Travel as spiritual practice
By Joseph Dispenza May 9, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Trip
Spiritual journey to Bali
September 16–29
LifePath
Information: 154-8465
www.lifepathretreats.com

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. –Rilke

Last year, two billion of us humans were taken off the surface of the planet at one place, transported about six miles up into the atmosphere for several hours, then taken back down again at another place. We went willingly, and for the most part, we enjoyed the experience..

Alien spacecraft did not abduct us. We took trips in airplanes.

When I first read that statistic from the International Air Transport Association—2.08 billion international and domestic air travelers, a third of the human race—I found it difficult to wrap my mind around it. Even allowing for the fact that one person may have made two or three or a dozen trips in airplanes in that 12-month period, the number is still staggering—and meaningful.

Two hundred years ago, most people who traveled more than 50 miles or so from home would have been considered explorers on a level with Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. Today, transportation technology has advanced to the point where we can leave home and knock about the world with relative ease and at speeds that were unthinkable even half a century ago.  

The occasional delays, disruptions and dislocations of modern travel notwithstanding, going from one place to another and returning to our home base has become routine and practically effortless.

I find all of this quite encouraging in terms of human evolution. We are becoming players with gravity and geography and time—just as we are supposed to be doing at this point in our development, just as consciousness is beginning to dawn in us that we are more than the sum of our merely material parts—more than, as the inventor Nikola Tesla called us, “meat machines.” If anyone had a doubt that humanity is racing collectively toward enlightenment at a rapid rate—and that we might even be experiencing a spike upward in unfolding consciousness at this particular time—just look at the numbers.

I believe that all travel is, ultimately, inner travel—that all the travel we do in the outer world is really a metaphor for the travel that we are doing at the same time inside ourselves. Every journey we undertake in the world outside ourselves is also an inner journey into the deepest parts of our psyches, our hearts and our souls.

Given that all travel is a journey within, it is encouraging that so many of our human family are leaving the comfort zones of home—our present state of awareness—and venturing out (in) to the wild blue yonder: the hidden, yet undiscovered parts of ourselves. Making a journey is always about going from where we are now, to another place, a higher realm of consciousness. Seen this way, all our travel has a spiritual character—and all our travel is sacred. 

So, as a species we appear to be embarked on a spiritual quest of vast and unprecedented proportions, searching for the “stranger”—us, undiscovered—at the most profound levels of our individual being. 

Looking at travel as a spiritual experience is not new. As far back as we have recorded stories, heroes have left their homeland to perform some mighty feat or find some lost treasure. Pilgrims, too, have left home on journeys of faith and their tales have become the subject of great literature. Sages and spiritual leaders have compared life to a journey and have likened us to travelers along a path to higher consciousness.

We are the hero of every journey we take and all of our journeys are spiritual forays into the unexplored center of our being. Every time we go there, we have the opportunity to bring back the great prize—for the hero it might have been the head of the Medusa or the Golden Fleece or the Holy Grail; for us it is self-knowledge, self-awareness.

Once we begin to see travel as an inner journey, it’s possible to turn every trip we take into a spiritual practice—a hero’s adventure that enlivens our hearts and enlarges our souls.

Travel becomes a spiritual experience for us when we are conscious every moment that our physical transportation from place to place has a metaphysical counterpart. Undertaken with awareness, travel surely is one of the most available and most effective means to nourish, broaden and quicken the soul. The destination does not matter as much as the attention we give to the understanding that all travel is inner travel. When we venture out into the world (into ourselves) with that knowledge, we are giving meaning to even the most mundane trip—and giving ourselves the opportunity to grow our life of the spirit in ways we might never have imagined.

I believe we do this even if we are not fully awake to it yet. This is why when I see travel statistics that indicate we are evolving into a race of travelers, it is cause for joy. To me, the numbers mean that our species is flying back to the Creator with the news of our dawning spiritual awareness—and we are doing so at supersonic speeds.

Joseph Dispenza is a co-founder of LifePath in San Miguel and the author of God On Your Own and The Way of the Traveler.