Today is a really special treat: A tour of the Vatican Museums before the doors open for the official start of the day. We get to walk empty halls, including the Sistine Chapel, before the hordes arrive. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience if you love art and marvel at what happens when there’s an infusion of Soul energy into human bodies.
For some of us who were here last year for the same extraordinary opportunity, it’s a twice-in-a-lifetime experience. But last year the tour was at night. This year we leave the hotel before dawn and arrive just as the sun is rising. Some of the major works, such as Rafael’s “School of Athens,” are much better illuminated by natural light. John calls in the Light in the dark as our buses leave, and then the angels that emanate the Light of artistic inspiration and exhalation take over, including the angel Michael (Michelangelo).
I’m not going to say anything about the divine Sistine Ceiling except that I think I need a chiropractor. I got a few surreptitious snaps (it’s supposed to be “no photos,” no one knows why) but nowadays, with our technology, enforcing that would require a personal chaperone for everyone in the room. John does a short blessing and we chant, and then we head to breakfast at a restaurant in a Vatican courtyard.
One of the staff on our trip who’s a Sistine Ceiling virgin said to me as we stumbled out of the Chapel into the glare of the morning sun, “How do you process all that?” I didn’t have an answer. It’s a full immersion in the most flawless facsimile of heaven that humanity has produced. Do they need chiropractors in heaven? I think they’re called Masters who step down the energies of Spirit so we can handle them without burning up. Breakfast helps to ground me.
Then the museum officially opens and the hordes arrive. We go to St. Peter’s, shuffling through narrow halls, and the inspiration of the great earthly artistic Masters is replaced by attempting to avoid inhaling others’ exhale, stomach to back, shoulder to shoulder, like cattle in a slaughterhouse chute, trying to be polite humans but secretly wanting to bolt or push, or worse.
Rome seems to have a karma with barbarian invasions that’s still going on. We got to be like early citizens of the Roman republic for a while, enjoying the splendor unmolested by the masses. Now it feels like we’re being overrun. It’s said that normally there are 12 million visitors to the Vatican Museums per year, and this year there will be 30 million.
My mind starts thinking that there must be a solution to all this, and I start to turn into a kind of political philosopher or politician or reformer. Is it better to educate these people in school so they can better understand what they’re looking at, and then when they graduate they get to visit the Sistine?
I make myself stop going down this road immediately. I’m making the same mistake that has put humanity under the thrall of Lucifer for so many eons: Thinking there’s a “problem” down here on earth, judging it, and then looking for a solution. This train of thought starts from judgment so everything downstream is tainted, and the “solutions” just embed the original judgment in stone. Then an ever-increasing complexity hides the initial judgment, with the result that it’s buried so deep under mountains of human institutions and traditions that it’s almost impossible to unearth.
This world and its denizens are perfect as they are and I can stay out of the cattle chute if I want and/or send the Light. And I can avoid the slaughterhouse by spending the money to get the pre-opening tour—or just hang out with the Traveler, who generally seems to provide the easiest, most graceful experiences on this difficult planet. J-R once said to me, “If I were in your position I’d hang out as much as possible with me and John, because we’re always radiating an energy.”
Then it’s onto St. Peter’s, an ornate, gold-covered, gorgeous monstrosity that’s supposed to give people a sense of the magnificence of the divine by startling them into recognizing their smallness, much like the old Egyptian temples. People walk around staring at the stone sculptures and relics instead of at each other where the Spirit is. John does a longer blessing here with a few other delicate in-the-flesh humans, telling us that Spirit resides in us in freedom so that we don’t need traditions and rituals and relics. We place the Light in this glittering false-skied behemoth.
Michelangelo’s Pieta is here in St. Peter’s as a similar reminder. In all this stone splendor Mary displays the living/dying fleshly human condition that we all share. Is the Pieta joyful or sad? It just is, if I accept it without judgment. Michelangelo carved his name in big letters on Mary’s sash to remind the world that it’s a human that enlivened the stone. We shuffle past it with the other cattle. Then it’s out into St. Peter’s courtyard under a real blue sky instead of a rock and gold one, and onto the buses for some free time.
View the Photos by David Sand from Day 13 of the Travelers Through the Ages Tour, Italy 2025
Italy Day 13 – Afternoon – John Morton Sharing
At various intervals I give up trying to describe John Morton sharings. God, Spirit, hyperbole, gushing blah blah blah etc. Enjoy the photos and tune into the energy. It’s always there and it’s a rarity at the same time. John was in great form, and everybody was lit up. Any kind of art, whether it’s visual or auditory or written, requires some sort of dramatic tension, which requires duality or some kind of negativity to contrast with the positive so that forms become visible instead of lost in the glare. What can you say about a state of no tension, no duality? That’s sort of a zen koan.
