Bali - II

In my previous entry, I explored how the fact of knowing one's place in society could add to a sense of stability and reduce a certain amount of agitation that we experience in the west. 

I think it's more than that, though.  I think the commingling of the spiritual with the mundane also has a lot to do with the Balinese contentment. I have always seen a large barrier between the spiritual and the religious, and an even larger barrier between the religious and the secular.  Here, I don't believe either of those barriers exist.

There is more to this feeling than just the omnipresence of the shrines and temples and offerings you see everywhere.  Although... it really is remarkable how dense the landscape is with these artifacts. Shrines are stuck into every possible corner, poking up behind the walls of family compounds, huge monuments to the Hindu gods in the center of intersections, giving protection to travelers. Rice fields during harvest have large offerings set up to ask the goddess of rice the permission to take the grain from the ground. Rice fields during planting, have offerings to the same goddess to help make fertile the seeds.

Our driver, Made, makes it clear that the Hindu religion does not worship many gods, but only one god, with many names.  The way he talks makes me think of a well run business, with one brand and identity, but many workers scurrying around taking care of the enterprise.  You go to different departments to get the job done, but the transactions are always with the company as a whole.  It makes sense, actually.

The shrines have umbrellas to keep the gods cool and protected, and many of them are wrapped with black and white plaid cloth.  I also started seeing many huge old trees with their trunks wrapped in cloth.  When we asked Made about this, he said it's because some of the trees are spirit trees and the cloth honors that.

Then there are the offerings.  Little baskets made of banana leaves and palm fronds are filled with rice and flowers and any other things that may be deemed delectable to the gods, arranged with beautiful mosaic symmetry and left everywhere.  On the sand at the beach, in corners, on the intersection monuments, all over the shrines.  Flower petals are left in places that will delight the eye: on the steps of stair ways, aligned along the edges of fountains, on pillows, behind ears.  Beauty is created for beauty's sake.  Shallow vessels of water can be found in front of restaurants and other businesses, with mosaics of flower petals creating beautiful patterns. Even when we had our massages, there was a bowl of sand placed under our massage table face rest, with a pattern of shells and seeds arranged for our pleasure if we opened our eyes during the massage.  For no reason other than beauty.

For no reason other than beauty... and to honor and befriend the gods.  This is amazing to me.  Significant time is spent daily on these offerings, and there is no profit motive in them at all. Making the gods happy is, of course, something that is for self interest, but not at all in the way we usually think of self interest.  Our self interest usually has a dollar sign attached somewhere. But this does not.  This is all about beauty, and dedication to one's own system of religious beliefs.

It spills out everywhere.  There is incense in the air, and the aroma of flowers. There is the sound of the gamelan playing from the temples and from homes, a music so sweet and so poignant that it's like the aural equivalent of the frangipani blossoms that spill over the sides of fountains and rivers.

The air itself is rich with the spirits of the gods, the ancestors, the remnants of the pagan deities that used to inhabit this island. There is a commingling between air and water and earth, between the life of the spirit and the life of the practical world. Even the homes resist hard boundaries, with their open architecture that removes walls and windows and brings the outside in, and the inside out, and removes the distinction between the two.

More soon.

Bali - I

I am sitting by the pool of a villa in Gianyar, Bali.  The Hindu noon time call to prayer is

broadcasting over the village loudspeaker, a gamelan plays somewhere in the valley, and periodically the cicadas screech overhead. Roosters crow and the cow behind the house bawls.  It is in the 80's, both in Fahrenheit degrees and percentile of humidity.

Bali is a rich and complex island. In many ways it has rearranged my realities, from inside and out. There is a profound blurring of boundaries that I usually think are hard and fast rules of ways to live and approach the world.  As always, getting out of one's own cultural bubble provide an immediate and often jarring shift of perspective.  The only way to get a good look at where you are in the world is to move completely away from it and see it in a much bigger frame.

I take so much for granted, as an American. I take for granted that the only true motive in a culture is one that has a profit margin associated with it.  I take for granted that there is a difference between religion and spirituality. I take for granted that a good path to happiness includes the state of being materially comfortable.  I take for granted that I have the ability to make anything I want of myself if I only work hard enough, or meet the right people, or get lucky enough.  I take for granted that I, as a person, have an inate right and, indeed, mandate to be the best individual I can be, and that my goal on this planet is to personally evolve as much as possible -- both materially, and psychologically, and in my relationships with other people.

All of these things seem to be bedrock assumptions for me and the Americans I know. They don't seem crazy, and they don't seem particularly self-limiting.  They just seem to be normal.
They may be normal, for us, but they aren't universal.  So, in terms that are understandably generalized, let me tell you what I've been learning here.

Bali is a happy island.  Our guidebook starts off saying that the Balinese are contented.  They enjoy being Balinese, they don't really see a need to not want to be Balinese, and (the joke goes) when a Balinese reincarnates, they want to come back as a Balinese. Our experience here has indicated that this is pretty on the mark.  The people we have come in contact with and have gotten to know fairly well (we have two drivers that help us out and we talk to them about everything we can think of, given the constraints of our mutual vocabularies) all seem pretty contented with their lives. They laugh when we talk about how stressed out drivers get in LA. They smile a lot. They simply just seem... for lack of any fancier term... pretty happy.

It is an enviable state, and one that immediately starts challenging our assumptions. They do not seem to be incredibly wealthy, they seem to have to work a lot, it is hot and sultry here, the streets and towns are crowded and in a kind of seemingly endless state of repair and disrepair, and basically they don't seem to have a lot of external ways and means to make themselves comfortable.  To me, it seems the American attitude towards living here would be one of continue disgruntled complaint.  It's too hot.  The bathrooms are gross. The traffic is chaotic.  It's a great place to be on vacation, don't get me wrong. It's incredible.  It is screamingly beautiful and achingly serene.  But if you transferred many of these conditions to any given place in the US, I think daily life would be met with a high degree of discontent.

But... these people don't seem to have that. Is it because they are not bombarded 24/7 with advertising and images of things that look like fun to purchase or experience?  Possibly.  But I think there is plenty of western culture and iconography that has percolated over here (an image of Benedict Cumberbatch adorns an ad for a disco in the beach town of Sanur; one of our drivers plays nothing but US pop/rock from circa 1980).  I don't think their happiness is entirely because they are too isolated to know what would truly make them happy.  I think they see those images and they don't affect them the same way they affect us... because I think they don't have that intrinsic need they are constantly trying to fill.

I believe a big key to our differences is in that need.  We have a need we are trying to fill, and I believe we live in a culture that tries to perpetuate that need, rather than satisfy it.  Our news broadcasts and media and politicians inflame our fear and anger, keeping us on edge.  Our response is to pack ourselves full of cheap, fast comfort food, or lose ourselves in an endless orgy of entertaining diversions, or work extra hard to alleviate our constant anxiety about money, and then spend it as soon as it comes in (or  beforehand, more often), all in an effort to fill a need that we are continually being reminded of so we will spend more money and meet the needs of a society whose primary goal is economic expansion.

I'm not sure that that is the primary goal of the Balinese society. The primary goal over here seems much different.  Don't get me wrong.  I am not at all saying that they don't care about material comforts and don't appreciate money and all the truly good things that can come of it.  I am also not saying that their economic needs are real and tangible and they would love to feel financially comfortable (which I'm assuming most of them are not... but I have actually never heard a hint of it in any conversation we've had). 

I totally get that as a whole we a very privileged and affluent culture.  I am deeply and profoundly grateful that my family and friends and I have had the means to take this time off and come to this exquisite part of the world.  And, at the same time, I am noticing that we pass fewer people looking for handouts on the streets of Ubud than we do in Old Town Pasadena on a Saturday night, which is pretty damn shocking.  We are a lucky and privileged people who place a premium on the material world. And yet we don't take care of our own people very well, and we don't seem very happy in general, despite the wealth and comforts we enjoy.

Here on Bali, people are named in accordance with their birth order.  Male or female, there are something like three names for a first born child, something like three names for a second born child, maybe two names for a third born, and a name or two for a fourth born.  After four, they start over again with the first born names. I find this fascinating, mainly because it actually works.  We have two drivers, and they are both named Made ("Mah-day") because they are both second born children. They say it doesn't get confusing because they also use their family surnames.  It's like a taxonomy: your name tells your story of where you are in which family.  It makes perfect sense.

And there is a caste system. Everyone knows where they are in their society. The number of roofs on your shrines lets everyone know who you are and where you rank in society. And although I haven't yet checked it out with Made 1 (our first driver who has given us the most insight into Balinese life), my guess is that there isn't a sense of trying to get to the next caste level.  As opposed to our lives where we labor furiously trying to better our position in life and "level up" to the next social stata, my sense is that people just know their caste and work within it.

Families live in family compounds.  These consist of multiple buildings surrounded by walls. There is an area for shrines, a central courtyard for meetings and games, sleeping pavilions, procreating pavilions, ceremonial pavilions, kitchens, pig styes, etc.  My guess is that families kind of are born and grow up and die in these compounds, little communities that have deep roots and are basically unchanging in their patterns over time.

All of this is, of course, very different from our lives in the US.  We split off from our families and live far away, or create our own chosen families with our friends, or stay isolated in our cars and single apartments. Change is a constant for us, because we think of ourselves first as foremost as individuals who are individually able (and mandated) to change the trajectory of our lives. We change our names, we change our addresses, we adorn our cars with bumper stickers proclaiming our specialness.  We have festishized the taking of our own self portraits, and we reinvent ourselves many times throughout our lives. 

This feels so normal to us.  But I wonder if it's not part of this underlying issue of our low level perpetual discontent.  What would life be like if we didn't have the ability to better our position?  Or, more to the point, what would life be like if bettering our position was not part of a fundamental value system?  What if that just didn't.... matter?

You would be a person born into a family that is of a certain part of society. You would not be able to change either of those things. To us, that sounds kind of like an imprisonment.  But couldn't it be kind of freeing, if seen with a different filter?

More to come.