A Spiritual Experience on the Camino

Many pilgrims, most with no religion, recount having had a ‘spiritual’ experience whilst walking the Camino even though the majority find it difficult to describe the experience. As a non-theist, I too have found it difficult to explain the spirituality of walking the Camino, leaving aside the history, the religion, the traditions, and the folk-lore. It’s more than all of that.

If we look at the word ‘spirit’ it might help to explain the state one reaches when on a long-distance hike. I have often explained my own spiritual state, after a week or so on the Camino, as being in the ‘Zen-zone’ – when mind separates from the body and the whole becomes one with nature. (This is especially so when walking on the wide open plains of the Meseta).

Spirit (n) L. spiritus

My large, heavy Websters gives at least 18 different meanings of the word ‘spirit’.

1. Breath, courage, vigour, the soul of life.

2. The thinking, motivating, feeling part of man as distinguished from the body, mind, intelligence.

3. Life, will, consciousness, thoughts etc, regarded separate from matter.

What does this mean, “.. the thinking, motivating, feeling part of a person as distinguished from the body and intelligence?”

I remember reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Professor Carl Sagan, the well-known scientist, called “The Dragons of Eden - Speculation on the evolution of human intelligence.” Although it was written over 30 years ago, the information, suggestions, speculations and assumptions he made then are just as relevant today.
In the chapter on the development of the human brain he focuses on the differences between the left (mostly rational) and right (mostly intuitive) hemispheres, suggesting that our pre-verbal, pre-ambulatory ancestors relied on their ‘intuitive’ non-verbal perceptions and cognitions to survive in the world.
“Intuitive knowledge has an extremely long evolutionary history: if we consider the information contained in the genetic material, it goes back to the origin of life.
The other of our two modes of knowing – the one that in the West expresses irritation about the existence of intuitive knowledge – is quite recent evolutionary accretion.”

Sagan says the people in the West have made so much contact with the left-hemisphere functions of our brains and very little with the right, that we find it difficult to connect with our intuitive brain. The scientist Robert Ornstein compares this to the stars being invisible to us during the day, despite the fact that they always there, day and night. ‘The brilliance of our most recent evolutionary accretion, the verbal abilities of the left hemisphere, obscures our awareness of the functions on the intuitive right hemisphere, which in our ancestors must have been the principal means of perceiving the world”.
He suggests that in the meditative state of many Oriental religions the left hemisphere of the brain is suppressed which allows the ‘stars to come out’.

Isn’t this what meditation and spiritual ‘awareness’ is all about? An Eastern guru said, "Enlightenment flowers when individual consciousness merges into universal consciousness. It is an experience beyond mind.”

Spirit - the thinking, feeling part as distinguished from the body and intelligence.

You can pick out pilgrims who have been on the road for a long time. They have calmness about them, serene and laid-back they don’t rush to be the first to leave the shelter in the morning; they are never the first to arrive, they don’t get caught up in the rush for beds. They don’t judge other pilgrims. They don’t complain about the shelters, or the food, or the paths or even the weather. They have become the Camino – the Way – they are in the Zen-Zone.

Is adrenaline? Endorphines? Is it Seretonin that induces that feeling of emotiona wellness? Is it Zen?
“Zen emphasizes experiential wisdom in the attainment of enlightenment. As such, it de-emphasizes theoretical knowledge in favor of direct realization through meditation and dharma practice.”

Walking-Zen is the exquisite state you reach when you walk without awareness. You are no longer aware of the pack on your back or the blister on your heel or the sun on your head. You are one with everything around you and although you see everything, you do not think about them in words, they just are. You just are. You are just walking.

You are in the Zen-zone – having a spiritual experience.