Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
TRIP: Wow, I didn't expect to get such a wonderful story. That's
fantastic.
WIZARD: It's beautiful, yes.
TRIP: I hope that gives listeners a sense of it, and certainly I
certainly get it. That was fantastic. You were given, well let me ask
you another question, Arunachala is the sacred mountain in
Tiruvannamalai, and it’s considered one of the most sacred places
in India, and there's an ancient temple there in the town, and
pilgrims circumambulate it once a month. I visited there once
with the Wizard, and it was so easy to experience the sacred in that
place, it was just palpably sacred. And my question for both of you
is what is it that makes certain places and things seemingly more
sacred or so sacred, more sacred it seems than others, when we
know that everything is sacred even the ordinary is sacred. Why is
it that we are able to experience the sacred in certain places and
things so readily, and not in others? What is it about those places?
Then finally, given that why should we pay homage to a specific
place, a specific sacred place? Is it useful to us to do that, or is
more useful to see the sacred in everything all the time? I'll open
that up to my two resident wizards here.
WIZARD: You want me to take a stab at it?
TRIP: All right, go ahead.
WIZARD: The driving volition behind the perception of divinity is
Faith. So when so many people for so many thousands of years
bring their Faith to a particular place, it quickens the Shakti, or the
form to break open to peace. It's like the form is the mother and
you go there and the form itself puts you into the heart of the
father. And the mountain represents Shiva, that formless aspect
that Ramana was enticing us to join in.
And it's a symbol that's solid, it's immoveable, it’s got all the
metaphors about it, it embraces the home. Vision transcends the
23