The Pilgrim’s Health & Safety procedures

 

 

From the safety of her home, and which is becoming ever more uncomfortable and dark and cold (read: depressing), the pilgrim looks out upon an apparently peaceful and friendly world. She looks afar to a tiny bright peak and which, she knows, is her true home. (Some pilgrims, specifically religious ones like the Shakyamuni Buddha and Meister Eckhart, looked down to the bottom of a dark, cool abyss.)

To get to her peak (i.e. her peak experience) she must leave the safety of her home and cross open country. If she has observed the world outside cleanly and clearly, or listened to returnees or visitors, she will know that the world outside, that is to say, the pathway between initial state A (i.e. her current, undesirable True Self) and end state B (i.e. her future, passionately desired True Self), is a hostile place. Hence to get to her true home will be a dangerous undertaking. She may also, if she is truly observant, realize that once she leaves her home she will never, can never return.

 

Although the distant peak looks tiny (hence easy of access), bright and welcoming, it is actually the peak of a high mountain (or the base or ground of a dark abyss). The closer the pilgrim gets, the higher (or lower) she climbs, the more dangerous her pilgrimage becomes. Consequently, the intelligent, all or nothing pilgrim will make sure all Health & Safety precautions are taken (and practiced to perfection) before she leaves home.

The Health & Safety rules is: Never ever take your eye off the goal of the pilgrimage, day or night, ‘in sickness or in health’, during rapturous joy and dark depression. No dallying, that is to say, no forays into unnecessary side-trips. Take no unnecessary risks (to wit, no heroics). Keep the body and mind sound so that they can withstand every, and any storm – and which tend to blow up suddenly and without warning and sometimes with devastating results. It’s when such storms arise that the pilgrim uses both her safety line and her safety net, that is to say, if she has installed them.

 

However, if the pilgrim has accepted a goal (i.e. a new or upgraded True Self) offered by (therefore lodged within) a given ‘larger’ but ‘other’ self, for instance, a pilgrimage to a ‘given’ religious, education or business holy site/state, i.e. a religious place or state, a college degree, or the 1st million Euros), she can get a fully protected pilgrimage package deal.

 

There are no fully protected (and insured) package deals for the true pilgrim; that is to say, for the individual transforming herself into her own True Self to be attained either within a ‘given’ space, for instance a religious or cultural one, or beyond all spaces is/as a space uniquely her own, the latter being created by her as an original and unique unit of identity (or reality niche), hence as a state or place which no one else has ever reached.