View the Photos by David Sand Pre-Trip Travelers Through the Ages Tour 2025

I have to start out by giving you some crucial medical information about me that I hope you’ll be able to treat with caring and sensitivity. I have AIGS—Auditory Information Guide Syndrome. As soon as any tour guide starts to speak my ears turn off and I am unable to process or retain any information whatsoever. I like to think it’s because I respond only to spontaneity and aliveness, and because the tour guides have repeated their talks so many times there is no place in me to hold information that has the energy of others’ boredom associated with it, no matter how subtle. However it may just be that I demand that my environment please me royally at all times, and if “reality” doesn’t entertain me exactly the way I want to be entertained I switch channels to my inner entertainment, which is far more engrossing and amusing than 99% of what happens in this world.

I share all of this with you so that you can learn to live, unembarrassed, with your own AIGS, and embrace your inner spoiled prince/princess. You deserve to be entertained without interruption. You should never feel guilty about retreating to your inner entertainment center, ignoring anything external that doesn’t meet your standards, and recognizing the true inconsequentiality of the mental realm and its dreary deities.

The assisting team took a walking tour of Como today. There’s the usual pretty cathedral with thousand-year history, destruction, rebuilding, wars, clerical misbehavior, etc. There are the usual cobblestone streets where such-and-such happened and so-and-so walked. I’m already starting to get bored after two sentences. If you want more information just google it, or ask AI, which can fill you up with as much brain candy as you want. I was there to plant the Light and have a good time. (I’ll repeat what I’ve written in previous years because I think it’s such good advice: Somebody told me that they asked J-R on one of the Egypt-Israel “PAT IV” trips how they could assist the spiritual work. J-R said, “Just stay in your loving and have a good time.”)

Emotionally, and as far as entertainment value for me is concerned, Como is a jewel of a town where you can easily access the lake and stroll along losing track of whatever is un-entertaining. There are ferries that take you to picturesque tiny timeless towns that dot the lake. Como is one of the most perfectly beautiful, unspoiled lakes I’ve ever seen, with just the right touch of medieval-ness and patina to add enough of the human element so nature is enlivened and not dulled by human activity and creation. There are many gorgeous ancient mansions, hotels, and mansions-converted-into-hotels along the lake, redolent of old, old money and centuries of family secrets.

The fun started after the morning tour, when the Girlfriend and I took a taxi up the road that borders Lake Como and visited the Grand Hotel Tremezzo, where our 2019 Heaven on Earth tour stayed. Absolutely the most beautiful hotel I’ve ever visited. It exemplifies the best of the Italian aesthetic, which I’ve seen nowhere else in the world: an ability to blend whimsicalness and childlike joy with a very sophisticated sense of balance and proportion. The French and English can do impressive beauty but it lacks the humbleness and playfulness of the kid inside us, and the exuberance of the basic self. The best Italian architecture and design is an explosion of joy and color that still retains harmony. It’s highly refined while still expressing childlike humility and carefreeness. Leigh Taylor-Young told me that she re-decorated her whole house in high-spirited colors after she came back from this hotel.

I took a few snaps of the hotel but I was too fulfilled sensorially to have any impulse to create anything that could improve on what I was seeing. The part of me that I discussed in the previous blog, that’s hypersensitive to violations of the harmony of natural order, can’t find anything even slightly disturbing in the environment of that hotel. My disturbance sensors are totally shut off and I float in a kind of oceanic, imperturbable non-reactive nirvana, an aesthetic flotation tank where I don’t feel a single pinprick of anything out of place. If you want to see the real Lake Como, you can skip the big town called “Como” and just visit these quieter, exquisite places along the lake.

A sunset ferry ride back to our hotel in Como completed the day. The way we got on the ferry was an example what I was talking about in the previous blog about my travels in the Italian Alps—how the Italians create an environment that’s in tune with natural order by incorporating enough disorder to maintain natural flow and spontaneity. The ferry from Tremezzo back to Como was sold out online. The website told us to get tickets at the ferry stop. The ferry stop booth was closed (we saw the ferry stop lady leave her booth on some sort of break, and other booths nearby were similarly abandoned). So when the ferry docked in Tremezzo, the Girlfriend just ran through the disembarking crowd, through the line of embarking people with tickets, and onto the ferry—without a ticket. She asked the ferryman to let us on. He said sure, and she turned back to me and waved to me to follow her. We bought our tickets onboard from the congenial ferryman in violation of all the rules we read about on the website and in timetables. That’s Italy.

While on the ferry we passed one little town with an old stone bridge that kids were diving off of into the lake, probably a good 15 or 20 feet down. No signs, no legal disclaimers, no rules, much more like America when I was a kid, before we were conquered by lawyers and the high priests of Safetyism.