Ish Peregrino: Pilgrimage Is More Than Travel. It Changes How You See Reality

37:25But our society put a lot of emphasis in pleasure, a lot of emphasis in do what you want, build your identity base in pleasure, in your desire. And at the same time, the other system is we wanted to connect with future, with potential, with purpose. But when you put the volume too high, you started to lose reality and privilege and pluralism because you wanted to conquer and to go. And so I feel like these two ways of talking about desire, goals, and will, they are so prevalent in our society. And I think that they are nested in something bigger that can give us more meaning and can give us more capacity to regenerate what we have been heard and capacity to live a real contact with sacredness.

38:49And this is what we call the pilgrimage way, no? That's excellent. So I want to propose to you then, and that way I can introduce another one of your points, that the tourism is about pleasure and a good life should have some pleasure in it. The explorer is about power. It's about conquest. It's about taking control. It's about realizing purpose. And we should have some power in our lives. If you have no power, you will experience unending, incapacitating anxiety. So there's that. But I think the pilgrimage, and this is the word you used again in bold, and it's a very important word to me, is about participation.

39:28So deeper than pleasure, deeper than power is this ability to participate. Wait, here's the quote. I wrote it down. Participate in a system that is always renewing itself, which I thought was, oh, my goodness. So you participate. You indwell it and you internalize it. You resonate it. You conform to it. You let it inform you. And you participate it and it is always renewing itself. It's alive. It's inexhaustible. Am I understanding your sentence well? It's beautiful. Yes. I feel like it's not about will. It's about willingness. Yes. It's about availability. It's about... Receptivity. receptivity wider conversation I don't know if you know the poem by David White everything is waiting for you and the beginning of this poem is your big mistake is to act in life as if you were alone and by the end he said alertness is the hidden alertness is the hidden capacity to, oh my goodness, sorry.

40:50That's okay. It's a beautiful quote and I have it here and I wanted to share it. Just take your time, take your time. It's beautiful. Thank you for your patience. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. And the last invitation, he said, put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. So I feel like the pilgrim path is about crossing thresholds. Like you don't need to do that all the time. It's what the masters do, no? Like the same masters, no? Letting go and letting come. Beginner's mind, yes. Beginner's mind all the time. But when we started to do a pilgrimage and I did like the traditional, but I tried to enter in my journeys, even here close to my house, like I have a special place.

41:49And when I go to this special place, I try to do what the indigenous people in my country do. And they call it pagamento, like pay respect to the earth for the possibility to be there. And when you pay this attention, you enter in another time from Kronos to Kairos to Aeon, from the opportunity to the eternal. Sorry, I didn't want to lose that. That was a gem. From Kronos to Kairos to Aeon. To Aeon. which is time as the place of our places. Yes, yes, yes. So in this respect, you started to hunt beauty and be a hunter of beauty. You started to enjoy, but at the same time, you started to allow yourself to grieve too, to grieve for your life, repentance.

43:01and I found in preparing this conversation a beautiful quote. And I don't know if you know Christos Janaras. I am doing a deep study of Christos Janaras. I'm discovering a couple of years ago and I was like, blew up my mind. And when I was, please go ahead. Oh, no, I'm just saying I read Norman Russell's book on him And then I'm reading, I read, I can't remember the author. He does a book on Maximus and he did an overview. And then I'm reading Norman Russell's interview with Christos Yonaris. And I'm reading Yonaris's, oh, the unknowable and, oh, what is it? The one he wrote on Heidegger and the Areopagite about the apophatic path and what it means.

43:58So, you know, I spoke about him in my talk in Chicago and his notion of the communal criterion of truth. Sorry, I'm getting too excited. No, it's beautiful. No, no. For me, the two big thinkers in – this is the triangle that forms my life right now. William Desmond from the Latin West, Gennaris from the Greek East, and 4E Cogsai. That's the triangle of my life right now. So yes, I not only know Yanaris, I love and I'm studying Yanaris deeply. So please. Well, when you started to talk about metanoetic passage, I didn't know that that was a concept from the Kyoto school. Yes. So I started to read Yanaris' word about metanoetic.

44:50And he said something like, when you share out your soul freely, voluntarily, and you throw off every conceptual cloth of self-defense, you arrive to a metanoetic that is share out your soul. sorry, is a mental product of love. So it's not like enter in this pilgrimage and allowing this big conversation is a voluntary act. Like you need a lot of agency to empty yourself, to open yourself in this humility is not you don't have humiliation you have um a free of the soul and it's beautiful when he said metanoia is a mental product of love yes i i think that's exactly right uh yeah tanabe was uh philosophy as metanoetics is where i um and uh that idea of pilgrimage as it's that was my way of trying to understand Charles Taylor's point about a kind of argument in which you're not doing premises you're trying to right you're trying to move people to a different place let the geophilosophy transform them and then they can look back on where they were and they can see the limitations of their previous view and that can move them out of their view, which is very different from arguing with them.

46:27And then, of course, you move again and you move again. And that's how I was connecting pilgrimage to contemplation to theory. So behind all of our theorizing and all of our arguments, we do need to do the contemplation. But deeper than that, we need to do this metanoetic passage that makes us, like you said, allows us to, I liked what you said that, that the Yanaris quote about the opening, right? That he's almost using like language of like uncloaking yourself, almost making yourself like naked towards something. It just strikes me as such a powerful idea, this idea that you as once like when you're doing that act as you said it's it's a very voluntary act but yet it's i think it was voluntary necessity it's like i this is my agency i'm fully exercising my agency but i can do no other because i am called i am deeply called and like that like the way beauty deeply calls me or love deeply calls me or a good argument deeply calls me So it's highly voluntary, but also, you know, Frankfurt's phrase that designed to shake us up because it sounds like a self-contradiction.

47:49It's a voluntary necessity. That's what I found. Pilgrimage also really, really highlighted for me. That's why, because I was on pilgrimage and I was sitting with Bishop Maximus and I've been reading Wynne's book, Renewing the Senses and thinking about theonomy. And that's why voluntary necessity and how it's what the patristic fathers were talking about when they were talking about faith. They weren't talking about silly believing without evidence. They were talking about what you were talking about there. And I like the way that it's an act of full agency, but it's also, like you said, it's an opening because something beyond you is calling you.

48:30It's calling you. It's like the way I love Sarah. I fully want to be doing this, but I can do no other, right? I can make thoughts about not being with Sarah. I can, right? This is Frankfurt's thing. I can think, well, if I wasn't with Sarah, I could date a lot of women and I have more free time, but I can't bring myself to actually live that. That's not livable for me. So it's, I love her freely and yet I can do no other. And that's the same way I experienced that on pilgrimage too. And that's why when Bishop Maximus was doing his thing, that moment, that was one of the magic moments for me. Just that, just that.

49:17And you see, that's what's missing. That's what's missing in both the explorer and the tourist. There is no voluntary necessity. There's either purely arbitrary, right? Right. Or there's just purely imposing things on the world. whereas this is i'm sorry i'm talking too much i should be listening to you it's so beautiful because in one of the the talks and i invite the people to to watch this this talk with alexander vain i think that her his last name is like that you talk about the different like in some ways archetypes of your guests and i wanted to bring this this idea because you talk and please correct me like you talk about jonathan paggio and how he he was an artist and i think you mean ali by the way not alex is it ali alex alexander vain from he was in a rebel wisdom before yeah that's an ally i'm sorry yeah yeah yeah that's okay go ahead yeah and you talk about Jonathan Paglios, an artist, Bishop Maximus as the saint of the master.

50:30Yeah, yeah. Tom Sheetan. I had the pleasure to meet him. Yeah, what a poet, eh? Oh, my goodness. He's wonderful. And you talk about, and please forgive me, I don't remember their names, but the scholar and the one who's embodied. Oh, so that scholar is... In attendance. And the embodied guy is Rafe Kelly. There was my son Jason for Spinoza, and he's the student. And then there's Charles Stang for the scholar. So I was thinking how in some ways in different parts of the pilgrimage, you have encounters with these different figures, and you can incarnate these figures in yourself. You know, you need like the poetic act to go into a pilgrimage.

51:32If you are not a tourist, if you are not an explorer, because in the paths, in the pilgrimage, you find tourists and explorer, but you need certain like a poetic act to enter into the artistic, and artistic because the art go beyond the comfort, go beyond the routine. And you need at the same time the scholar. You need to know about the path. You need to know about the practices. You have to study. You have to study. Absolutely. Absolutely. The history, the places, just the logistic you need to study. And you need your body. and we don't need to be athletes. In fact, something that is close to my heart in these different pilgrimages, you are never ready for a pilgrimage.

52:29Like I met a man who was, he was amazing. He prepared himself. He was an explorer. He was an athlete. So he prepared himself for six months and he was in great shape. And I remember I wake up very early. I started before sunrise. And two or three hours later, he wake up and he passed me very, very quickly because he was in great shape. And I'm never completely ready, but I go with my limitations. And what was beautiful in your description is you met the master in certain moment in your pilgrimage with nature, with a conversation, with silence, with grief. You find a master and by the end, you come back to the student mind.

53:28It's so difficult to talk about what happened in the pilgrimage. When you arrive, you said, it's one of the most important time in my life. And when you talk, you feel like you can't. It's better to keep silence. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes. It's why it's such a pleasure to talk to you and why I'm probably over enthusiastic and saying too much is because you and I can, we share this. It's like people who've never had ice cream or something. No, it's really good. You got to try this. It's a transformative experience. Yes. Isha, I wanted to thank you for that. I hadn't, I mean, the idea that each one of them was archetypal, that was, as you know, a pilgrimage takes on a life of its own and a rhythm of its own, and you have to learn it and listen to it and then conform to it.

54:19So that came out while we're on pilgrimage, but I hadn't thought about, that's beautiful. Each one of those figures is archetypal for a dimension that is needed in order to go on pilgrimage. I hadn't thought about that. Thank you for that. That is brilliant and beautiful. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for receiving that with such a grace. I love that. Oh, that is, that's tasty. That's just really wonderful. That's really wonderful. So what, like, I know we just talked about how you can't put it into words. But what do you think? I'm going to ask you a question that people are sort of pushing on me about, and I try to answer it and I try to not answer it because a complete answer would be wrong and not trying to answer them would be irresponsible.

55:18I mean, there was one moment, this was before you met me in Spain. I was in Istanbul with Jonathan Pajot and we're in the car and he turns to me and he says, why are you doing this? And I give, like, I talk about metanoetic passage and all the stuff we're talking about. And he goes, yes. And he gets all that. He says, but you personally, why John, why you? And then I said, you know, because I'm trying to come into a relationship with God for lack of a better term, like there's something there's. And so I'm going to ask you that in that open spirit, That question is very open-ended. How, well, I am assuming it does, but how does pilgrimage change or inform or support your relationship to God, to what is mysterious and ultimate and most real, and yet intimately calls you to your better self?

56:18I know it's a hard question. Take a few moments if you need. I'm willing to be patient in silence.

56:36I think it is to remember that I don't know. Yeah. I think it is to remember privilege. because doing, like coming from the country where I born and working with different communities in prisons, in conflict, in vulnerable areas, I know that it's a privilege to take time from my work to go and explore nature. and I suppose that each pilgrimage call us in different ways the first pilgrimage that I did was more about my suffering in one life and I wanted to change my life other pilgrimages are related with silence with repentance with forgiveness with gratitude with connecting with the fire, like different aspects of the sacredness.

57:54I love a part of the Bhagavad Gita, I think that it's chapter 12, when Arjuna said to Krishna, show me your faces, like show me yourself. yourself and the image is so so scary so so big for ajuna that he said please stop i can't hold all your faces so if i can put it in a in a metaphor pilgrimage is a way to to see one face of of god and in this part of seeing his face realizing the many faces the many aspects of of of god or sacred and at the same time pilgrimage is an invitation to incarnate a pilgrim in our life like to be more like when I arrived from the last pilgrimage like I was like fighting with myself to not to not forget what I learned to like bring in another Indian Indian deity Shiva Natarash is dancing and he's on top of the demon of forgetting?

59:33I don't know, like when you forget something. Sorry, my English. Forgetfulness. So I wanted to remember and to bring more and more this spirit of reverence, harmony, grief, like all the ecology that we built in pilgrimage. So this is as far as I can arrive right now. That's a fantastic answer. So the first part, you know, different pilgrimages call you to different virtues, gratitude, courage. I see that. But the second and third thing really resonated with me, seeing one of the faces of God. I talked a lot for Charles Stang, for example, and this was on because of Wynne's amazing book, Renewing the Senses, about how Wynne talks about, and Spinoza has this line about the face of the cosmos, but where normally we think of the reality as a place that is filled up with stuff.

1:00:46and we go from the parts to the whole. But there's times when the whole and even what's beyond the whole shines in each part. This is Blake's to see a world and a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, right? And this is what, and Wynne says, the most prototypical instance of that for us is a face. Every part of the face signifies the whole person to us. And that is like scientifically true. You can look at what's called thin slicing. I can show you a photograph of just somebody's eyes and you can tell me what's going on, what they're thinking, what they're feeling. We're so, yeah. And so he said what happens, and he was going through some of James's example of people in religious conversions, as they go through this conversion and reality, like ultimate reality, not just the, right, is now facing you as opposed to you're just looking out at all the parts.

1:01:45it's like facing you and this phenomena of things facing us which is a very different right and lebanos talks about the face of the other and and things like that and then i was thinking in conjunction with that you know that we're facing something that calls to us and it launches us into resonance and voluntary necessity and we find this intrinsically good and that's very similar to how we interact with a person. I'm not saying that the sacred is a person like an individual substance or anything like that, but we get this personal connectedness that is very different from just an impersonal connected.

1:02:27And the words are inadequate here because there's just, but Yonaris, to quote somebody, and Zizuelas and others have been trying to build up this notion of the personal, which doesn't mean the individualized substance. It means what we're talking about here. It's inherently relational. It is to face and be faced. It is to be called. It is to sense the mystery and the intrinsic realness of something and to come into a reverential I-thou relationship with it. All of that was ringing through me when you said pilgrimage is to see one of the faces of God. So that was just, that was just so beautiful.

1:03:13That was just so beautiful. And then that last point you made, I've been struggling too, because like you said, it's like, and that's what I meant by Plato's anamnesis, the deep memory, not remembering a fact, but the deep remembering. I want to continue to remember the philosophical Silk Road. I want to be loyal to it. How do I remember it and carry it into my life that keeps it alive in a way that it deserves? Yeah. What did you say? To indwell or to internalize the pilgrim that yes yes thank you i i had um you are you are really like you're really insightful about this stuff like thank you it's an honor to talk with you and thanks to to your your influence too i have been articulated with your work thank you for your generosity i i wanted to bring two aspects, one a personal experience and a second one like an additional insight that I received for the pilgrimage and it's related with our time and I think that the other pilgrims in history they didn't have the experience maybe that we are having right now.

1:04:44The personal experiences after after one week, like nine or 10 days after my last Camino, my last pilgrimage, I try to work a lot with my dreams. I try to remember my dreams. Sometimes I write my dreams. And during 10 days, part of the night, I dream with the path, with the land, with the people, with experience. And when these dreams gone, I felt like the path said goodbye and I felt really, really sad. So I tried to remember what the path, and I felt like this in these moments, in these dreams, the path was still walking me. And I felt sad when this dream didn't appear again. And the second thing, we talked during your visit to Sevilla about a book, Hospice in Modernity, by Vanessa Andreotti.

1:06:01And she said something beautiful. She said that beyond the crisis, the environmental crisis, beyond the political crisis and the personal crisis, we have a crisis of relationship. Yes, I agree with that. And in this crisis of relationship, we need to start with the small things, with the small steps. Because if we, sometimes activism has like the same will of explorer. Yeah, yes. And it's beautiful. The activism is necessary as a counterforce, but we need a third part. And I love her proposal about hospice in modernity with care, with, with love, with, um, like taking care what, what we, we can save, but allowing ourselves in communities with land to, to hold new realities.

1:07:10And what I feel about this opportunity to do the pilgrimage is when I come back, how can I relate better in my personal life? but with communities, how can I pay respect in the lands where I do my work? How can I train capacity to build capacities of deep listening, more intimacy to work with organizations? I have a business with my partner and we call the initiative Threshold, the Umbrales, Because this sensation, we lost this sensation of crossing thresholds. Yes. And we lost this sensation of going through a passage and being transformed for this journey. So we wanted to build through silence, dialogue, body work, and reflection, this experience of passage and threshold.

1:08:22And I feel like this is a small response to many of the crises, especially the relationship crisis. I think the relationship crisis and the meaning crisis are two different aspects of the same thing. I think she's deeply right about that. And I think also your intuition about saving the world by saving the relationships that your life touches. Yes, I'm very worried about totalitarian proposals for utopia. I agree with you. And some activism I am critical of because it seems to be coming from that spirit. And I don't like utopias. They have drenched, they have continually drenched the world in massive amounts of bloodshed and destruction.

1:09:14And don't tell me your, I don't mean you, the viewer, don't tell me your utopia is the one that's going to work. Because I have no good evidence for that claim. So I appreciate what you said. I try, I try to, I try to do that. I try to calibrate because I can put some of my effort into what we're doing right here. This is more widely disseminated. I can talk to influential people. I get to talk to movers and shakers and business people and politicians and artists and philosophers and scientists. And I can do that, but I also can make an impact, as you said, to the people around me, my community, and trying to, I think a large part, well, I think the largest part of a wise life is learning how to love wisely.

1:10:19And learning how to love wisely means to properly proportion your care, concern, and commitment to the reality that you're addressing with your love. Um, so, um, and of course everybody intuitively understands this. You should love your spouse much more than you should love the furniture in your house. It's not that you shouldn't love the furniture in your house. You should take care of it. Right. But you know what I mean? Um, and so trying to get, trying to take some of those obvious contrasts and learn, and I'm not claiming I'm great at this, but learn how to properly proportion my love for a lot of more subtle things like how much should I commit to the public space how much should I commit to my private space uh you know one of my good friends sort of pushed back on me and said you're sacrificing our friendship for the public space and I realized oh I shouldn't be doing that and I thank him for doing that and I sort of reoriented um so I think that that's very well said, I think what I'm trying to say ish is I think a careful lingering reflection on properly proportioning your actions and your love so that you don't ignore or go charge ahead like a bull in a china shop is something that is not being carefully modeled or taught to people today.

1:11:59um i just sorry i took time to make that point because it was sort of emerging from me as i was saying it i was working it out as i was talking to you and i was just one final point isn't it the case that pilgrimage helps to do that right because you're i found you're constantly calibrating between little minutiae mundane details like where's my shoe right to you know you know wow i just had this almost mystical experience like i found like it was i was constantly being coming to be more flexible in my calibration of my care. I started, well, that was beautiful. Calibrating, I think, and relevance realization, you use this term.

1:12:39Of course, yeah. And I found that the word henro, in the kanjis for henro, the Japanese word for pilgrimage, one of the etymologies is patrol and the other is courtesy or ceremony. And I found it beautiful because in some ways, the speed, the rhythm in our life, sometimes can make us love more our furniture than our spouse. Yeah, that's exactly right. We get common rhythms. That's well said. Yes, yes. We don't pay reverence to our food. We complain about our food. We complain about the temperature in our home. We started to run so fast and to lose our attention that when we go into the pilgrimage, we started to value a lot of things.

1:13:43I had one of my friends in the path, and I just wanted to say something about the people that you encounter in the path. is many times you don't remember their names. But the beautiful thing about the path is that you start the conversation in a deep level with the question, why you are doing the path? Why are you doing this? Yes, yeah. And people start to open up in ways that courtesy don't allow us to do that in our life. and in one of the stages I met this English doctor and he was very fancy. I was married with an English lady. So I realized when I hear his accent, I realized that he was from a high part of the society and he was a doctor and he said, I have a big house, I have my electric car, I have a big television and I can sleep.

1:14:50Right. I need pills. I have a terrible relationship with my body. And I came to the Camino five years ago. I walk for hours. I sleep in terrible conditions because you share a bed and I sleep like a baby. so i'm doing the camino five times it's my fifth time for five years to sleep but the problem is in in his like it was beautiful but he didn't change his reality when he come no he's still treating it too much like tourism he's gonna get a possession and that's like a drug so he had that revelation, but the revelation is not enough to rescue from the parasitic self-destructive and this, and self-reception experience.

1:15:54So, so I just wanted to bring this, this idea that the, the friends in the, in the path really, the friends in the path, the experience of the path really helps you to, to, to realize the thing that you need to let go or to grieve, the thing to be grateful, the things that, like, for that reason, the last part of the pilgrimage is about covenant and the paths that you can do. And if you have the capacity to do a good ritual with covenant, you can little by little integrate what you want to achieve in the Camino. But integration is the same or more important than the Camino because it's about calibration.

1:16:50That's a great place to end it. I think that's a great good note that the integration is as important as the Camino. Ish, I'm going to give my last word. You're going to have the last last word. My last word is thank you so much. I got so enthusiastic. So many things you said, like not just relevance realization, resonance realization, they rang true. They called stuff up for me. You provoked insight. You're insightful. Your language, I mean, you're speaking, you're not speaking your mother tongue, but your language is still pertinent and it's beautiful. And I just, and I don't, yeah. If people could hear this word as deeply as it should be heard, the sincerity that you brought to this.

1:17:38I don't like the word authenticity because it's too much the property now of the autonomous self. But the sincerity that you brought and the realness that was shining through, you really presence pilgrimage and that's wonderful. So I wanted to thank you. I hope you and I can talk again. I want to give I always give my guests my interlocutors the final word any last thing you would want to say to people who might be watching any last it could be an inspiration a summation a final reflection a point that was missed just this is your this is your chance for the last thing you'd like to say thank you for your patience with my English and the patience that the viewers are going to have with me I wanted to honor your work, John, because you inspired me many years ago and you have been inspired thousands of people.

1:18:39And I wanted to say that this pilgrimage idea is not about going to the Camino de Santiago, Chicoco, or these amazing places. Of course, if you have the opportunity, do that. But it's about related in another way with what you have around you. Like make it sacred and allow the things talk to you. It's about reverence. It's about attention. It's about romance with reality. to recover the real agency. And it's the agency of openness, emptiness, and loving the world. Thank you so much.

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