Spain & Portugal Tour 2017 | The Way of the Traveler

Burgos, Spain

Packed up, jumped on a bus, took a plane to Madrid, jumped on another bus, stopped to eat lunch and headed to Burgos, toured and called it a night! A full day indeed. Burgos overlooks the Arlanzón River, about 2,600 feet (800 meters) above sea level. Founded in 884 it became the capital of the county and, later, of the kingdom of Castile. Burgos enjoyed the prestige of a capital city until the reign of Philip II when it sank to political insignificance. After 1560 Madrid was declared the única Corte (“only court”). Burgos was neglected until its revival in the 18th century under Charles III.

We stop off for a fabulous lunch with many rooms to enjoy in a beautiful tree-lined, lush area with a feast of homemade bread, white Fish or Lamb.

The Cathedral of Saint Mary of Burgos with stunning art and engineering is not to be missed. It was built in 1221 in Gothic style but was significantly altered in the 1600s and 1700s, which added Renaissance and Baroque elements. The Cathedral dome is spectacular, which was created by Juan de Colonia 300 years after the foundation was laid. In recent centuries, many works of art have been added to the cathedral. It seems to be a museum of art, history, religion, and architecture all in one place.
Love and Light, Julie

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Touring Photos by David Sand

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David Sand’s Column

It’s been an intense few days and I’ve only had time for photos. Now I’ve finally got some time on a long bus ride from Burgos on the way to see the washcloth of Jesus, or something like that. I don’t know how impressed I’ll be because the biggest miracle today is that Maria José Marañón of PTS is wearing pants. I think I got a healing.

It’s been cathedrals, fortresses, and palaces, and sometimes combinations of them in a single complex as we drove south into Andalusia through a landscape that still looks like southern California. Over there is Westlake Village, over there is Agoura Hills. The same dry heat, fierce blue sky, and pale yellow hills.There are combinations of Islamic, Christian and African architectural influences in the ancient parts of the cities—sometimes all of them in the same building. Generally, the Islamic design is dark and earthy, and takes me deep into the unconscious; and the Christian design takes me up into the mind and ego. Occasionally something moves me above all that into what I perceive as Soul. The Alhambra in Granada is like that. It’s a palace that seems like it was intended to create a sense of peace rather than to move mass consciousness as the churches and mosques often were. The intricate white plaster-work, accented by devotional poetry and phrases from the Koran, piles up in snowdrift layers above our heads and swivels the gaze upwards. The proportions of the whole complex are based on sacred geometry, and I’m sure that it’s affecting me subliminally because I walk around in a kind of ecstasy of harmony. My whole body relaxes and it feels like I’m walking around inside a piece of solidified music, with the perfectly spaced marble columns as bars between the measures. The theme that the architects followed was “heaven on earth,” which is an excellent description of the sensation.

One of the inscriptions: “The hands of the Pleiades will spend the night invoking/Allah’s protection in their favor and they will awaken to/the gentle blowing of the breeze./ In here is a cupola which by its height becomes lost from sight…” New 3-D laser scanning techniques have recently given us the ability to decipher the thousands of inscriptions carved in highly stylized Arabic on the walls.

Much of the other architecture leaves me flat. When we’re in Sevilla in the Grand Plaza (see the photos on day 7) I finally realize that it’s because don’t know what it’s trying to say to me. When I look at an 18th-century French palace I know it’s about grandeur and the divine right of kings; when I look at a Gothic cathedral I know it’s about transcendence. When I look at the Grand Plaza in Sevilla, for example, it’s just a mishmash and I don’t know what it’s trying to say. I mention this to someone and she tells me it’s saying “have a good time.” I never thought of that, and I guess that the part of me that it’s addressing is asleep or not listening. In the sunny little town of Ronda, where Orson Welles is buried and where Hemingway hung out (macho men of my father’s and grandfather’s generations of World War fighters, often called the heroic generation), we visit a bull ring—Roman Coliseum meets rodeo meets Stratford-on-Avon, with primitive bleacher seating around a sunlit sandbox. As I ignore that unrepentantly macho part of my male forebears, and so in myself, once again I don’t get it. I go around asking people if they served hamburgers during the bullfight thinking I’m very funny.

It’s been a physically demanding trip, we’ve been going all day every day—getting up early, walking on hard marble or cobblestone…looking for a few minutes to sit on a wooden bench or on some little slab of stone between cathedral columns, and an hour’s free time feels like half a day. All the while we’re contemplating and immersed in some of mankind’s most emotionally intense creations—churches, tombs, religious art with saints looking rapturously heavenward or dark and violent biblical scenes. We’re working with the eyes and the feet, ambulatory light columns. And then in the evening we dress up and go to exquisite multi-course dinners in spectacular settings, often with magnificent views (see day 9 as we dine outdoors under the Alhambra), energized as though nothing happened during the day. We’re playing the roles of both servants and royalty. That kind of intensity brings unresolved issues bubbling to the surface and the seesawing between extremes increases the amplitude of the energy. We go from squinting the dazzling daylight to sipping cool drinks in the evening air. There’s no time to think or go into avoidance. The doors to whatever voids are lurking inside us get forced open under this kind of pressure, or at least we’ll be too tired to keep them shut. This is a spiritual journey, designed for transformation in addition to tourist travel, and although transformation doesn’t have to be difficult, you need just enough difficulty to keep the patient awake—releasing karma instead of avoiding it. You can’t avoid the void.

And this is also a journey of service, so we move our bodies through a lot of different settings to transmute what we can. People come slightly unhinged from their moorings, a forced detachment that frees them from demands and desires that would block the entry of Spirit. And all the while the Traveler energy inside is so loud that it drowns out everything else. I feel like Superman, flying miles above my body, like nothing can touch me even though somewhere inside there I know that this faraway gorilla to which I’m tethered is a bit tired. In spite of the little challenges, for the most, part spirits are great. We’ve had years of training in maintaining positive focus, and it shows. There’s lots of laughter at whatever is unexpected or challenging, and abundant cooperation, a oneness of consciousness. I’m reminded of J-R taking us to Egypt and Israel, and telling us about Moses leading people out into the desert to change their genetics so they could be the children of God instead of just the children of Light (see “Christ: My Man for Eternity” on Youtube).

A long time ago J-R told me that if he were me he’d be around him and John as much as possible because the two of them were always radiating an energy. John sits next to me on the bus for a while and I can feel the loving radiation. I have no idea if he’s always aware of it, and J-R has said that a restriction was placed on the Travelers a long time ago where they feel the loving as it’s reflected to them by others, to keep them working with us. John does his short seminars wherever he can—in churches, palace courtyards, buses—and they bring the group together into a single focus. They’re little tastes of the hugeness of the Traveler radiation, which flies as far beyond the words as we are above our bodies.

A train to the ancient city of Cordoba brought us into the south on day 6 and a more worldly kind of radiation—sunlight radiating off the stone walls so you can enjoy the heat from all sides. There’s so much mixing of cultures and architecture that the Cathedral/Mosque of Cordoba actually had Muslims worshipping there on Fridays and Christians on Sundays, sometime around the 7th century. Successive additions were either Muslim or Christian, so you can walk through a horizontal layer-cake of Islamic and Christian forms. The next day was Sevilla and the beauty of the Alcázar (the words “ sacred pleasure-dome” come to mind), then Granada and the Alhambra, and the next day took us all the way to the Mediterranean beach with umbrella’d cafés with white furniture right on the shore— European party-land, big yachts and bars, all very tasteful and designed for brief dips into sunscreened pleasure for warmth-deprived Euro-vacationers. We went as far south as we could, bounced off the Mediterranean, flew north where it’s a good ten or twenty degrees cooler, and now we’re headed for the Camino.