Meet the Neighbors: A Spiritual Stroll

1. Maybe I'm a bit goofy when I'm idle.

It's Saturdaaay (is that a Marcy Playground song stuck in my head?). The Indian schools, like just about every kind of work in India, continue into our weekend, leaving only Sunday free. Call it rigidity of habit, but I've taken Saturdays off. Needless to say, I'm exhaustedly exhilarated to be able to sleep in, especially since my circadian rhythm has been spun around so fast that it's been sick all over the inside of my head (especially lovely).

About half way through my mid-morning lounging activities, I get my first experience with Delhi belly. What is Delhi belly? It's when those good little squirmy guys living in your belly meet new, bad ones from say, that papri chaat you got from a street vendor (not that I did this) and the bad ones start beating up on the good ones until all of sudden, one of the good ones snaps and accidentally kills one of the Greasers. Or that might just be the plot from The Outsiders.

But no problem; I have an entire Duane Reed with me. I feel like the Fresh Prince (the Cinderella story for the rest of us) as I sit around the house, watching the world's smallest hummingbird (I thought it was a bee at first) dart around the world's most unfamiliar fruit tree.

2. Turtle-Wax for the Soul

Which is, I'm told, a point of light inside the forehead. But I'll get to that later.

ajkotgurukul.org

My housemate, Virali, and I decide to take a spiritual tour of several of the nearby houses of worship this evening. It's quite beautiful out as we make our way around Sector 33, past the Terrace Garden to the Radha Krishna Mandir, a Hindu Temple devoted to the playful god Krishna and his wife, Radha.

A very short walk from our house and we're removing our shoes by the side of the marble entry-way stairs. Virali touches the bottom step, then her head and chest, and again at the top. We enter, hands in front of our chests.

It is a long, cavernous room currently containing only three other people. I'm told that it will be much more full during aarti, the daily puja (ritual worship) during which ghee lamps are offered to the deities, usually to the accompaniment of song. There are no rituals or ceremonies at the moment, and the visitors mostly sit in quiet reverence. What's left for us now is darshan, to see and be seen.

The focus of the room is a large shrine housing three deity images, murti. Somewhere between a large doll and a small mannequin, these are representations of the deities, which are in themselves anthropomorphic representations of the divine. Everything, everyone, is Brahman, the sacred universal essence of being, and it is only through ignorance that we believe we are separate from the divine. To reach the spiritual pinnacle is to come to the total, experiential realization of one's own divine nature and to blissfully and completely merge with the sacred. In the cycle of death and rebirth, we have many, many eons to reach spiritual perfection and become one of those great sadhus or yogis.

The rest of us, in the meanwhile, seek to develop an understanding of the nature of the sacred and the self by connecting to the divine, something which is more easily done through a representation rather than the abstract concept of Brahman. Hindu deities are thus manifestations of the greater divine, characters with stories and qualities and recognizable forms which we can connect to. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says:

“It is much more difficult to focus on God as the unmanifested than God with form, due to human beings having the need to perceive via the senses.”

Through our senses we come to better know the divine, through these murti we can connect to it. The murti begin as containers for the god, who, through ritual, is asked to take residence in the form. At the time the murti becomes inhabited by the god, its eyes are painted on; it may now see. The murti is now the deity.

And it is treated as such. Everyday, the statues are bathed behind curtains, dressed in finery and jewelry, given offerings and rituals throughout the day. People come to the temple not only to pray and meditate, but to be with the divine. We come to see the shrine and to be seen by the deity, through those eyes opened at the moment of divine inhabitance. This is the meaning of darshan: to see and be seen. 

This all plays an important role in the spiritual practice called bhakti yoga, the development of a relationship with the divine through one of the deities. By developing a relationship that is personal, loving, devotional, and intimate, one becomes closer to the divine; one may develop the form of love for the deity that is strongest for them, be it the love for a mother, a father, a lover. All that matters is love and devotion. When practising this, one desires to please their beloved deity with offerings, puja, etc. At the Mandir or in a small home shrine, one meets his sacred beloved and touches the divine. There is no grovelling, no prayers required on specific threat of damnation, no fear of misfortune should one displease the deity. Nor is the deity a supreme father, a creator, or idol to worship for favors, but a manifestation of the essential quality shared by all of the Universe. This is worship of what we know to be essentially the same as ourselves, a chance to cherish the good and the beautiful in the Universe. A relationship of love with the divine breeds love.

Our darshan lasts only a short while. Upon entering, we prostrate to the shrine and sit on our heels before it, hands in front of our chests. We respectfully sit, allowing ourselves to be seen. Upon leaving, the priest places a small spoon of water in our right hands; Virali drinks hers and spreads the rest on the crown of her head. A small piece of sweet bread, and we're off.

3. Self, I never knew thee.

We've planned to go to a Gurudwara (Sikh temple) next, but are distracted by a large compound offering with a sign free Rajyoga classes. Now, I know almost nothing about this Rajyoga Mandir, but Virali informs me that it offers a type of Hinduism in which nuns where white robes and do good deeds (so, I assume, we're at about the same level of understanding). We enter past the tall gates that are rather characteristic of Chandigarh (my school is similarly equipped) and are directed to wait in a small room called “the Museum.” There are just under a dozen exhibits, dioramas depicting men smoking and horrible goat-like demons with crab marionettes. A young nun in a course white robe and shawl comes and gathers us, taking us to the office, where we smoothly ask, “What can you tell us about rajyoga?” No, we don't know anything. Start from the beginning.

She directs to watch a television program at 9:30 on Sunday night, and then leads us back into the museum. For the next forty-five minutes, she explains the Brahma Kumaris philosophy with the help of the displays. Quite a bit of this is explained on their website,

“Growing violence, crime and corruption at all levels of society, the fissiparous and centrifugal tendencies that are evident in the forms of disintegration of our society on ethnic, religious or cultural grounds and the break-up of families, serious decline in standards of professional ethics, awful increase in the use of narcotics, intoxicants and drugs that result in altered states of consciousness, militancy, deviant behavior etc. are some of the signs that show how chaotic and perverse our society has become and how artificial our civilisation is. There is as much stress and mental tension that a very large number of people suffer from many psychosomatic diseases. There is so much poverty, illness and peacelessness that one cannot but conclude that our attitudes, our philosophy of life, if any, and our actions are violative of some healthy norms, values and principles of living. All this clearly points to the truth that there is something basically wrong with our ways of thinking, our life-style and our inter-personal relationships.

The crying need of the time, therefore, is a renaissance of ethical, moral and spiritual values. An increasing population and delicate eco-system only makes the call for action more urgent . Leaders of the world must recognize that the root cause of the complex interconnected problems facing humanity lies within the human spirit in the form of deficiency of human values and virtues. Having gone astray, humanity must now find its way back to its divine roots. This calls for a mass shift in the human consciousness and attitudes. To re-construct these values, Social Service Wing has been established.” http://bksocial.net/

Compound window.

The concept of degradation of values and quality of human moral life, as well as that of impending doom, apocalypse, and a paradise rising, is very common in both religious and secular contemporary world views (don't believe me? Have you ever heard that we're destroying the planet with pollution and the hope that we may be able to build some sort of utopian space colony in the future? No? Because it's the plot of Wall-E, to start). In Hinduism, there is the belief that the world passes through four yugas, or eras, during which the world grows progressively worse and humans progressively more amoral and areligious. Luckily for us, the cyclical nature of things means that the cycle starts all over, and from the ashes a utopian age arises.

This is the basis for a great deal of what the young nun tells us about the four ages and the development of religion through time. In the Golden Age, we were deities ourselves, pure and in touch with God (note that they use the singular here; Hindu gods are our divine selves in the Golden Age, not God himself). Over time, through the silver and bronze ages, we moved away from our purity and morality, and began to forget the nature of God. The religions of the world emerged, each trying to explain a single sacred phenomena that we had begun to forget. Today, in the iron age, we are so surrounded by corruption, extremes, and death, we have forgotten about God. But through a moral life, we can begin to move into a new golden age.

“You see a child, when he is around his parents, he feels safe. He cries and smiles. But when there is no parent there, the child's face is blank, unsure. How do the faces you see in the world appear?” The nun smiles. “Do you think they know that God is around?”

What is the most basic article of faith? This is not all that we are. (If you got this reference, we should be friends).

“What are you? Are you the mind? The body?” the nun asks us. We both noncommittally say something about a combination of the two. “When someone dies, everything that we saw is still there. Yet we say he is gone. Now, what is a person, truly?”

“Every religion goes back to light. They remember that God is a source of light. You too are a source of light. A point of light.”

We travel from case to case, seeing images of the degradation of man throughout the ages, of an anthropomorphic Earth being carried on her death bed through nuclear explosions. In one, a rat is leading a camel by its reins, for “such is a person being driven by pleasures.”

In the middle, “a vision of heaven.” The nun smiles broadly. In the case are figures like those you would see in a Hindu Mandir (temple), but here they are not serving as murti. They are the Hindu deities, beautiful and joyful in their eternal youth and good fortune. “This is how we once were and how we will be again.”

We are distracted by everyday life, by drinking, smoking, novels, and obscene movies (no, not just the kind with “x”s in the title), by our busy lives and worries, by our misconception that we are our bodies or our stations. We must get back to what is good, she tells us.

The nun's humble enthusiasm is charming, and she seems pleased when we ask if we can come back for the classes. We will begin on Monday morning.

4. Reverence 
(http://www.gurdwarasrigurutegbahadur.com/)

From outside

After we leave the Rajyoga center, we make our way to Sector 34 to visit a nearby Gurudwara (Sikh temple). I will spare you a lecture on Sikhism, but to those interested I recommend wikipedia, for, as my graduation speaker put it, it's rapidly become a reliable source of information (there go four years of conditioning).

In short, Sikhism is a monotheistic tradition in which one strives for liberation and eventual union with omnipresent God. The most fundamental tenant is devotion to God, and denial of qualities such as greed, anger, and attachment help one to move closer to the divine. The tradition emphasizes the importance of the Gurus, which act as conduits to the divine and offer the student a path to spiritual attainment. To live a moral life and devote one's heart and soul to God is the path worth taking.

The Punjab region of India (of which Chandigarh is the capitol), has a very large Sikh population. The Gurudwara we visit is enormous and gorgeous; it divides the sky with its presence. We cover our heads with scarves, leave our shoes at a shoe-check window, and line up to enter. Women enter and sit on the left; we prostrate and walk, hands before our chests, down the center of a large, beautiful room with what looks like a golden casket shrine at the far end. In front of it, we prostrate, offer a coin, and prostrate again. After a moment of respectfully sitting on our heels with hands in front of our chests, we move back to sit on the floor with the other visitors.

A man is chanting near the front of the room and we sit for a few minutes watching. When we leave, we follow others to a many-sided (6? 8?) structure. We place our foreheads on the edge before circling the structure. 

The Gurudwara during the day.

My knowledge of Sikhism doesn't extend much farther than introductory materials, but the reverence and the beauty of the place are appealing. I will have to visit other Gurudwaras and learn more. If I could have my way, I would be spending most of my days visiting places such as these.

Everywhere I look here, I am surrounded by the sacred. From the small shrine to Shiva I pass in the market, to the details of my home and neighbourhood, to the many places of worship surrounding me. The divine lingers.