Amplified Religion

Just back from tea with Viswanathan and his wife Sethu, our hosts here at Mitraniketan. It’s a lazy Sunday, a no-plans day after being away for 3 and a half days, my 4^th and final Sunday here in India. Around 4, with a plan to do some blogging, I walked down the drive from our Guesthouse to their house, intending to fill my water bottle (they boil water for us westerners). Viswanathan was standing outside his house, so I stopped to chat. Then Sethu came out. Then one of the Danish volunteers, Lene, appeared. So we all sat down for tea.  Lene had just returned from the hospital in Trivandrum, where she had been tending to Anders, another Danish volunteer, who fell and broke his wrist on Friday while I was away. So lots of talk about Anders, and medical care and being at a hospital here. Lene, being a former nurse, and fellow Dane (Anders is Danish), has spent the last two days keeping Anders company and trying not to activate her former nursing instincts! Two hours later, I’m back to write again.  Can you tell I’ve found relaxation, delight in the care and love at this place, and just … one of the family????

Of course, about this relaxation state, I should say that the 3 and a half days away was partially spent at an Ashram.  Back when I was telling people I’d be in India for a while, many would make the reference to Liz Gilbert’s book, and say, “Oh you’re going to do your Eat. Pray. Love time?”  I suppose I could say I have, condensed as it has been into 4 weeks time (Gilbert took a year). One certainly eats well here in Kerala, even if I haven’t totally converted to eating enthusiastically with my fingers all the time (westerners are usually given the option of using utensils). But more on that topic some other day. 

I could pray anytime, especially, given the frequent amplified religion of Hindu temple “broadcasts.” There are temples, shines, and banks of speakers everywhere.

Probably mentioned this before, but it’s drifting up from town even now – more drumming/chanting just now. I think there have been 2, 10-day festivals since my arrival - then, the frequency of these broadcasts increases. Tomorrow is the final day of the current 10-dayer, one of the bigger ones celebrating the major God Shiva. Students who went home for the weekend from the People’s College likely won’t be back til Tuesday. 

And love? See above - there’s lots of that, among such friendly people. I’ll hold my comments on Gilbert’s Hollywoodesk, romantic happy ending.

But back to Pray. As I mentioned before, we had a brief meeting with “Guru” at Santhigiri during our seminar tour visits a couple of weeks ago.

But I still wanted to have a “real” Ashram stay, and have been collecting information about options along the way.  There are 2 within reasonable distance from here (and I already decided not to hop an overnight train to some more distant place). For better or worse, these two cater more to Westerners. One is the home of Amma, the “hugging saint,” (Martha Amrithanandamayi Mission) who, when she’s not touring the world, conducts marathon sessions to give a very deep hug to each person who has stood in line for 8-14 hours. Thousands of people live there, permanently, and as guests, and you can pretty much do what you please. I almost went there, just to see this phenomenon in person (but to by-pass the day-long wait for the enlightened hug, tempting though it may be), but more structured and higher quality yoga teaching drew me instead to Sivananda Ashram, (even though I’ll be within an hour of one of their Ashram’s in the Catskill Mountains of New York within days). They won’t serve Indian food there though. 

Sivananda, honoring the work of … Swami Sivananda … actually established its first center in Quebec, and has centers around North America, Bahamas, Europe, etc. It offers a schedule of meditation, chanting, yoga, and “lessons.”  And the food is fabulous (10 am breakfast, 6 pm supper, with 2 teatimes in between). And it maintains an Ayurveda medical clinic. In fact, it was a pretty busy – and non-solitary - set of days, what with the all day schedule (6 am to 10 pm), and living in a dormitory (though comfortably designed with 2 bunk spaces separated by low walls from the next). Attendees are primarily European with a smattering of North Americans and Asians. A large percentage of the seekers are in their 20s and 30s, though there were plenty of us “elders” holding our own.  They ask participants to show up for everything, trying to instill a discipline that most of us quickly loose in the real world. 2 hours of yoga in the morning and 2 in the late afternoon was very restoring.

But having by-passed my time opportunity to immerse more fully – which in hindsight I would have loved to have done - and so more in tourist mode, I opted to do an optional travel day that was offered my second full day. Friday’s are the weekly “off’ day for the longer-term visitors. So I found myself on a tour bus to the very southern tip of India, a little pilgrimage/tourist town called Kanniyakumari, where 3 oceans come together – Bay of Bengal to the east, Arabian Sea to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the south. It is from here that one can see the sunrise and sunset across these oceans. It is also from here that the revered Swami Vivekananda meditated before setting sail for Chicago in 1892 to deliver an address at a big spiritual/religious convention – and so is credited with bringing eastern spirituality to the west. We, and hundreds of other Indian travelers in batches of 30 or 40 were ferried out to the hunk of rock a 5 minute boat ride from the mainland, to visit the temple dedicated to Vivekananada. Underneath the temple is a small dark mediation room, with a lowly lit image of AUM – the universal symbol of oneness which Vivekananada made central to his teachings.  VERY powerful sit I had there. I arrived at a profound Indian spiritual place.

Along the way, we stopped at one of the more beautiful Hindu temples – Suchindra - where the monkey god Hanuman (who serves Sreerama) is featured. Barefoot pilgrims (actually we’re barefoot a lot here, always removing sandals when entering buildings – even in formal places), we walked among the Indian worshippers, stopping at any number of little vault-like rooms holding various gods and goddess statues and images. All amidst low-lit, stone floor, columns, and ceilings, dripping , smelling and lit with oil lamps, various vendors plopped here and there selling or giving ash, pastes, palm leaves for offerings to the Gods. Amplified religion. Well no speakers here. But lots of echo. Bowing, praying, offering, chatting. And it is topped off by a beautiful towering roof of intricate stone scultures.

Tourist tangent: We finished the last 2 hours of the afternoon on a gorgeous stretch of beach a few kilometers up to the west of the tip of India – SWIMMING in exhilarating surf (and quite strong undertow) and … remembering it was the middle of February! SWIMMING in the Arabian SEA!!! Beautiful. Well, that’s praying too. Amplified waves.

India is a land of religion deeply infused in its culture. There is some kind of government board that oversees maintenance of temples, as well as private boards for the private temples. No separation of church and state here. Perhaps it’s what makes Kerala in particular, maybe all of South India the relatively peaceful place that it is. It is largely rural here, so that makes a difference, but religion (and the climate, have to remind myself), sets a way, a pace, of life that sets different priorities. “India time,” as Reghu reminds me. I’m at home!

Settled In

 The body eventually has its way if you don’t give it its due. So the cough/cold that occupied me last week forced me to slow down, post seminar. There’s a related tension I’ve been experiencing, the one having to do with traveling – between the urge to maximize the experiences of exploring the incredible riches of a new place, especially one so different from home; and then the need to just BE in the place absorbing the energy and way without agenda. Paying attention to life in one place.  That’s the direction I’ve chosen to lean.

My friend/colleague Mette, a Danish folkhighschool teacher, who left for home on a 4 am flight this morning, spent the two days before her last day here, in silence. She made arrangements with the 4 women in the kitchen (in Viswanathan/Seshu’s house, the place that prepares meals for all the volunteers/guests) to just “hang” with them (in silence), being available to help chop vegetables, clean, or just observe. Or not. Fully committed to … just BE. An inspired idea, which I admired.  And since the rest of our group has departed, it left me on my own for the first time  -to “clean my desk” J, write a bit, nap a bit, walk a bit. But stay in the forest. Town is too hot. (pushes into the 90s there). So I have been slowing down.

Speaking of hot, the temps have been holding generally steady in the 80s over my time here, 80/27 in the morning, upper 80s/30-31 in the afternoon. All last week , it was quite warm, even in the morning. But now in the last couple of days, the early morning temp has dropped to a pleasantly cool 75/24 , as it was the first few mornings I was here. Also last week, it actually rained a couple of times, so the humidity ramps up a bit for some hours afterwards. (rain is a relative term here, as real RAIN comes with the monsoons in June and July; the rains now last for an hour, on and off). Then there are the occasional power outages, (like last Friday when word was, a tree had knocked out a major line to the area). But the power is off now on a bright clear Tuesday morning.

Life at Mitraniketan – and the parts of Kerala I’ve traveled through – is a fascinating mix of old and new. There’s news in this morning’s paper – the Hindu – about making plans for a new high speed train through Kerala. But daily life now includes the long lived buses and trains and auto-rickshaws (and fewer cars and taxis), which we are all dependent on to get around. Mitraniketan has its own resident driver, Shiju, who has taken us to various events and on “field trips.” If it’s a day trip, he leaves us somewhere and goes off on his own, but we also make sure he eats some supper with us before the drive “home.” Trains are incredibly cheap. A small group of us did a day trip to Kerala’s famous “Backwaters” last week, then 2 of us spent a night in a little beach town, Vakala before taking the train home (which means catching a rickshaw to the train station, train to Trivandrum (our big city, capital of Kerala), then bus back to Vellanad (Mitranietan’s home town). Total cost – about $1.00

Of course prices are inflated in tourist towns like the beach at Vakala, especially in the shopping department. In the case of Vakala, the northern lands of Tibet and Kashmir are imported for us tourists. So all of a sudden, the culture and craft of Buddhism, is available – beautiful ornate fabrics and normally not a part of south India, throws, Buddha and    carvings and sculptures, singing bowls and so on.  (Hindism, the world of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, reigns here – along with Islam and Christianity).  Conversations with several shop-keepers revealed some of their perspective.  One talked about how he sets his prices according to where a person is from. Russian shoppers, for example, are apparently notorious for hard bargaining, quickly coming back with an offer of half of his.  So he knows to give a starting price of 3 or 4 times times the value. Another told me,  “We know Europeans and Americans have a lot of buying power here (given the relative difference in prices), but we know they’re not necessarily wealthy.  After all, I know a cup of coffee costs $3-4 at Starbucks in NY.”

We had a nice morning there though – sipping tea and a chocolate croissant ($1, probably would have been 50-60 cents inland a bit) in the shelter of a shop from which we could watch the waves coming in, and dissecting the seminar from the week before. Then I went and spent an outrageous $15 in the spice, oils, and miscellaneous gift shop adjoining. Then a bargain $10 on a pair of draw-string long cotton pants which a tailor right on the beach stitched up for me in a couple of hours! (finally something lightweight for the woods – men don’t wear shorts here - well the tourists on the beach do!).

But back to real life.  Kerala is a land of hard physical labor. Using things till they’re falling apart (like a good ol' New England Yankee! – warms my heart). Working the rubber trees, one tree at a time (the rubber sap would quickly clog up tubes if you tried the New England-style maple sap collecting systems). Building with pick axes to clear the ground, scaffolding scraped together with wooden poles, hammering re-enforcing rods into pieces with chisels. I’m thinking of the new bakery they’re building here at Mitraniketan. Great story: a group of German “friends of Mitraniketan” decided they community would benefit from a modern German-style bakery unit. So they shipped the whole thing in a bright yellow metal shipping container (like the ones they load on boats), which meant a HUGE deal to figure out how to haul it up the windy narrow roads to get here. Then they realized that this metal box was way too hot to work in by afternoon, and so they’re now – 5 years later – building a regular building to house the equipment. Meanwhile, the Germans keep showing up to advise them on baking techniques, recipes, etc. After a LONG start up time, they’ve managed to find some outlets for fresh bread in some of the tourist resorts – sweet nutritionless white bread! We volunteers crave the delicious wheat bread that comes once and a while.

There are other “community development” projects here – a kind of “farm extension center” that teaches people how to grow better crops, etc. A women’s pottery coop.  A craft market. I’ll leave you with my favorite – about 150 or so women come to box up already packaged condoms – packs of 2, in boxes of 10 packs, cases of 20 boxes, etc. I heard the Viswan’s wife Sethu refer to them as the “Latex ladies.” Love it.

Have a good week!

Enlightenment

Our little band of AWErs (Association for World Education) has spent the week talking about enlightenment. I always had to chuckle back home when telling people I was helping coordinate a seminar on enlightenment to be held in India, the land of enlightenment.  Such incongruity.  (Though as has been pointed out this week, the west, spurred by its rampant materialistic addiction of the 20^th century, has been shifting to rebalance by seeking a stronger spiritual life, and the east vice-versa – pardon the broad generalization there).

A small group of us – including Danes, a Russian, a Belgian guy, and some Indians – worked on e-mail and skype since our last AWE gathering in Denmark in the fall of 2010 to develop purpose, direction and structure that includes this major stopping point in Kerala.  What with the difficulties of communicating across cyberspace, language, and culture, it’s been filled with both joys and confounding amazement at how often we would come away with completely different understandings of ideas and decisions. Of course, that has provided with the ideal path to enlightenment!

We built the seminar around 3 basic questions: What is enlightenment? What educational activities and environments support the development of enlightenment? and What is an enlightened teacher? (or what is enlightened teaching?)  Still on board? Pull up a chair. Coffee or tea? A primary motivation in the fall of 2010 was to revisit the identity and boundaries of what world education means (as AWE).

A central concept in our discussion is that enlightenment has to do with “whole being,” or “whole living.” – trying to find our way to living beyond the socially and personally imposed barriers (traumas, fears, insecurities conventions) to who we truly are, who we started this life as; trying to live connected to others, to life, and not as separate, ego-dramatized individuals. Traditional education, while spending some significant time with the body in the early years, tends to focus primarily on the mind (always a trouble maker). As working the mind begins to dominate more and more over the body, the spirit and the soul meanwhile have been mostly neglected (except in those inspired, but too few classrooms – or schools - where the teacher is truly her/himself living from the heart).  Then our western, scientifically driven world squeezes out of us what we know about life and living as children. And look what has happened to American educational practice over the past 30 years in the name of reform.  Even more mind dominated.

Everybody is in this conversation here because they have been inspired by and tried to work in the margins of educational practice – which in developing countries – and to a lesser extent in industrial societies - is often in the margins of society.  Because of that, we all have to keep banding together and at some risk, preaching to each other (rallying the cry).  But I hope here, primarily, we have just been having an experience of awakening (as the Danish folkhighschool inspirator Grundtvig taught, always a precursor to enlightenment) by living “wholly” together – by connecting our eyes, hands, feet (often barefoot here), minds, hearts, movements, songs, energies, and spirits – all amidst this most profound land and life of southern India:  intensely alive with color, celebration, smell, joy, pain, celebration, taste, beauty, bigness, smallness, celebration, speed, slowness,  sound, celebration. In other words, we practice this whole way by creating a cultural container for it – and that in a nutshell is what this world education needs to do – one learning circle at a time, by building a learning container together that enables us to break through the barriers that our habits enslave us with.  OK, better stop.

So we did laugh a lot. and roll our eyes. and ponder. and stare in awe. and … We  visited a teacher training college, watched the most amazing performance of traditional dance (never see faces dance so close up before), visited a guru (my first ever), listened to panels of speakers, worked in small group discussions, grappled with mid-week revisions, toured about inspiring craft, farming (learning how they grow mushroom spores for growing more mushrooms), and technology programs here at Mitraniketan, struggled with words, and tried to conclude with some … answers.  But enlightenment is really only a path with questions. :-)

So what? (I always ask my students).  I can only speak for myself of course. But I feel exhausted and awakened. Dragged back down onto the ground and heartened to get up and try again. Lifted by these amazing people around here who live so closely with the earth and air.  Really inspiring.

As to my work, I am redoubled in my dedication to do what I can to co-create experiences for anyone – especially teachers -  to bring our compromised enlightenment to higher levels in our work and communities. Or better put, to pull away the barriers so that our already enlightened selves can be released. Learning and committing to regular practice that breaks our long entrenched and mind-fueled habits.

I’d love to hear your comments.

And I’ll try to get back to life on the ground here in India next time!