Travels in the Riel World

Have you ever imagined what it’d be like to spend time at a yoga retreat in India? Well, now you can live vicariously through Kyle Jarrard, who wrote an account for the International Herald Tribune of the experience he and his wife had in Puducherry, India.

The first sound in the morning is crows, right at 5. Then we hear waves off the Bay of Bengal slapping the shore. In the garden, a man meditates while walking quickly over the lawn of the ashram guest house in the dark. Along the shore, other men pace the beach in the silver jetty light. Fishing boat lanterns like stars ride the black sea south to north.

My wife and I have come to this old French comptoir (formerly Pondichéry) in southeast India mostly for the yoga. The classes used to be held in one of the many parcels of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram scattered across the colonial city. But for this retreat, there’s a new venue and to get there you have to be on Ajit Sarkar’s bus by 5:45…

For the first few blocks the streets have French names: Rue Dumas, Rue Suffren, Rue Romain Rolland. Then we leave town and head south over fetid canals and clogged streams, through trash-heaped neighborhoods thumping with all-night Hindu festival music while men in dhotis stand around sipping tea out of plastic goblets. Cows with brightly painted red and green horns meditate in the middle of the road as we plunge into the lush Tamil Nadu countryside…

We take our yoga classes on the roof of the new school, under a tall thatched structure with open sides. Most of the people in the assembly know their Hatha-style yoga; others stumble a lot - but soon everyone gets into the flow, despite the great sensual distractions: banana groves to the north wavering in the gold sunlight; rice paddies to the east where a few dozen women bend weeding at daybreak; thick coconut trees to the west that invite the eye to enter and roam; and to the south, the village, overlain with teak, drumstick and casuarina trees, where cooking-fire smoke rises and every dog yaps at everything.

There was a fascinating article a few days ago in the NY Times, just prior to the death of former Indonesian President Suharto, which discussed the power of local beliefs in spirits and black magic. The story focused on mystical explanations as to why Suharto was clinging to life, but in the process it also illuminated the role that mysticism plays in the daily lives of many Indonesians and contemplated how animist beliefs have managed to hang on in a contemporary Muslim society.

The diagnosis among believers here in Solo, the heart of Javanese culture, is that powerful occult forces in (Suharto’s) body will not let him go, that certain rituals that would cleanse his spirit have not yet been performed or that nature has not yet signaled that it is ready to receive him…

Indonesia is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, the most populous in the world, with 240 million people. But the version of Islam practiced by most people here is mixed with the Hinduism, Buddhism and especially animism that were present before Muslim traders brought their religion to the country in the 12th century.

Animist beliefs and superstitions color everyday life for many people, and occult explanations, including the power of curses and black magic, are sometimes given for everyday events.

“Indonesian Islam is what I call accommodative,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta. “Most Indonesian Muslims accept local tradition even though the local tradition could not be accepted by, say, Wahhabi-minded people,” he said, referring to followers of a strict Islamic sect.

When a reporter expressed skepticism about the existence of spirits, a local mystic responded this way:

“It’s just because you don’t understand, just the way I can’t understand you when you speak English.” … “It’s not mysticism,” he insisted, as if trying to break through a language barrier. “It’s reality.”

South Korea may be a technically savvy country (it has one of the highest per capita rates of broadband internet subscribers in the world, well ahead of the U.S.), but that doesn’t stop them from consulting shamans when they need a little luck or assistance. According to this article, in fact, shamanism in Korea is more popular than it’s been in decades.

There are an estimated 300 shamanistic temples within an hour of Seoul’s bustling city center, and in them, shamans perform their clamorous ceremonies every day. They offer pigs to placate the gods. They dance with toy guns to comfort the spirit of a dead child. They intimidate evil spirits by walking barefoot on knife blades…

Korean shamanism is rooted in ancient indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits…So when tradition-minded Koreans are inexplicably sick or have a run of bad luck in business or a daughter who cannot find a husband, they consult a shaman.

I also found it interesting how the writer placed shamanism within Korean culture and the country’s other spiritual beliefs.

Shamanism’s eclecticism has influenced Korean attitudes toward religion, helping make South Korea one of the world’s most pluralistic countries — a place where Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity coexist peacefully and often overlap, said Yang Jong-sung, a senior curator at the National Folklore Museum of Korea.

“Korean shamanism is very, very materialistic and this-worldly, as Koreans tend to be,” the curator said. “I don’t think a Christian pastor can succeed here if he only talks about heaven and does not hint at health and material prosperity.”

In light of the strength of Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the modern world, it’s easy to forget that another monotheistic religion that sprang from the Middle East was also quite influential at one time in history.  The International Herald Tribune has an article today about Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia, and how its modern day adherents are trying to maintain their faith across numerous countries.

“We were once at least 40, 50 million - can you imagine?” said Antia, senior priest at the fire temple here in suburban Chicago. “At one point we had reached the pinnacle of glory of the Persian Empire and had a beautiful religious philosophy that governed the Persian kings. Where are we now? Completely wiped out. It pains me to say, in 100 years we won’t have many Zoroastrians.”

There is a palpable panic among Zoroastrians today around the world that they are fighting the extinction of their faith, a monotheistic religion that most scholars say is at least 3,000 years old.

Zoroastrianism predates Christianity and Islam, and many historians say it influenced those faiths and cross-fertilized Judaism as well, with its doctrines of one God, a dualistic universe of good and evil and a final day of judgment.

While Zoroastrians once dominated an area stretching from what is now Rome and Greece to India and Russia, their global population has dwindled to 190,000 at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000 ….  The number is imprecise because of wildly diverging counts in Iran, once known as Persia - the incubator of the faith.

Yoga is an ancient tradition with origins in India.  Even so, the newest advocates of the practice are a bit surprising.  According to this story, the Indian military is now utilizing yoga as a means of reducing stress among troops in hazardous deployments.

Embraced by fashionable Westerners as a way to exercise and get in touch with, well, whatever, yoga has now become a necessary component of India’s 17-year-long counterinsurgency effort in the disputed state of Kashmir. … India’s main counter-insurgency police force in Kashmir has begun requiring its paramilitary troops to “de-stress” as a way to cope with the tensions of a conflict that shows no sign of ending.

The men of the 1st Battalion meet to start their yoga - and a related practice of deep-breathing exercises called pranayam - every morning at 6:30, on mats and tarpaulins laid out under the shade of a giant Chinar tree. … It’s hard to imagine any other counterinsurgency force in the world - say, the US Army’s Green Berets - adding yoga to their combat training, but according to the soldiers themselves, it’s bringing results.

“Even after CRPF, I will never leave this,” says Constable Suresh Chand Yadav, of Varanasi. “I lost 12 kilos in weight, and when I go on duty, I have a peace of mind that keeps me sharp.”

When I was in Bali a few years ago, I had an opportunity to see firsthand the role that spirituality plays in the everyday life of Indonesians.  For many people, this spirituality goes beyond mere organized religion and extends to a strong belief in the powers of the non-physical world. Now those beliefs have become a political issue, as some Indonesians are suggesting that the country’s recent string of natural disasters may be a result of their national leaders having taken actions that angered nature.  The Christian Science Monitor explored this issue in an article today.

Shockwaves from the string of natural disasters over the past 19 months, including numerous earthquakes, two tsunamis, and an imminent volcanic eruption, have reached even Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the state palace. … The president’s political opponents, such as the well-known soothsayer Permadi, have eagerly spread the notion of a divine warning. Speaking on Metro-TV Wednesday, he warned that the president was angering nature.

According to the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI), a national polling agency, the president has reason to be worried. … The survey concluded that 78.1 percent of those polled believed the disasters were a “warning from nature to Indonesia.” … “In Indonesia, people believe in the supernatural,” says Muhammad Qodary, an LSI researcher. “And the more people believe [the disasters] don’t come from scientific explanations, the more they’ll look to the supernatural.”