angle that could explain the lure this island had for me I discovered the following description at www.earth-keeper.com:

Staffa Island is in itself a unique and very powerful energy center. Staffa is a temple, a pulsing generator of white crystalline energy, charging all around it. Staffa energizes and protects Iona, and is a key benefactor of Iona's vibrational quality. The varying lengths of hexagonal crystalline basalt pillars are like musically tuned windpipes on a massive organ creating a pure symphonic frequency, (in concert with all 7 chakras). Its generated energy is musical, crystalline, and penetrating. It energizes and effects the area like an enormous Tibetan bell. It charges and vitalizes the sea. A visit to Iona, by any seeker, requires a visit to Staffa, and especially Fingals cave.

I had the marvelous opportunity to spend 6 hours alone on Staffa Island, half of which was in Fingals cave. Fingals Cave on Staffa was the inspiration for German composer Mendelsson's ' Hebrides Overture-Fingals Cave'. It is appropriate that honour was paid to the generator island in musical homage. Sir Walter Scott referred to the crystalline cave as " A naturally adorned cathedral where one touches the spirit of God". Jules Verne visited the island and was equally inspired to write of Fingals Cave in his book "The Green Ray".

Fingals is a pillared sea cave on Staffa, running 227 feet in length, approximately 75 feet wide with a tapered roof, and curved pipe pillars extending 100 feet high. Its symmetry is stunning, and remarkably shaped liked inside of a great cathedral, complete with buttresses. The Druids only entered Fingals Cave for initiate rites of the highest order.

What I always feel there as at other sites with similar properties is the strong physical sense of connecting to heaven and Earth, and the result is simply a deep peace. It is also a feeling of being home. Pilgrims from all over the world come to Iona including a Scottish man I had met in Canada. He had stayed for a month on the island and had received huge amounts of intuitive inspiration while there. He had told me that many years before he had visited the island and had got the inspiration to take his entire family from Canada to Israel and to not take any money! With three children and a wife that would seem to be totally insane. Yet he did it. He believed so much in the pilgrim message of being completely free of material concerns that he actually found passage on a boat to Lebanon and then went on to Jerusalem with his entire family. Miracles happened almost daily for him as well as the most severe tests of faith that such miracles always seem to require.

This one island, this little stone in the massive pond of the Atlantic Ocean at the edge of Scotland may be almost unknown in Japan today. However as we have seen the Scots kings are buried here for a good reason and Columba settled here for very specific purposes. By beginning my film pilgrimage here I was clearly intending to fill myself with the very special energy this island obviously contains, not just as a superstition or a quaint legend, but as a living reality that anybody with an open heart can discover. In the harsh modern world of the United Kingdom, when people have all but forgotten this magical world of the druids, places like Iona are an oasis for the weary pilgrim. Though I had little to eat there, knew nobody on the island and had the constant company of a roaring gale in my ear, this time on Iona was a preparation for the long road ahead.

The Druids later became the Culdees after Christianity was blended with their beliefs but unlike the Roman Catholic version of the belief, the earlier Celtic Christian one brought via Ireland from the desert fathers was always much more connected to nature, to the sea and sky. Never forgot that Egypt was the place we must all look back to when we remember who we really are. For them, the early Celtic Christians of this forboding landscape the church was never an authority symbol of the great power centre in Rome but much more like the druids themselves i.e. a place for healing, for understanding and for learning to occur. Rather than having leader priests and popes the Celtic spirit has always enjoyed the understanding that we are all the same tribe or clan, that you are my brother and you are my sister.

Scota and the Egypt connection

2008-07-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

From various writings of ancient chroniclers we deduce that the nation of the Scots is of ancient stock, taking its first beginning from the Greeks and those of the Egyptians

Walter Bower, Scotichronicon

Egyptian tycoon Mohamed al Fayed, owner of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge, London is also the bereaved father of Dodi, Princess Diana's companion in their fatal 1997 car crash. I have visited this amazing department store on several occasions during trips to Ireland and Scotland via London with my wife, and can attest to the fact that though I cannot stand being in department stores, this one is so rich in colours and smells from the exotic food and coffees from around the world that it was worth it just to wait for her as she shopped. Mr. Fayed, being a very prominent UK resident as well as being the chief bane of the inquest enquiry surrounding Diana's death (he believes MI6 killed her under orders from Prince Philip) has listed his ten favorite books on the Manchester Guardian’s website. One of them is The Scotichronicon: A History Book for Scots, described simply as Scotland’s debt to Egypt revealed at last. What did he say there? That Scotland owes a debt to Egypt? As I was to discover, this enigmatic statement's meaning would take me very deep into a historical quandary of literally Biblical proportions. As a Scot I am of course interested in the history of our ancient land but what I am going to share with you here might solve the riddle of why a country once called Caledonia and Alba should end up being called the land of Scots, or Scotland. As I mentioned in the introduction to this section of Earth Pilgrims I am a passport holder of Ireland and the UK, of which Scotland is a part so it is in my interest to know what energetic patterns exist behind the two countries so centrally important to my life. Is it a total coincidence that ancient Egypt has fascinated me all my life and in particular its veneration above all else of the star called Sirius?

Being an expert in taking people on adventure journeys that would also allow them the opportunity of being involved in my research, I was always on the look out for interesting places that would connect with my work. In Scotland I had led people to Orkney, to the Ring of Brodgar which is the largest monolithic stone circle in Scotland. There in midsummer, where you could read a newspaper at midnight, I had found another clue to megalithic culture in the UK. There could be no doubt that the 'primitive' peoples of Britain had very sophisticated knowledge of stellar positions, especially of course solar knowledge.

Before the Da Vinci Code fever had even started I was a regular visitor to the movie's climax location at Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh in the 90's. I had also held seminars in and around a structure older than the pyramids, at Newgrange north of Dublin in Ireland. Reckoned to be 6000 years old, its central chamber is filled with a golden light at the Winter solstice (if the dense Irish clouds have broken!) and thus displays its chief function as a solar calendar in stone. Nearby Newgrange is a place central to both Ireland and Scotland's history. Though many Scottish kings found their last resting place in Iona, a community we now know was developed by an Irish monk's faith and royal lineage (Columba could have been a king of Ireland) the burial mounds at Tara have always been central to royalty in Ireland. Yes, royalty. What we will discover is that the entire system of kingship in Ireland, stretching back many millenia, is intimately related to the pharaohs of Egypt. Right down to the clothes, the language and the form of the ceremonies themselves...

I had written about the probable connection between ancient Egyptian religion and Christianity in my book Christ and the Templars but for many people in modern Japan this is not a top priority subject. They often mistakenly reduce everything concerning Christ to a rather peculiar religion that has almost no historical relationship with Japan. However that is to miss an important point. If indeed Egypt and the modern world share connections that are profoundly spiritual in nature (let us remember always that religion is basically a formalization of concepts and rules of behaviour that sprang from real and direct spiritual experiences) then as Earth Pilgrims we really need to know what they knew now, in our darkest hour. And may I respectfully and playfully suggest to the reader at this point that if you do not see that darkness currently encroaching all around you, then perhaps the rose tinted glasses you are wearing need replacing. We need to know what those people knew and how they communicated that knowledge over time and space. In short history has to start having real and effective meaning if it is to be of any use to us at all in our future pilgrimage as a species.

Scotland is a key player in world affairs since it has indisputably produced amongst other things, the majority of invention to physically power the industrial revolution and thus your modern lifestyle as well as philosophically produce the key concepts of freedom and democracy through Scottish masonic influence on the founding fathers of the US. So if there is a connection between ancient Egypt, Ireland and Scotland it is in our interests to know about it. That is true even if it means facing the assault of established historians who will claim that every small country likes to invent myths linking it to a famous ancient culture. If these following nuggets of information are mere myths, then we have a coincidence of improbabilities that is statistically frightening in its implications in my humble opinion. Let's see.

In my research I always try to find out who has done the most work in any particular field of my interest and then I contact that person directly. It is an astonishingly simple way to get really in depth information. In Japan people go through very long and laborious systems of introduction when they want to meet someone well known and this method often fails to deliver when the person is not Japanese. What I mean is that there is no sense of obligation involved for non-Japanese and thus the individual in question might very well not 'play ball' even if you end up meeting. One of my strange talents is to know how to connect with people at any level of society. No doubt this is the result of being a traveler all my life and also being a Scot who abhors hierarchies of any form. That is why my role model is Jesus. He destroyed all hierarchies in his teachings. He bowed to no man. He bowed to all men. I have therefore no sense of either superiority or inferiority which is the sense that Japanese hierarchy is built on. It works in Japan. No blame.

So I wanted to find a well researched expert in the alleged link between ancient Egypt and Ireland. Ralph Ellis was the name I came up with and sure enough though he is an airline pilot by profession, his extensive knowledge of ancient languages, including hieroglyphic Egyptian is most impressive. Unlike trained historians and archaeologists who must stay within very fixed and often narrow tunnels of enquiry dictated by their university or organization, the independent researcher is often just interested in finding out the truth. So I contacted him by email and we began a short correspondence and soon realised what a small world we live in. Both he and I had recently been communicating with Simcha Jacobovici, the director of the Jesus tomb documentary. Previous to Ralph Ellis I had come across one other man, Ahmed Osman whose book 'Out of Egypt' had deeply shocked many. His strong contention was, like that of Ellis, that not only was Christianity born in Egypt but that the Israelites were themselves from Egyptian stock. And even Sigmund Freud had spent many years studying the life of Moses and had concluded that Moses was himself an Egyptian and very possibly the famous Akhenaten himself under an assumed new name after the Exodus. What? If there is even a 20% chance that is true then the entire history of the Jews and the Christians is a whole new 'ball of wax'. But Ellis went a step further in connecting the Egyptians, whose Jewish progeny became the Christians who moved across Europe via the Roman Church to Britain, with another route to Europe via Ireland. So I read his thesis on Scota entitled, Scota, Egyptian Queen of Scots.

Using the famed historian Manetho's text as his main guide, Ellis establishes that Scota was really Ankhesenamun, daughter of Akhenaton and Nefertiti and wife of Tutankhamen. He also finds that far from being a Greek king, Gaythelos her husband with whom she fled Egypt was a pharaoh himself. His name was Aye in Egyptian. Little is known of Aye, although Ellis speculates that he was the father of Tutankhamen and married Ankhesenamun after his son's death. Aye ruled only briefly before religious struggle brought him into conflict with the Egyptian people and he and his court were forced into exile.

Having established the origins of Scota/Ankhesenamun and Gaythelos/Aye, Ellis tracks them as they flee. He contends that the couple took enough ships to bring 1,000 of their followers and plentiful supplies out of Egypt and across the Mediterranean. He finds that they landed first in Spain, where they lived for several generations and so their son Hiber ended up giving his name there to Iberia. Four generations after they first settled, the descendents of Scota made their way to Ireland. Here in his explanation Ellis refers to Irish stories, but supplements this ancient 'myth' with facts. He points to the number of gold torcs – necklaces worn by pharaohs - that have been found in the country. He shows us tombs that were surely built with Egyptian knowledge. He even finds us a mummified head that demonstrates that Scota's people took their method of embalming their dead with them from Egypt halfway across the world. It defies the favourite word of established historians when such evidence is found, coincidence.

Back in 1955, archaeologist Dr. Sean O'Riordan of Trinity College, Dublin, made an interesting discovery during an excavation of the Mound of Hostages at Tara, site of ancient kingship of Ireland. Bronze Age skeletal remains were found at Tara of what has been argued to be a young prince, still wearing a rare necklace of faience beads, made from a paste of minerals and plant extracts that had been fired. The skeleton was carbon dated to around 1350 BC. In 1956, J. F. Stone and L. C. Thomas reported that the faience beads were Egyptian! In fact, when they were compared with Egyptian faience beads, they were found to be not only of identical manufacture but also of matching design. The famous boy-king Tutankhamun was entombed around the same time as the Tara skeleton and the priceless golden collar around his mummy’s neck was inlayed with matching conical, blue-green faience beads. Lorraine Evans in her compelling book, ‘Kingdom of the Ark’, reveals archaeological connections between Egypt and Ireland. Evans argues that the connections between the two distant lands were plausible and there is archaeological evidence to support the theory.

Even further back in 1937 in North Ferriby, Yorkshire, the remains of an ancient boat were discovered. While thought to be a Viking longship at first, continued excavation produced additional ships, wrecked in a storm. Further investigation showed that the boats were much older than Viking ships and were of a type found in the Mediterranean. It was concluded that these boats originated from 2000 years before the Viking age and were radiocarbon dated to around 1400 to 1350 BC. Evans then makes connections to argue that these boats could originate from Egypt, as the timeframe fits the dating of the faience beads. Let us not forget that fully intact ships were also discovered under the sand near the great pyramid so there is very little doubt that the Egyptians were seafaring. If you can build a pyramid that lasts thousands of years you can surely build ships! There is therefore physical proof in England that ancient Egyptians could easily have sailed to Ireland more than one thousand years before Christ.

This archaeological evidence, when combined with the Tara jewelry discoveries creates the distinct possibility that the Irish people, who were later to develop writing skills long before the rest of Europe, are descended from the highly literate and scientifically advanced Egyptians. Let us not forget that Ireland has produced more nobel laureates in literature than any other country and had people writing books when the dark ages kept the people of the European continent ignorant, just the way the Church wanted them. Sean Connery’s great movie ‘The Rose’ looks at this theme in great detail.

There was one other coincidence that has always fascinated me. Though a Celt through my Irish background I have unfortunately been unable to speak our original language, Gaelic. Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Cornish and Welsh Gaelic are all interrelated but bear absolutely no relationship to European languages whatsoever. Though many believe the Celts originated in India, this idea of Egypt being their source, at least in Ireland demands a linguistic connection. When I was studying Gaelic by myself I discovered that the language group closest to it in nature is called the North African language group. Now where is Egypt?

Even old maps of Europe name Ireland as Scotia and thus in later days when the Scotia people came to Caledonia (Scotland in the old naming) they renamed it in honour of themselves and thus the place of my birth came to be known as Scotland. Therefore a long way back in my DNA chain there was a man or a woman whose own people had once sat in temples in Egypt perhaps, temples where the heliacal rising of the brightest star in our sky, Sirius, would be the most significant religious ceremony of their entire belief system. I do not find enough evidence in Ellis's theory however to suggest that Jesus himself was a pharaoh but the idea is most certainly intriguing when you know that all of the great history and beliefs of Israel was born in Egypt. Perhaps this helps us to understand how and why two relatively tiny countries, Spain and Scotland were later to have such an enormous influence on world history. They were both of them heavily influenced through Scota and her descendants, by the great civilization of Egypt. Why did they escape Egypt? As we all now know the Amarna regime of pharaoh Ahkenaten overthrew the entire old belief system to become essentially the first monotheism i.e. there is only one God. And his name was ATON. This made him so unpopular with the money making priests of the extant multigods system that he was literally erased from Egyptian history and disappeared entirely from the country? Where did he go?

Is it again a coincidence that Judaism was also an early monotheistic religion, as was its later close relative Christianity? And who but Moses could have established that through his incredible leadership of the Israelites, who were in fact Egyptian royalty? Or is this all just a pile of steaming coincidence as any established historian will tell you with utter confidence? As for me, my lifelong quest to understand the living significance of one star, Sirius, has taken me on a wild ride through a history that is only just beginning to be known. Now you know and as Japanese you might be interested to know that a member of your government diet has written a detailed book about the origins of Shinto being in Assyria and how it was always a Sirian worship religion. And how did it get to Assyria? From nearby Egypt perhaps?

Exhausted dreams

2008-07-01T23:49:00.000-07:00

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

Anais Nin

The pilgrim dreams, even as he walks. We never stop dreaming in fact but when the body is switched off and the beta brain waves slide down into theta frequencies we are suddenly in a fluid and lucid world of intense imagery. I doubt dream analysis. I challenge anybody to make sense of so many dreams of water unleashing its power, wreaking havoc on Earth. Just the other day, once again. A staggering sequence in vivid detail of a wave so high the mountain on which I stood looked like it would soon be deeply underwater. The sheer beauty of it. The simplicity and elegance of a big wave. The power of forward motion that nothing can stop. And the inexpressible horror, the feeling of total impotence and terror as it approaches.

The water crashed just below me into the high slopes and I was again saved. But I have been in or on those waves as they wildly careen towards land or over falls and I have felt the tremendous thrill of the rollercoaster at the end of time. Did you know that there was one more painting by Da Vinci discovered at Windsor Castle that we haven't heard about? Yes, the Queen's wee house that had a terrible fire back in the 90's. I saw that painting entitled the 'Last Judgement'. No people. No mountains. No landscape. No machines. No animals. What then!? Water, but water in its fiercest expression that any man has ever witnessed, a wild and totally destructive chaos of gigantic waves of water. The BBC report of Feb 14 2002 notes:

A collection of 10 Leonardo da Vinci drawings kept by the Queen begin a tour of the UK on Friday as part of Golden Jubilee celebrations. The 10 pictures are usually kept in a Windsor Castle vault away from damaging bright lights.The pictures have been held in trust by the Royal Family since before 1690 and are thought to have been acquired during the reign of Charles II.Among those going on display are The Head of a Young Man (1508-10), Studies of a horse (1490), A Scene from the Last Judgement (1515) and The Anatomy of the Shoulder (1510).

As a remote viewer and instructor of hundreds of Japanese, some Brits and a few Canadians over the last decade I know for sure that we can get flashes of the future. It is called precognition and is far more common than we think. Science may poo pah the idea that we can see into what has not yet occurred but do not forget that science has so far been totally inept in really answering, and I mean without a shadow of a doubt kind of final proof, the three most important questions in science:

1) Origin of universe: The so called big bang theory is not proof. It is a theory and a hotly contested one if you actually check it out. Hundreds of scientists have signed a petition denouncing it.

2) Origin of life: The idea that DNA just magically appeared in the chemical soup one day is now viewed as ludicrous by an increasingly vocal group of scientists. It is just a theory too.

3) Origin of you: Darwin's theory of evolution is also under the lens of severe criticism by none other than some of its own proponents who simply cannot account for the missing link that forever separates us from our closely related and entirely unevolved hominid brothers and sisters. The theory basically says that (if you metaphorically compress all of time into 100 years) until yesterday we were scratching our asses in caves, unable to talk, without a tool in the world and this morning we casually woke up and designed the space shuttle. You may laugh, but do your homework first.

So don't be shy when telling arrogant scientists that they have nothing to swagger about. I love science too. And the real scientists are really humble when it comes to proclamations about reality that are supposed to be definitely, totally replicable and true. It is the bureaucratic scientists that work for giant corporations that proclaim we are definitely the cause of global warming and that co2 is definitely the culprit we must be careful of. They have an economic axe to grind and they have people like Al Gore, once the second most powerful man on Earth, as their spokesman. Science does not understand dreams, yet. Psychologists cannot explain dreams yet. If dreams were explicable then why would we have them? Explanations are for the day. Dreams are for the nights since we see them better then. Or at least with the night of closed eyes. We must not close our eyes though, when science tries to bamboozle us with science.

The last time I had a really clear precognition was in Tokyo in June 2008. I was waiting for an editor to meet me in the Imperial hotel. As I was standing at the men's urinal in the toilet I clearly got the message that he would be late, the reason why, and the amount of time HE thought he would be late. Five minutes later he called to give me the exact same information and I confirmed that I had received it five minutes before he called. A small matter. But a real matter for science to grapple with. What does it tell us about time? How can you perceive what has not happened yet? Was it telepathy? My remote viewing graduate students often reported the same. It became relatively commonplace to experience this. There is absolutely nothing paranormal about it. All animals can sense danger ahead of time. We are at least partly animals are we not? So it is inbuilt. But like dreams you have to switch off the beta transmission frequencies of 'deal with the here and now, the concrete physical world only' in order to tune in. Having a pee is deeply relaxing when you really need to pee. Et voila, precognition.

Even more powerful dreams seem to happen when we are exhausted. In Japanese these are called 金縛り. It really does feel like you are bound in metal like a butterfly pinned to a display case. Nothing can move. Not even an eye. No sound can be made. Wide awake and unable to move the dreamer commonly rises up and out of the physical body to have an aptly named 'out of body experience'. People have been having them since we slept with the big cats in caves during the ice age. After a forty plus kilometer day on the road in Shikoku I would flop down on the futon of whatever little inn I had managed to get to. Some were run by very economically challenged country people whose sole income was the odd pilgrim here and there. One place I showed up the owners were in their eighties and could barely walk. The place was so run down I really doubted they could provide a meal. They did. It must have cost them a lot more in time and energy than the four thousand five hundred yen I, the only client, paid them that day. Life is hard for minshuku people these days. Their buildings are often ancient and their facilities crumbling apart. With not enough income to repair or update they are forced to suffer the loss of clientele who will go to a cheap business hotel instead. I always tried to support the minshuku. Soon they will be gone forever.

And then I would dream, or experience an altered state that was so lucid it made walking by day look pale in comparison. If this is all just electrical activity in my brain then what is the power source?! More importantly where is it?? In short we have no idea at all what dreaming is about really, we have theories though. And there are some I like better than others. Fred Alan Wolf, a Ph.D in physics has some really cool ideas.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf is one of a special group of scientists studying consciousness. Dr. John Lilly is another. They are 'shamanic' scientists, which means that they appear to risk their own souls through radical experimentation. They do not stick to dry "objective" theories but test their own human limits often using dramatic methods. Lilly used the isolation tank and LSD. Fred Wolf used Ayahuasca , a potent entheogen made from the bark of an Amazon vine mixed with a dmt rich plant by jungle shamans in South america, in his own explorations of what happens in shamanic states of consciousness.

As a physicist he wanted to know how shamans time travel, heal and apparently contact other dimensions. For these reasons, since I too was doing shamanic work exploring altered states I chose to interview Dr. Wolfe amongst other pioneers. In Seattle at the Whole Life Expo (1995) I attended Dr. Wolf's excellent workshop entitled " The Dreaming Universe " in which he shared with us his research in dreams especially what he had learned with the aboriginees. We set the next day as the interview date and the place was to be his hotel. You would expect a 'shamanic' scientist to have a synchronicity-rich life. He does. We literally bumped into him and his wife in a small Seattle coffee shop on the way to his hotel. And his wife is also called Sonia!

So there were the two Sonias and us drinking coffee before the Starbucks era! The following interview is the bulk of a long discussion which covered many topics. It was the first Japanese interview published of him ever (translated from this English one) and I hope it will encourage readers to buy the Japanese version of his book "Taking the Quantum Leap". We published this interview privately in Transdimension Vista, circulated to several hundred discriminating Japanese readers.

Echan: Well let's get rolling. I would like to thank Dr. Fred Alan Wolfe for being here today, this is an interview specifically for Japan to take note of. We would like to inform people in Japan much more about who is out there right now doing work specifically in fields that connect science to other areas, ones which so far haven't received much credibility . One of those areas of course is shamanic studies. So I would like to talk to you today by covering two areas largely grouped into 'shamanism' and 'physics'. I enjoyed your talk yesterday and would like to start by asking you aboutTULPOIDAL FORMS mentioned in connection with Alexandra David Neel during your workshop. What is your understanding of a TULPA?

FRED: Well there are two ways to talk about it : There is the experience of tulpas and the is the scientific theory or (information) based on a theoretical model of what tulpoidal images are. So the first is the experience because many people do not know what the experience is.

Echan: Let's talk about the experience.

FRED: One of the common ways to induce tulpoidal images is to do something on concentrated meditation on a visual object. A typical example is a candle flame. A typical thing which anybody can do is to, in a darkened room, watch a candle flame for a period of time and then close one's eyes and watch the candle flame with the eyes closed. In other words what you are watching now is the image which has been imprinted .

Mainly it is retinal and it is also acting on your brain. What you are trying to do is to increase the length of time in which you can maintain the image.That holding of the image is the key to tulpoidal imagery. This is what I call vigilant, or intense observation . You are focussing on the means by which images are held in the brain. You are focussing that intent on a situation where the object of the image is no longer present. Now the focus is inward, on the means by which that image is being maintained. I suggest people do this.

The first time people do this they are able to hold the image for 30 seconds before it falls apart. That is what you will see happening, gradually disintegrate and fall apart until finally it gets harder and harder to hold it and it just dissolves away. Then you have to open your eyes again to rekindle it. This is how you practise doing this. After a period of days or maybe weeks you can hold the image for as long as maybe five or ten minutes. Buddhists can hold these images for hours. The next thing is maybe you have a dream image or a master or a beloved one. Maybe someone who passed on. Now you hold that image in the same way. Because now you have learned how to use the 'means' which is the vigilant observer inside to hold, to keep holding. At a certain point when you become a master of this, which is a kind of yoga.

Alexandra Neel said that her master got to a point where the image that she was holding was some kind of trickster, an impish character and this character began to play tricks on her! It appeared when she least expected , at the edge of her bed or jump up in front of her so it became something she felt that she could no longer control.

This is what I call vigilant, or intense observation

Echan: Of course her eyes were open at this point.

FRED: Yes, her eyes were open at this point. Actually the thing that is very important to understand is that the mechanism by which we see, by which we recognize imagery has something to do with what is going on in the outside world coming in but that isn't really where it is at. Really where it is at is the means by which you 'see'. In my workshop I give examples...

Echan: Yes that was a great example! At yesterday's workshop we all saw how a three dimensional red cube on the screen literally disappeared when we all focussed on the blue background.

FRED: Yes it was what you bring to bear is your own image so that creates the image you see..There is not really any 'out there' out there, specifically, objectively. There is no such thing as an objective world, it is an impossible concept that came from the Newtonian mechanical world view. That things exist independently of consciousness. There is absolutely NO evidence for that. It is like the emperor has no clothes, any child can find out that there is nothing until you see it...

Echan: What do you think about the re-appearance of this knowledge? We, unlike Alexandra who had to dress up as a man and go on a dangerous journey to Tibet to get this knowledge, have a wealth of information. The paradox is we have too much access to information and do not seem to know how to use it. Any comments?

FRED: Knowledge of things like TULPA used to be esoteric, dark, secret or occult so in the scientific tradition of the West there has been a tendency to dismis it. Secret knowledge can also cause a lot of trouble. Recently I did a fire walk with a man who really knew what he was doing but some people have got seriously burned! Ayahuasca can kill you or cause serious liver damage if not properly prepared by an experienced shaman. I trust the shaman I work with because he has been making it for forty years. I would not trust an American who says he is a shaman to do it. A real shaman NEVER calls himself a shaman. This work has always been difficult for lay people therefore secret societies were created to keep fakes out. You must participate in shamanism a little at a time and never pay huge amounts of money at the beginning.

Echan: Good advice for Japan right now! Many people are hungry for knowledge yet easily influenced by tricksters. The veil seems to be lifting though between dimensions. We are becoming multidimensional beings. What is the veil? Why is it lifting now?

FRED: Like the communist IRON CURTAIN it never really existed. It is political-politics colour everything so you cannot think freely. The old Anglo Saxons had no concept of a veil between this world and the spirit world until the Romans conquered them. Communication systems are great now and there is intercultural mixing as never before so the world is much smaller. However some cultures like the aboriginee deliberately use the veil to protect their culture.

Echan: Let's say it disappears. How will human culture change? The observer effect in physics says we create our own reality by how we choose to interpret brain data. What of the future?

FRED: We will become more aware of and have more respect for SPIRIT. We will see the SACRED more because we will be more awake. I don't think we will have a bombardment of information from other dimensions. Rather we will see more spiritually in this world. In the Eastern cultures they have always had more reverence for the SPIRIT in each other.The next step seems to be changing the educational process.

Echan: You said real education is about understanding synchronicity and how present education is the INHIBITION OF MAGIC. This is surely very important for Japan to awaken to.

FRED: It is the worst thing you can do! I did not understand Einstein until I saw the MAGIC of the theory of relativity.

Echan: How did you see it?

FRED: By playing with triangles! I leapt into the imaginal realm and suddenly the equations made sense. I imagined waves on the ocean. Electromagnetic waves are just the same.

Echan: But this education is not happening. There seems to be a conspiracy to stop people learning about this magic. The system does not change. What do we need to do?

FRED: I have faith in the human proces. When institutions are new they must do battle with established ones.

Echan: But compared to Newton or even Einstein's era our time seems limited to accomplish change. What do you think of the Mayan idea that 2012 marks the end of our present cycle. We only have 17 years left!

FRED: That is a good point but it depends on us. We need a stable base we need time to produce the people. The universe will not end in 2012 but the Mayan calendar is important. There is no separation of mind and matter and no need to panic. Our spiritual integrity will be maintained. My teacher Carlos Flores is a shaman and he once said to me " Don't worry about finding your soul. It will find you. It is constantly trying to find you. But you want to watch T.V.-you want to be entertained!

Stranger in a strange land

2008-06-30T17:37:00.000-07:00

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards

Philip K. Dick

How does a pilgrim essentially feel? Can that question be answered with any degree of certainty since all pilgrims are unique? I think it can, and I believe my answer may hold clues for how we, the Earth pilgrims as humanity, may operate in the future.There were many times in Shikoku when I would stop for a moment and look around after a long stretch on the road. It might have been up a mountain, by a river, or in the back streets of a tiny village somewhere, a village where relatively few outsiders ever come. And I was the ultimate outsider! Unshaven, sunburnt, carrying a large heavy staff and always wearing sunglasses I must have appeared quite formidable to local farmers whose lives revolve round constancy, certitude and staying put. I believe the quintessential pilgrim feels what I do when suddenly you stop and look around at nothing familiar at all. Every single building, person and geographical formation has never entered your brain via the magic of the retina and been decoded as an image. That tree over there is absolutely brand new. The talk entering your ears in a foreign tongue could just as well have come from Mars even if you speak the language-the world it is from is not yours. Freshly harvested vegetables or the night cooking as you slowly walk by, tired at the end of a long day assaults the olfactory sense with both excitement and sometimes disgust. Where am I? Who am I? The pilgrim essentially feels this: a stranger in a strange land.

"I am not of this world, my race is of heaven alone" might express it even more poignantly. Of course it was the famous science fiction writer Robert Heinlein who had titled one of his books Stranger in a strange land. Heinlein is usually identified, along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, as one of the three masters of science fiction but it is not generally known that he was a financial backer of another, in my mind even more brilliant writer of science fiction called Philip K. Dick. Here is the Wikipedia introduction to him:

Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American science fiction novelist and short story writer. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature of drug use, paranoia and schizophrenia, and mystical experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. Dick wrote of these stories. "In my writing I even question the universe, I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real."

That is the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land that we, especially in the 21st century have almost totally forgotten. I was immediately attracted to Dick's writing, in particular his notebooks which were published as In Pursuit of Valis. Long before we had any idea in science that the universe might be alive (as I noted in an introduction of Biocosmos theory in my book Solar Code ) Dick had coined the phrase Vast Active Living Information System (VALIS) to describe his mystical understanding of a world far, far more complex than our pale and wan, nay limp philosophies of the modern age will ever conceive. He saw, he knew that the human mind is something exceedingly extraordinary and this led him to doubt just about everything. He especially doubted his own perceptions and considered how he himself might not be real, that he might be a simulation of a real person, thus his great treatment of androids in a book later to become the movie Total Recall. His was thus a very difficult life, of course.

In addition to his novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, many of which appeared in science fiction magazines. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, nine of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. In 2005, Time Magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923.In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

He was far too deep for America in his own time. America then, as now, was totally intent as a nation on selling its citizens and the world its version of reality as a non stop shopping spree in freedom and democracy. All in the name of God too.You will forgive my satire here but remember that Japan is not far behind. How could such a schitzophrenic nation ever understand a true schitzophrenic like Dick? He really was split betwen worlds and did not know to which one, if even either, he belonged. But that is just another definition of a mystic who feels that his race is of heaven alone but has not an iota of evidence to back that up. Phil Dick was a very disturbed modern mystic, impossible to undertsand if you are totally sure about the reality of this world and what people believe about this world. What if it was all just an evolved computer game? Then there came an incident in his life than many travelers and pilgrims can more easily identify with perhaps than the static city dweller or farmer. Wikipedia continues:

On February 20, 1974, Dick was recovering from the effects of sodium pentothal administered for the extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth. Answering the door to receive delivery of extra analgesic, he noticed that the delivery woman was wearing a pendant with a symbol that he called the vesica pisces that early Christians used as a secret symbol. After the delivery woman's departure, Dick began experiencing strange visions. Although they may have been initially attributable to the medication, after weeks of visions he considered this explanation implausible. "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane," Dick told Charles Platt.

He woke up to a far greater understanding of the reality in which he found himself. He wrote thousands of pages of notes on gnostic Christianity which I find to be just as good as, if not better than the Gospel of Thomas for example. Here was a modern man living in his mind in the first century AD when Rome was heavily persecuting early Christians, many of whom were of the gnostic persuasion, meaning they leaned towards a more Buddhistic understanding of Christ. Know thyself, in two words. Most modern church goers of course do not know such people ever existed since the persecution of them was entirely successful. Rumi is another gnostic, an Islamic one. But it was not just his mind that changed. His notes reveal how his attitudes, his habits, his food and drink all changed too. It might of course have been, according to modern day witch doctors, psychologist shrinks, that he simply went mad. I think not. And besides who can possibly define anybody as mad any more in a world where Bible thumping US senators have prayer meetings before going to decide which Iraquis to drop bombs on? All in the name of freedom, peace and democracy of course.Those God fearing men and woman must be sane, because if they are not then we are all mad...

A recurring theme in Exegesis is PKD's hypothesis that history had been stopped in the 1st century A.D., and that "the Empire never ended". He saw Rome as the pinnacle of materialism and despotism, which, after forcing the Gnostics underground, had kept the population of Earth enslaved to worldly possessions. Dick believed that VALIS had communicated with him, and anonymous others, to induce the impeachment of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, whom Dick believed to be the current Emperor of Rome incarnate.

Do you not see how if he had only survived a little longer to see the United States today and observe its totally incoherent, psychobabbler president he would feel totally supported in this apparently crazy idea? Even the far more balanced Einstein had often made the point that any new idea which at first does not seem crazy to everybody has no chance of developing into a serious theory.

In between my monthly pilgrimages to Shikoku I was regularly communicating with Graham Hancock and had organized a major lecture series for his new book Supernatural in Japan. One of his really wild ideas is that our DNA contains access points to entirely different dimensions that are currently simply not available to perception unless we change our state of consciousness. Shamans have always known this. Phil Dick was a literary shaman. But how many movie goers, and pilgrims for that matter, have any idea who was behind this incredible body of film genius?

Since Ridley Scott turned "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?" into the science fiction classic "Blade Runner," seven of Philip K. Dick's novels or short stories have made their way to the big screen. To date, these films have generated over $1 billion in world-wide box office and ancillary revenue. This astounding success is the result of combining visionary stories with talent from the world's finest film directors, studios and stars. Steven Spielberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, John Woo, Ben Affleck, Harrison Ford and Keanu Reeves are only a few of the illustrious names associated with these projects.

The feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. For those who may have lost contact with this most primal human emotion let me remind you it feels wonderful. It is like an ancient memory, like the fairy tales of the bewitched princess turning into a frog but always having the deeply buried memory just at the edge of consciousness. This feeling reconnects us with reality at a far more instrinsic level than the superficial hype of 21st century democracies which promise us lives that even if we ever got, would bore us to death far faster than aids or cancer could claim us. We are a mystery. We are a power. We are a conundrum inside which sleeps a majestic secret. By reclaiming our true nature as Earth Pilgrims on a short stopover between dimensions, between worlds most marvellous and terrible, we remember, as Phil did that this little world we are sold here does not meet our standards in the least. Our race is of heaven alone.

Pilgrim Health

2008-06-30T01:37:00.001-07:00

When you live your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meanings, you connect with the underlying field of infinite possibilities.

Deepak Chopra

Is walking all day good for your health? That totally depends on how you walk of course. As any athlete can tell you, any mountain climber, marathon runner or long distance sailor the body condition is secondary to the way you think. When I decided to join thousands of Japanese in Honolulu for the 2005 marathon I knew that I needed a strong role model to pull me through the second half of the 42 odd kilometers. Anybody can run. Anybody can walk. But as the boxing legend of the silver screen Rocky said, you have to not just give good punches but stay standing as you keep taking them. Endurance is thus the magic word here. Not just anybody can continue walking, or running for long periods of time. As I passed and was passed by other pilgrims on the roads of Shikoku it was obvious that age had little to do with the art of continuing to walk. I met several men and women in their seventies on the road, some of whom had circumnavigated the island multiple times. In Honolulu I was astonished to see a vast majority of the huge Japanese contingent (the event is sponsored by Jal and Konami sports club) was at least my age at the time, 53. They finished the marathon too so it was not just a few kilometers for show and then off to do some shopping. The Japanese capacity for hanging in is simply stunning. But my role model was not a Japanese, since the people of this country have a DNA advantage over us white men. That is the advantage of eating very good food growing up here and then the even more important advantage of cultural indoctrination in ganbaru. I had learned many important lessons during that marathon from these die hard older men and women but the real key had been encapsulated in two words that were to help me in Shikoku a great deal. Relax and pace.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has a rather famous cousin, two in fact who are both well known actors. Ralph Fiennes and his brother Joseph have distinguished themselves in many major motion pictures but it is not commonly known that their cousin has been described as the world's greatest explorer. Ranulph Fiennes has always been a quintessential explorer and has led expeditions up the White Nile on a hovercraft in 1969 and on Norway's Jostedalsbre Glacier in 1970. Perhaps his most famous trek was the Transglobe Expedition that he undertook from 1979 until 1982. Fiennes and Charles Burton journeyed around the world on its polar axis using surface transport only, covering 52,000 miles and becoming the first people to have visited both poles.In 1992 Fiennes lead an expedition that discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman. The following year he joined with nutrition specialist Mike Stroud to become the first to cross Antarctica unaided. Their journey of 97 days is the longest in south Polar history.In 2000 he attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the north pole. The expedition failed when his sleds fell through weak ice and Fiennes was forced to pull them out by hand. He sustained severe frostbite to the tips of several fingers, forcing him to abandon the attempt. On returning home his surgeon insisted the necrotic fingertips be retained for several months (to allow regrowth of the remaining healthy tissue) prior to amputation. Impatient at the pain the dying fingertips caused, Fiennes removed them himself in his garden shed with an electric saw. This man definitely was a character!

Despite suffering from a heart attack and undergoing a double heart by-pass operation just four months previously, Fiennes joined up with Stroud again in 2003 to carry out the extraordinary feat of completing seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Their route was totally mind boggling and meant they ran every day despite jet lag and lack of proper rest:

26th October - Race 1: Patagonia, South America
27th October - Race 2: Falkland Islands, "Antarctica"
28th October - Race 3: Sydney, Australasia
29th October - Race 4: Singapore, Asia
31st October - Race 5: London, Europe
31st October - Race 6: Cairo, Africa
1st November - Race 7: New York, North America

Wow! Who is this guy? Or more to the point what allows his body to do that? I am willing to bet that you will not find the secret of his endurance in what he eats. If you are to find it at all look inside his head and inside his heart, the one that had a double bypass operation to repair the catastrophic damage it had received after the heart attack. No doctor in the world would dream of suggesting vigorous exercise to this man, already 59 at that point, when he decided that running seven marathons in a row all over the Earth would be a lark! The purpose was to raise money for charity and I am sure many of the sponsors might have been expecting a dramatic death to bring in even more money through publicity. So here was I, younger than him and with all my fingertips in place and a healthy heart about to do a mere one seventh of what he did and surrounded by ganbaru Japanese. What could be easier? I emblazoned his image in my mind throughout the marathon and comfortably finished in a little over six hours (much slower than his time) having relaxed my upper body the whole way and most importantly having run at my own pace. A quick calculation will tell you my average speed was about seven kilometers an hour. Knowing that such a man actually existed as Sir Ranulph was easily enough to keep me going and contrary to my expectations I did not need to fall into bed at the end but went shopping with my wife and sisters in Waikiki, then on to some night life shows. One image. One role model. One source of mental upliftment was all I needed. Health is a state of mind.

But Deepak has always known that. That is why I made the trip in 1992 from Victoria in Canada to Portand in Oregon specifically to interview him and to introduce his ideas to a wider Japanese public. I was after all a reporter of the new paradigm and part of that paradigm was the holistic health movement gaining attention in the West. As a trained acupuncturist who had apprenticed under a living master of the art, Dr. Shigeri Mii in Osaka, this was not just a theory to me. Day after day I had hands on experience with hundreds of patients whose complaints could practically fill a dictionary with their diversity. The hospitals could not put a name to many of their complaints and thus could not assign a specific drug, which is how allopathic medicine works. Complex sets of symptoms that wiser doctors now realise are mainly psychosomatic were all related to depression in one form or another. A pain in the lower back was compounded with headaches and an inability to digest well and by the way sleeping was arduous and hard to get in much quantity. But back in the early nineties it was not known that depression is the number one killer disease on this planet. It is the archetype which lurks beneath all the other symptoms and it is insidiously evil in its ability to cripple us in every way whilst never being discovered. A soul parasite that cannot be talked away with brain chemical explanations alone, this 'sick at heart' feeling is claiming more and more lives even as our medical technology gets more and more sophisticated. Doctors cannot fix it and that is the truth. What can then?

Deepak has some really good clues and so do the pilgrims in Shikoku, at Mount Kailash, at Qoylluriti, Amaranath in Kashmir, on the slopes of Mount Sinai and in hundreds of other pilgrimage routes around the world. Vigorous exercise carried out over long periods of a day has always been the fate of humans before we got mechanized. Warp back to the days before the industrial revolution and the average person in almost any country of the world moved all day long whether working in the fields or foraging for food. We are built to move and in an ironic twist of fate we may have extended our lifespans but I seriously doubt that the medical profession has increased our essential health. Though I was very happy that medical technology, advanced repair work really, sewed back the split achilles tendon twelve weeks before I had to climb a mountain in Peru, I see no evidence that the medical profession today is in any way wiser than the ancient Japanese and Chinese who knew how to put their kanji together. 病は気から・・

Deepak became a superstar, a reknowned author and now is honing in on the mechanisms that make us age and die in a comprehensive study of the human bodymind that may be one of the most sophisticated we have ever had at our disposal. And in our interview for AZ magazine the absolutely key concept that was to impact me was not food and exercise but how it is our memory that determines our health. Holding on to negative memories about sickness is the single most devastating way to ruin your health. Live and forget! Ignorance then will surely turn to bliss. By forgetting ourselves we are saved.

The Synchronicity Factor

2008-06-29T18:14:00.001-07:00

"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially ... These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits."

John Lilly

The Shikoku pilgrimage unfolds. Walking all day. Walking in the rain, walking in 35 degrees celsius ovens of sweat, walking in joy, walking in sorrow but most of all walking in synchronicity. Carl Jung had fascinated me particularly in my thirties, that most difficult period of our lives. Why do I say that? In my experience watching many others go through this threshold period, transiting from the follies of youth to the sobering realities of mortal demise, the thirties are when we lose it or use it in a new way. A quiet sense of desperation about not having attained even a fraction of the dream we had held in the teens and twenties is compounded by a powerful rebellion against all that seems to be not worth sacrificing for the sake of..marriage, family, career, money and all the rest of the fodder we are supposed to give up our wild pasions for.

Jung was smart enough to see that it is the vastly unexplored depths of our own hearts where lie our troubles and also our redemption from them. He saw invisible forces called archetypes at work in our souls and much later I was to identify these with David Hawkins' brilliant theory of attractor patterns and fields. Those unseen fields are like magnetic influences on our state of mind and explain beautifully how even with all the best intentions and the most exquisite mental training we sabotage our own higher interests time and again. Marriage is a great example when we so often hurt our partners under the banner of love and family values. It is a deep and insoluble mystery at many times we are faced with, but the thirties really provides us with the 'grist for the mill'. In short our state of consciousness defines everything in our lives. My thirties had seen me leave Japan for a new life in Canada, followed by a meteoric rise to business success as an international investment consultant.

Using my Japanese language skill I had, along with my wife and a team of Canadian lawyers and realtors and accountants, provided Japanese business men with a smoothly functioning vehicle to buy and sell real estate. By the late thirties it looked like I was set for a life of prosperity and fame. I had been the focus of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation TV special on entrepreneurs. The 30 minute program broadcast nationally highlighted my work on a big project in the Rockies where a dying mining town would be rescued by the Japanese golf resort entrepreneur I had brought to the bargaining table. There was me sitting at my desk in a 4 million dollar mansion I had sold to an investor whose Canadian corporation I was also the director of. Outside my Uplands office in Victoria I could see the Pacific Ocean, the snow white peak of Mount Baker in Washington state and even the occasional orca whale trawl by. I would arrive in my black BMW and drive up the long driveway to the ornate front door letting the automatic gates shut behind me. Surrounded by antiques, including tha actual phone booth where Bonny and Clyde had been gunned down and even having a guest cottage on the 3 acre property next to the private beach, I had made it at the age of 38. Life was good. For a while...

The bubble economy of Japan crashed just about then. So did my business. Getting the owner on the phone to pay the gardener's bills of that mansion became a prime concern as his bank was balking at lending any more for his foreign excursions. Within a short year I was virtually without income but had an expensive lifestyle to support and a growing family of three children and an Irish setter. The stress on my wife grew. The thirties ended with a crash and burn scenario that I am certain is not unique to me. There is a very mysterious force at work here which at the time seems hell bent on completely destroying us. Now I see it as reforming us. Literally to make the form over. Had I continued with that high rolling lifestyle I would undoubtedly have become a monster, plagued with the pride and selfishness that sudden success almost always brings the spiritually unprepared. And we are all unprepared. So I went back to Japan, alone, to start a new career as a writer and lecturer. The theme was consciousness.I therefore had to meet those who knew about it. So I did, and my fortieth orbit began of our sun. I had survived the thirties just, and was about to enter new territory yet again.

I was also about to meet a legend. Though excited with last minute preparations for his arrival, I had the nagging feeling that I was totally unready for the encounter, having not bought that book back in the psychedelic seventies. The 'Centre of the cyclone' had been well discussed by fellow travelers on the road to Katmandu in '71 and I had overheard accounts of its writer, a scientist named John Lilly repeatedly using LSD inside an isolation tank. In there he would literally transcend the confines of 'normal' consciousness conjuring up in my mind images of a pioneer shaman. Extraterrestrial contacts, solitary trips into totally uncharted inner realms - Lilly returned with stories to spark wonder in even the most jaded heart . While many had toyed with hallucinogens in those days Lilly had, in the words of Stanislav Grof, (another altered states pioneer who showed up in Kyoto too) "really played hardball with LSD". He had gone, alone and unaided where no contemporary scientist had ever gone before, totally disappearing from consensus 'reality' for days at a time risking mind and body in what appeared to me as a heroic initiation. And having returned he was about to enter my reality tunnel for a series of talks in Kyoto. The door opened...

It is of course all thanks to ECCO that we met. According to Lilly the 'Earth Coincidence Control Office' seamlessly creates the precise event sequences that manifest as our daily lives. Long before the term 'synchronicity' had become a new age hiccup, this neuro-explorer had encountered phenomenal beings in the very boiler house of the Gods. They revealed to him how short term and long term 'coincidence' is crafted into our dimension of 'reality'.

Just six weeks earlier on a trip from Canada to Tokyo, a video had caught my attention in a fashionable Aoyama bookstore. "Thinking Allowed", a taped interview with Lilly by Jeffrey Mishelove went home with me that day, along with a biographical documentary on Carl Jung and an interview with Karl Pribham. After immersing myself in Pribham's holographic brain theories and marveling at Jung's having kept a mistress in his household for most of his productive life, I then cued up the Mishelove tape expecting a fiftyish psychedelic guru. What I got on the screen was a sixtyish parody of Davy Crocket in a tight leather suit. Six weeks later an old man stepped into my tatami room..

The sound of laboured rasping of breath preceded the gaunt 1992 biophysical form-a body he claims to have frequently left and restaffed with 'walk ins' after many of his neurodimensional jaunts. One felt that here was this husk of an enormous being but that the essential core was still deep in the depths where the isolation tank connects cortical hardware to untranslatable hyperspace. I knew that he was now seventy seven, but still had not expected such a dose of mortality in a psychedelic iconographer. Dr. Timothy 'tune in, turn on, drop out' Leary swears that this man is one of the two most important philosophers of the century. As Lilly settled into a window seat looking out on the fall colours and contours of Mt. Hiezan and Daimonji I marveled that he had made it to this age at all..

He has probably ingested enough psychotropic substances in his lifetime to keep any one of us in a constant altered state for at least a year. Like the doctors of old who deliberately waded into jungle swamps to get exotic fevers for their research, Lilly had been both the subject of the experiment and the experimenter. I kept coming back to that thought over the next five days as I read his detractors rant on about how a great scientist had been ruined in the tank. Perhaps as we begin to emerge from our obsolete mechanistic paradigm of the universe to a truer understanding of being, more researchers will find the courage to abandon their glass barriers. Perhaps they will directly confront the multilevelled reality of their most important tool-consciousness itself. Surely only a scientist as solidly grounded in classical medicine, biophysics and neurophysiology as the wizened magus now sitting before me, could have retained enough 'objectivity' to record for our benefit his experiences. Records of priceless and prodigious phenomena, the topography of a realm so far outside of the comfortable certitudes of here. What do you ask Theseus on his return from the labyrinth?

"Would you like something to drink Dr. Lilly?" I served him the glass of milk he requested and decided to read the books he brought before plunging into an interview. The first five days we spent together (he slept in my tatami room on a very hard floor) slowly unfolded like the conversation between a sorcerer and his young apprentice. In our breakfast dialogues and in the ensuing interview , Dr. Lilly repeatedly stresses a fundamental insight: what we assume to be reality is just a belief system, a system that we must constantly strive to transcend until we are completely capable of 'expecting the unexpected." When he left I could not quite move back into my room. Like Lilly himself who had been 'zapped' telepathically with a trove of information by a passing compassionate whale, I was going to need some time to process the impact of these thoughts and his being..

The Israel connection

2008-06-28T17:51:00.000-07:00

"James Cameron is a great guru of science fiction, and he's taking it to a new level with Simcha Jacobovici. You take a little bit of science, spin a good yarn out of it and you get another Terminator or Life of Brian"

Stephen Pfann: Department of Ancient Semitic Languages, Hebrew University Jerusalem

On February 27th 2007 I had watched a cable TV report in my small tatami mat room at an inn near the coast of Southern Shikoku. It was the intriguing Discovery channel story about the so called Jesus family tomb which had been aired a month previously in the West and was beginning to make waves on the internet as all heretical stories about Christianity are destined to. The internet after all was basically created in the English language and still is dominated by that tongue, thus strongly linked willy nilly with the religion of the culture which spawned it i.e. Christianity.

The story involved a director not known to me at that time, Simcha Jacobovici, and a producer who everybody knows, James Cameron, winner of the most academy awards in history. That piqued my interest. So a famous director who is fond of strong female characters like the heroine of his epic movie Titanic was involved in the making of a documentary movie for the Discovery channel about a tomb in Jerusalem that was purported to contain not just the man himself but his family, wife and even perhaps one disciple! Very Interesting. Yet I asked myself why would a guy who has won multiple oscars be involved in such a relatively minor production? Or was it going to be something very major? Was his involvement in the making of this documentary simply a very smart career move? Could it be that the impact of this movie for TV was fated to become even more contentious than the Da Vinci Code book and movie? I was soon very intrigued as the thoughts swirled around my brain on the following day's walk.

I returned from the pilgrimage on March 3rd. On March 6th one of my research colleagues, Marshall Masters, who runs an internet radio show from California had called me on video Skype. As I spoke with him, a Jewish American who used to be a science features correspondent for CNN, the subject came around to the Jesus Tomb. He and I had worked together in the production of a documentary for the Japanese satellite/cable TV show Mondo 21. It concerned global warming and the effects of solar radiation on the greenhouse gas phenomenon. But he is always interested in ideas which provoke people to think outside the box.

"Do you want to do an interview on the Jesus Tomb? This could be very big!" he asked me all of a sudden. Because I had been researching Jesus Christ for many years and in particular the gnostic teachings associated with him and the templars, as well as having co-translated a book called ‘Master of Masters’, I am in a position to talk fairly intelligently about the whole issue of this new discovery. And since I am a Scot living in Japan, I am removed from the very fundamentalist Christian environment of Bush's USA. That is really important when you realise that if you become the target of fundamentalists you really could end up fundamentally inactive forever. My previous interviews on his shows had been quite well received and apparently I was a well liked speaker. Maybe it was the Scottish accent...

"Sure let's do it, this could be the final blow to hard line orthodox Christianity" was my reply. In other words it was my belief that we have absolutely no more need of paternalistic religions that attempt to guide us whilst being blind themselves. Though in a different age this is not something you might easily have been able to proclaim with such certainty. In a male chauvinist world a strong male God is essential to progress. But in these times it is a classic situation now of the blind leading the blind and any sane person with a fairly good mind can quickly see how we must evolve beyond male saviour Gods. In an internet era of breathtaking information capacity we do not any longer require celibate Popes, but rather wise people with really good ideas. Especially wise women might I add..

On March 7th, the day I wrote the preface to a book on the subject of the tomb I sat down at the computer and clicked to the Discovery channel to get the full information on this documentary. After seeing it I went downstairs to have lunch with my wife Sonia who has been my faithful collaborator on many book projects and had recently finished translating a new book called the 'Truth about the Photon Belt and the dark star Nemesis'. Though I had another book project just started she suddenly suggested that we focus on this story, the Lost Tomb, and in particular its relevance to a woman we both love and admire from our long research. She had guided us as well to travel to the place where we were sure she had visited: Glastonbury in the South of the UK. In fact just a year earlier we had recorded a video at a small church bearing her name next to the famous Glastonbury Abbey-the oldest church in the UK.

Sonia has herself been researching Goddess related themes for more than 20 years and her intuition is usually very sharp when it comes to new projects. "Let's do it then!" I replied quite spontaneously. Funnily enough the preparation had been done the year before as we had purchased several books in Glastonbury all devoted to Mary Magdalene. And the book that I had taken with me on the pilgrimage in February was entitled 'The secret teachings of Mary Magdalene'. It was a very well researched book written by two women. Another coincidence was that it was the two Mary's names engraved on the tomb of Jesus discovered in Jerusalem more than 27 years ago, which pointed the way to a Discovery channel special documentary being made.

You see although Mary was a very popular name 2000 years ago in Judea in Greek the name Mariamne can only have one meaning according to the documentary. The Greeks had chosen this name specifically because it pointed to a very important woman, a woman who if she lived today would be as famous as Diana or Mother Theresa or Hillary Clinton. There could be no doubt at all the story claimed, that the name inscribed on the limestone coffin found under an apartment complex in Jerusalem, the name that was used in ancient Greek speaking middle East countries like Judea, meant Mary Magdalene. But even more revealing was the inscription next to her name ‘mara’ which means, ‘ master’ and that refers to the fact that she was a leading apostle, perhaps the chief disciple therefore of the man whose name was inscribed on the other stone coffin displayed at a Discovery press conference. His name was Jesus, son of Joseph.

By the time the interview happened with Marshall there had been strong reaction to the documentary from die hard Christians. Not surprising in the least I might add. If your entire belief system revolves around very specific historical events which culminate in a resurrection from the dead, then finding a grave that purports to contain the body of a saviour who ascended to heaven is pure heresy. It is like reporting today on CNN that the big bang and the expansion of the universe is completely wrong and that evidence has just come in, solid evidence, that the universe was never created at all. Every scientist invested in the big bang theory would foam at the mouth metaphorically and do everything in his power to stamp out the idea that the universe has always been here and always will. All established scientific institutions would organize major campaigns to stifle such nonsense, since it is obvious to all right thinking scientists that the case is closed and that we know for sure how the universe was born. But do we? And do we really know about the truth of Jesus?

Now the situation began to get really spooky. I had on my desk at least ten books written by very well reasearched people concerning Mary Magdalene. I was ready to quote from them during the two hour interview that we both knew would spark outrage in the fundamentalist community. This would especially happen in the US where many still believe the universe was created six thousand years ago as per the Bible. But the documentary and its related book which had shot to #6 on the New York Times best sellers list could not simply be yayed or nayed, it demanded to be discussed rationally and unemotionally, something we are all supposed to be able to do in a democratic society.

If it had just been once we could have passed it off as a coincidence. Happening twice was a sure sign that something very peculiar was going on. But when it started up again during the third re-recording of our interview Marshall threw in the towel. "We better not do this! This is a sign from spirit!"

Now here is a guy with a strong science background who is also a member of a group called Mensa. Mensa International is the largest, oldest, and best-known high-IQ society in the world. The organization restricts its membership to people with high testable IQs. Specifically, potential members must score within the top 2% (at or above the 98th percentile) of any approved standardized intelligence test. Mensa is formally composed of national groups and the umbrella organization, Mensa International. And so here was one of its members using the word 'spirit' and obviously at a loss to understand why on all three tapings, and on no other tapings of his many interviewees it had happened.

A weird clicking sound like background static had polluted all the interviews. They were unusable as the sound quality had deteriorated so much. Yet on each occasion he had checked his equipment religiously, being the professional he was. After each he was so excited that an even better interview than the previous one had been executed. And then an hour or so later I would get a message telling me it had happened again. This was definitely Ghostbusters territory we were in and only much later was I to realise that this event had not only saved both of us from incredibly bad press but that it had propelled me on a journey to Israel and a whole new pilgrimage altogether. There I had met real experts in the fields of paleography and archaeology as well as in early Christian theology. I also met Simcha...

Tradition Vs Convention

2008-06-27T18:36:00.000-07:00

Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead

Thomas Merton 1915-1968

Japan is...this might not be the best way to start a sentence. I am reminded constantly that one's experiences define one's reality and one's experiences are categorically defined by the overuse of the word IS. It seems to me that it is impossible to say anything objective at all, about anything at all. Everything depends on a point of view and every point of view pivots on the word IS. Think about that. He is a ..... America is.... The people of Japan are....etc. All history books become suspect even science becomes suspect as we are all learning via the highly political movement called global warming which I have vigorously opposed from the start. After meeting Al Gore I was doubly sure that the real agenda is control and not helping us all save the planet. When he got the nobel prize a high level British group condemned his theory on at least nine points saying it was not science at all. You cannot save us from nature. We are part of it. It is like saving the baby whilst allowing the mother to die on a island where there is only the baby and the mother. The baby dies too. We are categorically not the cause of global warming and climate change as I see it. Such hubris. Our fate and Earth's fate are one. Unless we leave Earth.

So before I can write about tradition and convention as it relates to the pilgrimage in Shikoku let us remember that I am talking about my pilgrimage. You, the reader may be inspired to hit the road at some point. But you will definitely not experience my pilgrimage. Yet you will be part of a tradition that has been going on for hundreds of years. It is the convention I am concerned about here because as we shall see there is not much to recommend about simply joining the convention of donning Buddhist garbs and going through the motions of a pilgrimage. In the same way there is not much point in going to temples and churches and mosques to outwardly appear spiritual, mostly to yourself, if the living heart of spirituality is not alive and awake in you. So let's get etymological to prise open the meaning of Trappist monk Merton's quote above.

Tradition: inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior. A religious practice or a social custom or a belief or story relating to the past commonly accepted as historical. The handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction.

Well that is fairly clear. We have a tradition in Scotland of asking the most handsome man who has got black hair ideally to step outside on New Year's eve with a piece of coal in his hand. He will then cross our threshold as the new year is entered and present it to the family as a sign of good luck. In Japan the tradition is to visit a shrine at midnight and bring in the new year with the blessings of the Shinto gods. In Europe there is an old tradition of walking the Camino to Santiago as a form of penance and self reflection and in Japan it is of course the 88 temples around Shikoku as a means of gaining Buddhist merit from the hardship endured.

Convention: Is a general agreement about basic principles or procedures accepted as true or correct by usage or custom especially in social matters and a rule of conduct or behavior. Aha! The word rule has surfaced and that is where we must focus the keen eye of discrimination because when rules are applied to any tradition it surely starts to die an ornate death dressed up as righteousness. But what has all this word play got to do with pilgrimage and more importantly about our experience of the world and thus the very IS that defines our reality?

Most of us think that tradition and convention basically mean the same but we are playing a semantic game here for a reason and that reason is to show how these two core concepts actually encapsulate the root of our current dilemma. What dilemma? The entire planet is currently being infested by an insidious form of mental cancer known as globalization that promises to make us all happy by making us all the same under the marvellous banner of democracy. As I write this a gutsy Brazilian tribe called the Kapayo have had it with the conventional understanding that white men in business suits know what is best for us all. One thousand indigenous Indians have just arrived on a fleet of beaten-up buses for a massive protest against a proposed dam on the Xingu River. The dam will help aluminium companies in the area by providing electricity but it will basically wipe out the fish these indigenous people have depended on for millenia. Their tradition of eating fish from that river will be eradicated through the conventional understanding that progress is good for us. Us. Do we depend on fish from that river? Our conventional minds destroy traditions. Right now it is happening. In the past Sting and Anna Roddick the founder of Body Shop were able to halt dam construction in the Amazon. Now, I doubt it can work even with the internet at our disposal. Convention is clearly destroying tradition. Pilgrimages are perhaps turning into Lohas vacations for those who have lost the connection with tradition and applied the rules of convention to an ancient body of spiritual practise. But Merton says it so much better because he saw how the beautiful tradition of monasticism was being perverted by rules and regulations about how to be a monk and thus how to be spiritual. As if there was a way to be spiritual!

In this matter of monastic tradition, we must carefully distinguish between tradition and convention. In many monasteries there is very little living tradition, and yet monks think themselves to be traditional. Why? Because they cling to an elaborate set of conventions. Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing. But this superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful. In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.

From No Man Is An Island (Shambala Library)

Merton saw the danger of following outward conventions without understanding the heart of the matter. The heart of a pilgrim cannot be gained by dressing up alone, as in the picturesque and quintessential pilgrim above. I remember walking up to a temple at the South of Shikoku where the famous monk Kobo Daishi had gotten enlightened after reciting a mantra a hundred thousand times. (was he counting?)It is a particularly popular destination for those who might not make the whole journey but cannot miss a visit to the spot where the legendary Kukai (his other name) literally saw the light. At the bottom of the mountain I had been talking to my wife in Kobe on the cellphone to dictate the Japanese blog entry for that day. I had really pushed myself that morning and had walked 18 kilometers in 3 hours. She was not in any mood to feel the fatigue of my situation and we were having communication problems as the reception was bad. Anger welled up. I yelled at her that if she didn't want to help me with the blog I would find someone else. I stopped for a smoke half way up the mountain from where a marvellous view of the sea presented itself.I had to settle down before going into the temple. Just then a disheveled looking man walked past me at very high speed. Obviously a really dedicated walker he had none of the usual pilgrim accoutrements and seemed very concentrated, even intense. I immediately recognized a man in deep pain. Something had happened in this man's life, something dreadful perhaps. He really was doing internal penance I felt, he was not in the slightest bit interested in what I or anybody else thought of him, or of whether he was being a good pilgrim or not. The speed of his walking indicated that he was perhaps trying to distance himself from something but of course since he carried it the penance was 24 hours a day. You cannot walk away from yourself.

Merton saw all the rules and regulations of the monastic order he was part of as being only partly successful in producing true monks. And his understanding of a true monk was a person who really was capable of loving his brothers, his community and by extension the whole world through the voluntary simplicity and single mindedness of renunciation. Monks are stationary pilgrims when seen in this way. They may not wander the roads externally but they most certainly face the spiritual challenges acutely. The main challenge of the traditional pilgrim as with the traditional monk was dealing with long periods of solitude. The pilgrim experiences this walking in his own company, the monk praying in his own heart. Both have communities around them but the real work is done alone. Merton with his acute directness tells us in no uncertain terms what we are asked to do if we really do want to continue the ancient spiritual tradition of the monk and the true pilgrim:

To live alone with God a man must really be able to live alone. You cannot live alone (or walk alone) if you cannot stand loneliness. And you cannot stand loneliness if your desire for solitude is built on a frustrated need for human affection. To put it in plain language it is hopeless to try to live your life in a cloister if you are going to eat your heart out thinking that nobody love you. You have to be able to totally disregard the whole issue, and simply love the whole world in God, embracing all your brethren in that same pure love,without seeking signs of affection from them and without caring whether or not you ever get any. If you think this is very easy, I assure you that you are mistaken..

Still wracked with a feeling of impotence at not being able to talk kindly to my own wife through simply being tired from overstretching myself, and from realising the enormous difficulty of the human condition, I rang the hanging gong at the temple above. The heart Sutra was being recited all around me but that was not my prayer. It is of course a convention to religiously recite the same prayer, the heart sutra at every temple. But that was not my tradition and with my craggy looking unshaven face, the white towel wrapped around my head and the hand rolled tobacco in my hand I had reached a point in this pilgrimage where I had to face hard facts. At the grand old age of 55 I was no closer to living a spiritual life, of being a real pilgrim, than when I had nievely set off on my first trip to India at 18 and was pretty sure the sacred landscape there would sort me out. Ah, such is human pride. I stubbed out the cigarette and headed for the next temple...

The road to Shikoku

2008-06-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

One of the greatest engineering feats of the perfectionist-minded Japanese must surely be the monolithic bridge connecting the island of Honshu to Awaji island at Akashi. The Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge also known as Pearl Bridge, is a suspension bridge that crosses the Akashi Strait as part of the Honshu-Shikoku Highway. It is the longest suspension bridge in the world to date, as measured by the length of its center span 1,991 metres (6,532 ft), substantially longer than the second longest suspension bridge, the Danish Great Belt Bridge. Its total length is 3,911 metres (12,831 ft).I felt every inch of that distance in the tensest of ways on the day I set out on my pilgrimage on July 11th of 2006. The problem was the wind.

In order to successfully complete the circumnavigation of Shikoku, a distance of about 1300 kilometers, throughout a one year period of monthly pilgrimaging I would need to cross this bridge a lot. Since I would progressively start each month farther away from the previous as I travelled South in Shikoku, public transport to reach my starting point would be very time consuming. I would have to take trains and buses and even taxis to get to some of the far flung areas of this island just to start off from where I had finished the previous month.I thus bought a motorcycle to reach my pilgrimage point every month and on this day I was full of excitement and anticipation about the prospect of officially becoming a pilgrim with my very own 'log book' called noukyou log. In this would be hand written and sealed the proof of having been to each temple. Of course many thousands went by car, by bicycle or by tour bus and would still get the stamps. But earning them on foot was surely the best way to go about being a pilgrim. I guess even at the age of 55 I was still very much like the 18 year old standing at the Dover docks on my way across the English channel and onwards to Katmandhu. The road ahead, being unknown, is far more attractive than the one you have already trodden. Who knows what might happen?

I should have read the signs rather than just looked at them. In kanji next to a symbol of a car being blown over it said 横風 meaning strong side winds on the bridge and roads ahead. For cars that is not a real problem unless the wind is very severe. I decided to ignore this very important information because there was no way I was not going to start walking from temple number one in Tokushima. I was ready. I was willing. I was finally a pilgrim. You never turn back on a new journey especially.

You get used to strong head winds on a powerful motorcycle but being hit from the side is totally different. For the entire, almost interminable crossing of that bridge my knuckles were white from the tension and I seriously doubted I would get across without accident. It is a miracle of design that bridge, with three wide lanes that seem to sail over the whirlpool rich seas below, a long way below. As soon as I was on the left lane, the slowest, and the wind hit me as it flew up the narrow channel we were all crossing I realised the meaning of the warning signs. I was steadily and surely being pushed into the lane to my right. Going slower should help me I surmised. It did nothing of the sort. I could not stop on a suspension bridge. The only thing to do was litearlly grit my teeth and grab those handlebars as fiercely as possible and to will that motorcycle back into the left lane with every blast of wind pushing me to the right. I prayed. At any moment a particularly strong blast could easily send my miniscule weight (relative to and heavy trucks speeding paston my right) straight in front of a very ugly end to my pilgrimage. Imagine what happens when a truck hits a motorcycle and then consider that the impact could literally eject my body over that low barrier on my left and down hundreds of feet. I remembered that Discovery channel special about falling into water from heights. There is a long standing superstition amongst high bridge workers that if you have a heavy tool in your hand and drop it under you as you fall, then the hammer or the spanner will break the surface tension of the water and thus allow the plummeting body to avoid instant destruction. Water is of course not soft as any one who has ever had a bad landing on a dive at a swimming pool knows. But the Discovery channel hosts had tested dummies with and without tools being dropped and the height was a mere 15 meters or so. All the dummies, weighted to be as close to possible as an adult, were smashed to bits.

The thought easily crossed my mind as an experienced traveller, 'Difficulty at the beginning' straight out of the I Ching. I pondered even as I wondered at how slowly I seemed to be progressing across this masterpiece of horror now... so this is to be the first test of commitment then? This is how I get treated from the very start? Do I really want to get to that island and walk for hundreds of kilometers? I glanced at my hands through a plastic visor now in the process of being ripped from the front of the helmet from the force of the wind. White knuckles were beginning to freeze the entire backs of my hands from the tension, meaning I would eventually lose control of the clutch and accelerator as well as the front brake, quickly folowed by a lack of ability to steer at all. Left into the low barrier and off for a high dive, or right into a moving mass and the sure probability of being mangled alive.The prospects looked very grim and I suddenly realised that I had no idea what I was getting myself in for. Much later I was to see that any real journey is only partly a physical one and is far more psychophysical in nature than any of us really want to recognize. That is why all cultures began to take root when we stopped being hunters and gatherers, and very short lived ones at that, and started to stay put via agriculural communities. From the point of view of fate it is far easier to get at a human being who is moving through an unstable environment than in the shelter of a walled community. In short shit happens a lot more easily when you are on the move...

The pilgrim in our age

2008-06-22T18:53:00.000-07:00

No, I know all the war rhetoric, but it's all aimed at achieving peace.

George W. Bush

She was perhaps not that well known in her lifetime. After all she was penniless, homeless and did not have a blog. Her days were filled with walking, often sleeping rough, and talking to those who might have approached her asking what 'Peace Pilgrim' written on the front of her tunic was all about. She would then share her views about the true meaning of peace and how it could only be achieved by individuals who actually lived it. Like her. She regularly got arrested as a vagrant and must have been one of the most delightful people to take into a jail for overnight stays. Today in Las Vegas it is a crime to walk the streets with no money in your pocket. You might be well dressed and even have a profession but beware of actually being without cash in that disneyland for contemporary zombies.Though we were all born essentially as pilgrims, in my understanding of the word as spiritual travelers, it is now a crime to be one perhaps. I mean NO money. NO possesions she had. A toothbrush maybe..now just who was she and what was she up to?

At some point in our lives, if we are at all alive, we will experience a crisis that to me is always spiritual in nature. We are not supposed to have such crisis in our welfare state world of course. It is seen as a failure. A trip to Las Vegas is supposed to make us feel better. There we can gamble and take in a show and eat gargantuan meals whilst sipping on cheap booze. We can feel via all that gold and glitter in the desert desert (not a typo) that life is OK and that we, though miserably overweight and spiritually discombobulated beyond all recognition, are essentially doing fine. Our ability to actually feel how far we have plummeted into the morass of hopelessness that so often assaults our every sense in a glitsy metropolis, has atrophied beyond the fossil stage. Yes, I am a fan of the idea that three meals a day and a good job amounts to not much more than a prison sentence in pleasantville.

The crisis hit Peace Pilgrim in her forties when the cold war promised to freeze us all to hell. But she did something about that real feeling of helplessness and profound dissatisfaction that everybody else with a heart carried within themselves, but were just too scared to admit.She quit the world. Or rather she quit the world of denial and stepped into the real world of the human heart. She became an individual the day she put on that tunic and started to walk. She continued to walk for over quarter of a century, all through the air conditioned nightmare (as Henry Miller aptly coined modern America), in every state along endless byways and highways. She would fast until being given food and would sleep out unless offered lodging. She relied entirely on that something that I guess we all have to get familiar with if I am right about our future. She put her trust in Life itself and knew that her extremely simple needs would undoubtedly be looked after day, after day, after day.

She did this with dignity, in deep peace and with the mesmerizing verve of a true missionary. Her mission was to show people what peace means. It is an act, not simply a state. It is not the result of political decisions made by economically powerful people in rooms high above the Earth. It cannot come via treaties, agreements, nuclear brinkmanship games or grand speeches in giant halls where jewel bedecked humanoids preach what they cannot practise. Peace Pilgrim was an excellent example of a Christ in action, a Gandhi without a press, a Buddha minus his disciples. She was an absolutely unique expression of the simpilicity and the humility that must always accompany any true measure of what I understand now to mean peace. She was a state of mind that the whole universe has always adopted to get things done perfectly, elegantly and with creative joy. Her life was health incarnate, freedom unsurpassed and natural passion unbridled. If only she could let everybody know the unspeakable joy of this inner peace, if only her life could inspire others to stop looking to others to create a peace that will never exist unless YOU are that peace here and now.That was her crazy dream.

It does not matter what she was before all this, or where she went or when but her words matter. Her mission matters still. She lives on in her friends and in the hearts of all those who yearn for a post Las Vegas planet. A planet where we actually realise that the only option for a real life is one in peace and that no amount of coercion at any level or in even the slightest of outside ways will ever produce it. A planet where war is so unthinkable that we have lost the word for it. A life during which there is absolutely no necessity for stress whatsoever since we are existentially fearless. Can you imagine that in post 9/11 days? It was the cold war that set her off on the road. What will it take for us? Do we even have the receptors to dream it anymore?

Peace requires a state of consciousness that according to psychiatrist David Hawkins is at least 600 on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 1000. If Buddha and Jesus sit at the top of such a scale and Albert Einstein at just under 500 with Gandhi clocking in at around 750, just imagine how much work we each have to do in order to be peace. You cannot buy such a state of consciousness even with the best of education. Our churches and our temples no longer practise it fundamentally at all. The peace that democracy promises us is backed up by military budgets that require war to be penned in the first place. As a mental idea it is about as effective as a celibate preaching the virtues of abstinence in a brothel during an orgy. It is a matter of the heart and who among us still has a handle on that most misundestood of all organs? Are you sure?

On and on she walked. One night in a snowstorm and with nowhere to sleep she came close to becoming a frozen pilgrim. A car was stopped by the snowdrift across from her. Inside a man. She, a not unattractive woman, alone and helpless in a country where women get raped every minute somewhere. Of course he let her in and his intentions were very clear. The only reason that nothing happened that night as she slept in the back of his car, was undoubtedly the fact that her inner peace had reached a level of consciousness that touched everbody around her with its magical presence. I hear the sceptics roar through their noses at this. As if a state of consciousness could change others' behaviour. You better believe it. It is the only thing that ever does...

The turn of the tide

2008-06-18T16:14:00.000-07:00

Let's warp back into the present for a few moments to see how the concept of Earth Pilgrims is securely embedding itself, albeit through a great diversity of names, in the fabric of the evolving human soul. Paul Hawken summarises it brilliantly...

Great Pilgrims

2008-06-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

"I am Milarepa, the yogi from Tibet. There is a great purpose to not having possessions."

These two Tibetans will never be known. They will not write books, or make movies about pilgrims. During the punishing process of prostrating themselves on the ground full length on their way to Lhasa their faces are unseen. I urge the reader to contemplate what kind of a spirit one must have to do this day after day after day. The physical endurance is one thing but it is the maintaining of a state of mind throughout the pilgrimage that really interests me. I personally used an ancient Aramaic mantra to fuel me while walking on average 10 hours a day during my own journey. The constant repetition of a mantra, or a prayer was of enormous unseen benefit. These two pious Tibetans are undoubtedly performing an inner ritual as they stand up, lie down and stand up again for weeks or months at a time. They cannot allow their minds to wander. As soon as they start to think about how far they have to go still they freeze. Therefore the maxim of the spiritual traveler will always have to be 'one step at a time'. The realisation of this philosophy is of the utmost importance to all of us living in these uncertain days of climate change and social chaos. Can we really live in the moment?

The word ‘pilgrimage’ derives from the Latin peregrinus, meaning ‘foreign’. It is derived from peregre, meaning ‘going’abroad. A ‘pilgrim’is thus someone who is on a journey, hence is not at home. The goal of pilgrimage is to come home. Peregrinus was also used in the Vulgate version of the Bible to translate the Hebrew gur (sojourner) and the Greek parepidemos meaning a temporary resident. Christians for example were identified as temporary residents in this world whose true home was in heaven. They must therefore live and behave day by day according to the standards of their homeland as they journey through life. Ideally, that is. Such an outlook would be hard to find much support for these days yet paradoxically without such an attitude we may all soon find ourselves environmental refugees. A refugee is a kind of pilgrim too albeit a forced one. Is it really that hard to imagine that all we possess, our homes, our cars, our land and properties could very well be the victim of sudden change? All around us we see such change on our TV screens yet never imagine it could happen to us. But if we were to interview the victims of such sudden uprooting they would all say that they had never once imagined it either. We really are temporary residents now, more than at any other time in the history of the world. Nothing is certain.

Even as I write the price of oil is almost $140 and yet when I was involved in commodities trading in the late nineties the price at $40 was considered very expensive. You do not require advanced mathematics training to figure out where our future transportation is not going. We will of necessity have to become more physically mobile, much more resilient and independant and we too will have to find the spirit that powers humble Tibetans such as these. It is no longer a question of quaint religious superstion we are talking about here. The attitudes embodied by pilgrims will surely become a vital key to our survival and thus to our further evolution as the planet is ravaged by environmental catastrophes as yet unimagined. It is time to 'walk our talk' so let's take a look at some pilgrims who were well known and who have shared with us their wisdom both East and West.

Soul Peregrination

2008-06-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

I fear nothing, for God is with me

Joan of Arc's last words

To peregrinate simply means to travel on foot i.e. do what real pilgrims do. When on my Shikoku pilgrimage I had taken a photo of my naked feet pointed in the direction of the temple I had stopped at to rest, and to air those feet out of my worn shoes in the fresh air. A comment on my blog suggested that to point one's feet at a temple was disrespectful. Fair enough, each country has its own cultural straightjackets that help it to maintain its uniqueness.

But I must admit I thought this was juvenile. After all, the people pointing the fingers are not the ones walking from temple to temple, thus keeping it economically alive via donations and various payments. I was simply relaxing after a long stretch on the road. However this simple incident showed me that even pilgrims are not free of the constraints their culture imposes on the peregrination they undertake in order to transcend culture. Or perhaps they unconsciously enrich it?

In Peru I was gently reminded to take off my leather hat around the stations of the cross heading up to Qoylluriti and conversely I had to don a Jewish cap in order to visit the tomb of David in Jerusalem! Unlike the vast majority of Japanese people I have little time for petty rules. It is the heart that counts in pilgrimage, not the white vestments, the outward signs of prayer and supplication before shrines or the gathering of merit, albeit stamped in a log book. What was the true pilgrim after in essence? Why the emphasis on walking? If the body really is the temple of the soul, I argued in my blog reply to the faux pas, then the feet are holier than the temple they are pointed at. But in our materialistic enculturation over centuries we have adroitly forgotten the point: the integrity of the soul. Buildings wither and rot but the human soul, if it is anything at all must surely transcend time, space and religious superstition. The spiritual hypnosis of modern Japan I can see, replete with millionaire fortunetellers and dubious spiritual counsellors always ready to tell us about our past, orbits around many quaint beliefs that do little but emphasize a profound malaise of the soul. Pilgrimage was surely proposed by our ancient ancestors as a remedy for that. Get on the road, get real and get ready for hardship for it was through hardship that we were able to prove we were more than mere mortals; we were, and always have been spiritual beings undergoing materialistic training, not the other way around.

The global literature concerning pilgrimage is not as vast as one might imagine. Considering that all the major faiths have pilgrimage within their belief systems ask any modern city dweller in the West about books on pilgrimage and the answer is likely to revolve around two or three well known tomes. The connection between famous movies and pilgrimage authors is practically unkown. 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' is now a succesful movie from the 'Chronicles of Narnia' series written by C.S. Lewis. He was an Irish writer and scholar and was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". Neither of these literary giants could have guessed that their works would influence far more people through the medium of film in much later years.

Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies over the years but even avid readers of his work may be unfamiliar with his first book, The Pilgrim's Regress, a book of allegorical fiction which charts the progress of a character through the European philosophical landscape before eventually arriving at traditional Christianity. It is Lewis's personal revision of John Bunyan's 17th century novel, Pilgrim's Progress, recast with the politics, philosophy and aesthetic principles of the early-20th century. It is a very hard book to read unless you are really interested in why paganism in Europe eventually leads to fascism and why Christianity is the flavour of the day so to speak. In other words it was Lewis telling the world how he peregrinated in his mind through many philosophies before arriving at satisfaction with the Christian worldview. It was a talk at an English pub given by Tolkien to C.S. Lewis that apparently turned him into a true believer. I would have liked to have eavesdropped on that conversational gem! But Lewis of course got his inspiration from the vastly more popular book on pilgrimage and the soul that was to become an eternal classic.

The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan published in February, 1678 is a Christian allegory. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of English literature, has been translated into more than 200 languages, and has never been out of print. Pilgrimage is thus an interesting adventure for many it seems. It clearly outlines the peregrination of an individual soul from bondage to liberation through an incredible series of adventure, tests and serious considerations about the nature of human sin. Though of course couched in Christian terms it is probably the best classical book on pilgrimage ever written and deserves to be read by any thoughtful individual. Its story is our story, and its hero is everyman and everywoman who has deeply inquired into the spiritual dilemma of being born on Earth.

If you think you are free then you will never try to get out of prison and if you think you are spiritual you will never go on a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage has always been only for those people who realise that they live in bondage and need liberation (the East), or for those who live in sin and require redemption (the West). Otherwise, why bother? Eat, drink and be merry! Surely that is enough!

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century. The tales are told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the famous shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. They are written in Middle English. We had to study them at my ancient grammar school in Aberdeen, founded in 1257 if you can believe. Lord Byron was one of our most illustrious graduates. None of us could understand a word of this book, one of the first to herald the entry of the English language into European culture. Trying to teach 14 year old Scottish kids about the intricacies of human foibles using this book is akin to attempting to teach nuclear physics to Irish labourers. But Canterbury Tales has always been associated with the idea of Pilgrims though I seriously doubt it communicates the pilgrim message succesfully. Books about the Camino though seem far more to the point.

The Way of St James has existed for over a thousand years. It was one of the most important Christian pilgrimages during medieval times and was considered one of three pilgrimages on which a plenary indulgence could be earned, the others are the Via Francigena to Rome and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.In other words by going on that pilgrimage your soul would be spared from undergoing further religious suffering through the forgiveness of the Church in Rome. In the great movie The Mission, with Jeremy Irons as a Catholic priest and Robert De Nero as a penitent murderer we see De Nero's character on a kind of pilgrimage dragging a huge heavy bag of metal objects behind him. To modern people this may seem absurd, as if physical suffering could bring back the dead or really atone for the ultimate sin of killing another. That is because we think in terms of democracy and the rule of law. The medieval mind saw things through the lense of a key concept which we call the soul. Invisible yet real this spiritual kernel could be purified, could be saved even though its body had committed terrible acts. We live under the yoke of governments but the middle ages lived under the yoke of the Church. There is incredibly still a tradition in Flanders of freeing one prisoner a year under the condition that this prisoner walk to Santiago wearing a heavy backpack, accompanied by a guard!

Legend holds that the brother of Christ, St. James after his death had his remains carried by boat from Jerusalem to northern Spain where they were buried on the site of what is now the city of Santiago de Compostela. The Pilgrimage is a 1987 novel by Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho and is a recollection of Paulo's experiences as he made his way across Northern Spain on the Pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela in 1986. The book starts as he fails his initiation into the order Regnus Agnus Mundi (RAM) and is then told he must complete the pilgrimage to gain the rite of admission. He begins his journey with a guide, also a member of RAM, who goes by the alias Petrus. During the journey Petrus shows him meditational exercises and introduces him to some of the more down to earth elements of Western mystical thought and philosophy.It was a worldwide bestseller from the start and tells us that the concept of pilgrimage has been renewed. Shirley MacLaine was later to also write a book entitled Camino and this no doubt further encouraged individuals in the postmodern world to review the entire idea of pilgrimage. We may not have a holy inquisition bursting out of the Church in the 21st century but we have plenty of fascism as George Bush's 8 years of crime and mayhem around the world have shown us. It is a good time for all of us to reflect humbly on the forgotten sense that we are souls navigating bodies through a very dangerous world.

The Pilgrim past and present

2008-06-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.

Ansari of Herat

One of the objectives of the Earth Pilgrims documentary series must be a re-definition of the word 'pilgrim' for our modern world. In a growingly secular global society where religion has too often become a weapon of control, the role of the religious pilgrim has blurred to the point of obscurity. If you doubt the 'control' then consider that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, arguably one of the main pilgimage sites on Earth, was recently the scene of an embarrasing fracas during Easter celebrations in 2008. The religion's founder would not be amused at the following:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A scuffle broke out at the traditional site of Jesus' burial on Sunday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian believers, who fiercely protect their hold over sections of the shrine, traded blows.

Police said a fist-fight broke out after Armenian worshippers yanked a Greek Orthodox cleric away from a tomb in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the traditional site of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection.

A spokesman said he did know the precise cause of the scuffle. Fights are not uncommon among the representatives of Christian sects who jealously guard their rights to parts of the centuries-old church.

"There is always tension there between the different sides," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. "That's why police were on scene ahead of time to prevent any arguments or disturbances from breaking out."

When I have visited this church the sense of real estate is poignant. The Franciscans vie with the Greek orthodox for control of the territory inside this most important of all Christian churches. What an incredibly pathetic statement of our failure to understand the meaning of 'pilgrim' as quoted above by a wiser brother on the way. There is obviously something askew with the manner in which the original idea of pilgrimage has become seriously compromised by that most human of all vices, greed. Greed for control of a place venerated for centuries and greed for the power and prestige that come from sitting on a relic. Personally I felt that this church, amongst all the places I have visited in the world of 'sacred geography' is very poorly suited to the true meaning of pilgrimage. The only saving grace is in the faces of the pilgrims who have travelled acrosss the world to physically position themselves in the place where their master died and was resurrected. For them there can be no power struggle if they are at all serious about their religious convictions. Yet it is not the poor pilgrim who controls the place but the far more morally corrupt priesthood which vies for even another square inch of territory. How did this happen?

The ancient notion of pilgrimage which is so obviously present in almost all the world's religions of course reflects a human desire for spiritual fulfillment. I would dare to say that atheists too have such a strong desire since their denial of God reveals a sincere consideration of the meaning of 'spiritual'. When we realise that the very word fulfillment entails an understanding that merely satisfying physical or mental appetites alone will never fulfill anybody, we inevitably have our noses pressed upon the tricky word spiritual. Naturally, modern psychologists will tell us that spiritual really means 'mental', but these fragmentary experts on psychic phenomena tend to be infantile interpreters perched on the back of Greek philosophical giants (amongst others) who really did comprehend spiritual. What I am saying is that fulfillment implies a totally holistic therefore spiritual understanding and whether you are religious or not about such an understanding is entirely a personal and private affair. Oh, if only the priests and mullas could arrive at this. One's spiritual life, as one's highly related sexual life, is nobody's business but yours.

Throughout history, pilgrimage has mainly been a religious phenomenon that set people on a physical journey that hopefully yielded spiritual results. All of the world's religions have inherently some sense of pilgrimage. Many Jews, Muslims and Christians visit Jerusalem, the Abrahamic centre of those three faiths while Muslims alone travel to Mecca or visit the tombs of Sunni saints. Buddhists will journey to Tibet and of course in Japan Shikoku's 88 temples for example as well as to an expansive canvas of sacred places all over Asia . Hindus would go principally to Benares (Varanasi) as well as to a plethora of holy sites including a cave in Kashmir adorned witha giant phallic symbol at Amarnath. Catholicism has its own rich history of pilgrimage dating back to the Medieval period when pilgrims traveled to major churches, such as Chartres or visited the sites where saints had lived, such as Assisi in Italy and to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Basically any site where either an individual of high spiritual consciousness once enacted a significant miracle (in the case of the Fatima phenomenon for example), died, was born or spent long years in prayer or meditation will be a candidate for a pilgrimage. The Camino (the Santiago de Compostella pilgrimage) has become greatly popularised by the works of Paulo Coelho and Shirley Maclaine amongst others and allows both young and old to feel spiritual and enjoy Spain as a travel destination in a unique manner.

Swami Sivananda was an Indian Yoga master, Physician, Monk and Founder of The Divine Life Society. He had the following to say on pilgrimage:

“Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.”

Resting by roadside inns appears to have become religion, with the best of intentions of course. We now find ourselves languishing in those inns, scrapping like dogs in them over bones as seen in the above example and even worse preaching about how our inn is better than eveybody else's. Indeed it is time for us to consider seriously whether the concept of pilgrim has any use for us anymore, and if so in what way. The documentary film Earth Pilgrims and its attendant book series, published by a major Japanese publishing house, will show us that the answer is a resounding yes. The age of religious pilgrims I dare to say is over, must be over. The time of the Earth Pilgrims is upon us as our communal space and time vehicle, Earth herself, is poised for what clearly looks like a voyage upon rougher seas. She orbits in now very hoary climes and is perhaps in no mood for local power struggles upon her sacred face. If we are to really have a future, and I say that in all sincerity and with the logical consistency of an open minded layman who has simply opened his eyes to reality, then it must be as spiritual pilgrims on a scared planet. All else, as Ecclesiastes says, is pure vanity.

The individulas who will be sharing their profound insights with us about the deeper ramifications of this pilgrimage including Satish Kumar, Graham Hancock, Wade Davis and several others have been chosen because they are not stuck in the inns. Satish has ventured deep into the meaning of pilgrim in his life and his work. Graham shares with us how the pilgrim-as-shaman is the great archetypal explorer of inner worlds that are just as real as this one. And Wade Davis whose perigrinations amongst the ethnic minorities of planet Earth, they who were once the mainstream of humanity for tens of thousands of years, will teach us what it is we are on the verge of losing forever. If we can only remember that we are essentially pilgrims, born to move through life and death into a deeper world, then we may have a chance at a new civilization. The farce of a political solution, an economic answer, or a religious breakthrough that will somehow save us from ourselves, has to be seen with naked intelligence as the same promise of fulfillment that has ever left us dry. There have been great souls though amongst our Earth Pilgrims who knew this, even 800 years ago. Let us close then with our favourite pilgrim, Rumi:

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival: A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice — meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

The demise of mystery

2008-06-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

“The final mystery is oneself.”

Oscar Wilde

I had spent much of the 90's chasing down people who would perhaps assist me in understanding the riddle of human consciousness. A great mystery had provoked this activity on my part, one that had radically shaken my beliefs in just about everything. I had finally come face to face with something that just could not, would not be pigeonholed into any extant theory on Earth. It was an ongoing series of 'meetings' with totally bizarre apparitions in the night sky of Canada starting in May of 1992 and which had subsequently forged a new career for me as a leader of unique journeys to what in those days nobody would know as 'sacred sites'. The age of power spots had yet to begin especially in Japan but that did not mean that interest in exotic travel was nil. The appearance of an insolvable mystery must surely be one of the greatest motivators of all for the human psyche. I would have gone anywhere as long as it promised a hint of understanding. In retrospect I guess that I was being guided to expand my view of reality through investigating the cultures of people who were radically different from us.　The Maya for example.

In order to finance my research at the myriad ceremonial centres of the Yucatan peninsula where many of the Mayan pyramids were located, I created adventure journeys for Japanese. They were aimed at individuals who had heard me lecture in Japan and had received flyers at one of my talks. These were adventurous people, often women as well as men who had seeen enough of the system in Japan to balk at it long enough to create some time to leave it. The talks had spiced their interest as I talked about sacred geometry, multidimensional consciousness and the precession of the equinoxes.

Naturally I had to do huge amounts of reading to prepare for these lectures (before the internet) as well as engage in dialogue with people who had specific knowledge of the subject in question. Because I am a natural born raconteur (the Blarney gift of the Irish) the talks would often captivate hundreds for three hours at a time. Out of those hundreds a dozen or so would decide to join me in Merida for example, to come by themselves that far, and to begin the experience of visiting extraordinary sites like the pyramid of the magician at Uxmal. I would invite a Mayan leader by the name of Hunbatz Men to join us and interpret as he explained what these 'ceremonial centres' were actually built for, and by whom.

As we climbed pyramid step after step he would engage us in a world view that was so totally at odds with our modern world that it demanded a serious revisioning of the concept of culture itself. How for example did the Maya know about fractals? To them the same word that means to us DNA would be read backwards to mean galaxy. In other words the ancient alchemical formula of 'as above so below' was embedded in their language itself. From the DNA level of our bodies to the swirling galaxies only recently identified by the HUbble space telescope there exists a continuum that for them was totally real. We have utterly forgotten this fact and so 21st century scientists (who are often politically manipulated) can with total certitude tell us that the sun has absolutely nothing to do with global warming, extreme weather and declining sperm counts. If the Maya were to hear of such humans I am convinced they would conclude we had all gone crazy. After all the sun accounts for 99.8% of the total mass of the solar system.

These journeys not only allowed me to get paid to research and to more importantly experience very different world views but also provided me with a wealth of contacts globally. I discovered that the Yucatan in particular seemed to have a rejuvenating effect on both my wife and I. That may simply be the result of the laid back culture of the Mayan lands, the balmy weather and the great food. Or it could hint that such locations are inherently high energy places where we feel more 'at home' that we do in our own countries. The Maya captivated me for the first half of the nineties and I returned seven times with scores of Japanese in tow in total. We got remarried by Hunbatz at Chichen Itza, visited the tomb of Pacal Votan in Palenque before his red Queen's tomb had been discovered and saw a white owl at Dzibilchaltun. I seriously considered renting an apartment in Merida, so captivated were we with this world view and this natural connection the Maya seemed to have had with the universe.But the mystery persists to this day, though I of course have formed various theories about the irruption into my world of inexplicable flying 'stars'. Some mysteries may not be solvable. Their function may be to constantly remind us, as Earth Pilgrims, that we know absolutely nothing at all about reality. As Lewis Carrol reminded us with Alice in wonderland, the rabbit hole goes very deep indeed. And it is not only rabbits we will find when we go down them...

Yarawaka Washuma

2008-06-09T09:40:00.001-07:00

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by "Mind at Large" - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."
Aldous Huxley

Medicine in English has two important and related meanings.The Webster online dictionary definition of medicine includes these: 'Something that treats or prevents or alleviates the symptoms of disease' and 'Punishment for one's actions' as in "you have to face the music"or "take your medicine". Long before the pharmacy had been dreamed of however shamans from Siberia to Chile have been using simple plants to profoundly affect our human psychosomatic conditions. Yes, psychosomatic which of course refers to both the mind and the body. Actually these plants usually inform us in no uncertain terms that the mind IS the body. At critically important times in any pilgrimage we do indeed face the music and to take the medicine does not simply mean to ingest it into the body but also to withstand its effects on the mindbody.

With such an understanding and intent then, did our film crew start the walk along the railway tracks in a quiet corner of the sacred valley of the Incas, not far from Ollantaytambo and about an hour from our base of operations in Pisac. We did not have any diseases however and we certainly were not sick, though we often joked that I with a recently severed achilles tendon, Amnon with a sprained back from carrying cameras across the planet and Paulo with festering jungle bites on his elbow were a group of spastic film makers. Jeff and Luke at this point were relatively well though Luke was later to undergo serious purification by fever and Jeff, especially today, was about to embark on what can only be correctly termed a catharctic journey. Our intent was to prepare ourselves psychosomatically for the ascent of the holy mountain upon which tens of thousands were soon to congregate. I was clearly limping still and was by no means fully ready to attempt such a strenous climb. Today would change that..

Our driver Lalo had dropped us off near the base of hill upon which sat the ruins of a ceremonial Inca temple called Yarawaka and more anciently Choco Pujillo in the Quechua tongue.There we found the only shade in this high desert-like wilderness of catctii, shrubs and bald hills. I had done ceremony with Paulo before at the great Inca temple of the water at Tipon and he himself had recently used this spectacular setting (and I really do mean spectacular) to assist other people who had a strong intention to 'use the medicine' but for the other three in our crew this was to be a first encounter with the powerful cactus called Washuma by the Quechua and later as San Pedro by the Catholicised natives of the area. Whatever you call this beautiful plant, after about an hour of drinking it, IT calls you. That is when you have to start the process of taking the medicine. How you do that will define the journey that you and this deceptively simple cactus, used all over Peru and sold in all the markets, will share. Our day at Yarawaka was to unfold as a classically beautiful ceremony of healing, connectivity with Earth and communion with sky. For this we must always thank Paulo, our navigator, our host, our brother and our medicine man par excellence. A great cook too! Here he is at centre:

The previous day had seen us all involved in the preparation of this sacred plant. A meter long cactus (they grow to over ten meters) had been selected by Paulo as the key vegetal sacrifice to be used in our ceremony. We had filmed him explaining with great lyrical clarity how the wax-like covering of this resilient desert inhabitant had to be carefully peeled away from the body in order to properly cook it. Using Swiss army knives we all got immediately engrossed in the delicate operation of revealing the tenderer skin below the surface. The chemistry of this remarkable plant includes mescaline, much like its Northern relative peyote, which is concentrated in a green ring around the outer edges of the massive girth that Washuma incorporates. We then sliced the now skinless San Pedro into more manageable sizes so that each of us could then separate the mescalin-rich areas, needed for preparation, from the rest of the cactus pulp which would not be put in the pot. Meanwhile the sun was gracefully sailing below the peaks of all our surrounding Apus (mountains) and the ponchos were thrown over our heads. All the while Paulo reminded us that the manner in which we prepared the plant would likely impact the manner in which we experienced its power. Like a great chef at work in a world class kitchen Paulo was teaching us the simplest of all lessons: your inner actions define your experiences..a great cook's secrets lie just as much in the attitude of his heart as in his hands and his mind. Treating this beguilingly basic life form with respect and care was later to involve singing, praying and envisioning as it came to a boil on the tiny butane stove behind Paulo's house. I had just caught it, at one point in the evening, in time to stir it away from sticking to the bottom of the pan. By the following morning a clear liquid traced with grey-white streaks was in a bottle and on Paulo's back as we navigated the terrain up at the site of our ceremony. The sun was growing in strength and altitude as we assembled for the gulp..

With great attention and ease did Paulo then bless the sacrament we had prepared and in a few gulps actually, the bitter tasting potion was inside me. Having long experience with sacred plants the world over I knew that within an hour my everyday consciousness would be subsumed into something far more alive, vital and intense. My three companions however although well informed by Paulo as to what to expect must have sensed a little apprehension through wondering how it would all unfold.

Much faster than expected I had to get up from my relaxed position under the tree (as in the photo above) and start to move. Like a snake uncoiling inside my body core the energy of plant/human dynamics was keenly felt. As I left our medicine altar I picked up Paulo's rattle and spontaneously began to address the surrounding mountains. That is certainly not something that a modern man or woman even faintly contemplates ever doing, and yet somehow the power of this simple cactus through its mescalin rich flesh, tuned my bodymind into a totally different channel. It was like a hidden switch on our regular TV's that when pushed actually sends you into the screen rather than just observing it from a safe distance. The mountains were so obviously and really present as sentient entities (meaning that rock can be aware of its rockness)that to ignore them and go about my day was like ignoring traffic at a crossroads i.e. impossible. The mountains quietly demanded recognition as the entities which had sculpted the landscape that I was about to enter as an aware being, a luminous being capable of feeling mother Earth at far deeper levels than in 'ordinary', thus relatively decrepit states of consciousness by comparison. No wonder all shamans in Peru venerate the great Earth goddess, or Pachamama. Without her we have nowhere to experience anything at all. We are in a void.

Jeff had wandered off towards the substantial ruins above our tree base spread out over a fairly large rolling hill. To the far right of that from where we sat was the telltale sign of an Inca cemetery-scores of holes in the cliff face. The Incas never put their dead in the ground but rather placed them in dug out caves. Perhaps their respect for the great mother Earth, respect that we were to viscerally encounter this day, extended to not polluting it with dead bodies. The Incas truly were unique.

My internal alarm system was going off. I knew full well that this plant was extremely powerful in its ability to subtly change our perception. Let me me clear here. A few martinis will change your perception very well (the old school thus had them for lunch to get through automaton afternoons at offices across the US for example) and so will recreational drugs like ecstacy or LSD, tantric sex, yoga, extended trance dancing and for that matter a couple of days without sleep. San Pedro does not transport you out of this dimension like ayahuasca, ibogaine or other DMT rich alkaloids well used by South American and African shamans. We have driven, eaten at restaurants, held conversations with people in markets and in towns under its influence. San Pedro comes on like when you wake up in a strange bed, in a new country and the sun is shining outside. For a few moments you have forgotten who you are supposed to be just after awakening, and the sense of wonder that you once had as a child is temporarily reinstated. Everything is alive and ripe with meaning. You are alive and deeply grateful for being so-even if it is just to open your eyes and look at the wonder. Washuma reconnects you with your innocence whilst profoundly altering that atrophied sense of magic. For some it can be too much too soon though, as if you had time travelled back to that most glorious moment of epiphany that happened when you were three for example, and had seen past the world and into its soul. My alarm went off because I knew he had no water and that he was on the move in a prickly environment that was going to get really hot in an hour or so. Though San Pedro is very easy on the digestive system people have been known to vomit and feel some discomfort as a result. My main concern I guess was snakes, scorpions and sunstroke. The others were still at the base of the tree relaxing into the Washuma feel. I decided to track Jeff even as the medicine spoke to me in all my cells that it was going to do powerful work on us all today. I needed to catch up with him..

Qoylluriti Pilgrimage

2008-06-03T08:32:00.001-07:00

“Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.”

Wade Davis

I awaken after a night of intense shivering attacks in the tent. It is, after all, close to 5 thousand meters in altitude here at the makeshift pilgrimage town of Qoylluriti on Ocangate mountain. The air is thin enough to make me hyperventilate while trying to keep warm in the sleeping bag. And yet, outside sleep thousands of pilgrims with nothing on them but plastic sheets or ponchos. I see a woman huddled behind our tent who has no shoes on, lying on the ground and completely without protection. What are these people made of? Their fortitude both amazes us and humbles us, we who are five of a very small number of non-Quechua speaking participants in this ancient festival of the snow (Qoyllu) and of the star (Riti).Getting here had not been easy of course but that was expected. What I had not counted on was the power of what I was about to experience. The wave had hit me.

Amnon, our Israeli cinematographer, was awake in the tent too and we both soon realised we had to get moving. The glacier had three huge crucifixes on it and when the sun hit them with its first piercing rays the festival would climax.The previous night had been spent at the bottom of the mountain where truckloads of pilgrims were arriving from all over Peru. It felt like a wild west town full of horses, dust, and hastily assembled stalls selling everything a pilgrim might want for the journey up the holy mountain. Arriving at midnight from Pisac we were told it was customary to start the hike at dawn. My four companions had thus decided to sleep in our vehicle where space was very limited and I knew for certain I would not get a wink. It was therefore a good time to see if my rental sleeping bag was really fit for minus 10 degrees centigrade. So I rolled it out behind the white van we had rented in Pisac to get out there. The smell of human excrement lightly pervaded the entire area. People were singing and dancing, drinking tea and diligently preparing all around despite the fact that it was past midnight. On this pilgrimage singing and dancing are central to one's prayers to the Lord of the star and the snow. In ancient days that Lord had been a great overseeing mountain spirit. Now it was Jesus Christ. I had bad dreams that night. There was some kind of sleep too though.The smell may have been responsible for the visions of very nasty entities coming to get me...tough shit.

Thankfully our film equipment was on a horse's back and not ours. By the time we had left the ramshackle village of 'pilgrim's progress' services and had a view down on to it from a few hundred meters it was clear we would suffer the effects of high altitude. Walking with a back pack, fully clothed and covered in my trusty poncho that had seen so many years of previous action in Peru, I soon realised that though the path was not overly steep it most certainly led higher and higher. That was the point. That meant that breathing got harder and harder. Around us , behind us and ahead of us hundreds and then thousands walked. They walked with children. They walked with grandparents. They walked in rubber tires cut into shoes.

Some carried kitchen equipment or huge drums for the diverse ceremonies. All shared the copper brown skin, solid white teeth and thick black hair that every Quechua speaker is in natural born possession of. I mused that black was not the original colour of humans but rather this - what the American plains Indians had shared in genetic background for millenia and what the whites had called 'redskin'. It was a decidedly haunting colour for me. It was so much more realistic on this mountain than my own pale skin colour. The sun, when it did come up was obviously going to be very intense. Meanwhile, it was the pilgrim's job to focus on that most simple and difficult process called 'one step at a time'. We would get there. We all would. Nobody would get left behind for sure so it was simply a matter of time. We had that.

This was not a race, but a procession towards a simple kind of glory that most of we so called advanced nations have long abandoned as nievety. How could a pilgrimage, a simple procession up to a glacier accompanied with much fanfare, really have any impact on reality, on our health, our finances or our homes? Our sense of the magical seems to have atrophied to the point of cryogenic stillness. In short we are fast forgetting the power of the human heart wherein that most mysterious of all entities, the soul, most certainly appears to dwell. It was the energy of that heart, multiplied by what I estimated at 20-30,000 pilgrims, that was to propel the wave that hit me from the glacier. It was a wave of something very rarely felt and even more rarely reported. It was that wave of energy that humans can produce at certain times in certain places when they remember who they are. It was a wave that had no location in space or in time. Call it love. It hit and I buckled. And we got it on film..

Two navels

2008-05-03T19:59:00.000-07:00

Daimonji overlooks Kyoto in much the same fashion that Sacsayhuaman overlooks Cusco. Having not been up this charming mound for decades I had of course not realised the similarity between these two 'Earth navels', Cusco and Kyoto.

Both are surrounded on all sides with low mountains and both are of course at major cultural crossroads. Kyoto is the undisputed heavyweight of Japanese arts, crafts and imperial presence whilst Cusco once boasted real gold flowers in its many Inca gardens. It flourished as the centre of that legendary empire replete with a plethora of priests, artisans and a royal family. Ancient Kyoto was no different.

Thus the synchronicity was not lost on me that two of my trusted companions on the next leg of our filming should live at the bottom of a mountain with a huge kanji engraved upon its surface. Big. The above photograph is literally BIG on fire during a yearly ceremony for the Buddhist equivalent of 'all souls day'. From Cusco one can see the Quechua resonance of Daimonji which has 'Viva El Peru' engraved on its dusty surface. The umbilicus literally feeds the growing embryo and indisputably these two great cities fed their respective empires both materially and spiritually.

Climbing the hill with an achilles tendon that still requires attention to strides, in the company of some of my Peru film crew provided an excellent opportunity to test some equipment as we gazed over two cities. One was in our visual field, the other in our imagination.

Kind of like how film works...

Dialogues with Satish Kumar

2008-04-07T19:57:00.001-07:00

Echan

Well you really had a wonderful mother.

Satish

Absolutely! She was a truly spiritual being, and a pilgrim. And so, mother would say that when you touch the Earth, you are touching a sacred space, a divine space, and God is present in the Earth. And everything upon this Earth is a manifestation of the divine spirit in physical form. Every physical form has an invisible dimension. And that invisible dimension is the divine dimension, the spiritual dimension, the dimension of imagination.

You have to imagine that this flower is not just a physical flower, it has divine spirit in it. And that can only come with the power of imagination. And that was teaching I got from my mother at age four and five.

Echan

Well this is a very important point Satish – imagination. The way that the word is currently used is severely limited to the idea of artistic imagination, or writing, of painting, or of creating. The true purpose of imagination according to Thomas Aquinas, for example, in the Western tradition was exactly what you’re describing. It was so that we could actually visualise the impossible to visualise, which is the invisible, untouchable, unreachable, ungettable. However, by using the powers of our imagination we can get closer to the divine presence, therefore we should use our imaginations in such a way. But you were given a mother that taught you this from four. You’re part of probably 0.0001% of all humans who’ve ever lived, and came in with a very big lucky break.

Satish

That’s right. My mother’s teaching was that the physical form is a vehicle to carry the invisible reality. Now, for example words. Words are only a vehicle to carry the meaning. So the body is only a vehicle to carry the love. If you have no body, then how do you embrace somebody? How do you look at somebody? How do you kiss somebody? So body is a vehicle to carry that compassion, that generosity, that love.

So in the same way, the flower is carrying something. The flower has a physical form, but it will also have an invisible dimension, and that invisible dimension can only be realised through imagination, and through the third eye, which is the eye of the imagination. The two eyes are the physical eyes, can see the physical form, but in order to see the non-physical form – the invisible reality, you have to have another dimension in your self. And that other dimension is metaphorically spoken of as the third eye. And what is that third eye?

The third eye is the eye of the eye of the heart, the eye of imagination, the eye of the spirit. So imagination, from a spiritual point of view, from an Indian perspective, is much bigger than just artistic or poetic imagination. Of course that’s a part of it, because true art and true poetry can reach the divine. William Blake, and his imagination, was reaching the divine.

Echan

Tagore was of course reaching the divine.

Satish

Exactly. Tagore was reaching through his poetry, though his music, though his paintings. But he was reaching that invisible reality of the divine. And the divine word, sometimes we are a little bit confused, and we don’t know what it means. The Divine simply means the eternal reality of blissfulness. Eternal reality, which is implicit every moment, in every thing, here and now. Divine is not in the next life. Divine is not in the next life. Divine is not in the book. Divine is not in the church. Divine is not in any kind of exterior reality. Its interior reality is present every moment in every thing in every second of time, in every word we speak, in every atom we touch, the divine presence is there.

But what is lacking is imagination. Without imagination we cannot experience it. And you have to experience divine. You have to imagine that there is bigger reality in that flower, in that tree, in that river, in that butterfly, in that human being, in that bell, in that sound. In everything there are two dimensions – the visible dimension and the invisible dimension, and the invisible dimension is the divine dimension.

Echan

That’s a very important point; you’re talking about two dimensions – the visible dimension and the invisible dimension. But you are not talking about duality, as far as I can feel. You’re talking about a unity of two dimensions at all times. They are not separate, they are not different dimensions, they are coexisting immanent dimensions, I believe is what you’re saying. As opposed to the ancient Western idea, the Gnostic idea, that there is a real world – a physical world – but it’s not as real as we think it is. It’s like a Matrix, like in the movie.

But there’s a separate spiritual world above and beyond that is almost untouchable and unconnectable, and therefore we are in a prison here; we are far from heaven and we have been cut off. This is an idea that seemed to have some possibilities, however what you’re describing now is not duality. It is the coexistence of two dimensions.

Satish

Yeah absolutely. It’s not duality because the spirit and the matter are two aspects of one single existence. Without spirit, matter cannot exist. And without matter, spirit cannot manifest itself. So matter needs spirit, and spirit needs matter. Without each other there is no existence. So it’s a completely one, single, complete whole, called Purnam in Sanskrit, meaning a complete and whole reality.

But in order to understand it, in order to make sense of it in our language, in our intellect, in our communication, we sometimes explain it. So this is only a way of explaining that there is a visible and invisible reality, but they are one and the same and there is no separation.

Echan

We all have the ability to use our imaginations to appreciate the divine presence in every moment because we’re all born the same, we all have bodies, we all have brains. However the great tragedy, especially of modern times I think – I don’t know too much about if this happened in historical times, if we completely lost our imagination before – but it seems to me that we have utterly and completely lost our divine imagination, almost totally today, resulting in the manifestation around us that you’ve been such a great campaigner for, of a return to a more spiritual, ecological outlook that is not limited to any one perspective.

Let me get back to your mother, because the problem is we don’t have the imagination now. I see that as a challenge, as a problem. We’ve lost that imagination. You were gifted with a mother who taught you that imagination. Perhaps you can let us know how she taught you in more practical terms in a more day to day basis; how she brought you to being a pilgrim, and how you related back to her your experiences, and how that helped you to grow, because I think you had a unique upbringing.

Satish

Yes, I was very fortunate to have a mother who was extremely wise. She saw nature as the divine manifestation. So in practical terms, she taught me to connect with nature; to rediscover, to always rediscover our connection with nature. Because we are nature, and therefore we are related to everything around us.

When we would walk she would always give examples.

She would see that as a child I would see what was going on, and she would point things out; for example the honeybee. My mother would point out “look at the honey bee. The honeybee can teach us the lessons of transformation.” Now that is the divine dimension that you can only learn from imagination. The honeybee is in a physical reality, doing a physical action, but there is an invisible reality of transformation. Now the honeybee goes from flower to flower, collecting nectar from here and there. Little from here, little from there – never too much. And once it has collected nectar, it transforms; it transforms nectar into sweet, delicious, healthy honey.

That’s the divine dimension. Now also the honeybee is a pollinator. The honeybee is the key to our existence. If there is no honeybee, there is no pollination; if there’s no pollination, there are no plants; if there are no plants, there is no food; if there’s no food, there’s no life. So in this extremely simple way, this is how my mother taught me to be a pilgrim of nature, and a pilgrim of the divine at the same time; and by connecting with nature we realise that everything is completely and intricately, and in a subtle way totally interdependent. Life will not exist if there is no honeybee, this is just one example. This was the practical way my mother taught me to be a pilgrim.

Walking was one of the most beautiful ways, because when you are walking you have time – you are going slowly. And when you are going slowly then you are looking around. If you are on a horseback, or worse in a car or a train, or worse of all an airplane, you see nothing. You don’t connect – you are disconnected. But when you are walking you are connected with the earth, you are connected with the air, you are connected with the trees, you are connected with the sunshine, you are connected with the flowers, you are connected with fungi, you are connected with birds, you are connected with the entire universe.

You are one. There is no dualism there, you are completely one.

And these were the simple, practical examples that my mother would give me, to teach me to be a pilgrim.

Many thanks to Luke Hancock for transcribing this from video tapes

On being alone

2008-03-24T04:09:00.000-07:00

One must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.--Meister Eckhart

My pilgrimage began in earnest around the year this picture above was taken. I am standing in the main temple of Durbar Square in Katmandu, or rather swaying to the rythm of music the film set has generated for the scene. The movie is Hari Ram, Hari Krishna and was directed by Dev Anand, the legendary prototype for all that was to later become Bollywood. The film was such a smash hit that people would surround me in the streets of Delhi a year later, as they would many other hippies, and taunt me with the theme song. There are many ways that poor pilgrims get help on long journeys and becoming an extra in that movie probably saved my life. No shit. Pun intended, as I was rescued from amoebic dysentery through my one month on the set.

It was 1971 and I was restless. Jack Kerouc, Henry Miller, Thoreau and the zen masters of China and Japan had, along with a whole cast of philosophical and artistic characters instilled the dreaded wanderlust in me. There had to be answers to the fundamental questions that plagued me. Nobody was teaching any of these answers to students at the prestigious Aberdeen University, founded so long ago that one wonders if there were actually any people around. Of course since I declined the opportunity to go there I was never to find out the riches this august institution might have provided. But that is a mighty big might.

To get to Katmandu from Aberdeen on a fiscal limit of twenty pounds one needs to have no plan. This is where being a pilgrim began. Of course the destination must be firmly emblazoned on the inner eye's screen but without money there is simply no way to decide where you will be when. The road is thus its own teacher and its own student as we poor pilgrims become the catalysts for an energy older than our kind. It is surely the energy of movement amidst chaos. What happens next on any given day is anybody's guess therefore be prepared for anything all the time.

At eighteen I had my share of Arab truck drivers wanting to make deals for the long haul from Innsbruk to Teheran but I valued my heterosexuality more than the warmth of a cab in the wintry Austrian night. Yugoslavia was a hard master. Grey to the point of Prozac, its bleak landscape matched its socialist citizens whom one would suppose would communalize transport. It was the opposite. Sleeping in railway tunnels not five feet from freight trains taught me about how to handle the cold alone and how not to perfectly fall asleep.

An orange here, a piece of unleavened bread there. Always alone. Moving on with the constant mantra. Istanbul, Erzerum, Tabriz Teheran and Herat. Kandahar, Kabul and Peshawar, Lahore, Amritsar and Delhi. Varanasi and Katmandu - like an endless loop song it kept me going for almost two months but by the time I arrived inside Pakistan, at the border in fact, there were jets of liquid proceeding from a place in my anatomy where it should not have been the case. Thin as a wire but miraculously undaunted I must hereby pay homage to the bravery and the foolishness of youth. To do this without support and without money spending most of every day walking and hitch hiking it now astonishes me to consider where all the faith came from.

It was raw need. I had to get answers. I had to find out what lay behind this pathetic veneer that had been presented as reality by my parents, my teachers and my friends. The menu was all wrong in the societal restaurant. It was not food for humans, it was fodder for sheep. To eat it, worse to digest it would be fatal to my spiritual health. Rather go hungry and wander and wonder. Thus I did on many a day.

To encourage oneself is a sublime art that many a hitchhiker must quickly master. Entire days can go by without significant movement forward and then just as you get that desperately lonely and forlorn feeling that they were all right in warning against this foolishness, a tooothless turbanned Pathan will stop his mule and cart and hand you a carrot or an apple.

I was seriously ill by the time I got to Katmandu with regulat jets of brown sewage emitting from my emaciated body. What next? Katmandu! The destination! Surely I will be cared for there! Ah, the hope of ages surely rings in every pilgrim's heart. It will get better for it must.

The Hog Farm had stopped in Katmandu. Famous as the world's most colourful traveling hippie commune they rode across the planet in psychedelic school buses and fed the poor as they fucked and tripped their way across unknown worlds. Their religion was sex and drugs after all. It was the early days of the hippy movement and we had swung from as far to on side of the moral divide as it was possible to relative to our parents. Nakedness was a virtue now and possession was a sin. They were wonderful hosts as I found them and they told me Anand wanted lots of hip extras. I was instantly employed.

I recovered my strength and headed back down into the steaming plains where I would continue to sleep on pavements and totally immerse myself in the freedom of total insecurity. Et voila a pilgrim of sorts was born. A largely unconscious one for sure but I certainly had what it took to be on the road because I had mastered the art of being my own best company while most kids were wandering how to spend their pocket money in the student union. After three trips to India and back by the time I was twenty I was ready for an even more extreme adventure. Cairo to Capetown beckoned...into the veritable heart of darkness...

A pilgrim makes a movie, but how?

2008-03-07T01:53:00.000-08:00

So now we make the movie. We are making the movie. The movie is being made.

The old fashioned way to do things was that you first get a plan, you get financing and then you do the project with the security of knowing the money is there. At least in the film business this is generally the case. Film business. Not film art. Did you never think it strange that we pay the same amount at theatres for films whether they are good or bad? That there is a no return policy? That Hollywood budgets are grossly inflated to make people think they are getting a deal?

But times have changed with the advent of digital technology and the internet. Our film, Earth Pilgrims will be released internationally on the internet as a pay per view movie. This has become feasible because of one company. Vividas. Based in Melbourne this relatively new company has cracked the nut of how to upload movies to your nearest server without any buffering.

You can therefore sit at home and for a third of the price of a movie theatre enjoy a full length movie. You can pause the movie but not rewind it. You cannot download it to you hard drive. You can watch it once. The going rate seems to be about five dollars. Figure that half of that goes to Vividas for providing the platform and the cash cart system for purchasing. A new age really is dawning for the independent film maker.

We still need money for staff, for travel for editing for all the fors a movie involves but the philosophy of making this movie has to be different. It is after all by a pilgrim about pilgrims and as we all know pilgrims take what they are offered and go with the flow. Otherwise they are tourists. In our case we must literally take one step at a time. We are, and we are having a really good time doing that. It is after all a spiritual adventure film about the power of synchronicity....

I funded the journey to the UK and Israel personally. Months ago I had thought about using a business friend's acumen to rustle up investors. But investors are not interested in films. They are interested in return on an investment. I promise nothing except that this movie will move you. Go invest in gold futures if you want to make money on war planet Earth. But if you want to invest in the soul, in the spirit of a spiritual adventure then become a pilgrim. Then you will no doubt find out what Satish Kumar and Graham Hancock and Peace Pilgrim all found out too.

First you show up on the road.

Graham always went to the front lines in his research. He was never an armchair commentator on somebody else's theory. In our long ranging discussion at his home last year, before we did this year's interview for the movie, he had told me how many times he had dived on the underwater ruins at Yonaguni island in Okinawa. Hundreds. To write the book Underworld he had had risked his life on many occasions looking for real artifacts to back up his theory. He really traveled that underwater road on great faith.

Satish of course walked from India to Europe without money. He faced countless difficulties. Yet now he has been shaped as a lifelong pilgrim who does not look for investors but rather invites fellow Earth Pilgrims, you and me, into his incredibly prosperous life. Not rich. Prosperous. There is a whole world of difference. I believe that one of the root meanings of prosperity is ' success in prayer' and prayer is a staple for pilgrims.

Wade Davis lived with the tribes he was studying. He drank ayahuasca with them and he listend to their stories. He is a pilgrim with a poet's gift and an anthropologist's no nonsense approach. His teacher had opened up the inner Amazon as no man had before. Richard Evans Shultes had really inculcated Davis with a very special gift. He knew that you cannot really ever understand another unless you walk in his mocassins.

I expand the meaning of prayer here to mean 'communication with unseen realms' so that sitting by a roadside, sweat pouring down one's face and body, aching all over, hungry perhaps and most definitely aware of your own fragility the most obvious unseen realm is your own feelings. That is where the road really starts for a pilgrim. The rest is scenery for the ongoing work of dealing with feelings that have nothing to do with trees and mountains but a hell of a lot to do with the meaning of your life and of your imminent death. How can it not be imminent? Are you so sure you have time? There goes the ego again at its oldest trick. Survival
illusion.

Gone are the ego supports on that road. The friends. The wives, the lovers, the children, the workmates and all the other personas who make our persona. Here it is just you. Dust on the street. Loud cars or even worse a tunnel with hundreds of vehicles shrieking around the curved walls at you. First a feeling, then a doubt, then a prayer begins. A prayer is an admission of mortality first and foremost. ' I am here but I will not be here.'

Thomas Merton was a tough looking guy who one day jettisoned a cool life as a bit of a university dilettante who was popular with the lassies. In fact because he knocked one up in Europe his grandfather dragged him back to the states to keep him out of trouble. Then one day his prayer started. He realised how totally phoney he was. Pilgrims get that a lot. I am a phoney might be the primeval prayer.

After 27 odd years as a trappist monk, a pilgrim of solitude shall we say, Merton had seen enough and felt enough to know how tenacious is the false self, the ego which no amount of ego can suffice to get rid of. How can a clown remove his makeup on stage and stay in the business?

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does
not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude"

Now all you have to do is substitute the words MY LORD GOD for MY REAL SELF, if you are religiously squeamish, to get the picture. The face of Thomas Merton tells anyone with half a wit about character and real people, that there was zero phoniness left in the man. He had faced himself. And he saw what we will all see if we are willing.

A temporary visa on Earth recipient who must move through his own and the world's history not knowing a thing about reality, that is our real face. A clown who mistakes his makeup for himself and spends an inordinate amount of time on the applying of the makeup on a daily basis is what we are really doing.

The pilgrim has been wounded. And being so he has wondered. And that is surely the beginning of all wandering.

We are making a movie. Whether we have money or not, or sponsors or not or breafast or not we are making a movie. We are walking the path that we are filming. And here then, where we are now, Merton's prayer makes total sense.

I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end

But I know I am here. And I know it is now. And I can see we have a new website for this movie.

Earth Pilgrims: A documentary film blog