Last year there was an article in an airline magazine on pilgrimages. The author, Robert Sullivan, posed the question, “Is our planet so generally deprived of grace as to make pilgrimage seem the only answer?”
This question stirred up more questions within me. Why do people go on pilgrimages? Why do they have to go to a distant land to reaffirm their faith and reconnect with their own inner peace?
What is this really about? Webster defines a pilgrimage as a long journey, but there is a quality to a pilgrimage more important than miles traveled. Most people who go on a pilgrimage to a far destination also go on a long journey within. On this inward journey they are seeking aspects of themselves that they cannot explore when they are in familiar settings. Or can they?
This started me thinking about Avatar as an inward pilgrimage. During The Avatar Course, I have watched students slip beyond their familiar mind sets and explore deeper aspects of their lives. The faces that they present to the world soften with compassion and broaden into warm smiles as they discover things that have been hidden for so long.
Like a pilgrimage, Avatar gives them the opportunity to access buried beliefs that unlock an understanding of why things are the way they are now. Many find a common thread of core beliefs about their own deservability or self-worth. It is a thread of beliefs that is shared by all of humanity but is only discovered in the vulnerable moments of a sacred pilgrimage or in the safety and acceptance of an Avatar Course.
Both The Avatar Course and the sacred pilgrimage are opportunities to dissolve this thread of beliefs. The advantage of The Avatar Course is its speed and efficiency. Like a long pilgrimage, it reaches down and awakens a person’s own creative powers and self-sufficiency. It seems to me that people undertake pilgrimages not simply out of reverence for some divine shrine or location, but more for the chance to work through the layers of limiting beliefs and experience their own divine spark.
In a recent course, I saw three students each resolve a major issue in their life by simply uncovering and discreating a belief that ordinarily would never have surfaced. They were on an Avatar pilgrimage.
Sandy Robertson, Florida & Pennsylvania
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