The Second Rule of the Camino (part 2)
Whatever it is you're looking for on the Camino is buried deep within you. And in order to uncover it, you have to be willing to let go a little. If you're not careful, you might get hurt.
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If you’re an older subscriber then welcome back. I appreciate anyone who stuck with the meta-journey of my diary of Camino entries, in some small way hoping that it felt like just much of a slog for you, dear reader, as it did for me, though I hope it was also just as enlightening an experience.
I’m going to wrap up the Camino chat in the next couple of weeks, but just wanted to try and summarise everything in a few essays - as much for myself as anyone else.
From then I’ll be broadening my horizons a bit more, though my (current) New Year’s Resolution is to resume a weekly format of essays and short stories about travel, the outdoors and all sorts of environmental stimulation.
This week I’m revisting all the more abstract philosophical stuff that came to mind while doing the Camino, inspired by an analysis of the movie Fight Club, of all things. The Camino and the fictional Fight Club might seem like polar opposites, but maybe spiritual retreats are not what you think they are.
Read on for part 2, and don’t forget to Subscribe, Share or Comment:
Of all the choices, the most fundamental might be whether to walk alone or with others.
The outcome of this is that the more you get in touch with yourself, the more you will naturally seek out connection with others – for connecting with yourself is the only real way to connect with humanity. However, when you embrace your aloneness, your connections with the world begin to become real and creative. So we embrace the real connection of others, until we become weary again, and the cycle repeats.
And each time we go back into the world, we are a bit more ourselves, and thus our connection to the world becomes more real, and so on.
I embarked on the Camino alone, and presumed the whole thing would be a solo affair, an exercise in solitude, with a few random pleasant encounters along the way. Instead I experienced all of the camaraderie, openness and generosity of spirit, fast friendship and warm hospitality that the Camino is renowned for, but which I completely underestimated before seeing it for myself.
This question of whether to do everything entirely my own way or to allow myself to form deeper connections with others, which necessarily means compromising somewhat on your planned course of action, was something I wrestled with a lot in the early days and weeks, even resisting getting too attached to people early on in order to assert my independence, before eventually giving in to what was becoming quite apparent: that connecting with people on the Camino, and the friendships that came as a result of walking the path with others, was where it was at.
To me though there was a powerful metaphor at play also: to walk alone is to assert order on your own world. It is an act of independence, of freedom, of conscious decision making. To allow oneself to be absorbed into the group meant a much more free-floating and untethered existence: choices were made at whim, or depending on others, decisions were made for the benefit of others, health-conscious morning resolutions were quickly discarded by the wayside at the first mention of a group dinner or a well-earned afternoon beer.
Eventually, I would become weary again – exhausted, really – and would walk alone again in order to become my own person again.
And this to me was the beauty of the Camino.
It was less about the Why than the How, less about the stories and more about living in the moment. To practice living from the heart one must follow every instinctive fancy and intuitive idea, and one must let themselves become lost to the instinctive desire we have for human connection, to be absorbed in the belonging of the group, even if it results in some not-very-forward thinking choices, and even if the result of this is that, as O’Donohue articulated, you lose a part of your soul.
This is not without repercussions, though if you are truly here searching for something within yourself, then this is what must happen. Before you reclaim part of your soul and consciously build something new with it, you must be willing to forego parts of yourself. This is inevitably painful, and your ego may see these instinctive actions as regrets at some time in the future.
Giving yourself completely to the Camino involves sharing yourself with the road and those you meet on it. And in doing so the world chips away and steals parts of you, piece by piece.
It is what it is.
Each way of being is a double-edged sword: the ego creates order in our world and gives it meaning, but too much can make us depressed, inauthentic and attached to things which make us lose sight of ourselves.
While our instinctive self is nurturing, compassionate, generous and the source of creativity, reflecting in our actions our true self, following it too much leads us on a path of indulging in every thought, idea, person and substance that crosses our path – if left unchecked, the id would let the ‘real world’ and all its attachments burns – and we see Tyler Durden do exactly that.
This too can leave us feeling inauthentic, anxious, and like we’ve abandoned ourselves.
However, in order to get the most out of the Camino, or any retreat or experience where the aim is some kind of transformational growth (which by its nature is spiritual), you have to be willing to let the parts of you die which are an illusion, and in order to do so, you have to just let go – as Tyler orders the Narrator while speeding on the motorway and burning his hand with acid.
This is How you Camino. The stories are a cover-up. The origin stories all come pouring out of people in their conversations about why they’re here, but really it’s not about what you say, it’s about the fact that you’re saying it at all. The real benefit in removing yourself from your normal life and walking all that distance is in dissolving your egoic attachments, your illusions about yourself, and being free just to… be yourself.
“The Camino is great” people will all say, myself included, but in fact the Camino is neutral. It is a journey with limitless possibilities, bounded by yellow arrows, a route and the country of Spain. What you find on the Camino is really up to you, and the results may not – and to be honest, should not – all be happiness and rainbows, and easy to swallow bits of wisdom and self-congratulation.
Travel as a means of finding oneself or personal growth is not an exercise in self-improvement.
“Self-improvement is masturbation. Now self-destruction…”
If you want to be enlightened, you have to be prepared to learn some hard truths about the world and yourself.
In losing part of ourselves we become what Buddhists call Hungry Ghosts, endlessly trying to fill the holes in us that cannot be filled. In reality, this takes the form of indulging in our vices: either substances or psychological, the former being food, cigarettes, alcohol and more; the latter being those bad habits we have, the unconscious damaging behaviours that we act out unbeknownst to ourselves.
But, the thing about personal growth is: the only way out is through.
“Say what you like about Marla, at least she’s trying to hit rock bottom.” - Tyler Durden
This isn’t just about hedonism and vices, though these of course do play their part for many. To be honest, one of the roles of alcohol in society is this controlled demolition of the ego in communion with others. Too much either acutely or chronically is of course destructive, though there can be method in the madness. The act of walking so far day after day, with your whole world of attachments condensed to one backpack which you must bear the weight of, is the fundamental means in which you physically and mentally break yourself down.
The middle third of the Hero’s Journey story sees the Hero venture into the Abyss, which on the Camino conveniently coincides with the flat industrial agricultural land of the Meseta, a land of little environmental stimulation, which has the effect of sending the pilgrim into his own head. The Abyss may be represented by dragons or demons or monsters, but it represents the Hero’s own shadow: their subconscious, their intuition, their id.
The darkest foe one faces is your own lack of self-awareness.
However, if you want to change something about yourself, something is going to have to give.
The members of Fight Club begin to engage in the business of soap-making (a pink bar of soap bearing the words Fight Club became a logo for the movie) – as Sam points out, made from fat stolen from liposuction companies to sell back to the rich women it came from in soap form.
A metaphor for alchemy.
You have to break something down to break through. You walk yourself into the ground over and over again, for days on end, until you become nothing and nobody, your only attachments carried in your backpack whose weight you bear on your back. Like the members of Project Mayhem who forego their real names, the names you collect in your phone on the Camino are all things like ‘Gavin Camino’, ‘Conor Camino’ and so on, forming one big family, though one where the identities from home are irrelevant.
And like the famous first and second rules of Fight Club – you can’t tell anyone about it, not because it’s forbidden, but because outside of this strange, living, breathing, rotating community, nobody understands what you’re talking about. You have to do the Camino to understand it, and to understand the rate of change that someone goes through in completing it, the endless cycle of daily death and rebirth which causes the pilgrim to feel like lifetimes have passed on the road.
Every version of you that exists is a story, a complete character with a beginning, middle and end. Even the tiniest choices require a change in this character’s story. The Hero’s Journey describes the process by which one character dies so that a new, more learned one, can take his place. If you want to make some kind of change to your life – or if life dictates that you have to – then it requires the old you to die, metaphorically speaking, and the greater the change the more drastic the death has to be.
The Camino is a literal acting out of this process, and the changes which can occur along the way are dramatic – lifetimes pass each day as you remove your egoic attachments and are left to focus on nothing but your actions, your inner child. It isn’t necessarily a difficult process, but it may be one you’ve never undertaken before. And it’s not all easy. It’s about seeing the world how it is, and it depends how aligned you are with reality in the first place.
Too much, too soon, can result in you losing control of yourself, whether through unconscious indulgence in an attempt to replace the fragments of your soul to others, or in the unconscious actions and behaviours which you’re trying to examine and release when you do such a pilgrimage.
Letting your inner child run free sounds like a good thing – and it can be, in fact it’s probably essential if you’ve never let it do so before, and modern life seems to exist solely to repress it. For most people, it’s probably the one thing that could dramatically change their lives for the better.
“The Camino provides, not what you want but what you need”,
as one of the most common Camino memes repeats itself from the mouths of apparent strangers. And maybe what you need is to not take yourself so seriously.
The freedom from the ego that is facilitated by walking the Camino is reflected in the spirit of generosity, compassion, non-judgement and friendship that is evident the entire way to Santiago.
If left unchecked though, this same spirit would lead you on a path of self-destruction; in fact, it probably would like to see your real-world burn.
Travel can be kind of dangerous like that.