[Woman vocalizing] [Woman singing in native language] [All singing in native language] Cindy Blackman Santana: It is said that every real pilgrim sets out with a desire and an intention.

[Singing continues] Cindy: Some have heard a story about a holy place with a special blessing or where a miracle happened.

But to get there takes effort and special rituals and prayers because the pilgrims' journey is conscious and always pointed towards the sacred.

Welcome to "Global Spirit."

I'm Cindy Blackman Santana.

Carlos: And I'm Carlos Santana.

After the ordeal, when the pilgrims finally arrive and connect with their destination, they're able to see, by changing their mindset, they're able to claim a new paradigm of existence for themselves and the new generation.

Cindy: So let's sit back and join our host, Phil Cousineau, for another "Global Spirit" program.

[Conch shell blowing] [Women singing in native language] Carlos: For tens of thousands of years, people have been making religious pilgrimages to the places they consider to be the most sacred locations on Earth.

The ancient city of Kashi, now called Benares or Varanasi, is just such a place.

Lying on the banks of the holy River Ganges, Varanasi is one of the holiest and most revered sites for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains alike.

[Man chanting in native language] Carlos: For millennia, millions of Hindus have made their final pilgrimage to die here in Varanasi.

Having one's ashes merged with the holy waters of the Ganges ensures a positive rebirth and freedom from some sorrow or suffering.

Carlos: To Buddhists, the most important pilgrimage site is here in Bodh Gaya in northeast India, where over 2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama achieved a state of enlightenment and became the Buddha after sitting under the branches of this Bodhi Tree for 49 days.

[Fifes playing, drum beating] Carlos: Over 10,000 miles away, on the other side of the earth, the Andean people of Peru walk for 85 miles on an arduous climb to reach this sacred place, nestled at the foot of a glacier-- the shrine of Quyllurit'i, where the boy Jesus is said to have appeared to and danced with a local shepherd boy.

Carlos: Few religious rituals are as demanding or as important as a holy pilgrimage.

People seeking everything from spiritual renewal to healing a sickness to a better job or even rebirth spend great amounts of energy, fortune, and time to perform pilgrimage rituals.

To explore the importance and the meanings surrounding this timeless phenomena, we have invited two very knowledgeable guests to discuss the topic and the experience of spiritual pilgrimage.

Zoila Mendoza is a Peruvian anthropologist, author, and a fluent Quechua speaker who has studied, filmed, and participated several times in the Andean pilgrimage to Quyllurit'i, "the lord of the shining snows."

Pico Iyer is a well-known spiritual traveler, a highly regarded essayist, and author of many journey-related books.

Today, Zoila and Pico meet for the first time to explore one of our series' most fascinating topics.

Welcome to "Global Spirit's" "The Pilgrimage Experience."

Welcome to "Global Spirit."

Zoila Mendoza, welcome, Pico Iyer.

It's marvelous to be here with two fellow pilgrims, two fellow travelers.

I've been traveling since I left college 30-odd years ago, many forms of travel, and one of my favorites and most profoundly moving to me has been pilgrimage.

I've been on pilgrimages to places like Jerusalem, uh, Angkor Wat, most recently Bodh Gaya, and my understanding over these many years now of pilgrimage is that it's a transformative journey to a sacred place, a place that is sacred to you, your people, your tribe.

Can we begin there?

What's your understanding of pilgrimage, and why do human beings feel this irrepressible impulse to go on these kinds of journeys?

Yes.

Zoila?

What I've learned about pilgrimage is that pilgrimage is a journey that people take to a place that they go see they're special, a place they need to be part of, and a place that they have learned something about through stories, through oral tradition that is an important place, that something happened there, and it's something important to them, and they need to be part of that story.

Beautiful.

Pico, how about you?

I think pilgrimage is the journey to whatever is deepest inside you; in other words, what is true behind the play of surfaces and illusions, and really about the journey to the source of your devotion, so I think, in our literature, in English literature, one of the great mentions of pilgrimage is when Romeo talks to Juliet and refers to himself as a pilgrim because it's a journey of love.

And it's, um, a--a journey to whatever sustains you at the core.

I love it when John Muir says, "Going out is essentially going in," and I think we make external pilgrimages to find places in ourselves that are otherwise concealed.

Mendoza: Yeah.

What we want to emphasize on this particular program, on "Global Spirit," is the experience of it.

Mendoza: Mm-hmm.

Can you... share a pilgrimage experience with us?

I kind of need to preface this by saying that, um, what I am thinking, writing, filming about is--it's a tradition that I come from in many ways, something, um, that I know the meaning of since I was growing up; not this particular pilgrimage, but the whole tradition of relating to these higher powers in the Andean way.

The importance of the experience, and particularly--and this has been taught to me by the people doing it-- the importance of the sensorial experience.

The transformation that I experienced doing that has taught me a lot about how people in the Andes are in the world, and doing that process, I learned to be that way.

Iyer: And that's interesting 'cause I am, I think, just the opposite of Zoila, insofar as you're so rooted in that tradition... Mendoza: Yes.

and I grew up to theosophist parents, of Hindu ancestry, going to Anglican schools, and now based in deeply Buddhist Japan for 27 years, so while not being grounded in any one tradition, I've made pilgrimages into the notion and spirit of pilgrimage; in other words, vicariously.

A line of yours from an essay that's much anthologized now: "Why we travel"-- Mm-hmm.

has stayed with me for years.

"We travel in order to avoid a life of abstraction."

[Iyer chuckles] Can you expand on that a little bit?

I travel to give the world a face and voice, and, uh... because abstraction is dangerous.

As long as we-- something is just a stereotype or an idea in our heads, we can be ruthless towards it.

As soon as it's people similar to ourselves, we're finding the common ground and are reaching out towards it.

I recently went to North Korea, for example, and just before that, I went to Iran.

And those countries, for so many of us, we know about their politics, their government, their economy, but we know very little about day-to-day life, so I suppose I travel in order to complicate the abstractions and explode the simplifications I would otherwise entertain, uh, and ideally, the more you travel into a place, the less you know about it, and the more-- at least, you learn about your ignorance, so--ha ha!--I--I travel not just to understand, but to see how local and provincial my understanding would be otherwise.

Cousineau: And I've girdled the globe, as they used to say over the last many years, but somehow, had never been to India, so the producer, Steven Olsen, and I recently traveled there, and I felt something similar, a--a--chiverie, a psychedelic riddle, as you describe it in your essay on--on Benares.

That will take me a long time to tease out, but let's begin the teasing now by going to the first film clip.

of our 10-day journey around India.

Cousineau, voice-over: I thought I was ready for India.

Now I see that there was no way to prepare oneself for the sheer intensity of an encounter with almost a billion human beings and a kaleidoscope of cultures and faiths.

[Drum beating] [Chanting] [Car horn honks] Cousineau, voice-over: Such an overload of the senses on our very first day in old Delhi could only be balanced by seeking out a place of calm.

[Overlapping chatter] On our first afternoon, Runjhun Kejriwal meets us at our hotel.

Runjhun is a talented painter and a practicing Hindu who is excited to make the pilgrimage with us to Benares for the first time as an adult.

[Woman speaking native language over P.A.

system] Cousineau: The pilgrim's journey typically includes an ordeal.

In our case, we are taking the second-class train, Kashi Express, which is rumbling eastward for 19 hours across much of north India to arrive on the banks of the Ganges and to Benares, or Varanasi, considered the spiritual capital of India.

Woman on P.A.

system: One, four, two... [Bell tinkling] [Woman chanting over P.A.

system] Cousineau: Founded in the 12th century BCE, this is the most holy place for Hindus to come to die, to be cremated, and to have their ashes scattered in the holy Ganges.

[Drumming, bells tinkling] [Woman chanting over P.A.

system] [Scattered shouting] Cousineau, voice-over: We've arrived at dawn, that liminal point between night and day, the threshold that announces the shift between one world and another.

We've entered the sacred space as pilgrims.

My senses are fully saturated.

I feel the need to take a moment to pause, to pay attention, to reflect on death-- my own death, my father's death.

I'm floating on this sacred river feeling the very continuity of life and the journey of all souls.

Cousineau, voice-over: While the dhobis beat dirt out of people's clothes, the maharaja's palaces loom high above.

Rich and poor, attractive and horrific, the circle of life-- it's all here, all visible for the eyes to see.

200 corpses a day are burned on these ghats 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with 600 to 900 pounds of wood needed to burn each human body in order to release the soul from the endless cycle of rebirth.

[Woman singing in native language] [Gulls squawking] What's profound about a sacred site in a pilgrimage is that something happens, that great notion of Joseph Heller, as well.

Something happens at these sites.

However, nothing will happen unless we're prepared, unless we travel with a sense of intention and deep attention, respect, and reverence.

Could we talk about preparation for a few moments?

How do you prepare for a scared journey?

Well, I think the beauty of any pilgrimage is, it brings us to a single-mindedness.

We're so scattered these days.

In the time that the viewers are watching this program, our human race will gather 12 times more information than exists in the whole Library of Congress.

We're all multitasking, doing a thousand things at once, all over the place, and pilgrimage gives us a focus, and the m--as soon as we travel towards one destination, we're traveling into depth and paradox and ambiguity, so, for example, in that clip we saw us traveling to Kashi, which means the city of light.

Of course, a city of light is a city of darkness, and the city of death, which is what Varanasi is, is teeming with life, more life than you know what to do with, um, and some people call it the city of darkness and dread, but in-- whatever is going on, as soon as you go to Varanasi, you're sloughing off, um, distractions of the world, and by undertaking a pilgrimage, you're spiritually preparing yourself to be as focused as possible, as you said, attention.

A soon as you look really deeply at one thing, you find the whole universe within it.

Zoila?

Mendoza: Andean Quechua culture is an oral tradition.

People don't read or write Quechua.

Everything is learned, um, deeply from the culture through the oral tradition, so a big preparation for those pilgrims is to be hearing the story about what happened in that site.

The miracle, they call it.

The preparation is, for instance, you're a child, you're hearing about this place and the stories of what happened there, and you want to be part of that story, and you want to get to that place.

That's a wonderful segue for the film clip that we'd like to show from your documentary film, Zoila, "The Lord of the Shiny Snow."

It's a beautiful film clip.

It's quite kaleidoscopic in its own way.

[Flutes and drums playing] Mendoza, voice-over: The pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i is the largest of Peru and perhaps of the Andean region with about 40,000 to 50,000 participants.

According to oral tradition, the best way to honor the Lord is with music and dance, the Chakiri Wayri being his favorite one.

[All singing in native language] [Flutes and drums playing] The Chakiri Wayri music announces the beginning of the pilgrimage.

They go through the town announcing their departure.

[Flutes and drums continue] The main church of the town is Catholic, and a stop there is a must before leaving and upon returning.

For Pomacanchi pilgrims, the walk lasts three days and two nights, walking approximately 85 miles at an average altitude of almost 15,000 feet.

[Flutes and drums continue] Each sunrise and sunset during the walk or at the sanctuary, the pilgrims salute the sun with the alawaru.

[Flutes and drums continue] This melody inspires devotion and respect to the forces that are invoked or greeted.

[Flutes and drums continue] The pilgrims carry the stones on their backs from the bottom of the last steep climb to the apachetas representing faults or sins.

By unloading the stones at the apachetas, pilgrims leave behind their faults or sins getting closer to the pampachay, or forgiveness, that they seek.

[Flutes and drums continue] Apachetas have existed since pre-Hispanic times.

Like today, the apachetas were obligatory stops for the travelers where they invoked and honored superior forces.

[Flutes and drums continue] Here, besides unloading the stones, a ritual will take place where the new members will be initiated or baptized and where the pilgrims will pursue the pampachay.

Pilgrims emphasize the importance of the unity of sound, sight, and motion during this extraordinary experience.

[Flutes and drums continue] Comparsa members climb to the sanctuary with their Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i icons, their banners, and the Chakiri Wayri music.

[Flutes and drums continue] The pilgrims build, buy, or act out according to what they wish for their future-- for example, building a house, buying a truck, getting a university degree, or just earning some cash.

[Flutes and drums continue] The central point of veneration in the sanctuary is the image of the Christ on a rock that is known as the Senor de Qoyllur Rit'i, or Lord of the Shiny Snow.

All the comparsas and other visitors enter the church to salute this miraculous Christ.

[Drums, accordion, and flutes playing] According to tradition, in this place, an alpaca shepherd boy, Marianito Mayta, met with the boy Jesus.

Together, they danced the Chakiri Wayri, and that made Marianito's herd increase greatly.

That is why the Chakiri Wayri, in all its different versions, is the musical theme of the pilgrimage.

[All singing in native language] Zoila, the phrase that came to me watching this again was "superior forces."

Was that your own coinage?

Is that a common term in anthropology?

Did one of your informant pilgrims mention this to you, and what are they referring to?

It is God or the gods, the land?

Is that the superior force, the ancestors?

Yes.

As I mentioned before, I've struggled a lot with translation, cultural and linguistic translation and how to speak about a tradition where the--the word, uh, "god" or "spiritual" doesn't quite fit or explain or say anything about what the experience of what we may call "religiosity" is about, so the term "superior forces" seem to me, one, even though it is not a direct translation to something what an Andean would say, it's a translation into English that summarizes how I've learned that it works in terms of conceptualizing for the Andean people those forces, those-- Again, force, uh, it's, to me, something that comes as something more clear than a god or a superior even being because force-- because it's so related to power of the mountains, power of the rain, the earth, the rivers.

It is a force.

It's actually a physical force that you feel, you know, earthquake and so on, so "forces" and "superior" in the sense that there is a feeling, and I like the word.

I've used "feeling" because feeling is really essential.

It's something that, again, um, uh, doesn't directly translate, but it conveys a lot of what Andean way of being in the world, um, is about, about feeling.

Um, that feeling is always of something that is superior in a way that you cannot control it and that you need to negotiate.

You need to go visit.

You need to establish reciprocity in order to be in a good relationship with those forces, so when they feel that they are in a place, in a physical place where those forces are closest to them that need to be involved and venerated, that's where they do it with the music, with the very specific music, and it's at the specific moments, like the rising of the sun.

Reminds me of the marvelous phrase and--and metaphor that the Irish use.

These are the thin places, the thin places where there is a real power.

It's not an intellectual abstraction.

There's a power in the earth.

There's a power in the stones usually most easily apprehended at dawn and dusk.

I think, too, of Mircea Eliade, the great religion historian out of the University of Chicago, where he describes the encounter with the sacred as an encounter with the deeply real, not something otherly, but it's a physical power that vibrates like a tuning fork in the--in the human body and the soul.

Uh, h--how about this, and encounter with the power, with the real Pico?

Have you experienced this?

Well, I love what you just said.

Uh, just two weeks ago, somebody suddenly asked me that most essential, most impossible of questions, what is God, and I s--I heard myself say, "Reality."

I don't know where it came from, but later when I thought about it, I thought that was a wiser answer than I knew, and then I thought, well, maybe it's inspired-- You know, I've--I've been lucky enough to travel every year with the Dalai Lama, um, across Japan, and I think maybe that would be his answer, that our whole life is a journey into reality and that's the cornerstone, and he always says, doesn't matter about afterlife, whether you believe in God or whether you don't.

We're right here.

How are we gonna bring kindness and responsibility to this situation right now?

Let's not get distracted with ideas, as you say, so, yes, I think certain places, like certain people, strike us with an intense distillation of reality, and we feel that they're quivering with life, and I loved what you said about the twilight spaces where, uh, the gods are surrounding us as much as other humans are, and I--I think, even in places like Bali, which I know you know, which can be disconcerting because you feel as if you've walked into the realm of angels and devils, and it's all taking place in a language you can't understand as a foreigner, so you're at sea, and, uh, you don't know what's going on, but you can feel it.

It's very charged, saturated air in many places like that around the world.

Haiti is another, I think.

Zoila, can you respond to this in-- in terms of your emphasis on the sensorial?

What a beautiful word.

Mm-hmm.

The, uh--the linking of the sounds, the smells, the singing, the dancing, the kinetic movement is a way to experience the pilgrimage in a much more profound way, but it's also the way that people learn.

How has this influenced your own teaching and writing?

Mendoza: Oh, very much so.

In--in--in fact, I, um, from the time I start--I could afford, like, a little video camera and knowing that nothing that I could write, uh, or the words that I could use could convey the experience of the audiovisual and the kinesthetic, so I had to show people, and it tells the story in--in many ways, I mean, things you don't touch but you feel, like the sun.

We're talking about the sun and the sunrise and the sunset.

In the Andes and actually many other-- I mean, in the world, we know how important the sun is for life, right, so it's obvious that everybody's gonna make something special about the--the appearance of the sun, and in the Andes there are many myths about the periods where there was no sun and--and things--you know, and people lived in darkness, and I think that comes from many other cultures, as well, and but so when you're in that freezing cold and frost season doing this pilgrimage and you're waiting so much for that sun to come up and warm you up, Mm-hmm.

you know, and so-- and you feel that warmth of the sun and that light, it's just so physical, so it's almost like you can touch-- you--you're--you're touched by the sun, right, the heat, and then at night, you're--you're saying good-bye, and you're really hoping-- and you have this music, and you're really hoping the sun is coming back because you're gonna be in this darkness, which in the Andes, as in many other cultures, darkness is framed as extremely dangerous, and--and--and darkness, uh, it's associated also with silence, and so it's dangerous, so it's the sun that makes life-- not only physical life, but social life--possible, so that's why it becomes really important doing the pilgrimage, being out there.

And, uh, you know, I love that notion of--of reality because I think many of us feel there is a reality behind our daily life or hidden within it, and that's really where we belong, and I think when we're making a pilgrimage, what we're trying to do sometimes is step out of the realm of time into the realm of eternity, you could say, out of chronos, into kairos, as the ancient Greeks you know so well used to tell us, and I remember very vividly, I spent a lot of time in the monastery here on the Californian coast, and I remember the first time I drove up there, and I stepped into this little room, very simple, but it had everything I needed, and the silence wasn't an absence of noise.

It was the presence of something, as is the case in many a-- a monastic institution, and suddenly, it was as if the lens cap had take--had come off, and everything was coming at me with a new intensity, and a blue jay would alight on a fence, and I'd-- I'd watch fascinated, or bells would sound, I'd feel they were sounding inside me, and I suddenly thought, "This is the real life, "and what I'm doing the rest of the time is a charade," and this is exactly where I want to root myself.

This is what will sustain me when I face suffering, old age, and death.

This is where I want to be anchored, not in my resume or my bank account or whatever, and I think that's partly what-- of course, what any spiritual life involves but especially what pilgrimage is, which is, it's grounding you in something outside, uh, the world of change, and you can call it God.

You can call it reality, but one way or another, um, and that's going to support you, um, in your darker moments, difficult moments.

Cousineau: I like thinking of the sacred as something that is worthy of our reverence and our respect, something that lifts the heart, takes the breath away.

How can pilgrimage give us a stronger sense of the sacred?

Mendoza: Because pilgrimage is a process, and the process, it's aiming to get somewhere that is special or something that is special, a space or a place or a thing that is special, and the sacred is that-- you know, very widely defined-- is that source of life of the beginning-- of the beginning for the world, so I think the process of pilgrimage gets us closer to that experience, but it's the--the idea of the process, there is a beginning, and there is the end, and the end is where you get to feel or to touch or to be in a place that you think is the sacred.

Iyer: Yeah.

I would say it's a journey towards the sacred that sends you back a different person.

Once you come back from that sacredness, something has turned inside you.

An Islamic pilgrim wears that name hajji as soon as he or she has completed the Hajj, um, and, as you said, I think we all know that we travel not to move around, but to be moved, and we travel to Jerusalem or Lhasa not just to see Jerusalem or Lhasa, but--but to visit those states of mind and intimations, longings, moods inside ourselves that we skipped or passed in our usual lives, and once we've been to Jerusalem or Lhasa, is idea is that the candle will still keep flickering inside us, even when we're back in the office and in our day-to-day routines.

A word we haven't mentioned but is almost synonymous with this discussion is "origins."

Pilgrimages are almost without exception a journey back to a place where something sacred began.

Does that make sense to either of you?

Yes, very much, very much so.

Um, the interesting case about Qoyllur Rit'i-- I keep going to the specifics-- is that it is a place that reminds you of the history of the people, where Christianity has blended with previous Andean beliefs and practices in such a powerful way that it's what they are now, so you cannot separate here Christianity and-- and, um, so-called pagan of Andean beliefs.

It's all in one, and this is where it happened.

The baby-- or the boy Jesus meets with the shepherd, who is a speaking-- a Quechua-speaking indigenous person, and they meet and they-- and the miracle happens, and they became one, so it happens there, but it is the encounter of these two traditions, of these two powers of the white Christian, uh, image and the indigenous that happens there, so that's where people go to remind themselves that that's them today, and that's gonna always be there because that's who they are, and they go back to that source of being, you know, to the place where it happened.

And we're walking with our ancestors.

I think when you take the camina to Santiago de Compostela, part of what you're doing us walking with strangers met along the way, but part of what you're doing is walking with every pilgrim for the last 700 years, and you--suddenly, you occupy a different place in history, and you feel as if you're, you know, back with your ancestors' ancestors' ancestors, um, and I think it's beautiful to go to a place of pilgrimage because of the other people you meet there often, and I'm sure it's the case in Peru, but I remember once, I was in Jerusalem, and I was staying in a little hostel in the Old City, and I was having breakfast, and I asked the two-- couple next to me, "Where do you come from?"

and they said, "Oh, a little town "called Paso Robles.

You won't have heard of it."

It's just up the street from my mother's house in California, so I said, "Gosh, how did you get here?"

meaning, "Did you take United or Lufthansa?"

Said, "Oh, we walked," and they had.

They had walked from California, across the United States for a year, taken a boat, walked across Europe for a year to get to Jerusalem.

The lady had broken her leg on the way.

She spent a we-- month in hospital in Italy, but by walking-- I had only flown, but by walking, they were walking with Native American people, so many people who had made those journeys across the centuries, and it seemed that there was a real wisdom to actually, uh, grounding themselves in the same soil that people have been treading forever.

I--I love the etymology of the word "pilgrim."

It goes back to "peregrim," which means to walk through the fields.

Mm.

Mm.

It's right there, embedded in the language that we have to get off the bus once on a while, Yes.

get off the train and actually put the soles of our feet to the soul of the earth, so to--so to speak.

Yes.

Is this, uh-- dare we say the word?-- a more authentic way to get in contact with the sacred by slowing down, taking a breath, maybe counting our breaths in the Buddhist or Hindu tradition, and walking to a sacred place?

I think it's safe to say, the sacred moves at the speed of life more than the speed of light, and we're moving at machine pace now, so you're just, as you say, going back to the human pace, and going back to the human ways of doing things would take us into the sacred.

They say the perfect cure for jet lag is to walk barefoot through grass, fresh grass, and I think for that same reason.

You're rooting yourself not in the world of machinement, in the world of timeless humans.

Mendoza: Mm-hmm.

I think the physical and the bodily is really important.

Uh, it may be my own perspective as a very kinesthetic learner and being and as a-- coming from a culture that is very highly kinesthetic, but I think the movement and the walking, um, it's of-- is so-- Even--even if it's just small, little steps in a circle in your little room, I think the motion makes--uh, gives you the experience of the mind and the body being together because while you're moving, your mind is doing something.

Perfect chance to move to our next video sequence.

All right.

Let's to go Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha found enlightenment after 6 years of mortification, a word I grew up with as a French Roman Irish Catholic.

[Laughter] [Men chanting] Cousineau, voice-over: Coming out of a faith-based, Abrahamic tradition, I've always been intrigued by Buddhism, a religion not based on a god, but on the achievement of a human being.

[Chanting continues] Pilgrims here in Bodh Gaya circumambulate the Mahabodhi Temple.

It's a bit like the winding of a watch.

It's the preparation for deep, spiritual experience.

[Chanting continues] I've come all this way to actually experience something, and I'm open to it, open to understand what draws people here.

I feel deeply inspired.

Something extraordinary happened right here 2,500 years ago which helped shape the world.

After sitting right here for 7 weeks, Siddhartha woke up and encouraged the rest of us to also wake up.

[Chanting continues] Cousineau: You practice Vipassana meditation, which means you can meditate at home.

You can meditate anywhere, but you choose to come here to Bodh Gaya.

Why here?

[Men chanting] Cousineau, voice-over: Devika is a devoted pilgrim from Sri Lanka who is staying at our hotel.

She comes with her aging mother.

Like many pilgrims, this mother and daughter hope to get more fully in touch with themselves through the power and the beauty of this sacred place.

[Singing in native language] Man: What happens to me here is that I have a more direct connection with the Buddha, and by that, I mean not just the historical character, but the sort of sense of the Buddha, the--the spirit, or the heart, of the Buddha.

Something happened here, and in a way, my life, really, has-- i--i--is now, uh, a process of trying to understand what that was.

Um, when I sit here at the Vajrasana in the very place where this happened, I can't explain it to you rationally, but I can tell you that I have a--a closer, more heartfelt sense of what that thing was that we give names to like nirvana, enlightenment but actually is beyond words and beyond concepts.

In my experience, there's nowhere like here in any spiritual context.

Uh, this is a unique place.

[Singing in native language] [Man throat singing] [Throat singing continues] One thing I loved in the clips was that again and again, we heard that word "intention" which you sounded at the beginning of our conversation, and it's a reminder that, I think, pilgrimage is not about the destination so much as the motivation, the spirit you bring to it.

One of my favorite pilgrims is Henry David Thoreau, who said, "It matters not how far you go.

"The further, commonly, the worst.

What matters is how alive you are," and if you have that spirit of joy in life, you'll find the beautiful and the sacred right here in this room and even more so in these charged places.

See, I love what's emerging here, that so often, we're citing other people who have gone before us.

This is making a 3-way talk a kind of choral movement... Ha ha ha!

Yes.

and I often think about this when I'm leading groups, and what I'll hear from them is that it's a relief to not be so obsessed with my story for these few weeks in Greece or Ireland or France, wherever we might be.

Can we talk about that for a minute, the idea that going on a pilgrimage actually allows us to connect with a story larger than ours?

Mendoza: Right, and, um, in--in the clips that we saw, um, you see the rocks, and we--we kind of focus on the idea of the-- of the unloading the--the sins and the forgiveness, but, in fact, the pre-Columbian, pre-Hispanic practice of leaving rocks in a place is acknowledging that you were there, and a part of yourself is staying there because you went through there, and all those rocks signify all the people who have been there, so you are loading and you're leaving that forever, and you're bringing that rock from another place, so ro--a rock means it's your presence.

You were there.

Yeah.

It's wonderful that you've been using that gesture.

It's the gesture of pilgrims the world over of leaving the stone that you picked up at the bottom of the mountain or on the riverbank and leaving it on the cairn, that wonderful, old word, that rock pile that represents all those pilgrims who came there before you, and it also represents, in my reading of it, something else, that, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama has said several times, one of the beauties of pilgrimage is that it allows you, a human being, to feel the pleasure of overcoming an ordeal.

Mm-hmm.

Rather than avoiding it, the ordeal is essential to the actual pilgrimage.

Yes.

The ordeal can be pain.

Yes.

That means there is some sacrifice.

There's, uh, fear, perhaps, to overcome.

Can you talk about that?

Yes.

I loved when you talked about mortification before because that brings us right into it.

The people who walked at the road to Santiago de Compostela come away with blisters.

They end up in hospital for a couple of days.

None of them regrets it.

Light makes no sense without darkness.

Jesus went into wilderness.

Buddha faced the demons while he was sitting under the bodh tree.

You know, all the great heroes who inspire the human race have to--have to engage with the darkness in the world before they can come out.

Cousineau: Is there a relationship between this amount of danger and fear that has to be overcome and the transformation of the pilgrim?

All of us know in our daily lives you have to walk right into your--our fear to--to come through it.

Running away from it never solves the problem whatsoever, and you mentioned His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and I'm often struck that when I travel with him, sometimes a heckler will suddenly arrive and start shouting at him, and my impulse would be to run away or to get the bodyguards to remove that person, but his impulse is always to encounter that because nothing is gained by avoiding the problem.

When you encounter it, it diffuses it, and suddenly, you find the common ground, and you step through your fear int--into, as you said-- I mean, I love the prefix "trans-".

Whether it's "transcendental," "transformation," all of it is about moving beyond, out of our limitations.

Mendoza: And I would say more than fear, though, um, is the uncertainty because there is a feeling of uncertainty that you-- can you actually do it?

Is it actually gonna be as amazing as people say?

So when you've done it and when you've reached the place, the sense of transformation has to do with, "Yes.

I have done it, and I've felt "this anxiety, this uncertainty whether this is an important thing, and it is," and the confirmation that is was this worth-it experience is what affects the transformation in them.

Cousineau: Let's make a segue to the next film clip.

This is the sequence at Allahabad on the Ganges, the site of the Kumbh Mela held every 12 years, up--upwards of 100 million people gather on the banks of the Ganges to take their ritual dip in the convergence of the 3 holy rivers.

Let's look at this video sequence.

Woman: We're doing a pilgrimage to Allahabad, which is a very surprising twist, and I consider this a blessing because we have an Indian family with us and so to do it with other fellow Indians and in a very warm and joyous environment, just be able to relax and feel the pilgrimage and take a dip in the holy river.

[Singing in native language] [Singing continues] Keiriwai, voice-over: Taking a bath in the Ganges is supposed to purify one's soul.

She's a goddess, and I'm trying to touch a part of her, and we all are gonna go in there one day and be a part of her.

[Singing continues] Man: My life, my family life is safe life.

My family culture is good culture.

What?

"My family life is good culture."

Ganga.

Our family is safe in Ganga.

OK.

This side.

Sit down.

We'll go-- we'll go-- Ha ha ha!

Keiriwai, voice-over: Ganga, for me, is, uh, the holiest river in the world because, to me, she is the only goddess that I see right in front of me.

She's the only living goddess.

There are a lot of stories about how Ganga is so pure, and, uh, in all our ancient texts, they say that a dip in the Ganges done with the purest of intentions at heart is the best thing in the world to do.

I'm blessed, purified, ready to begin anew.

[Man speaking native language] Thank you.

Yeah.

[Chuckles] [Speaks native language] [Speaking native language] Watching this sequence again, so many emotions come back to me.

It's emotional, spiritual, physical.

I can feel the Ganges around me.

Part of what was happening to me for my ritual dip in the Ganges here, in the first photograph, you can see I've just arrived in Delhi, and I'm full of myself, as my dad used to say.

I'm in my body.

I'm proud to have traversed halfway around the world to be in this ancient city, and then you cut to the second photograph, and I'm outside of my body.

That's actually the very definition of the word "ecstasy."

Ekstasis means to be next to yourself, outside of yourself.

That's part of the power of ritual and ceremony, to remove the ego for a few moments so that something else can come in--the sacred.

This was beautiful.

It was unexpected, and it helped take me out of myself so something could actually happen.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Does that make sense for experiences you may have had along the road?

Yes, and it's interesting.

There's a sense of washing clean, whether it's in Peru or India and most parts of the world, this baptismal quality so as to be reborn into your better self, probably is the notion, or, as you say, you slough off the self.

You slough off Phil and you become something more mysterious and ageless and intriguing.

Mendoza: Mm-hmm.

I was so nicely struck by this clip and the early one about the notion of the power o-- and the sacredness of the river because that is so Andean, and it also relates to life and death.

The meeting of rivers is a powerful place.

It's a place where special things happen because-- and here is the two actual and the mythical river meeting in one place, so the whole idea is so Andean, so water as a connection to the other world and is a powerful place to be and where transformations can happen.

It cannot happen unless there's this convergence.

And that brings up an interesting question for me.

Are some people more responsive to these powerful sites than others?

I would say, we all know travel isn't instant transformation.

You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food.

You take a wide-eyed, responsive person to Newark, New Jersey, and she finds this amazing, Tibetan museum that's one of the treasures of the world right in the heart of that city, so, again, I think it has a lot to do with what we bring with us, and the beauty of travel is, ideally, it opens your eyes, and, therefore, it opens your heart, and, therefore, it opens your conscience, um, so no guarantees, I think.

Ha!

I think that's very true, um, the individual nature, but what I've, um, seen or I've experienced is that young people do it, and--and older people do it, and I've seen that the younger people, because they're still so full of maybe expectations, uncertainty, and fears maybe, they tend to be not as open as the full experience while the second time they go-- and I've gone the second time with these people-- their fears and uncertainty are kind of more controlled, and so they were more open, and they were able to experience and appreciate mu--more of a transformation, so that what I've observed myself in the period that I've done the--the pilgrimage.

Pico, recently you wrote a really beautiful essay on pilgrimage from the Buddhist point of view, and one of the stirring things in there was the notion that pilgrimage can jolt you awake.

Human beings fall asleep, as we--we know from-- in all traditions.

Yes.

The walking itself, the participation with the group can jolt you awake.

However, be careful of having any expectations... Yeah.

expecting a benefit, Yes.

um, saying, "I deserve this because I just endured an 85-mile-long pilgrimage."

How do we reconcile the two?

I think it's not a bad thing if pilgrimage ends in disappointment or disenchantment because you're learning something, and it means that you projected the wrong thing onto, uh, that destination, or you've externalized something.

Some--sometimes when the Dalai Lama is speaking, a person will put up a hand and ask a very sincere question.

"Excuse me, Your Holiness.

"What happens if you really care "about something, you work hard for your dream, and it doesn't work out?"

He looks out at that person with a warm twinkle, and he says, "Wrong dream."

Ha ha!

In other words, you're not realistic, and he--as you said, expectations defeat themselves, so it's better to surrender to the world and to whatever your tradition is and wait to see what it gives you.

How do you reconcile the notion that pilgrimage, sacred travel is a kind of Mobius strip, uh, indivisible.

It's both an individual experience and a collective.

Iyer: Mm-hmm.

How do we reconcile the two?

That's why Phil disappeared in India maybe.

You joined the collective.

Suddenly, you were together with all those people bathing in the Ganges and leaving themselves on the shore and joining this river, literally of where you're all just waves of peace and water.

What about in-- in the Andes?

Is it only a collective experience there?

Would an individual pilgrimage just be incomprehensible?

Well, yes.

It would be not only incomprehensible but really silly, and it would prove that you're not human.

What happens is, the sense-- well, the sense of individuality is not like what we conceptualize.

It doesn't really exist.

You're never an individual and not even solid individual because you're so connected and you're always part of a group and you're always part of a half.

You're always a half to the woman, and, as the cultural concept emphasize, you're always part of a larger whole, and so the individual as something separate from the group doesn't really make sense culturally because people say, "We will not be able to make this without the music.

"We will not see anything.

"We will not be able to even move if we do not have the music."

That means somebody else has to be making the music for you to feel that, so it's all, you know-- it's the emphasis in the communal, but, again, it's not just a pilgrimage.

That is how social life and the culture is structured.

You used the word "choir" before, and I would think the music is, in some way, stitching people together into a larger harmony, that's it's--it's bringing them literally to a whole.

Um, I love the notion of a choir because it means we're less important than the melody we're all carrying.

Is there a responsibility for those of us who have been blessed to take journeys like this to keep our story moving through the world?

Iyer: Yeah.

That's why I became a travel writer.

I thought, "I'm lucky enough to be "in Yemen and Cuba and Laos, "and not all my friends and certainly not all "of our neighbors on the planet "will ever get that chance, "so the least I can do is share the places, "and the first thing I should do is share the fruits of those experiences."

Mendoza: So it is a big responsibility for us teachers, professors, writers, you know, to keep telling the story because the stories are what move people-- oral stories, written stories.

That's right out of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

There's a wonderful moment at the Tabard Inn As the pilgrims are leaving, one of the-- the poor pilgrims asks the innkeeper, "Please give me some advice.

"What should I do?

"I'm walking all the way to--to Canterbury.

What should I do?"

and the innkeeper said, "Find two strangers to tell your story to "on the way to the cathedral, "and on the way home, find two other strangers to tell your story to and keep the story moving."

In that spirit, I'd love to thank the two of you, Zoila Mendoza and Pico Iyer, for joining me on this wonderful journey, so from the bottom of this pilgrim's heart, thank you, and for all of you at home, safe and soulful travels on your next sacred journey.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I am Carlos Santana, and I hope you connected and return to this series "Global Spirit."

Thank you.