Morgalogue

Sorry - this has turned into a bit of a novelette. Get a cup of tea.  

It seems to me, that you can’t really know Asia without understanding religion. Here, it’s a lesson in both history and mainstream culture. Being completely and indiscriminately ignorant of all faiths however, the mind of the believer is taking me alot of effort to get grips with. Without ever properly having stopped to think about it, I guess I’d always explained the continuing devotion of millions worldwide to gods and goddesses as tradition. Self-serving ideas and institutions built to explain a world we assumed to be flat, still tangled up in our cultures and the identities we give ourselves. If people really wanted to think rationally about it, surely they’d realise it’s probably not true. The millions can be wrong - look at James Blunt - so what’s to know ?

Well, while actual faith may be beyond me, the last week has been a fascinating ride into the 3rd eye of Hindu spirituality.

I travelled from Auroville to Tiruvannamalai with Eitan, the Israeli family man granted leave I mentioned in my last post. Tiruvannamalai is a holy city; a dense huddle of temples, ashrams and housing gathered at the foot of a small sandstone mountain, literally waiting for a sign. Though small, the sacred mountain Arunachala rises majestically from the dusty plains and glows a warm red in the morning light. Shiva once came here and tranformed himself into a blazing column of fire. The mountain is now treated as the god himself.

Despite being asked regularly if Eitan (49) is my father, the big guy is often the more youthful, spontaneous and enthusiastic of the two of us. There’s a playful naievity about him that people instantly warm to, combined with the Israeli talent for directness to complete strangers. We’d both developed an almost journalistic obsession with the workings of Auroville and regularly compared notes over morning chai at the Ganesh bakery. The trip to Tiruvannamalai quickly became an ‘agnostics anonnymous’ spiritual quest in the sincere but comedic vain of a Louis Theroux travel programme. We’ve come, to find god.

We arrived in an area overflowing with the ashrams of various gurus, dead and living, and their spiritual devotees. The main street is an absorbing spectacle, lined with stalls selling pooja (offering) flowers, chalks, coconuts and bananas. Cows with decorated horns mingle with the traffic. Conscientious Westerners in crisp white pyjamas hurry past beggars, sleeping pilgrims and wild-bearded Sadhus (religious wanderers who have forsaken all relations and possessions) hunched over cooking stoves in their necklaces and dirty orange robes. As I stood, gaping, with my rucksack, a funeral procession, all drums and trumpets, went past leaving a trail of colourful flowers trampled into the road. The woman, only hours dead, was strapped to an improvised taxi-float preceded by howling relatives. While most people here are vistors of a sort, we, the uninitiated, felt like the only tourists.

      

There’s a real ‘goldrush’ energy about the town, with so many people believing they are on the cusp of discovering some divine secret of the universe or at the very least, salvation from their suffering and existential insecurity. As a heathen, I can only compare it to the street preaching scenes in ‘Life of Brian’.

In Western-orientated cafes and coffeeshops we eyed up the busy noticeboards to find out what was going down : 4 different kinds of yoga class, satsangs (spritiual Q&A sessions) with gurus from India, Australia, UK and Germany, classes in meditation, astrology, palmistry, strange dance and ‘movement’ classes with names like ‘Somatics’ and soul clensing mass blessings from visiting saints.

Our first tentative step into the unknown was a ‘laughter yoga’ class - a craze currently big in Bombay. It was basically the sort of warm-up exercise actors have been using for years - “Everyone laugh like pirates, hahahar … now laugh like you’re drunk !” - acting like eejits. Fun though. At the end we had to lie in a chain with heads on eathother’s stomachs and have a freestyle laugh-session. We may not have found god but it certaily made us some friends over the next few days “Didn’t we laugh together a couple of nights ago ? Hahaha” 

We paced respectfully around the ashram temples, viewing the enlightened at close quarters and doing our best to imitate them. The Westerners, perhaps out of an earnestness about their quest, perhaps mysticised by the foreign and the ancient, appear to take things more seriously. Spines are straighter, lotus positions more athletic, eyes always closed, sublime expressions willing nirvana to come. The Indians, running the show on their home turf, effortlessly breathe life into the ceremonies in much the same way they do the markets or the street outside. Eitan attempted the meditation room but after 15 painful minutes came to the conclusion that what was really needed, was armchairs.

   

Thankfully I’ve done SOME background reading. By the time I left Sri Lanka I’d been gifted a small library of Buddhist teachings and to understand  Hinduism I’ve bought the Bhagavad Gita - the ‘best bit’ of the epic Mahabharata. For some light relief I also have the Godfather of Nihilism himself, Friederich Nietzsche. I’m not saying I’m doing gymnastics with these philosophical concepts, but I get it.

This all comes in handy when you’re trying to interpret the jargon of abrieviated aphorisms used by the spiritualist:

Unity is a big concept. Also known as non-duality, non-plurality, the enlightened state, moksha or nirvana. It is the idea that outwith the limited, subjective, ‘ego-consciousness’ we humans are capable of percieving, exists only one consciousness, in other words, God. Aside from Love, consciousness (higher or lower), is the most popular word in town. Often in conversation people will surprise you by stating “there’s only me here.” Referring to the above Unity concept, all other people are merely manifestations of ourselves, and again God. Suffering is used describe practically every human condition as “to desire is suffering”. Ego, Ego-personality, or Self is the cause of desire and is the obstacle that must be removed in order to attain Unity or enlightment.

There is even a Super-ego that tricks you into thinking you’re thinking ’selflessly’ purely for its own egocentric goals ! Enlightenment cannot be ‘grasped’ at apparently. It must be studiously attained with complete indifference.

Due to this general concensus that ‘reality’, as we percieve it, is a mere pantomime of the mind, it does become difficult to gauge some people’s sanity. Eitan recieved a tip-off from a guy commanded to draw pictures by aliens, that a new world order had begun with Chernobyl. He was clearly nuts.

   

To find out what was really going on behind the serene, meditative expressions, ex-Australian news reader turned guru Miranda Holden’s Satsangs, provided a window into peoples private thoughts and fears. The Bhagavad Gita, written over 2000 years ago, divides ’seekers of enlightenment’ into the same groups I could see cruising Tiruvannamalai today: ‘The Sorrowing, the Truth-seeker, the Seeker of bliss and the Wise man.’ Miranda definately attracts the sorrowing.

Miranda’s satsang has kind of a TV confessional, Oprah Whinfrey format. On a rooftop, under a plam-leaf shack, members of a hushed gathereing take to the chair and reveal their problems to the soothing, velvet-voiced Miranda. Far from being a masterclass in how to trancend the physical form, most people were just unhappy, hung up on the problems of everyday life and looking for a big solution. They looked like people who’d been trying hard, perhaps too hard. Some of the choked, tearful monolouges were such honest and profound portraits of ordinary human insecurities, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it outside of a theatre. There was a girl who could’t feel close to anyone, a girl to whom losing her headphones was another sign that she wasn’t worthy of love, a guy who worried he would become a schizophrenic like his brother, a guy who wants to stop having to always be right.

Miranda played the part of a talented and perceptive therapist, bolstering peoples post-confessional euphoria with solid enough sounding tidbits of philosophy. It was starting to look like ’self-help’ for people who want something ‘deeper’ than self-help.

Not content with being a passive observer, Eitan cheered things up by taking the chair. “I’m basically a stable, happy person. Am I missing something ? Will spirituality make me any happier ?”. Miranda: “How happy are you, in percent ?”. Eitan:”86.5%” (laughter).

She pushed him to try and feel 98% happy. After a long, expectant silence Eitan conceded that 98% or 100% was unrealistic, making her point that worldly conditioning and a perception of self-entitlement had robbed him of the extra 13.5%. She said his gift of natural happiness was an opportunity for him to be “The light of the world”. All this hilarity and talk of happiness stirred something of a frenzy within the crowd. One guy decided we was 100% happy and leapt into the air declaring it to the world, before grabbing a guitar and bursting into song.

After it was all over a bemused Eitan was besieged by people hugging and thanking him for ‘his gift’. Once again ‘Life of Brian’ sprung to mind.

I was starting to think I was demysticising it all with my scepticism. I tried my best to remain open and ‘available to the moment’ as it’s known. Eitan was relishing every minute and his ‘have a go’ spirit kept me going. A class in tantric yoga with a slightly creepy, lisping Isreali failed to ‘energise my chakras’ however, and a blessing of love from visiting saint, Mama Meena, just made me feel a bit silly.

   

Smoking, playing guitars and drinking tea at a groovy backstreet cafe however, we met the ‘Truth-seekers’ and the ‘Seekers of bliss’ who tipped us off about a visiting ‘Wise man’ who restored my ‘faith’ in the whole endeavor. A fitting finale to the journey.

We stayed late talking to a palm reader who believes adamantly that there is no such thing as free will, a nomadic Aussie traveller and a Canadian musician who claims to have achieved enlightenment (’the biggest high, man’) for 4 days. Finally, these were people I could argue with without fear I’d offend, or worse still disrupt their fragile reality. These people were not so much ’seekers’ as adventurers. The want to find the maximum high, the ultimate truth, and truth must be tested to the limits.

They reminded me of times I’ve sat in a bar full of contesting extreme sports junkies, or the drugs-music-boundary-pushing early days of Rave. Addictive personalities. Most of us are afraid to challenge gravity or reality, fearing death or insanity but these folk seemed prepared to go ‘all the way down the rabbit-hole’.

I asked the musician about his vision of enlightenment as a mute, ‘peopleless’, perpetual ecstacy and asked him whether you could ever again ‘enjoy’ human desires in a sad film or a joke. He said no, probably not. He reminded me of a dilemma I used to ponder as a kid: We were told it would take a lifetime to get to Mars, but it could be done, you just wouldn’t make it back. I used to wonder, would I say yes ? Give up everything on earth for a shot at some unknown world ? This dude no doubt sleeps in his spacesuit.

The ‘Wise man’ that they spoke of was the German ‘guru’, painter, ex-rocker, Karl Renz. If Miranda was Oprah, Karl was Henry Rollins. Far from the sofly, softly approach, people come to Karl’s satsangs to be challenged, sometimes brutally, by ‘a master’. Karl refuses to teach anyone and does not believe in devotees or gurus. He can only tell us when we are talking shit, with the footnote that we should believe nothing he says. Funny, irreverent and with an unsurmountable, razor sharp intellect, the guy is thrilling to watch.

   

Philosophical debate, like stand-up comedy, is a bloodsport. And here, where people have more than a keen interest in the subject, the Davids were out to bring down Goliath. Needless to say, he made light work of all of us. What really shone through was the guys ease with himself and his definition of ‘reality’, so different from ours. Nietzsche wrestled with his godless reality all his life and ended up in an asylum at the age of 55. Ironically, from what I can see, his ideas don’t really differ much from the Eastern spiritualists, I don’t know whether he was aware of them. He was also not as gloomy a character as I thought and wrote a whole book called ‘The Gay Science’ about how a spirit of cheerfulness should accompany all inquiry. Yet despite coming to more or less the same conclusions about reality, he never found peace in them, or enlightenment.

The central argument of the less orthdox Karl and Nietzsche is that this ‘higher consciousness’ or ‘unity’ cannot be percieved in human form, you can only really imagine youself to be close to it and have faith that it exists. To quote Nietzsche “Consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text”. Karl claims that no-one has ever been enlightened - not Jesus, Buddha, Rama. Even if they did he says, what happened ? Nothing changed. You still have to carry on living your life in your body. So what to do ? ”You’d better start enjoying yourself, this could take a while” is his answer.

So it seems to be all about where you stop asking questions, where you draw the line between the ‘known’ and the ‘unknowable’. After that, provided you are truly at peace, there is no difference between faith and indifference. Just enjoy yourself. Which kind of brings me back to where I started. Nothing changed. Am I enlightened ? I’m enjoying myself.

Karl describes enlightenment as being “that which you can not not be”. I like that. Even the sentence, once you puzzle it out, is kind of a circular journey right back to where you stand. Be yourself. Be who you are. It cleverly avoids defining what we ‘are’ - which of course cannot be percieved, never mind described - by defining it as everything you can not be.

I guess my cynicism or lack of faith is just my nature. I have to pull things apart to see how they work, to see if they are real. I will never be a devotee. But I believe in something - Humanity. Love. People. I suppose it’s just about where you draw the line and stop asking questions. Don’t worry readers … I’m almost questioned-out.