The Pilgrimage (3 page)

a greater power. If he had fled when I arrived, we would- nt be having this conversation
now. But he confronted me, and I read in his eyes the name of a devil that you are going
to meet somewhere along the Road.

For Petrus, the meeting had been a favorable omen, since the devil had revealed himself so
early.

Meanwhile, dont worry about him because, as I have already told you, he wont be the only
one. He may be the most important one, but he wont be the only one.

We continued walking, passing from a desertlike area to one where small trees were
scattered here and there. Once in a while Petrus broke the silence to tell me some
historic fact or other about the places we were passing. I saw the house where a queen had
spent the last night of her life and a small chapel encrusted with rocks, which had been
the hermitage of a saintly man who the few inhabitants of the area swore could per- form
miracles.

Miracles are very important, dont you think? Petrus said.

I agreed but said that I had never witnessed a great miracle. My apprenticeship in the
Tradition had been much more on the intellectual plane. I believed that when I recovered
my sword, then, yes, I would be capa- ble of doing the great deeds that my Master did.

But what my Master performs are not miracles, because they dont contradict the laws of
nature. What my Master does is utilize these forces to ...

I couldnt finish the sentence because I couldnt explain how my Master had been able to
materialize spirits, move objects from one place to another without touching them, or, as
I had witnessed more than once, create patches of blue sky on a cloudy afternoon.

Maybe he does those things simply to convince you that he has the knowledge and the power,
answered Petrus.

Yes, maybe so, I said, without much conviction.

We sat down on a stone because Petrus told me that he hated to smoke cigarettes while he
was walking. According to him, the lungs absorbed much more nico- tine if one smoked while
walking, and the smoke nau- seated him.

That was why the Master refused to let you have the sword, Petrus continued. Because you
didnt understand why he performs his prodigious feats. Because you forgot that the path to
knowledge is a path thats open to everyone, to the common people. During our journey, Im
going to teach you some exer- cises and some rituals that are known as the practices of
RAM. All of us, at some time in our lives, have made use of at least one of them. Every
one of these prac- tices, without exception, can be discovered by anyone who is willing to
seek them out, with patience and perspicacity, among the lessons that life itself teaches
us.

The RAM practices are so simple that people like you, who are used to making life too
complicated,

ascribe little value to them. But it is they that make people capable of achieving
anything, absolutely any- thing, that they desire.

Jesus glorified the Father when his disciples began to perform miracles and cures; he
thanked God for having kept such things secret from wise people and for revealing them to
simple folk. When all is said and done, if we believe in God, we have to believe also that
God is just.

Petrus was absolutely right. It would be a divine injustice to allow only those people who
were learned and who had the time and money to buy expensive books to have access to true
knowledge.

The true path to wisdom can be identified by three things, said Petrus. First, it must
involve agape, and Ill tell you more about this later; second, it has to have practical
application in your life. Otherwise, wisdom becomes a useless thing and deteriorates, like
a sword that is never used.

And finally, it has to be a path that can be followed by anyone. Like the road you are
walking now, the Road to Santiago.

We walked for the rest of the afternoon, and only when the sun began to disappear behind
the mountains did Petrus decide to stop again. All around us the high- est peaks of the
Pyrenees still shone in the last light of the day.

Petrus told me to clear a small area on the ground and to kneel there.

The first RAM practice will help you to achieve rebirth. You will have to do the exercise
for seven con- secutive days, each time trying to experience in some different way your
first contact with the world. You know how difficult it was for you to make the decision
to drop everything and come here to walk the Road to Santiago in search of a sword. But
this was difficult only because you were a prisoner of the past. You had been defeated
before, and you were afraid that it could happen again. You had already achieved things,
and you were afraid you might lose them. But at the same time, something stronger than any
of that prevailed: the desire to find your sword. So you decided to take the risk.

I said that he was right but that I still had the worries he described.

That doesnt matter. The exercise, little by little, will free you from the burdens that
you have created in your life.

And Petrus taught me the first RAM practice: the Seed Exercise.

Do it now for the first time, he said.

I lowered my head between my knees, breathed deeply, and began to relax. My body obeyed
without question, perhaps because we had walked so far during the day and I was exhausted.
I began to listen to the sound of the earth, muffled and harsh, and bit by bit I
transformed myself into a seed. I didnt think. Everything was dark, and I was asleep at
the center of

the earth. Suddenly, something moved. It was a part of me, a minuscule part of me that
wanted to awaken, that said that I had to leave this place because there was something
else up there. I wanted to sleep, but this part insisted. I began to move my fingers, and
my fingers began to move my arms but they were neither fingers nor arms. They were a
small shoot that was fighting to overcome the force of the earth and to move in the
direction of that something up there. I felt my body begin to follow the movement of my
arms. Each second seemed like an eternity, but the seed needed to be born; it needed to
know what that something up there was. With immense difficulty, my head, then my body,
began to rise. Everything was too slow, and I had to fight against the force that was
pushing me down toward the center of the earth where before I had been tranquil, dreaming
an eternal dream. But I was winning, I was winning, and finally I broke through something
and was upright. The force that had been pressing down on me suddenly ceased. I had broken
through the earth and was surrounded by that something up there.

The something up there was the field. I sensed the heat of the sun, the hum of the
mosquitoes, the sound of a river that ran in the distance. I arose slowly, with my eyes
closed, and felt that at any moment I was going to become dizzy and fall to the ground.
But meanwhile I continued to grow. My arms were spreading and my body stretching. There I
was, being reborn, wanting to be bathed both inside and out by the immense sun that

Kneel on the ground. Then seat yourself on your heels and bend forward so that your head
touches your knees. Stretch your arms behind you. You are now in a fetal position. Relax,
releasing all your tensions. Breathe calmly and deeply. Little by little you will perceive
that you are a tiny seed, cradled in the comfort of the earth. Everything around you is
warm and delicious. You are in a deep, restful sleep.

Suddenly, a finger moves. The shoot no longer wants to be a seed; it wants to grow. Slowly
you begin to move your arms, and then your body will begin to rise, straightening up until
you are seated on your heels. Now you begin to lift your body up, and slowly, slowly you
will become erect, still kneeling on the ground.

The moment has come to break completely through the earth. You begin to rise slowly,
placing one foot on the ground, then the other, fighting against the disequilibrium just
as a shoot battles to make its own space, until finally you are standing. Imagine the area
about you, the sun, the water, the wind, and the birds. Now you are a shoot that is
beginning to grow. Slowly raise your arms toward the sky. Then stretch yourself more and
more, more and more, as if you want to grasp the enormous sun that shines above you. Your
body begins to become more and more rigid, all of your muscles strain, and

you feel yourself to be growing, growing, growing you become huge. The tension increases
more and more until it becomes painful, unbearable. When you can no longer stand it,
scream and open your eyes.

Repeat this exercise for seven consecutive days, always at the same time.

was shining and that was asking me to continue to grow more, stretch more, and embrace it
with all of my branches. I was stretching my arms more and more, and the muscles
throughout my body began to hurt. I felt that I was a thousand meters tall and that I
could embrace mountains. And my body was expanding, expanding until the pain in my muscles
became so intense that I couldnt bear it, and I screamed.

I opened my eyes, and Petrus was there in front of me, smiling and smoking a cigarette.
The light of day had not yet disappeared, but I was surprised to see that the sun was not
as bright as I had imagined. I asked if he wanted me to describe the sensations, and he
said no.

This is a very personal thing, and you should keep it to yourself. How can I judge it? The
sensations are yours, not mine.

Petrus said that we were going to sleep right there. We built a small fire, drank what was
left of his wine, and I made some sandwiches with a foie gras that I had bought before I
reached Saint-Jean. Petrus went to the stream that ran nearby and caught some fish, which
he fried over the fire. And then we crawled into our sleep- ing bags.

Among the greatest sensations that I have experi- enced in my life were those I felt on
that unforgettable first night on the Road to Santiago. It was cold, despite its being
summer, but I could still taste the warmth of the wine that Petrus had brought. I looked
up at the sky;

the Milky Way spread across it, reflecting the immensity of the Road we would have to
travel. This immensity made me very anxious; it created a terrible fear that I would not
be able to succeed that I was too small for this task. Yet today I had been a seed and
had been reborn. I had discovered that although the earth and my sleep were full of
comfort, the life up there was much more beautiful. And I could always be reborn, as many
times as I wanted, until my arms were long enough to embrace the earth from which I had
come.

For seven days we continued walking through the Pyrenees, climbing and descending the
mountains, and each evening, as the rays of the sun reflected from the tallest peaks,
Petrus had me perform the Seed Exercise. On the third day of our trek, we passed a cement
marker, painted yellow, indicating that we had crossed the frontier; from then on we would
be walking through Spain. Little by little, Petrus began to reveal some things about his
private life; I learned that he was Italian and that he worked in industrial design.*

I asked him whether he was worried about the many things he had been forced to abandon in
order to guide a pilgrim in search of his sword.

* It has been said that there is no such thing as coincidence in this world, and the
following story confirms the truth of this assertion once again. One afternoon, I was
leafing through some magazines in the lobby of the hotel where I was staying in Madrid,
when I noticed a piece about the Prince of Asturias Prize; a Brazilian journalist, Robert
Marinho, had been one of the prize winners. A closer study of the photograph of those at
the awards dinner startled me, though. At one of the tables, elegantly dressed in his
tuxedo, was Petrus, described in the caption as one of the most famous European designers
of the moment.

Let me explain something to you, he answered. I am not guiding you to your sword. It is
your job, solely and exclusively, to find it. I am here to lead you along the Road to
Santiago and to teach you the RAM prac- tices. How you apply this to your search for your
sword is your problem.

But you didnt answer my question.

When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront
completely new situa- tions, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you dont
even understand the language the people speak. So you are like a child just out of the
womb. You begin to be more accessible to others because they may be able to help you in
difficult situations. And you accept any small favor from the gods with great delight, as
if it were an episode you would remember for the rest of your life.

At the same time, since all things are new, you see only the beauty in them, and you feel
happy to be alive. Thats why a religious pilgrimage has always been one of the most
objective ways of achieving insight. The word peccadillo, which means a small sin, comes
from pecus, which means defective foot, a foot that is incapable of walking a road. The
way to correct the peccadillo is always to walk forward, adapting oneself to new situa-
tions and receiving in return all of the thousands of bless- ings that life generously
offers to those who seek them.

So why would you think that I might be worried about a half-dozen projects that I left
behind in order to be here with you?

Petrus looked around him, and I followed his eyes. On the uplands of one of the peaks,
some goats were grazing. One of them, more daring than the others, stood on an outcropping
of a high boulder, and I could not figure out how he had reached that spot or how he would
get down. But as I was thinking this, the goat leapt and, alighting in a place I couldnt
even see, rejoined his companions. Everything in our surrounds reflected an uneasy peace,
the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created a world
that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving
along. Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see
that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road. Nature itself journeyed,
seeking illumination.

I am very glad to be here, said Petrus, because the work I did not finish is not important
and the work I will be able to do after I get back will be so much better.

When I had read the works of Carlos Castaneda, I had wanted very much to meet the old
medicine man, Don Juan. Watching Petrus look at the mountain, I felt that I was with
someone very much like him.

On the afternoon of the seventh day, after having passed through some pine woods, we
reached the top of a mountain. There, Charlemagne had said his prayers for the first time
on Spanish soil, and now an ancient monument urged in Latin that all who passed by should
say a Salve Regina. We both did as the

monument asked. Then Petrus had me do the Seed Exercise for the last time.

There was a strong wind, and it was cold, I argued that it was still early at the latest,
it was only three in the afternoon but he told me not to talk about it, just do exactly
as he ordered.

I knelt on the ground and began to perform the exercise. Everything went as usual until
the moment when I extended my arms and began to imagine the sun. When I reached that
point, with the gigantic sun shining there in front of me, I felt myself entering into a
state of ecstasy. My memories of human life began slowly to dim, and I was no longer doing
an exercise: I had become a tree. I was happy about this. The sun shone and revolved,
which had never happened before. I remained there, my branches extended, my leaves
trembling in the wind, not wanting ever to change my position until something touched me,
and everything went dark for a fraction of a second.

I immediately opened my eyes. Petrus had slapped me across the face and was holding me by
the shoulders. Dont lose sight of your objective! he said, enraged. Dont forget that you
still have a great deal to learn

before you find your sword! I sat down on the ground, shivering in the cold wind. Does
that always happen? I asked. Almost always, he said. Mainly with people like

you, who are fascinated by details and forget what they are after.

Petrus took a sweater from his knapsack and put it on. I put my overshirt on, covering my
I LOVE NY T- shirt. I would never have imagined that in the hottest summer of the decade,
according to the newspapers, it could be so cold. The two shirts helped to cut the wind,
but I asked Petrus if we couldnt move along more quickly so that I could warm up.

The Road now made for an easy descent. I thought that the extreme cold I had experienced
was due to the fact that we had eaten very frugally, just fish and the fruits of the
forest.*

Petrus said that it wasnt the lack of food and explained that it was cold because we had
reached the highest point in the range of mountains.

We had not gone more than five hundred meters when, at a curve in the Road, the scene
changed com- pletely. A tremendous, rolling plain extended into the distance. And to the
left, on the Road down, less than two hundred meters away, a beautiful little village
awaited us with its chimneys smoking.

I began to walk faster, but Petrus held me back.

I think that this is a good time to teach you the second RAM practice, he said, sitting
down on the ground and indicating that I should do the same.

I was irritated, but I did as he asked. The sight of the

* There is a red fruit whose name I do not know, but just the sight of it today makes me
nauseated from having eaten so much of it while walking through the Pyrenees.

small village with its inviting chimney smoke had really upset me. Suddenly I realized
that we had been out in the woods for a week; we had seen no one and had been either
sleeping on the ground or walking throughout the day. I had run out of cigarettes, so I
had been smoking the horrible roller tobacco that Petrus used. Sleeping in a sleeping bag
and eating unseasoned fish were things that I had loved when I was twenty, but here on the
Road to Santiago, they were sacrifices. I waited impatiently for Petrus to finish rolling
his cigarette, while I thought about the warmth of a glass of wine in the bar I could see
less than five minutes down the Road.

Petrus, bundled up in his sweater, was relaxed and looked out over the immense plain.

What do you think about this crossing of the Pyrenees? he asked, after a while.

Very nice, I answered, not wanting to prolong the conversation.

It must have been nice, because it took us six days to go a distance we could have gone in
one.

I could not believe what he was saying. He pulled out the map and showed me the distance:
seventeen kilometers. Even walking at a slow pace because of the ups and downs, the Road
could have been hiked in six hours.

You are so concerned about finding your sword that you forgot the most important thing:
you have to get there. Looking only for Santiago which you cant see from here, in any
case you didnt see that we passed

by certain places four or five times, approaching them from different angles.

Now that Petrus mentioned it, I began to realize that Mount Itchasheguy the highest peak
in the region had sometimes been to my right and sometimes to my left. Although I had
noticed this, I had not drawn the only possible conclusion: that we had gone back and
forth many times.

All I did was to follow different routes, using the paths made through the woods by the
smugglers. But it was your responsibility to have seen that. This hap- pened because the
process of moving along did not exist for you. The only thing that existed was your desire
to arrive at your goal.

Well, what if I had noticed?

We would have taken seven days anyway, because that is what the RAM practices call for.
But at least you would have approached the Pyrenees in a different way.

I was so surprised that I forgot about the village and the temperature.

When you are moving toward an objective, said Petrus, It is very important to pay
attention to the road. It is the road that teaches us the best way to get there, and the
road enriches us as we walk its length. You can compare it to a sexual relationship: the
caresses of fore- play determine the intensity of the orgasm. Everyone knows that.

And it is the same thing when you have an objective in your life. It will turn out to be
better or worse

depending on the route you choose to reach it and the way you negotiate that route. Thats
why the second RAM practice is so important; it extracts from what we are used to seeing
every day the secrets that because of our routine, we never see.

And then Petrus taught me the Speed Exercise.

In the city, amid all the things we have to do every day, the exercise should be done for
twenty minutes. But since we are on the Strange Road to Santiago, we should wait an hour
before getting to the village.

The cold about which I had already forgotten returned, and I looked at Petrus with
desperation. But he paid no attention; he got up, grabbed his knapsack, and began to walk
the two hundred meters to the vil- lage with an exasperating slowness. At first, I looked
only in the direction of the tavern, a small, ancient, two- story building with a wooden
sign hanging above the door. We were so close that I could even read the year when the
tavern had been built: 1652. We were moving, but it seemed as if we had not left our
original spot. Petrus placed one foot in front of the other very slowly, and I did the
same. I took my watch from my knapsack and strapped it to my wrist.

Its going to be worse that way, he said, because time isnt something that always proceeds
at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.

I began to look at my watch every minute and found that he was right. The more I looked at
it, the more slowly the minutes passed. I decided to take his advice,