I've been praying a lot lately, comfortably and frequently. Most of the time, I find that I
want to pray when I'm on my bicycle, riding home from Ketut's house through the
monkey forest and the rice terraces in the dusky late afternoons. I pray, of course, not to
be hit by another bus, or jumped by a monkey or bit by a dog, but that's just superfluous;
most of my prayers are expressions of sheer gratitude for the fullness of my contentment.
I have never felt less burdened by myself or by the world.
I keep remembering one of my Guru's teachings about happiness. She says that people
universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybedescend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how
happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive
for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have
to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have
achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must
make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat
on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your innate contentment. It's easy enough to
pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is
like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.
Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep
making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state of harmony to God and saying,
"This is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of
contentment and help me always support it." I'm putting this happiness in a bank
somewhere, not merely FDIC protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there
as insurance against future trials in life. This is a practice I've come to call "Diligent Joy."
As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told
me once--that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not
only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level.
Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought
suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search
for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also
a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You
cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to
serve and enjoy other people.
At the moment, the person I'm enjoying the most is Ketut. The old man--truly one of the
happiest humans I've ever encountered--is giving me his full access, the freedom to ask
any lingering questions about divinity, about human nature. I like the meditations he has
taught me, the comic simplicity of "smile in your liver" and the reassuring presence of the
four spirit brothers. The other day the medicine man told me that he knows sixteen
different meditation techniques, and many mantras for all different purposes. Some of
them are to bring peace or happiness, some of them are for health, but some of them are
purely mystical--to transport him into other realms of consciousness. For instance, he said,
he knows one meditation that takes him "to up."
"To up?" I asked. "What is to up?"
"To seven levels up," he said. "To heaven."
Hearing the familiar idea of "seven levels," I asked him if he meant that his meditation
took him up through the seven sacred chakras of the body, which are discussed in Yoga.
"Not chakras," he said. "Places. This meditation takes me seven places in universe. Up
and up. Last place I go is heaven."
I asked, "Have you been to heaven, Ketut?"
He smiled. Of course he had been there, he said. Easy to go to heaven.
"What is it like?"
"Beautiful. Everything beautiful is there. Every person beautiful is there. Everything
beautiful to eat is there. Everything is love there. Heaven is love."
Then Ketut said he knows another meditation. "To down." This down meditation takes
him seven levels below the world. This is a more dangerous meditation. Not forbeginning people, only for a master.
I asked, "So if you go up to heaven in the first meditation, then, in the second meditation
you must go down to . . . ?"
"Hell," he finished the statement.
This was interesting. Heaven and hell aren't ideas I've heard discussed very much in
Hinduism. Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation,
which is to say that you don't really "end up" anywhere at the end of your life--not in
heaven or hell--but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to
resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you
finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void.
The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth,
where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil
depending on our destinies and our characters.
Karma is a notion I've always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I
believe that I used to be Cleopatra's bartender--but more metaphorically. The karmic
philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's
obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the
same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often
catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson
of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way)--take care of the problems now,
or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time.
And that repetition of suffering--that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new
level of understanding--there's where you'll find heaven.
But here Ketut was talking about heaven and hell in a different way, as if they are real
places in the universe which he has actually visited. At least I think that's what he meant.
Trying to get clear on this, I asked, "You have been to hell, Ketut?"
He smiled. Of course he's been there.
"What's it like in hell?"
"Same like heaven," he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. "Universe is a circle, Liss."
I still wasn't sure I understood.
He said. "To up, to down--all same, at end."
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. "Then how
can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?"
"Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go
down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss." He laughed.
I asked, "You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy
places, since heaven and hell--the destinations--are the same thing anyway?"
"Same-same," he said. "Same in end, so better to be happy on journey."
I said, "So, if heaven is love, then hell is . . ."
"Love, too," he said.
I sat with that one for a while, trying to make the math work.
Ketut laughed again, slapped my knee affectionately with his hand.
"Always so difficult for young person to understand this!"88888888
So I was hanging out in Wayan's shop again this morning, and she was trying to figure
out how to make my hair grow faster and thicker. Having glorious thick, shiny hair
herself that hangs all the way down to her butt, she feels sorry for me with my wispy
blond mop. As a healer, of course, she does have a remedy to help thicken my hair, but it
won't be easy. First, I have to find a banana tree and personally cut it down. I have to
"throw away the top of the tree," then carve the trunk and roots (which are still lodged in
the earth) into a big, deep bowl "like a swimming pool." Then I have to put a piece of
wood over the top of this hollow, so rainwater and dew don't get in. Then I will come
back in a few days and find that the swimming pool is now filled with the nutrient-rich
liquid of the banana root, which I then must collect in bottles and bring to Wayan. She
will bless the banana root juice at the temple for me, then rub the juice into my skull
every day. Within a few months I will have, like Wayan, thick, shiny hair all the way
down to my butt.
"Even if you are bald," she said, "this will make you have hair."
As we're talking, little Tutti--just home from school--is sitting on the floor, drawing a
picture of a house. Mostly, houses are what Tutti draws these days. She's dying to have a
house of her own. There's always a rainbow in the backdrop of her pictures, and a smiling
family--father and all.
This is what we do all day in Wayan's shop. We sit and talk and Tutti draws pictures and
Wayan and I gossip and tease each other. Wayan's got a bawdy sense of humor, always
talking about sex, busting me about being single, speculating on the genital endowments
of all the men who pass by her shop. She keeps telling me she's been going to the temple
every evening and praying for a good man to show up in my life, to be my lover.
I told her again this morning, "No, Wayan--I don't need it. My heart's been broken too
many times."
She said, "I know cure for broken heart." Authoritatively, and in a doctorly manner,
Wayan ticked off on her fingers the six elements of her Fail-Proof Broken-Heart Curing
Treatment: "Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away
from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny."
"I've been doing everything but the vitamin E."
"So now you cured. And now you need a new man. I bring you one, from praying."
"Well, I'm not praying for a new man, Wayan. The only thing I'm praying for these days
is to have peace with myself."
Wayan rolled her eyes, like Yeah, right, whatever you claim, you big white weirdo, and
said, "That's because you have bad memory problem. You don't remember anymore how
nice is sex. I used to have bad memory problem, too, when I was married. Every time I
saw a handsome man walking down the street, I would forget I had a husband back
home."
She nearly fell over laughing. Then she composed herself and concluded, "Everybodyneed sex, Liz."
At this moment, a great-looking woman came walking into the shop, smiling like a
lighthouse beam. Tutti leapt up and ran into her arms, shouting, "Armenia! Armenia!
Armenia!" Which, as it turned out, was the woman's name--not some kind of strange
nationalist battle cry. I introduced myself to Armenia, and she told me she was from
Brazil. She was so dynamic, this woman--so Brazilian. She was gorgeous, elegantly
dressed, charismatic and engaging and indeterminate in age, just insistently sexy.
Armenia, too, is a friend of Wayan's, who comes to the shop frequently for lunch and for
various traditional medical and beauty treatments. She sat down and talked with us for
about an hour, joining our gossiping, girlish little circle. She's in Bali for only another
week before she has to fly off to Africa, or maybe it's back to Thailand, to take care of
her business. This Armenia woman, it turns out, has had just the teensiest bit of
glamorous life. She used to work for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.
Back in the 1980s she had been sent into the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan jungles
during the height of war as a negotiator of peace, using her beauty and charm and wits to
get all the generals and rebels to calm down and listen to reason. (Hello, pretty power!)
Now she runs a multinational marketing business called Novica, which supports
indigenous artists all over the world by selling their products on the Internet. She speaks
about seven or eight languages. She's got the most fabulous pair of shoes I've seen since
Rome.
Looking at us both, Wayan said, "Liz--why do you never try to look sexy, like Armenia?
You such a pretty girl, you have good capital of nice face, nice body, nice smile. But
always you wear this same broken T-shirt, same broken jeans. Don't you want to be sexy,
like her?"
"Wayan," I said, "Armenia is Brazilian. It's a completely different situation."
"How is it different?"
"Armenia," I said, turning to my new friend. "Can you please try to explain to Wayan
what it means to be a Brazilian woman?"
Armenia laughed, but then seemed to consider the question seriously and answered,
"Well, I always tried to look nice and be feminine even in the war zones and refugee
camps of Central America. Even in the worst tragedies and crisis, there's no reason to add
to everyone's misery by looking miserable yourself. That's my philosophy. This is why I
always wore makeup and jewelry into the jungle--nothing too extravagant, but maybe just
a nice gold bracelet and some earrings, a little lipstick, good perfume. Just enough to
show that I still had my self-respect."
In a way, Armenia reminds me of those great Victorian-era British lady travelers, who
used to say there's no excuse for wearing clothes in Africa that would be unsuited for an
English drawing room. She's a butterfly, this Armenia. And she couldn't stay for too long
at Wayan's shop because she had work to do, but that didn't stop her from inviting me to a
party tonight. She knows another Brazilian expat in Ubud, she told me, and he's hosting a
special event at a nice restaurant this evening. He'll be cooking a feijoada-- a traditional
