An afternoon bus tour with the whole group, now just under 60 people. Our first tour with everybody together. We meet up outside the hotel, pass by the Opera and the Louvre, and then leave the bus for a walking tour that includes Notre Dame and the Pont Neuf. We pause for a group shot by the Seine.  At the end we get back on the bus to make one last pass at the Eiffel Tower. John reminds us to plant the light at Notre Dame, and also about clearing at the end of the day when we’re done. It’s sightseeing with a mission, or a mission with sightseeing as a backdrop. Nice work if you can get it. Then it’s time to pack up for the next day’s train ride to the south of France, where we’ll stay for the rest of the trip.

So glad to be getting out of Paris and the cigarette smoke (walking down the street is the equivalent of smoking several cigarettes), the clever marketing campaign for lust and materialism that the French call art, the mind-spawned atheism, and the whole Latin suppression of conscience and personal responsibility that’s like a toxin that’s been deposited in the body of humanity by the history of Rome. Just my opinion, of course, and not in any way intended to represent the point of view of MSIA. I love the architecture, the art, the patisserie, as much as anyone, and I don’t claim to be any different or better than any Parisian, and everything I see in Paris is just an aspect of myself.

Everywhere you look in Paris there’s beauty. It’s a feast for the senses. But I’d rather be in a third world country where the pain is physical and uncloaked, than where it’s psychic and concealed behind a sensually beautiful exterior. It’s work bringing the light to these places, but this is the Traveler’s work, so at the same time it’s graceful and pleasant and full of great food and some of the world’s most beautiful art and architecture (like somebody once said, “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”). On what other spiritual path can you have such great wealth and pleasure on one level, and pain on another, and be of service by bringing the Light, and complain about it all at the same time? Only in MSIA as far as I know. It’s a no-judgment cauldron that melts the incompatibilities and contradictions between all the different levels, warms the heart, overwhelms the mind and the senses; and the final effect is a steamy spinning of the consciousness into a state of ecstasy. Then the cigarette smoke makes you cough and you’re back in the body again, feeling defiled and sooty and waiting to get out of there.

When the consciousness is held to a form, no matter how beautiful, energy is locked down and repressed. On some of the bridges on the Seine there’s a new of custom of couples writing their names on locks, and then locking them to the sides of the bridge, representing commitment to the relationship. But it’s also a typically Parisian symbol of love as limited to, and imprisoned by, the physical body and the senses. Ironically, as the locks have multiplied and overwhelmed the bridge, they now have to get rid of the them periodically; but then they come back, as if the city can’t hold back the return of its own creations.

When I get locked into paying too much attention to the physical level on this trip, I feel a loss, and I start missing the physical J-R, looking for him where he used to be. Then I want to stuff myself with patisserie and head for the museums. So let’s get out of here, out of the rain and the smoke and the fashionably smileless faces, and into the warm, sunny south.
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