Light Tour -- Masada and the Dead Sea

In typical MSIA style, after all that spiritual stuff we have a very physical day. First stop is Masada, a desert mountaintop moonscape where the Jews held out in the grisly drama that became the basis for the celebration of Chanukah.

There is the option of taking a cable car to ruins of the fortress at the top, or hiking up the steep mountainside in bright sun and 90+ degree heat. A lot of us Masada-chists hike and it’s a great workout. I reminisce with a friend about how, on PAT IV 24 years ago, we ran up, then down, and back up again, just for fun. Now I do it once, take my time, and even stop a few times. Our guide at the top is Shlomo, an Israeli who’s taken the Insight seminars and was training to facilitate at one point. Years ago he was leading a tour and was amazed by a unique group that he happened to see, where everyone seemed so quiet and focused. It was one of our PAT IV’s. He found out more about us and ended up getting involved in Insight.

Worn out and relaxed from our battle on the mountain of Masada, we’re ready for some indulgence at Herod’s Dead Sea Hotel below sea level. Spa, massages, jacuzzis, floating in the hot, mineral-rich water, covering ourselves and each other with the healing Dead Sea mud. A kind of anti-baptism, a childlike, basic self fantasy; a mad mud orgy by a toxic sea that is the dead end of the Jordan River where we were baptized a couple of days ago, the final resting place of all that sacred water. We wash off the mud in water that probably baptized someone at some distant point in the past.

Then a big buffet lunch, and then more spa treatments, lounging, and dozing. Like everything else we do on these trips, there’s the physical level and all kinds of other spiritual levels operating simultaneously, and my sense is that a lot of work is going on while we doze. It’s like a spiritual spa as well as a physical spa, and often we do our best work while we sleep. There’s a special kind of relaxation that happens, at least for me, on this Traveler journey, where the veil that normally separates the levels of consciousness has been torn open. The mechanics of life, from the most mundane to the most esoteric, are more precisely ordered, more benevolent, more protected, more everything, in this no-man’s land that the Traveler has opened up between the worlds. To experience it we just have to let go and float up, because J-R snuck in while we dozed and removed most of the ballast.

Then a sleepy bus ride back to the hotel and more dreamtime. We’ll see you in our dreams.
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