From the majestic Himalayan Mountains to ancient Jerusalem and Mecca, sacred places around the world have a deep and spiritual meaning for many of the world’s religions.

Some holy sites are natural and some are human-made; some are famous, some are less known; some are grand and some are of a humble nature, yet they all share the same sanctity that has called forth reverence throughout the ages.

Today on The World Around Us, we will journey to some of the most consecrated locations around the world with anthropologist and photographer, Martin Gray. Mr. Gray has traveled the world to visit more than 1,000 holy places in over 80 countries.

His photographic works have been published in National Geographic and his own Places of Peace and Power website which has received more than 25 million visitors. In 2007, Sacred Earth was published as a photographic atlas of holy places around the globe and will soon be available in Japanese and Russian. Mr. Gray has been invited to numerous conferences worldwide to give his presentations on hallowed sites.

Let us now meet Mr. Gray and hear about how his journey to these blessed places unfolded.

What's the first sacred site you went to? And how did you start doing this and really take this on as your mission?

My father was a military pilot and we lived on an air force base in Holloman, New Mexico. There was a town nearby called Alamogordo. Both of them were near the greatest set of white sand dunes in the world called White Sands. It's white because it's gypsum.

There's a tremendous energy here because it's the only place on the planet with selenite - gypsum which has a very particular energetic frequency that this stone doesn't have. So the different pure mineral concentrations do that. I used to go out on these white sands. They're tremendously beautiful and the quality of the place touched me but I didn't know it.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, is a Polynesian island that is a special territory of Chile. It is well-known for its 887 monolithic stone statues called moai, mostly carved out of volcanic ash, with the largest weighing 82 tons.

The rich culture and beliefs of the people of Rapa Nui are found through their extensive petroglyphs, which are pictures carved into rock. It was during a trip to the island that Mr. Martin Gray gained further insight through his meditation to his life’s mission.

I went to Easter Island and I knew a lot about it, which is nice. There's a volcano called Rano Raraku, and on the top of it, I sat to meditate and I wasn't expecting another vision at that place. I was just meditating. Nice view out over Easter Island. It was beautiful. I shut my eyes and I'm just meditating, just listening, being quiet.

And again, I see one of these visions. I see this thing and it’s temple architecture. I saw this five-story wooden pagoda in the forest. It said, “Follow the pilgrimage routes of the ancient religions.” And then I went up to Machu Picchu a week or so later, and I'm meditating in a certain place there. I'm meditating there again; and again the picture came, the vision, this wooden temple.

So Easter Island and Machu Picchu were very important for me in the reception of further visions. Something communicated to me. I made the choice to do it.

Resting in the middle of a tropical forest 2,430 meters above sea level in Peru, Macchu Picchu, also referred to as “The Lost City of the Incas,” is another holy destination for many people. Built by the Incans around 1462, at the pinnacle of their empire, it is located on what is believed to be sacred land with the surrounding mountains. It is attested to be in alignment with major astronomical events, and regarded as a historic sanctuary for the ancient peoples.

There are many sanctified places around the world which share these unique qualities with Macchu Picchu. Mr. Gray explains that there are up to 40 types of sacred sites and 20 main causes for the holy power of a place.

What constitutes a sacred site?

I would say that there are 3 major categories of influence. One is geophysical. It’s the landforms, like around here it’s red because of ferrous oxide so it’s kind of magnetic. There are different landforms, there are different mineral concentrations, there is different water, there is underground, there are a number of geophysical anomalies.

The human beings in antiquity didn’t have machines that measured it but they felt it. So there is the power of place. Then there is the effect of celestial objects, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets. When these different celestial objects are in a different positional relationship relative to the Earth and the Sun, it causes a sort of emanation of energy of power of spirit of something at certain places.

Not all places that are on a grid. And then there is the power of human intention. And if you think, like for example, here we’re in Sedona, there are absolutely no vortexes in Sedona. There is no evidence of pre-existing native sanctity, none whatsoever. But because lots of people come to the places, they think there are.

There’s a sort of memory the Earth has, so the Earth becomes charged at these places. A field of energy, of quality, of love, of peace, of whatever you want to call it, develops in a field and it gets more intense.

Please keep your dial tuned here to Supreme Master Television. The World Around Us will continue after these brief messages with more sacred world destinations with Mr. Martin Gray.

They're windows. You look through them. There's sort of a visual homeopathic essence of the site. If you're looking at it, it's looking back at you. So when I'm taking these pictures, I'm saying to the spirit, “Let this window be of such a clarity that the quality of whatever it is, the visual harmonics comes through it and touches people in some way.” So, it's a gift to people, they’re prayers, and then they're fun to look at.

When you get an inoculation of something, it stays in there and it does something for a long time. So you find that the sacred sites, the energy almost flows through us. It's flowing, we just come and plug into the field. It doesn't start because we're there. It's there, we walk into it. And so it penetrates our being on a bunch of different levels.

We now continue with today’s The World Around Us with Martin Gray, an anthropologist and photographer who has traveled around the globe documenting over 1,000 sacred sites. By studying patterns, forms and relationships in nature, it is believed that humans can gain an understanding of mysteries of the laws of the universe. Geometry and mathematical ratios observed in the natural world have been applied to sacred architecture and art.

When you look at medieval cathedrals or pyramids in a number of different places, they’re built with certain, what we call, sacred geometry, and it’s sort of what a guitar is like. There is the sacred geometry in the structure of the guitar that gives you the mathematical frequencies of the notes. Inside of it, there is a certain sort of sacred geometry, the space. Same thing at temples, mosques, churches, cathedrals, that there is a quality of the space too.

Sacred geometry is the geometry of nature. I mean, you got these rocks here, and the rocks have got atoms in there and the electrons spinning around the neutrons and the protons – there’s a certain sacred geometry to it. It’s just a particular type of mathematics. There is all these different ratios in the platonic solids, and those determine, sort of the way that energy vibrates in space.

So that’s sacred geometry, but then you get like the Fibonacci series, there’s pi, and then there is phi. And you get this wonderful logarithmic spiral, and you find it in flowers, you find it in a nautilus shell, you find it in a number of different things. It’s the geometry of nature. It’s magnificent and complex and shows that nature’s smart, very smart.

What draws people to a certain place? Why do people choose to go to one sacred site rather than another? Mr. Gray explains that an energy which draws us to a certain holy place can be called “spiritual magnetism.”

What can people experience by going to these different sites?

Ultimately, it’s going to be individual because people are individuals. But there’s sort of a commonality of experience that people have at a certain place or a certain type of place which gives rise to a commonality of legends, of myths around the world, because they’re all speaking about the same quality. There’s yin points, yang points, feminine- masculine energies, negative-positive, negative not in the sense of bad, just polarity of energies.

What happens to people at these places? Some of them, people have miraculous healings. And there’s a bunch of different types of sites for different ailments. Very interesting, you’ll see this very strong in Christianity, for example, different ailments have different sites to help cure them, to have an effect upon them. Then there are sites that actually do awaken and amplify creativity.

The Greeks talked about oracular sites, Oracle at Delphi in Greece. There are places, for some unknown reason, human beings go there, and there is a tendency for some of them somehow see visions of what they know as their future.

In ancient civilizations, an oracle was believed to be a person or conduit of extraordinary wisdom, lending her or himself to offer counsel and prophesies. Oracles were considered as spiritual authorities. Certain sites were known for their dispensing of knowledge and were thereby known as oracles as well.

Aside from the Oracle at Delphi in Greece, other oracles include the I Ching or “Book of Changes” in China, Per-Wadjet temple in Egypt, Akashwani or “Voice from the Sky” in India, oracle priests of Mesoamerica, Agbala and Chukwu oracle of Nigeria, Runes of Scandinavia, and Nechung Oracle of Tibet.

There are a lot of sites around the planet where people have spoken about, the world of spirits being revealed to them, having a Shamanic experience where they are sort of channeling something. So Delphi is one.

With the focus of pilgrims on God and spiritual aspirations, holy places truly offer a divine and special atmosphere that is a blessed opportunity for everyone to experience.

Please tune in next Sunday on Supreme Master Television for The World Around Us with part 2 of our show, “Sacred Earth: A Journey to the World’s Holy Places with Martin Gray.” Up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May your journeys lead you to lands of everlasting peace and happiness.

From the majestic Himalayan Mountains to ancient Jerusalem and Mecca, sacred places around the world have a deep and spiritual meaning for many of the world’s religions.

Some holy sites are natural and some are human-made; some are famous, some are less known; some are grand and some are of a humble nature, yet they all share the same sanctity that has called forth reverence throughout the ages.

Today on The World Around Us, we will journey to some of the most consecrated locations around the world with anthropologist and photographer, Martin Gray. Mr. Gray has traveled the world to visit more than 1,000 holy places in over 80 countries.

His photographic works have been published in National Geographic and his own Places of Peace and Power website which has received more than 25 million visitors. In 2007, Sacred Earth was published as a photographic atlas of holy places around the globe and will soon be available in Japanese and Russian. Mr. Gray has been invited to numerous conferences worldwide to give his presentations on hallowed sites.

Let us now continue our conversation with Mr. Martin Gray about these blessed places.

It was in the United States of America that Mr. Gray experienced his first sacred site on the glistening white sands of New Mexico. The White Sands National Monument is the largest gypsum dune fields in the world, covering 275 square miles.

The Americas are also graced with other sacred spots such as Mount Shasta in California, USA; Medicine Lake in Canada; the Church of El Sisne in Ecuador; Lake Titicaca in Bolivia; and the Irazu Volcano in Costa Rica, among many others. Mr. Gray describes some of the special pyramids he has visited in Mexico.

There are some other sacred sites around the world that have pyramids. Teotihuacan in Mexico, outside of Mexico City, has a pyramid there that may be older than most orthodox archaeologists say.

Across the Atlantic, the European continent also has many holy sites. From Armenia’s Holy Etchmiadzin to England’s Stonehenge to Russia’s Monastery of Trinity, these places attract faithful pilgrims from around the world. Mr. Gray talks about the history of two Marian shrine destinations: Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal.

Bernadette Soubirous had all of these visions, where a feminine apparition happened. It said it was the daughter of God. There is this young woman that saw this water come out of the ground and this apparition manifested to her and talked to her. Same thing, Lourdes and Fatima, 1917, I think. So those places became pilgrimage sites by virtue of the people that came.

The birthplace of some of the world’s great past Masters, such as Lord Jesus, Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, Prophet Zoroaster and Bahá'u'lláh, is in the Middle East. Spiritual seekers are naturally drawn to this holy land.

Among sacred places in the Middle East are Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Petra, and Pir-e-Sabz shrine. One of the holiest sites visited is Mecca in Saudi Arabia. As the birthplace of both Prophet Muhammad and the Islam religion, all Muslims make the pilgrimage to this revered land at least once in their life if circumstances permit.

I’ve been to Mecca. There were 1.1 million people in the great Mosque in the building, and another three million really close around the mosque. It’s beautiful.

There's an Islamic sacred site in western Algeria called Tlemcen. There are 3 Shiite mosques in Sunni, Iraq. And then there's a place called Nan Madol. There are a few sites out in Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia.

Continuing on our journey eastward, we cross the biblical Red Sea and arrive on the continent of Africa, regarded as the cradle of civilization. Africa is home to such holy places as the Arc of the Covenant, Mount Sinai, the Mosque of Touba, and the pyramids. Thousands of people visit the Egyptian pyramids every year, marveling at the construction and in wonderment of its original purpose.

When we talk about pyramids, there are only two types. The pyramids that are very, very old, and then the pyramids that aren’t so old. And by not so old, to me is, 3000 BC forward.

The World Around Us will be right back after these brief messages. Please keep your dial tuned here to Supreme Master Television to discover what the Great Pyramid beholds.

There's no rule. There's nothing that you’ve got to do. Don't hurt anything and do what your heart tells you to do. Just enjoy it. Just be there.

I'm trying to awaken people to the idea that the Earth is sacred. Everything I can see is a gift: the Earth is giving to me. So I try to ask people to say, “Thank you to this living being that allows you to live here.”

Today on The World Around Us, Mr. Martin Gray, anthropologist and photographer, introduces us to some of the world’s most sacred sites.

You have some sites in Egypt that are really important like the Sphinx and the Osirion. There are a few other things there that are pre-Egyptian. And some people even say they were built pre-10,500 BC.

If you look at the layout of places on the ground according to their celestial alignments, and then if you look at their positioning on sacred geographical grids: Aha! You get something very, very interesting because a lot of times the place of these structures on the land is in a relationship to the positions of the stars in the sky from that latitude at different times.

Mr. Gray illustrates that these great works of architecture had lofty spiritual purposes.

In the Great Pyramid, there is this one chamber, the larger chamber, and there is a tremendous amount of geometry in all of the lengths, in the widths, in the volume inside of this. And so here you have this pyramid built with sacred geometry on a particular line.

The geometry the pyramid focuses on something inside, it’s at a place on the air; there is all the celestial power coming. It all focuses it into this room that has sacred geometry in the building of the room, and there is a coffer, a big stone which never had a lid.

And people would lie in there at certain times, and because this sort of focusing of a variety of energies at a certain place at a certain time in this chamber, it allowed people to have these extraordinary awakenings, spiritual awakening experiences, or oracular experiences, where they could see somehow into the future. There were magnificent things that happen to people in the Great Pyramid, in that box. But that’s the only pyramid like that in the world. All the others are different.

Asia abounds with sacred sites which include Mt. Fuji in Japan, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Mount Kailas in Tibet, and Cheju Do Island in South Korea. In India, the home of yogis and saints, the people venerate all life.

Southern Indian Hinduism or Hinduism in general is a really good one for this. You have so many different types of deities. All these goddesses and gods, and they each did different things at different places. So you see a really fine sort of indication of the different qualities of places in India.

In India, there are these Kumbh Mela sites. There are actually 4 – Nashik, Ujjain, Haridwar and Allahabad – which used to be called Prayag. Now it's Allahabad, where the Kumbh Mela happens. Each one of those are water sites along rivers. Each one of them is sacred on a particular astrological date that happens every so often.

Millions of people come especially to the Kumbh Mela because they feel at that particular time, there are some qualities, some energy, something that gives people an experience of divinity forever. It guarantees enlightenment and freedom from birth. 25 million people went there during the month period. It's magnificent.

Our Earth, a home to over 6 billion human inhabitants, is a living entity that sustains the life of countless flora and fauna. We have a responsibility to be caring stewards of our nurturing planet.

We mine the earth, then we manufacture something, and then there’s pollution that comes out of it. And then the things are wasted, become obsolete, and thrown away. So you have this planet being overwhelmed by the amount of junk that we human beings put out.

Then you have lots of other problems, spread of AIDS and depletion of non-renewable natural resources, and they are all completely interwoven with one another and the global super structure is shaking. We are losing animal species. Our planet is in such dire straits, and I know there is an awakening of consciousness on this planet. This is extraordinary. It’s not just the notion. I’ve been all over the place and I see it everywhere.

Mr. Martin Gray speaks of his philosophy on life and his deep respect for all God’s creations.

Don't hurt anything. Get up in the morning and put goodness and beauty into the world. Be really nice to people.

The whole world and every being, everything, is sacred.

Our sincere appreciation, Mr. Martin Gray, for graciously sharing your brilliant photographic talent and knowledge to introduce some of our planet’s holy places. May the conviction that “every being is sacred” resonates deep within human consciousness as our world evolves toward an era in which the sanctity of all life is honored.

Thank you, global viewers, for joining us for today’s The World Around Us. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television. Words of Wisdom is up next, after Noteworthy News. We’ll see you again.