#8 Pilgrimage

One of the five requisite duties of Islam is pilgrimage, the hajj. However, the other religions also have pilgrimage. And besides the hajj in Islam people also do smaller pilgrimages known as umrah, which is a pilgrimage to Mecca not during the month of hajj, but at other times during the year.

For about ten years I took people on this smaller pilgrimage called umrah every year. And found a lot of interesting things. One was when everyone went to Mecca it was a place very much outside of their normal experience to the point where they didn’t know what to expect. They didn’t know what was going to happen next and it altered their daily routine to not a small extent, to a huge extent. It made their physical surroundings so entirely unfamiliar and so entirely different that that part of them that was automatic in their reaction turned off for a while. It turned off to such an extent that they began to view things in an entirely different way. All of a sudden people who went through their lives as if it was normative were now going through their lives as if astonishing events were occurring to them on a regular basis. Monumental events that had consequences on their existence were happening to them regularly, events that they could recognize as having impact on their being and impact on the status of their life, and the degree of their consciousness.

About the third or fourth trip that I took I really understood that this was a regular occurrence for people and I expected it to happen. I knew from previous experience that it happened to me, but now I expected it to happen to other people. And one of the things that also happened to them simultaneously was their absolute need to share this with other people. So I created a space for the ability to share and in the evening we would have a meeting with the people and they would then describe what they had gone through and the impact it had on them. And it was really interesting because nothing was normative anymore, everything had consequence. And each action within the day had some sort of purpose and some sort of meaning.