Place is not Purpose

In ‘Doing the Work or Looking the Part?‘ I caution against the common mistake of assuming that an exterior ‘look’ is the same as the practice. In dressing up as a yogi/ni for example, chanting the mantras and living in ashrams will not of itself yield the goal of the journey – enlightenment. It is the work you engage in, the inward pathway you tread and the challenges faced doing this which will yield the prize.

But there is another no less insidious conflation which is place with purpose. This is in fact very common, especially with spiritual seekers who head to India and immerse themselves in the culture, the theology and attendant rituals. Living in India is not of itself what will deliver enlightenment. The point I have ever made about Pilgrimage is that it should be a ‘different hall of mirrors‘ that allows you to see aspects of yourself unobserved in commonplace settings and circumstances. So if you have normalised to living in India and surrounding yourself with spiritual markers, seeing it as your spiritual ‘home’, having swamis and sadhus as friends, you are in danger of conflating what is essentially ‘lifestyle’ with the goal of the spiritual journey. Every process has its place, its context, as a nest is where eggs are laid and transform in time into birds which eventually fly away. The nest is not of itself anything more than a safe container for that to happen.

As a lifelong lover of things Latin American, I knew that I was being called to India, a place so far and so different from the life I had known, to carry out my Pilgrimage. In the end it was my travels in the mountainous regions – the Himalayas – which came to symbolise this ultimate of life journeys. When the two Pilgrimage years 2020 and 2021 in India and Nepal concluded, I felt drawn to return year after year to these same places to seek out the same experiences I had had, but was met with just those places, devoid of anything sublimely spiritual at all.

Many people may have spent much of their lives going to India in this way but I feel have not really engaged fully with what Pilgrimage means. It must be one of the hardest of illusions to see through. Giving up your life wherever in the world, selling house and home in order to go and live in India on a more permanent basis could be  merely spiritual self indulgence if it doesn’t of itself yield enlightenment (in whatever way that is understood).

You cannot be too careful on this journey! Adopting the dress, the habits and practices of traditions or religions set within the wider cultural or geographical context of a location itself deemed to be ‘spiritual’ is not the same as the goal being sought. It merely serves for a period of time to support you in your seeking. People who love India per se, for whom it is a kind of spiritual ‘comfort zone’ might be better served by going to a completely different cultural and geographic region altogether in order to gain that level of self insight necessary. I went to India to undertake my journey and effectively converted for that time into being a Shaivaite Hindu for the purpose, conducting many pujas at the different temples I visited. But I never lost touch with the deeper knowledge that this was merely a ‘device’ and that the Supreme Divine could never be exclusively contained within any one theology or tradition alone. I had spent much of my life until then immersed in pre-columbian and Indigenous Amerindian cultures and cosmologies and had been brought up as a Christian, but the experience of Self seeking within an altogether different spiritual and theological system itself proved invaluable for seeing truths I might never have otherwise seen.

Now in my life as it pans out in the post pilgrimage years, I have finally accepted that I need to be living the truths I engaged with on my journey and practise them constantly, but that I don’t need to be in India, or anywhere to do this. It took me several difficult returns to India over four years seeking those erstwhile sublime heights of experience, and failure to do so to teach me this! Perhaps I will never return there now, but will be seeking to evolve this new life stage here in Britain, the country of my birth. But the person I now am after that so seminal of journeys has changed in ways that could never have been achieved otherwise.