London, Madrid, Italian Alps: Photos by David Sand

View the Photos by David Sand from the MSIA Events in London 2025

View the Photos by David Sand from the MSIA Event in Madrid 2025

View the Photos by David Sand from the Italian Alps 2025

God is pissing me off again. The energy of these trips starts weeks in advance, and as soon as I set foot on the plane the final stages of attachment to anything less than Divinity drop away, all my movements are guided with greatly increased precision, and I’m following a free and perfect order in the spiritual stratosphere. No matter how hard I try I can’t recreate that purely on my own. I have to have some sort of dedication to sharing, to participating in the God outside of me instead of just inside, and then everything is handed to me gracefully. If I could just do it on my own I could sit on a mountaintop somewhere and my life would be simpler. J-R said to me in a dream many years ago when I was in Egypt that “Spirituality isn’t sitting on a mountaintop. It’s poetry. It’s the Sphinx.”

I want relief, completion, finality, rest, the easiest path, a dissolving of all limitation, total freedom and total authority over my life. Basically, I want to declare the End. But one of the definitions of God is “that which cannot be controlled.” Even negotiation doesn’t work. My preference is to be the big boss, but I don’t get that (at least not yet), so my second preference is benign boss, and I’ll take that. I’ve tried the lowest preference, which is nasty boss (negativity), and I learned to accept the middle path.

I’m in the glorious Dolomites (Italian Alps) now, on my perfect mountaintop, filling myself up with ideal beauty until constipation forces me to share about it. God really does supply. I’m just not always smart enough to realize that I get more of it as I give it away. It makes no sense mathematically. God has never been very good at math, which is a human invention.

Each trip has its own personality, depending not just on the character of each place I visit, but on the sequence of the countries as well. This one was London (two John Morton seminars) to Madrid (one John Morton seminar) to the Italian Alps for a few days of living life exactly the way I want on my mountaintop before I descend to run my photo marathon on the MSIA Italy trip.

I really enjoyed London—very quiet and orderly compared to the wild and wacky USA. But there’s a sinister undercurrent to the orderliness, not unlike “Severance,” (a TV show that I watched on the plane about how we surrender to external control, set in a monotonous, computerized corporate environment), but in England it’s done on a much more human scale—old mental traditions and alluring, comforting control structures instead of faceless corporate control. But physically and emotionally it’s so pleasant and relaxing in old England. Big trees and handsome, columned white buildings in Kensington where I stayed, small shops and cafés. Beautiful warm weather and the moist, earthy scent of leaves, both on the trees and on the ground. I felt like I was in paradise for the first day and a half, but then the smell of the rot underneath the façade kicked in. I always end up making the USA my final choice because for all its madness, or because of its madness, there is too much movement for rot to establish itself.

The rot isn’t deep. Underneath is purity. In the taxi from the airport to my hotel I got a glimpse of maybe thirty kindergartners in identical little maroon uniforms and identical little straw hats, walking two-by-two holding hands, led through the tree-lined streets by their teachers in some wealthy part of town. I realized instantly why I keep visiting London. Later on I was similarly led by my (invisible) teachers to St. Paul’s Cathedral, which I’ve always loved, after a long walk through Hyde Park, Mayfair and Soho on my never-ending quest for the perfect guitar. I saw “St. Paul’s” on the subway map as I was leaving Soho and decided in a split second to hop off the train. Ever impatient for the end, I figured this could be my last visit to London given recent events, and I wanted my final stop to be St Paul’s.

I got there just in time for a magnificent choral service that reverberated through the white marble, and an African woman priest who, in an inspirational sermon that would have sounded out of place in that church not so long ago, talked from personal experience about finding Jesus within rather than in scripture. The rot breaks up the surface and all kinds of new growth comes through as the old decays. In America the surface is porous, or broken, or already plowed, or made of something that can’t hold together, like mud instead of brick, which is why I always return there. What John talked about in his London seminars was just as fluid and ungraspable. He’s on a level way above inspiration, and it was a day of inner freedom, beyond all my experiences, which is what I really want, deep down.

Then on to Spain, where the Inquisition never ended. I think it just retreated to the inner planes and blocked progression by making people so terrified of upward momentum that their energy goes into the lower chakras. But as a result the women are very sexy, so that’s some compensation. (God is terrible at subtraction. It just moves into a different expression.) Even the name of the place is pain with an “S.” Plural pain, which I guess would be torture. S[erial] pain? But the people who are tuning into the positive side glow in the darkness. Maybe you can see it in the photos. And the energy at John’s seminar was incredible. He kept saying Baruch Bashan (the words that end every seminar) and then continuing on, as if he were coming back for encores. The pain pulls in greater healing, and the healing keeps going until God declares the End. I was pulled way out of the body, and I forgot all about the pain. Sometimes I call him John Motrin.

Now I’m in Italy, in the Dolomites (Italian Alps). I’m driving in Italy for the first time in order to get to the best hiking spots. I was a bit concerned about driving here, given the Italians’ reputation as road warriors and my experiences as a pedestrian. Not only was my concern unfounded, but driving here is representative of the genius of Italy, and the reason why this is the only place I’ve travelled to where I feel at home.

Italy is all about natural order, as differentiated from imposed human order. There is a harmonious natural order to human functioning that manifests if we allow it. I’m very attuned to this natural order and aware of human deviation from it. My usual mode as I pass through the modern world is a kind of recoil as I try to attune to human made-up madness. A part of me is constantly going, “WTF was that? That thing is inharmonious, it’s out of place, it’s not going to work.” In Italy I don’t feel that. It’s an enormous relief.

The winding mountain roads in the Dolomites often have no white or yellow line in the middle, sometimes no guardrails, they’re way narrower than in the USA, and they never have those yellow signs around curves that tell you to slow down to a specific speed. You never know who you’re going to meet, or at what speed, on a hairpin turn. And yet everyone slows down when necessary, the drivers’ natural intelligence functions quite well, and it all works. It seems to me that the over-stimulation created by attempts to impose an external order that overrides inner direction (surreptitiously as in England, or brutally as in Spain, or, as in the USA, through fear-inducing chaos and the reaction to it, the religion of Safetyism) makes people dumber and more passive. I actually feel safer driving in Italy because people are awake and aware, cooperating with a spontaneous and intuitive flow that includes the body and basic self. Of course there’s some aggression on the part of the drivers, but that’s part of the natural order. And there are the usual traffic rules, and also room for breaking the rules, because natural order includes both.

And the natural order and beauty of the Dolomites (Italian Alps)…it’s inexpressible. Just look at the photos. (If you haven’t traveled to nature spots in Europe, there are restaurants in the middle of nowhere, in exquisite settings on mountaintops and on hiking trails, that are not accessible by car. The photos of the picturesque restaurant/rest-stop show one of these, where I was refreshed by a bowl of strawberries and blueberries under a mountain of whipped cream after a particularly tough hike up and down the mountains. They have their own llamas there as well as excellent food, and water from a local spring. I couldn’t believe the mountains of steaks and sausages and potatoes that people were eating, but then it’s understandable after the near-vertical hikes.)

But I have to tell you: after several days of ideal natural order it started to wear on me. I got a chance to be of service, which is a relief from the bondage of sensation—for example, just coincidentally being drawn to the sites of World War I battles to place the Light. For some reason I spontaneously decided to park my car in a place that looked pretty and I ended up hiking into an area of fortifications and stone-lined trenches from the war. And I picked up a couple of grateful hitchhiking backpackers who’d missed the bus back to their hotel. And I arrived at a beautiful mountain lookout at exactly the right moment to take a photo of a dozen or so people who wanted a group shot with everyone included. But now I need more consistent cooling off from the burning of sensory experience and the limitations of natural order. There’s a higher order that includes both order and chaos, called supernatural order. Time to drive to Como, where the MSIA trip will start.

As you descend into the lower-altitude levels of Italy, modernity starts nibbling on the bones of the natural order, although it’s still there as the basis of Italian culture. There are electronic speed traps and more guardrails. The surly, fractionalized electrical-mechanical buzz seeps into the people, and factories challenge the mountains for supremacy. The music that I play on the car stereo changes too. Nothing but soft English/European folk-rock in the mountains, like Cat Stevens. As I descend, the hollow wail of American country-rock, like Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan, replaces it—the longing-for-home cry for a supernatural order to replace the lost natural order. Fortunately, as I approach Lake Como the energy of the MSIA group intensifies to fill in what’s been lost. I forget all about whatever beef I have with my inability to make supernatural order permanent on this planet. As I review the photos of the Alps, the mountains take their proper place in my consciousness as symbols of the true Order, there’s a harmony even in the disharmony of the current state of the earth, and I feel at peace at the lower altitudes.