The Pilgrimage is a 1987 novel by Paulo Coelho, which is a collection of his experiences as he made his way across Northern Spain on the pilgrimage to
The Pilgrimage recounts the spectacular trails of Paulo Coelho as he journeys across
In this religious trip, he is accompanied by his enigmatic guide and mentor Petrus, an Italian, the two of them following a legendary road traveled by pilgrims of San Tiago, encountering a variety of mysterious guides and devilish opponents.
The lessons that Paulo learns from his guide on the trip are lessons which can help anyone lead a better simpler life. Further there are a series of exercises that Petrus teaches Paulo through the course of the journey, simple exercises that can help an individual lead a better simpler life.
Each of these exercises and the way to do them has been described in the book and it is in these exercises in which half the wisdom of the book is contained. Since dealing with each of them would be quite elaborate, I am just quoting their essence.
1. The Seed Exercise: It is an exercise which frees us from the burdens that we ourselves create in our life.
2. The Speed Exercise: The speed exercise helps us extract the secrets from what we are used to seeing everyday which because of our routine, we never see. It helps us recognize what is beyond the obvious and important.
3. The Cruelty Exercise: This exercise is a kind of self inflicted pain, as a penance to some unholy deed or thought that may have crept into our minds. As Petrus says “By transforming a spiritual pain – such as guilt, remorse, indecision and cowardice into physical pain, we can learn what harm it can cause us.”
4. The Messenger Ritual: This is one of the most important exercises, which helps one establish an acquaintance and then a relationship with our messenger – an angel, our own guide and counselor to help us in our journey of life.
5. The Water Exercise: The water exercise helps one aggravate and arouse one’s intuition. Intuition, as we know is something that occupies a very special place in Paulo’s philosophy.
6. The Blue Sphere Exercise: It is the ritual of agape – an idea of highest degree of love, which helps arouse one’s enthusiasm, to create a power that expands like a blue sphere and encloses the entire planet. This is the first and the only exercise in which Petrus accompanies Paulo.
7. The Buried Alive Exercise: The buried alive or the death exercise helps one realize the importance of life, something about which most of us seem so complacent.
8. The Ram Breathing Exercise: The Ram breathing exercise is something that makes us draw energy from everything around us. It helps us be in harmony with everything around us – the nature and the world. There are a lot of similarities in this exercise and the Yoga practices that have all the attention nowadays.
9. The Shadows Exercise: The shadows exercise helps us access and analyse various idea that may strike us towards realizing any of our goals and eliminate the incorrect of those ideas thereby making us reach to the solution.
10. The Listening Exercise: One of the easiest and most important practices of the road to
11. The Dance Exercise: The Dance exercise, the last of the exercises taught to Paulo is one which offers an almost perfect means of communication with the infinite intelligence.
Though I have dealt with these exercises in a very concise manner their actual fervor can be realized only on going through the context in which they have been mentioned in the book and trying them out on oneself.
Apart from these exercises, there’s a whole lot of spiritual wisdom that Paulo has to offer in ‘The Pilgrimage’. Just putting forward a few of them:
· When we are moving towards an objective, it’s very important to pay attention to the road(the means). It is the road which teaches us the best way to get there and the road enriches us as we walk its length. It can be compared to a sexual relationship: the caress of foreplay determining the intensity of orgasm.
· Love in all it’s meaning has been an as important word for Paulo as ‘dreams’ and he presents us this philosophy of life in ‘The Pilgrimage’ no less than in any other of his books.
· One of the most important analogies that the book draws is in its mention of Eros, Philos and Agape. Theses are three Greek words meaning love, but each one is different from the other, in meaning as well as intensity. Eros is that what most of us perceive of love. It is the feeling of love that exists between two people. When a couple gets married, its eros between them. Social love without a vestige of passion is eros accepted. It is the kind of acceptance and surrender that creeps in love between a couple, after the initial sexual high has been consumed. All of us seek eros, and then when eros wants to turn itself into philos, we think that love is worthless. And here is where philos comes into play.
· Philos is the love in the form of friendship. When the flame of eros stops burning, it is philos that keeps a couple together. When an elderly couple is happy with each other and enjoying life, it’s there where we can see philos – the most beautiful face of eros. And yet there is agape, the highest kind of love, both in degree and philosophy.
· Agape is the purest kind of love. It is total love. It is the love that consumes the person who experiences it. Whoever knows and experiences agape learns that nothing else in the world is important – just love. It is the kind of love that Jesus felt for humanity and it was so great that it shook the stars and changed the course of history. When we experience agape, we start pitying ourselves for having kept ourselves devoid of the love that consumes for so long. Agape is something that envelops the person experiencing and then the whole world, leading him into a state of trance. In fact agape, as Paulo says, cannot be really discussed, it has to be lived.
This description of love that Paulo does in The Pilgrimage is exceptional and highly imaginative. All great writers hold huge regard for humanity, the human endeavor and the spirit of man. We see this being discussed by Ernest Hemingway in ‘The Old Man and The Sea’, by Jawaharlal Nehru in ‘The Discovery of India’ and in so many other writings. In The Pilgrimage, Paulo says through Petrus:
Human beings are the only ones in nature that are aware that they will die. For that reason and only for that reason, I have a profound respect for the human race, and I believe that the future is going to be much better than its present. Even knowing that their days are numbered and that everything will end when they least expect it, people make of their lives a battle that is worthy of a being with eternal life What people regard as a vanity – leaving great works , having children, acting in such a way as to prevent one’s name from being forgotten – I regard as the highest expression of human dignity.
Still being fragile creatures, humans always try to hide from themselves the certainty that they will die. They do not see that it is death itself that motivates them to do the best things in their life. They are afraid to step into the dark, afraid of the unknown, and their only way of conquering that fear is to ignore the fact that their days are numbered. They donot see that with an awareness of the death, they would be able to be even more daring, to go much further in their daily conquests, because then they would have nothing to lose – for death is inevitable.
The pilgrimage is indeed a piece of very high philosophy and human learning. The idea that Paulo elaborates in ‘The Alchemist’ when he says that ‘every search begins with the beginner’s luck and every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested’ is been represented here too when we can see the author is tested to the severest of limits in his quest for his sword, so much so that there is a point when he is totally frustrated by the tests and humiliations that destiny impacts on him, but no success comes without the toughest battles won – this is what Paulo draws to us, through ‘The Pilgrimage’.
There’s so much that the journey teaches Paulo, it leads to a total transformation and yet the best line of the novel (according to me) comes towards the ending phases of the novel when Paulo through Petrus says:
Life always teaches us more than the road to
The same thought is expressed when after seeing an elderly couple who was all very happy, Petrus says to Paulo - They are happy. They learned the practices you are learning without even having heard of RAM. They find the power of love in the work that they do.
It is just an extension through which I believe Paulo wants to say that human endeavor for morality and teachings from life are greater than anything else. We don’t necessarily need a pilgrimage to know the RAM practices and yet if we know them through one, it’s so great. It’s results that are counted. It’s how good a person we are that actually matters. And that’s the highpoint of ‘The Pilgrimage’. It is a kind of self help book; it does not dictate the way life should be lived. It just narrates the experience of the author himself and the reader on his own draws the mentoring and teaching from the book.
