All World
Gayatri Pariwar

Reflections on the Pilgrimage - 1

When I first started out, my tunic read PEACE PILGRIM on the front and Walking Coast to Coast for Peace on the back. Through the years the message on the back changed from Walking 10,000 Miles for World Disarmament to Walking 25,000 Miles for Peace and ending with the present message of 25,000 Miles on Foot for Peace. This walking has taken me several times into the forty-eight states and into Mexico and into all ten Canadian provinces.

I finished counting miles of walking in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 1964. I said to myself, “25,000 miles is enough to count.” It kept me tied to the main highways where mileages are recorded on road maps. They’re not good places to meet people. They’re just good places to count miles. Now I’m free to walk where people are. Also, mileages are not given for my favorite places to walk: beaches, forest paths and mountain trails.

Some things don’t seem so difficult, like going without food. I seldom miss more than three to four meals in a row and I never even think about food until it is offered. The most I have gone without food is three days, and then Mother Nature provided my food — apples that had fallen from a tree. I once fasted as a prayer discipline for 45 days, so I know how long one can go without food! My problem is not how to get enough to eat; it’s how to graciously avoid getting too much. Everyone wants to over-feed me! Going without sleep would be harder, although I can miss one night’s sleep and I don’t mind. Every once in a while I miss a night’s sleep, but not for some time now. The last time was September of 1977 when I was in a truck stop. I had intended to sleep a little but it was such a busy truck stop that I spent all night talking to truck drivers. The first thing after I went in, a truck driver who’d seen me on television wanted to buy me some food. I sat in a corner booth.

Then truck drivers started to arrive, and it was just one wave of truck drivers after another that were standing there and asking me questions, and so forth. I actually talked to them all night and I never did get to do any sleeping. After a while somebody offered me breakfast and I ate that and left. Another time, a truck driver pulled his truck to the side of the road and said, “I heard you say over television something about that endless energy and I just wanted to tell you I had it one time. I was marooned in a town by a flood. I got so bored that I finally offered to help and I got interested in getting people out. I worked without eating, I worked without sleeping, and I wasn’t tired... But I don’t have it anymore.” I said, “Well, what are you working for now?” “Money,” he said. I said, “That should be quite incidental. You have the endless energy only when you are working for the good of the whole — you have to stop working for your little selfish interests.” That’s the secret of it. In this world you are given as you give!I usually average twenty-five miles a day walking, depending upon how many people stop to talk to me along the way. I have gone up to fifty miles in one day to keep an appointment or because there was no shelter available.

On very cold nights I walk through the night to keep warm. When the days are very warm I do a lot of walking at night to avoid the heat. I have walked when the nights were filled with the scent of honeysuckle, the sight of fireflies and the sound of whippoorwills.

Once a six foot fellow, confident he could outwalk me, walked with me for 33 miles. When he gave up, his feet were blistered and his muscles ached. He was walking on his own strength; I wasn’t! I was walking on that endless energy that comes from inner peace. Another time a woman asked me if she could accompany me on the pilgrimage. She told me she wanted to get away from “that husband” of hers. Maybe she did have a calling, but her motive was not the highest. Another lady who wished to accompany me for a day could barely walk by afternoon. I sent her home by bus! I have never experienced any danger on my walks. One time a couple of drunks did follow me in a car, but when I moved off the road they left. Only once has anyone ever thrown something at me: a man in a speeding truck threw a fistful of crumpled dollar bills. I simply gave them to the next church where I spoke.

A college student once asked me if I had ever been mugged. “Mugged?” I answered. “You would have to be a crazy person to mug me — I haven’t a penny to my name!” There was a time when I was walking out of town at sunset and a well-to-do couple in a big house called me over. They had read about my pilgrimage and felt it was their Christian duty to warn me that ahead on the way lay a very wicked place called ‘South of the Border.’ They just wanted to warn me not to go near that place. They did not offer food or shelter, however, so I walked on for several hours. It was a very dark night with a heavy cloud cover and all of a sudden it started to rain. Big drops were coming down, and I was carrying a lot of unanswered mail. I looked for a place where there might be a shelter and nearby I saw a combination - gas station, restaurant and motel. I ducked under the roof over the gas pumps and started to put the unanswered mail into the front of my tunic so it A disease might be treated by a medicine prescribed by a doctor

. But one can’t survive on medicine or tonics all the me for vigorous health. If you want to sustain good health, you will have to use the knowledge of prevenve care and maintaining vigor. Only the spark of knowledge could uproot avarice, desperaon, tension, apprehension, sorrow, and other mental weaknesses and psychological complaints, which make our lives burdensome. All the prosperity and might of the world together cannot control these complexies; rather they tend to augment the vices and worries in the absence of proper knowledge. True knowledge alone is the key to peace and happiness in this life and the life beyond. - Acharya Shriram Sharma Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination. - Swami Sivananda 30 AKHAND JYOTI Jan.-Feb. 2018 wouldn’t get wet. The man from the gas station came running out and said, “Don’t stand out there in the rain, come into the restaurant.” The man in the restaurant said, “Oh, we read all about you, and we would like to offer you a dinner or anything you want.” By that time I realized where I was. I was in ‘South of the Border.’ The man from the motel was sitting across the table from me and he gave me a room for the night.

They also gave me breakfast the next morning. There may have been gambling in the back room; something was going on there. But they treated me in a much more Christian fashion than those who warned me against them. It just demonstrates my point that there is good in everybody.

I have received hospitality in the most unusual places. These have included a conference table in the Florence, Arizona, city hall and the seat of a fire engine in Tombstone, Arizona. Once I was inadvertently locked for thirteen hours in an icy gas station restroom. My accommodations were quiet and private, although somewhat chilly! I sleep equally well in a soft bed or on the grass beside the road. If I am given food and shelter, fine. If not, I’m just as happy. Many times I am given shelter by total strangers. When hospitality is not available there are always bus depots, railroad stations and all night truck stops.

I remember being offered a queen size bed at a fashionable motel one evening and the next evening space on the concrete floor of a twentyfour hour gasoline station. I slept equally well on both. Several times a friendly sheriff would unlock the door of an unoccupied jail cell. When no shelter is available to me, I sleep in the fields or by the side of the road with God to guard me.