How to be a pilgrim

 

The Pilgrimage Site

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

The origin of the word ‘pilgrimage’

Home, the end of a pilgrimage

The end of pilgrimage

The 3 phases of pilgrimage

Coming home, the initial phase of pilgrimage

Going home, the end phase of pilgrimage

Making a home real, i.e. self-realization

 

The pilgrim’s actual goal

Primary and secondary pilgrimage

The drivers of pilgrimage

 

External, internal, inner and core pilgrimages

 

Who is not a pilgrim?

 

The meanings of fulfilment

The meanings of ecstasy

 

 

Religious pilgrimage

 

Sanctum

 

Understanding spirituality

 

 

 

 

 

Various 'How to’s '

 

 
Understanding pilgrimage

 

Going on pilgrimage, i.e. undertaking a journey (or process) from A to B, is basic to life. Getting from A, an initial (unstable) state, to B, an (stable) end state, is fundamentally involuntary. A particular pilgrimage, i.e. getting from a particular A to a particular B can be voluntary.

 

For B read: home (relig.: sanctuary). A pilgrim is someone not at B.

 

The reason for wanting to understand the principles of pilgrimage is no different from wanting to understand the principles of golf or poker, of cooking, gardening or driving your car, or making love. If you want to perform a particular function to perfection it helps if you understand clearly what it is you are trying to do. Clear understanding lets you avoid mishaps and anticipate and develop the required techniques (i.e. means-as-skills) and strategies for completing your personal application of that function perfectly (i.e. @ 100%, hence @1). Perfect accomplishment (read: perfection) rewards with rapturous joy. Perfect accomplishment also gives whole (hence absolute) meaning to that function.

 

Basically, every function, since it creates a particular outcome, is a pilgrimage. And every sub-function is a sub-pilgrimage (ad infinitum).

 

The function of pilgrimage is either to upgrade or restore the pilgrim to full functionality (read: perfection). A religious pilgrimage is intended to upgrade or restore the pilgrim (to wit: the sinner, i.e. the imperfect, elsewhere called unrighteous) to full religious functionality (hence to perfection or righteousness). However, there is a bit of a snag, for:

 

“The right way is the un-trodden.

It becomes the wrong way

When you’ve stepped on it.”

                                                                                 Victor Langheld

 

A                   to                  B

                                          

           The Split Man                                              The Nirvana Man

                      Incomplete                                                          Complete

 

Basics