The Land of Spiritual Healing

Bali

Thousands of years ago, the Buddhists came across an incredibly useful truth: we are all suffering most of the time, and the cause of this suffering is internal rather than external.  The stoics framed the issue differently, understanding that while bad things do happen to us, we have the ability, through our minds, to turn reduce the suffering they bring us.  Milton famously wrote: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  People the world over, in other words, for a very long time, have understood that we tend to suffer, and that our minds offer some method of alleviating that suffering without necessarily changing our circumstances.

Unfortunately, the Eastern form of this wisdom, which comes from Buddhist and some Hindu texts and teachings was then, and continues to be in many cases, wrapped in cryptic nonsense about chakras, energy centers, reincarnation, and other metaphysical nonsense.  In the modern context this is most evident in what has been called since the 70’s the “New Age” movement, which introduced white people to terms like “toxins” and “energy” (the kind that many insist moves from person to person, like a virus).

In Bali I have spent a week in a paradise filled with suffering people.  To some extent this may seem contradictory – can it be called paradise if everyone in it is suffering? – and to some extent it’s tautological – wherever there are people, there will be suffering, because people by nature suffer.  This is the first tenet of Buddhism, after all, and a rare part of religion that’s unquestionably true.

There are, one notices upon visiting Bali, two main populations walking the streets.  There are the Indonesians, sometimes titled more specifically Balinese, who are mostly poor and all too happy to sell cheap trinkets and taxi rides to tourists.  More on them later.  First I want to talk about the second population: the foreigners (it must be said: almost exclusively white people from the first world) who are mostly wealthy and all too happy to spend their fortunes on folk remedies for the pathogen that plagues us all: our seemingly incurable tendency to dislike ourselves.

The Lost Tribe of the West

Of course, in many cases you wouldn’t know that these people are suffering.  Blissed out, attending yoga classes the way a fan of the Greatful Dead inhales nitrous oxide (and with many similar reported effects), these individuals are engaged mostly with the mysticism and New Age thought that this place markets the way Las Vegas markets casinos.  Indeed what happens in Bali seems designed to stay there.  Yet when you look into many of their eyes, notice the expressions that cross their face when they’re not actively trying to look pacific, you see the same quiet desperation that Thoreau described in the majority of men.  They seek approval and attention.  Connection.  They want to be a part of a group, and feel lost and alienated by much of the world.  These are people with deep pain – deep enough that they’ve abandoned their home societies and come across the world willing to believe anything if it offers them a reprieve from it, that faceless dread, their own judging minds.

Happiness is, I suppose, as good a thing as any to bring to market, though I have to confess that it seems more honest in Vegas.  Still, the sentiment is the same.  The idea isn’t necessarily to win big, but to escape.  And there is, of course, always the hope you won’t admit: that you will win big.  In this case it wouldn’t be worldly riches, but the riches of the soul.  Enlightenment.  Though when I think of it, I’m not sure that these tourists come believing that they will be forever altered.  Perhaps they seek the wonders here the same way that college students seek the vacuous wonders of alcohol and drunken sex.  Of course, I might as well throw it in, individuals come for many reasons, and with many expectations.  I myself came with no expectation, not even really aware that this was a thing here, and as we’ll go into in a bit, I found it charming enough despite my judging tone.

One would think, given the nature of the endeavor, and the stereotypical idea of yogis and meditators as being, we could say, not as concerned with the material world, that these tourists would follow a similar pattern.  When I looked around though, what I saw was a tribe of people as concerned with their fashion, their codewords and handshakes, and ways of acting around each other as any other group on Earth.  The behaviors were different, but among themselves, uniform.  The men, few though they are (and one wonders what must be different between the genders that leads to his incredible disproportion.  There are at least four or five, sometimes many more, women to each man) are generally heavily tattooed, wear their hair long (often in the style coined the “man bun”), wear either loose shirts or are shirtless, are slender athletes or just plain skinny, and seem filled to the brim with all emotions except anger.  They are, in the common phrase, “in touch” with themselves.  And, I’ll mention, not afraid to touch others, which can be a bit creepy.

The women are mostly variations on two themes.  There is the theme made popular in the 1970’s, when eastern ideas first became known in the west, consisting of unshaven bodies, flower-printed head scarves, sarongs, and long, unruly hair, or dreadlocks (a hairstyle that inspires its namesake more often than perhaps its owners understand).  Then there are the modern “new age” types, who claim to despise the male gaze but seem to invite it (not that I mind), wearing as little clothing as possible, and even then clothing that clings to them as closely as (I can tell you now from experience) an infant monkey to its mother.

This all sounds very judgmental, and to some extent it certainly is.  I’m a judgmental person.  To some extent I’m simply doing euphemistically what these people claim to be doing literally: making fun.  But I also wanted to spend some time talking about this tribe, because I spent a lot of time while I was here thinking about them.  Why were they all here?  Why did they choose this lifestyle?  What string wove through all of them?

Christopher Hitchens said that women were the more credulous gender, and I’m inclined to agree sometimes.  I attended two breathing sessions to see what they were all about, and the women were clearly more enthusiastic, more ready to believe, more prone to prattle off new age codewords and nod their heads when talking about cleansings and the removal of toxins by breathing.  But I considered a different answer as well: perhaps women are drawn to these, and many other, cures for suffering because they simply suffer more than men do – because they’re desperate for any answer.  After long enough, suffering badly enough, it seems likely that we would be willing to believe in even utter nonsense, if only because every other solution seems to have failed.

Many, self-reportedly, have tried other, what we might call common solutions.  Several were alcoholics, or addicts of some other chemical substance.  Many of the women are beautiful, which carries its own type of curse (one from which I say sarcastically: thank god I’ve been spared) and corresponding disillusionment.  And most, male or female, have glimpsed something: something that keeps them returning to the yoga studio, to the breathing workshops and detoxifying clinics, that keeps their credit cards (or their parents’s, in many cases) flashing, and keeps them returning to that source of all modern enlightenment of any variety: the ATM.  This something is actually easy to understand, if you’re willing to allow me to explain.

Vipassana

The act of meditation has several different forms, and some are much less esoteric than others.  The type I include in my own life is called Vipassana, also known as insight or mindfulness meditation.  This form of meditation makes no promises of immediate bliss or enlightenment.  If you tried it right now, you’d probably feel no different than yesterday, and you wouldn’t feel any effects for weeks at least.  Even then, the effects would be mostly during the meditation itself.  It’s well known that you can practice Vipassana for years, even your entire life, and not experience anything like enlightenment.  The basic premise of the meditation is simple but surprisingly challenging: pay attention to your thoughts without getting lost in them.

The truths that one discovers almost instantly when attempting Vipassana is this: we are almost always lost in thought, our thoughts are not really under our control, and most of our thoughts are some form of worry, regret, or disappointment.  At best, we find ourselves looking forward to something.  But if you think about it (and I say that recognizing the irony), our happiest moments are those in which our minds just shut the fuck up for a second.  When we’re lost in our work, when we witness a beautiful sunset, when we have sex (except horrible sex, which we recognize by the fact that we find ourselves thinking during it).

These truths have several implications, and as one practices mindfulness one gains a skill of seeing when one is lost in thought: spending the afternoon indulging in an Inglorious Bastards like revenge fantasy against the man who was just slightly rude to us at Starbucks, for instance.  As we get better at seeing ourselves getting lost in thought, we become correspondingly better at finding our way back to reality.  We can leave the frustrations of work behind, and enjoy our evening with our spouse.  Or for many unfortunates in the Navy, we can leave the frustrations of our spouse behind, and enjoy our evening at work.  We waste less time fantasizing, lamenting things we can’t do anything about (like the current president), or just being lost in minutiae (what do we need to get at the grocery store again?  Better go over it for the thirteenth time.) and come back to the beautiful moments happening around us (like the dinner we’re having with this beautiful person who hasn’t yet realized who they’re settling for).

This is an incredibly useful skill.  Yet, it doesn’t make any appeals to anything not directly observable.  In fact, the entire practice, which can be incredibly frustrating, is simply observing our thoughts for minutes or hours at a time (as much as you can stand, really).  It is simply taking note of our bad tendencies – those that cause us suffering – and taking steps to minimize them.

There is a side-effect that many people experience (I hesitate to say all people, but it is at least a significant number).  During the meditation there can come a feeling of calm, of peacefulness, sometimes what might be called bliss.  The body can start to feel light, almost as if you’re about to start floating (unfortunately, I never have), and you feel good, like you’ve taken a drug, but without the clouding effects on consciousness that accompany most drugs.  The feeling, for those familiar, is akin to taking amphetamine.

This is something that I’ve experienced, and that I can experience any time I want to.  I just need to sit down for about ten minutes, and focus on my breathing, and it’s there.  And it does feel very good.

But this is not the goal of meditation.  In fact, it’s really more of a distraction from the real goal.  The effort is spent not for twenty minutes of euphoric sitting, but for all the moments when you’re not feeling euphoric.  The goal isn’t to get high: it’s to experience less suffering in life by being more aware of how you’re thinking, and therefore how you’re acting.

Why have I spent so much time explaining all of this to you?  You may be able to guess.  I attended two meditation classes during my time in Bali: neither involved any instruction in the techniques I’m describing.  This isn’t to say they’re wrong – just that they don’t seem very insightful to me.

To be clear, the sessions I attended, which I can only assume are representative of much of what’s offered here in Bali, are not thousand year old techniques practiced by monks and mystics in ancient India or Tibet.  Both of them were simply breathing cadences designed, purposefully or otherwise, to over-oxygenate the brain and bring about this heady euphoria that I’ve been talking about.  They are short-cuts to the feeling, with none of the insights or self-mastery of the practice.  Strengthening my hypothesis is the fact that both these sessions relied on emotional, uplifting music to bolster their effects.  True meditative practice is exemplified by the fact that it does not play to our emotions, but to our will.  It is not about feeling good; it is about feeling in control of one’s self.  But to the credulous, especially, I’ll risk to say, former drug addicts susceptible to another high, this feeling of euphoria resonates with what they imagine to be “enlightenment”.

I know what you’re thinking: “my, someone’s drank their haterade this morning.”  It does seem like I’m judging these people pretty harshly.  But the reason I take this practice so seriously – and attack attempts to take advantage of gullible people – is that this nonsense masquerading as self-improvement creates the stereotypes that cause more skeptical people to keep meditation and other spiritual practices at arm’s length.  It also, I really believe, isn’t helping these people improve their lives.  Just like Vegas, they may enjoy their time here.  But the good time will inevitably stay here.  Properly understood, meditation belongs with gym routines as a form of self-discipline and exercise that promotes growth and has a side-effect of releasing endorphines.  It is not easy and it’s not always fun (though it does become more appealing the more you do it).  It is not something for baked-out hippies.

Another reason why I find myself being critical of at least some members of this tribe is you see a lot of the same attention seeking behavior that, I’d imagine (having never been to a service myself) you’d see at a pentacostal church.  During one of my breathing sessions one man repeatedly shouted, with no provocation, “yeah!” in an apparent eruption of enthusiasm.  One man spoke after the session (there is a sharing time after each session in which participants offer their experiences to the group) about having seen white lights, one of them centered around the aforementioned man who’d been shouting in the affirmative.  These felt to me, a man who’s practiced meditation for several years now, disingenuous.  For those who ask: “what’s the harm?” I offer a comparison.  During intercourse, the sound of your partner in genuine ecstasy will, in most cases, have a positive effect on you.  When you realize they are faking these feelings, the effect is, well, rather more disappointing.  The presence of “fakers” is definitely a thing, too, a fact given away by the fact that the guru was obliged to insist at the start of our session: “being disingenuous will get you nowhere.”  Still, I sense that injunctions such as this have little effect on the vain-minded.

Okay, you’ve heard my criticisms of the New Age tribe on Bali.  Strong though they may be, my only goal in this depiction is to provide evidence of the fact that this tribe woven from the same wool (though perhaps sustainably sourced) as the rest of human tribes.  They contain the same flawed elements: the narcissists, the disingenuous, the credulous, and the desperately fearful.  They must also, though, contain what we may call the better elements of humanity: the brave, the noble, and the genuinely kind.  And so they do.

The positive point of this group is that whoever you are, when you approach them with good intent, they make all the effort that is reasonable to accept you and embrace you.  I am in many ways the antithesis of the common background of the tribe: I’ve spent most of my life in the military, have a short haircut, and a conservative dress code that includes collared shirts and closed-toe shoes.  And yet even I, yes, even I, felt welcome in their group.  Friends were made quickly, and their insistence on openness even led me to talk about some vulnerable aspects of my life.  The way they acted, some of them at least, was genuine, and that genuine nature was like a door through the walls that most of us erect around our weaknesses.  I admitted to a stranger what I wanted most in my life, and feared I’d never have (self-discipline).  And I confessed that I judged others and myself, and that this was a huge burden for me.  In this way, the groups served for me as a kind of therapy, and I imagine that many feel this way.  It is a shame that we have to talk about the vibrational energy of consciousness, or the magnetic energy of the Earth, first, but if it doesn’t drive you crazy you can safely ignore it and enjoy the fact that some of these people are very open about the fact that they really don’t care who you are.  When you’re looking into someone’s eyes and you really know they aren’t judging you, it is a great feeling.  That is an element of this tribe that they have gotten right, and that we can take back to our own tribes.

The Locals

The other group of people in Bali are, of course, the locals.  I’ll talk about them less because I have less to say, but it’s really just because I didn’t really spend enough time here, or experience much of the island aside from Ubud, which is really the hippie capital of Bali (called colloquially the “cultural center”, though how much of what goes on there is a part of Balinese or Indonesian culture is dubious).  It is worth saying a few things, though.

The people of Bali are poor, but not pitifully so.  There’s also few beggars, but many, many people selling services and products.  A short stroll down any street will subject you to dozens of men questioning you: “taxi?”  Every man in Bali, it seems, wants to drive you where you need to go.  Not that this is exclusively a bad thing, and to their credit a simple: “no, thank you” deters them.  Not the persistent salesman of Jerusalem, these.

The other type you’ll frequently find congregate at the exit of every site of tourist note: vendors offering cultural trinkets like sarongs or penis-shaped bottle openers (you laugh, but these are in literally every store of this type).  They set up large bazaars, the local name of which is unknown to me, and harass you in the same way as the taxi drivers, and can be rebuffed with the same ease.  Sometimes it can be truly astonishing where you find these people.  I went on a rafting tour with a friend, and as we walked out of the jungle afterward there was a group of locals sitting by the side of the trail, offering wooden carvings for a dollar.  There is something truly baffling and admirable about seeing someone willing to sit by the side of the road for the entire day on the off chance that someone will buy something from them for a dollar.

When you look around a bit closer, you see all sorts of this entrepreneurial spirit amidst the Balinese.  Houses in Ubud are more like gated compounds, designed to house several generations of extended family.  These days many of these are rented out to travelers.  I stayed in one, and was taken aback by the level of care and comfort offered for around $10 a night.  I had a private, air-conditioned room, a free and delicious breakfast, and a local resource for travel advice.  I was also able to get a ride from the uncle of the owner of this home around town.  He took me on his motorbike to several sites popular among tourists.  It wasn’t until I spoke with another guest that I realized this was a standard route.  Even the restaurant we went to – seemingly spontaneously – was the exact same one that this other traveler had visited.  I realized that the locals have formed networks of businesses and drivers around these popular tourist sites, in addition to the bazaars where they sell trinkets.  Outside of every one of these places are groups of drivers chatting and waiting for their tourist charges, while inside tourists walk around or dine and enjoy the sights and the cooking.

This didn’t feel like some huckster ploy to me.  I didn’t feel like I was being led along, taken advantage of, or deceived.  Nor did it feel, and I try to be quite conscious of this, that I was taking advantage of them.  In fact I found myself marveling at the system that these people had developed and continued to apply to maximize the amount of money spent by the tourists while ensuring that it was also distributed to as many locals as possible.  You have to remember, there’s a lot (relative term) of money flowing into Bali, enough that some foreign investors have already started moving in on the local turf.  In downtown Ubud there are a lot of local restaurants that feel pretty run-down (though clean) and have rock-bottom prices.  And then there are beautiful, sleek, modern, air-conditioned restaurants with braggadocios menus riddled with terms like “locally-sourced” and “organic”, which ring hollow when you realize that the only thing in this city not locally-sourced is the owners of these restaurants.  Tellingly, the prices are also significantly higher at these establishments, and I recommend avoiding them for both reasons.

Companies like Uber are also moving in, trying to capitalize on the island’s lack of public transportation.  Uber isn’t really needed here, though, since most taxis are very affordable.  Still, you have to watch out.  As my host informed me, not all the taxi drivers are actually locals, and many are not innocent and well-meaning.  On my first cab ride, from the airport, I was ripped off significantly, paying probably five times what I should have.  Uber offers a remedy for this, but at the cost of ensuring that local drivers will get less income per ride.  I found a somewhat comfortable middle ground by checking the Uber price and then using that as a bargaining point with a driver.  I was willing to pay a bit more when I knew all the money was going to a local man.  After all, that’s the trade of tourism right?  I get to see your country, you get my money.  Everyone wins.

To sum up my thoughts, I have a lot of respect for the people of Bali, though I only saw them for a short time.  Obviously there are bad elements among them ready to rip you off, but the vast majority were unbelievably friendly and helpful, and it is truly impressive to see the way they are marketing their country while attempting to stave off the toxic impoverishing influences of foreign business, which offer nothing but higher prices and familiar, fraudulent terms.  What one sees, if paying attention, is an adaption like any other in a Darwinian world.  The Balinese have, for better or worse, found their niche, and like and group of people, utilize it to best effect.

Ubud

I won’t pretend to know the contents of the entire island of Bali, given that I spent my entire time, give or take a few hours, in the city of Ubud.  So I’ll just talk about that.  This also applies to my observations on the people in Bali.  Everything I wrote may ring false to you if you find yourself in Seminyak, or Denpasar, or on the northern part of the island.  But I can give you a fair impression of Ubud.

As I mentioned, the town is built for tourists.  Marketing itself as the “cultural capital” of Bali, its streets are lined with shops selling all sorts of nonsense that appeals to foreigners, some expensive clothing stores, and massage parlors aplenty.  It is, in fact, mind-boggling how so many massage parlors generate an adequate profit to remain in business.  When you’re not being solicited to purchase a taxi ride by a local man, a local woman is probably smiling at you and querying: “massage?”  This sounds pejorative, but it’s honestly just something that happens almost continuously as you walk the streets.  Fortunately, they aren’t persistent, and smiling and saying “no thanks” is enough to dissuade them.

Not that you should always say “no thanks”.  The massages in Ubud are first-class and for a westerner, cheap enough to seem like a joke.  We’re talking $7 for an hour-long massage.  In America I’d pay that much for just the cup of tea beforehand.  These people are also professionals.  This isn’t a seedy red-light district with “happy endings”.  Acting like an idiot will rightfully get you thrown out.  I was actually relieved (no, not in that way) to find this to be the case.  If I want a handjob I’ll give it to myself, thank you.

Just outside the city are several sites that harken back to older times.  There are several Hindu temples, including a few held by UNESCO as world heritage sites for their demonstration of an architectural style known as Tri Hita Karana.  This philosophy seeks to bring humanity into harmony with fellow humans, nature, and the gods.  These sites are beautiful, and as one walks through and looks at the countless statues one only regrets that the stories behind them, largely taken from the trio of Hindu poems The Bhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, and The Upanishads were more familiar.  It’s a fact that must be remembered.  All of these statues depict characters that are well-known to Hindus, and that would have been well-known to them throughout the times that these have existed.  It means that they are more than just beautiful – there is a huge amount of meaning that is hard to grasp for an outsider.  Not that it can’t be grasped, but it takes work, work I unfortunately did not have the time to put in.

The other major archeological site is the site at Gunung Kawi, which has nothing to do with the Hindu faith (though there is a temple nearby).  The site itself is a burial ground, similar to Egypt’s valley of the kings, and has several stone reliefs, each about twenty or thirty feet tall, carved into the side of two stone cliffs on either side of a river.  They’re not quite awe-inspiring compared to other things I’ve seen, but it is interesting to see a piece of Bali’s history from before the time of the Hindus on the island.

As mentioned previously, many of these sites can be seen on common routes during the course of a day, and the best way to see them is to hire a local driver who will drive you on a motorbike.  If this sounds like a tourist gimmick, it’s not.  The road culture of Bali, and the rest of southeast Asia from what I hear, is one that is centered squarely on the motorbike.  Called “mo-peds” in the states, these small bikes can sometimes be seen carrying entire families, but more commonly will have a single rider, a couple, or a driver and a tourist.  Tourists can also rent them, though I didn’t have the courage to brave the unruly traffic of the roads.

It is an experience in itself riding through the traffic of Ubud.  One quickly learns that the common, unspoken laws learned in the states do not apply on the roads of Bali.  At first it seems there are no rules at all, bikes flitting about this way and that, cutting off cars, or vice versa, riding down both sides of the road, but after a short adjustment period you see, as Shakespeare would call it, the method to the madness.  The choked streets, which seem impenetrable, quickly open up as drivers give each other the right of way, kindly letting a car or motorbike through.  This tendency isn’t rare, and is necessary since there are almost no traffic lights or stop signs.  Every intersection depends on the good-will and common understanding of these drivers.

The odd part isn’t the chaos, really.  It’s that with so much chaos, there isn’t a huge amount of road rage.  I didn’t once see a driver yell at another, shake a fist, threaten or cajole.  I saw one accident: a foreigner driving a motorbike had a fenderbender with a car.  Beeping horns is common, but has a different tone.  It is not, as in America: “get out of my way”, or “what the fuck are you doing?”  Instead motorbikes sound them before passing blind corners or intersections, or before overtaking another bike or car, to say “I’m here” or “passing you, move over”.  Sometimes there is confusion, of course, but it was surprising how well it all worked given how insane it seemed initially.  But in this case it was just a different common understanding of how roads should work, and probably the fact that the island is small, and people aren’t really in a hurry to get anywhere.

Of course, to wrap up this quick summary of Ubud, and Bali in general, the scenery on this island is beautiful and worth making a trip for in itself.  For this, I recommend seeing the Tagallalang rice terraces, or if you’re willing to make the trip, the far superior Jatiluwih rice terraces, to see the incredible feat of engineering represented by terrace farming (something I shall spend more time on in a future post), and also taking a rafting tour, which will bring you down a river about 10km through rapids and past hundreds of feet of carvings along the side of the river, cliffs that stretch hundreds of feet above you, beautiful overhanging trees, and really just feels like being in the middle of an Indiana Jones movie.

Really, the best reason to go to Bali is to see people living differently.  This is a great justification for travel, one that rises above the hedonism and self-indulgence of “seeing the sights” or even having a meditative experience, which is a form of looking into yourself, rather than outward.  Bali is not the only place where you can do this, of course, and I plan to go to many more.  But it is better for this purpose than the last two places I’ve been, Australia and New Zealand, which were beautiful, but which may as well have been America (their dollars are even nearly the same value, or at least closer than the current exchange rate of ~14,000 Indonesian rupiah to 1 USD).  Bali, I even shared on Facebook, feels like real traveling, in which you’re seeing how other people from a different culture (in this case, two different cultures) live their lives.  Diving deeper, as I did in Australia and New Zealand, you can learn about their history and mythology.  But what is truly interesting to me right now is how people are living right now.  How the Balinese have adapted their lives to the industry of tourism.  How westerners, jaded with the false promises of consumerism, desperately search for answers to their primordial questions in the ancient mysticism (often spiced up with modern terms) of a people who two hundred years ago would have been written off as savages by these white peoples’s ancestors.  It is more relevant than history, because history has simply led us to it.  It is the current moment.  What better reason to travel than to see the world not through the selected clippings of a newspaper or the sensational stories that emerge on twitter, but for yourself.  To pay attention and notice the small banalities that are shared by all humans – the expressions of infants, and the way adults smile and play with them – as well as those banalities that are different – hundreds of motorbikes zipping everywhere on the street.  It’s actually not in the incredibly beautiful or symbolic temples, the rice terraces, or the yoga studios where I found the most meaningful and significant moments of my week in Bali.  It was in the details gleaned from walking the town and paying attention.