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.