After too much meditation in India, Gilbert flies off to Bali. Her tales of the island and the culture and its people were very engaging, to the point that I am now putting it on my list of places to experience. Yep, experience, not just visit.
I especially liked this:
Author (p.238)
“The Balinese don’t “wait and see ‘how things go.’ That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.”
… and Bali’s three vital questions, which as Gilbert points out, are rather invasive depending on who’s asking.
Q1: where are you going?
Q2: where are you coming from?
Q3: are you married?
What comes to mind are images of parents haranguing their teenage kids with the first two questions and come adulthood, with a spin of the third: when are you getting married?! Why can’t some people get over the fact that marriage is not an end-all, be-all?
Anyhow, there’s another creepy bit of info I learned from Gilbert’s Bali adventure.
Author (p.263-264)
“The child is taught from earliest consciousness that she has these four (unborn) brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. The brother inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and… poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers collect your soul and bring you to heaven.”
Then Gilbert tells Ketut Liyer (the medicine man) about a knife-wielding man standing next to her bed in her recurring nightmare ever since childhood. Ketut explains the man actually wielding a ‘kris’ is her spirit brother representing strength, who’s there to protect her probably from some demon trying to hurt her.
Said Ketut, “ Lucky you can see him … very rare for regular person to see like this. I think you have big spiritual power. I hope maybe someday you become medicine woman.”
This reminded me of a really nasty nightmare I had back in 2003. I turned in past midnight and it didn’t feel like many hours have passed when I woke up (or dreamt I did) with my whole body frozen (like how your legs feel when you suffer cramps while swimming). There was a man at the head of my bed who I cannot see in pitch darkness, but he was breathing down the top of my head and quietly laughing in a very sinister way. I could feel goose bumps all over and I mustered to call out my roommate’s name. She never heard me. After a very slow and painful attempt, I managed to tug at her bed sheet with my right hand, to no avail. It could have only been a dream because I woke up by daybreak not remembering how it ended. Thankfully, I never sensed him again. Don’t tell me that was my spirit brother representing strength because my entire body felt utterly weak and useless at the time. Never mind spiritual powers.
And then, there’s another gem of an excerpt …
Author (p.272)
“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 in 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.”
Unfortunately, I’m as vexed as Gilbert by Ketut’s explanation of “heaven and hell, same-same”.
She finally commits to a new love (whatever that is) again after much heartache from a failed marriage and a rebound relationship, almost like a fairy tale ending in an almost fairy tale setting, off the coast of Lombok, to the east of Bali, the island of Gili Meno… “tiny, pristine, sandy, blue water, palm trees… perfect circle… and you can walk the whole circumference in about an hour… almost exactly on the equator, and so there’s a changelessness about its daily cycles.” (p.340)
