Why Pilgrimages?

“If you are aspiring and working towards something higher, then your life is a pilgrimage.” —Sadhguru

Pilgrimages have been an essential part of the spiritual quest since time immemorial. But why do people go on pilgrimages, enduring hardships and discomfort? Sadhguru looks at the significance and purpose behind making a journey to a sacred space.

Sadhguru: What is the difference between travel, a journey and a pilgrimage? People move from one place to another for a variety of reasons. There are explorers who are always looking for virgin land that they want to put their footprint on. They want to prove something. There are travelers who are curious to see everything, so they travel. There are tourists who just go to relax. There are other kinds of tourists who just go to escape from their work or family. But a pilgrim is not going for any of these purposes. A pilgrimage is not a conquest, it is a surrender. It is a way of getting yourself out of the way. If you do not budge, it is a way of wearing yourself out. A process of destroying all that is limited and compulsive and arriving to a boundless state of consciousness.

Subduing Who You Are

The very idea behind a pilgrimage is fundamentally to subdue the sense of who you are.

It is to become nothing in the process of just walking and climbing and subjecting yourself to various arduous processes of nature. In the ancient past, to get to such places, a person had to go through a certain amount of physical, mental, and every kind of hardship, so that he becomes less than who he thinks he is right now. Today things have been made much more comfortable. We are flying up, driving down and just walking a little bit.

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