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Acknowledging departure
‘Burning the boat’ Acknowledging
departure, physically or mentally, is vital (life enhancing). It ends the
cutting off of (or separation from) identity bits that ‘drag’ or block
process, therefore is an act of closure, and which produces an energy surge
(experienced as joy). Acknowledging departure returns an identity
to (reduced) whole (hence holy, that is to say, to increased if not full
coherence) unit status. If the cutting off process is not ended, i.e. fully
decided, then it remains open and can impede the pilgrim as she seeks, whole
step by whole step, to reach her goal (read: sanctuary). Acknowledging
departure, i.e. ‘Burning the boat’ (or
slamming the door’), cuts off the return (e.g. the Non-Returner in Buddhism), thereby
forcing concentration on arrival and the means to it. The act of
acknowledging departure can be mental (i.e. verbal, visual, emotional or
self-represented as a feeling) or physical (i.e. as a formal act in the real,
everyday world). Physical departure acknowledgements (doubling as
(acknowledgements of) arrival at a new, reduced (hence more concentrated,
hence higher energy) state) are regularly provided during passage rites (for
instance as birth, marriage, divorce or death certificates, as college
degrees, or as certificates (viz. the Compostella received on reaching
Santiago de Compostella, or the Nobel certificate) or as medals (for
instance, the St James’ shell) or souvenirs bought or stolen on completion
of, for instance, a religious pilgrimage, and later misused as holy relics
for personal and/or communal gain, a dubious but highly profitable practice
perfected by both the Benedictines and the Jesuits. Acknowledging
departure (therefore also as arrival at a new state, i.e. the state of the
pilgrim) functions like ‘saving’ in your computer, and which results in the
creation of a new whole fact (or datum) capable of being stored (thereby
recovering processing capacity) and later on being applied as such, for
instance as part of the Guide System. When does pilgrimage happen
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