Bali, last
paradise or paradise lost
Travelogue
Febr-March 2012
A few
weeks on Bali, at the end of the monsoon season, is a hot and humid experience,
but also allows, next to the sun, surf and disco opportunities, a dive in a
cultural and spiritual society with many lessons and warnings for our
21-century complacency. In this essay I will try to convey my insights about
what Bali means to me, a Dutch westerner and would-be
philosopher/anthropologist, journalist and writer, especially concerned with
the field of psycho-social development. I will be touching upon things like the
impact of religious and ritual life, the root cause of corruption, the impact of
mobility oriented borrowing, the hidden natural disasters of the pre-Hindu era,
the energetic lay-out of temples, the focus on beauty and newness in Bali, the
ill-represented relevance of the puputans, but all these are no more than
personal observations, at best hypothetic.
Bali is a
great place, no doubt, it offers a combination of natural and human treasures
that is quite unique and allows us westerners a comfortable taste of the
tropical. Many fall in love with the island and come back again and again. The
eerie beauty of the rice fields along the hillsides, especially when the thick
monsoon clouds colour the sky and the volcano’s are just barely showing
themselves is a sight that stays with you.
But two
days after we left, close to our Sanur hotel, five terrorist were killed, one
wonders about the underlying realities and deeper dichotomies in Bali.
Bali has
retained, despite annually some 2,5 million foreign tourists, it’s own culture
with a strong religious Hindhu-dharma focus and probably more shrines,
sanctuaries, protective offering altars and temples than inhabitants. It has
great beaches, mountains, volcano’s and rice-paddy vista’s. Economically it
relies on handicraft and tourism, but is outside the cities and beaches still
very much a traditional agricultural society.
The 4 million or so Balinese are friendly, cooperative, clean and
focused on aesthetics, more crafty than artistic, concerned with living now,
not in the future, tightly knit into family and village structure and very
concerned with the “otherworld” they see as balanced and mirrored in the
tangible.
There is
an image of Bali as a paradise, as a peaceful land of beautiful people mainly
concerned with keeping the forces of nature and the spirits in other dimensions
happy. In a way this image, stemming from the early visitors in the 1930’s,
reminds me of how Cambodia was seen, before the Lon Nol and Pol Pot atrocities
came to light. The Bali image is too rosy, too idealistic, repressing the
reality of 80.000 deaths in the KPI-purge in the sixties, the volcanic threats
forever present, the 40.000 orphans hidden from sight, the Hindu-Islam feud
(and the bombings to make that real) and doesn’t look much further at what
defines the Bali mindset. It’s of course a good promotional image, Bali as a
holy and blessed paradise, but the fundamental juxtapositions that have led to
what happened in Cambodia are also present in Bali. The terrorist attacks and
bombings are a warning sign.
The
scooter burden
Let me
elaborate on one example, that anyone in Bali will recognise, being the
disproportional amount of income spent on mobility and how those 1,5 million
scooters are financed. With salaries in the tourist trade around or even below
the 100 dollar mark, 40 to 50% of income goes to financing mobility. (A normal
scooter costs around 1500 $, with 48 month payback plus 1,5 to 2% interest per
month). The mobile phone and gas eats up another 10 to 20 $, not much left to
save! And if there are savings, they might go the very expensive marriage
festivities, funerals etc. The influence
of moneylenders, in Cambodia one of the root causes of peasant upheaval,
communist success and eventually the rise of Kmer Rouge is hardly recognised as
a risk-factor in present-day Bali, as these are now euphemistically are called
banks. The big, national ones charge less, but many of the poorer Balinese have
to go to local banks or loan-sharks, and never get out of debt. This even more,
because nobody wants an older model, new cars and scooters define the streets
of Bali, older models are shipped to the poorer islands. New, beautiful, status
comes with aesthetics and fashion, even the Balinese policemen look impeccable,
shabbiness is a sin, at least for the higher castes or those pretending to be. So the young girls and boys basically work to
pay for their image of mobility (on the road and via their mobile), at low
wages in the tourist industry, and still relying on their free housing (the
family compound or village doesn’t charge for living there)and low price of
food. They are in fact slaves to the banks and outside impulses like the
economic crisis (less tourism) or rising gas prizes will threaten their whole
existence and lifestyle. No scooter, no mobility, no work, as living in the
tourist places is unthinkable, in cultural and financial terms. Balinese are
proud people and not afraid, as the puputans illustrate. Those were not
senseless repressions by the Dutch, killing whole royal courts, but the result
of deep integrity issues. The royals were caught between old adat (customary
rights) and the treaties they signed with the Dutch concerning Tawan Karang (kliprechten-beachcomber rights) and
saw no way out. Interesting enough, this underlying issue of checks and
balances in law is of relevance in the cyberspace law/rights discussion see:
http://www.lucsala.nl/klikrecht.htm
Risks
The high
proportion of income spent on mobility, the correlation between mobility and
tourism, the interest of up to 25% per year (per se not so exorbitant with 10%
or more inflation) strike me as economic risk factors. The Balinese can hardly
become involved as investment partners in real estate, touristy or industrial
ventures if they have no expandable income. With now most investment coming
from foreign or rich Djakarta sources, the money power beyond their control,
and inter-island and inter-religious animosity an issue, this will limit true
sharing of Bali’s resources by all. A simple rise of the gas-price with 30
percent could spark unrest that might translate in capital-flight.
Corruption
This
leads to looking at what corruption really means. Newspapers everyday report
about officials involved in corruption and fraud, and usually blame the
higher-ups. Not a single Balinese I spoke has not heard about how Suharto and
his family enriched themselves, but these are the same people routinely paying
off the policeman, guard or official. As a tourist you are not supposed to see
how the driver with some slight of hand donates a little here and there, and
how the police at road-traps desperately tries to find some real or on-the-spot
made-up cause to get some money. How the workers in the hotels have to share
extra income with the higher-ups, how the corruption pyramids pervade
everything. How the rich Javanese and the smart westerners use the corruption
to get what they want, to whatever cost to the ecology, the culture or the
poor.
Now I am
not so naive not to acknowledge that this is also happening where I come from,
the rich West, but Bali makes you think about the root of this. Now the recent
Occupy movement, blaming the top 1% for whatever went wrong for the 99% (in the
financial crisis), made me think about this too. I came to the conclusion, that
it is us, the 99%, that were to blame. Our greed and need to posses ever more
was inviting the entrepreneurial lot among us, always there and necessary for
progress and change anyway. We cannot progress without the wild and unruly, a
thing that one can truly feel in Bali, where the culture in a way is very
strict, repressive and stagnant. Remember the tame and the wild horse of
Plato’s Phaedrus as a model for the psyche. Now I wonder whether corruption is
not a kind of invisible protest, in the
sense that it is the small man’ s need to bribe and therefore corrupt the
system. Unconsciously maybe, but is this not the only way to preserve some
sense of pride, of power over the system? Especially in Bali, where on the one
hand the caste system and the family dwelling
and desa rule are prevalent, on the other hand the worldly power lies
with bosses, investors and officials seen as foreign, the second economy of
bribes and corruption seems to me a natural complement to an overpowering first
economy. Corruption is of and for the people, maybe a good title for a
protest-song at Kuta-Beach by my good friend Fantuzzi, we are the corruption as
we need at least the illusion of another way out of the corner we find
ourselves.
Bribing
and offering are, and I make a strange bridge here, maybe both psycho-social
mechanism to obtain and ensure magical power, so much the underlying sentiment
in Bali. The one to the worldly, the other to the intangible, both part of life
on an island, forever threatened. And maybe it’s good to remember that Adam and
Eve had to leave paradise after the first act of bribery, the apple of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil, so corruption is the essential sin, of revolting
against the overpowering force.
Defensive
and magical
The anthropologists of the 1930’s
looked, with Western eyes and a soft spot for the primitive, at Bali, at the
temples, rituals, gamelan music and aesthetics, admired the traditional art,
but failed to see the fundamental defensive nature of the culture, the
carelessness for whoever or whatever is outside of family or village, the
escapist tendencies and the tight harness of the agricultural seasonality. They
see the ritualizing states of self-control, resulting in graceful and tactful
behaviour as a part of the religious expression among the people, not as
escapism, a hiding behind a mask.
Gregory Bateson however, (with
Margaret Mead) by filiming and photograhing Balinese life and rituals in
1936-1938, observed the preoccupation with balance in the postures and
movements, he described this in 1949 as the ‘tightrope walker’ a ‘corporeal
metaphor’ he recognized in the Balinese style of being nice but within
permissible borders (dadi) and defensive. He wrote: ‘In sum it seems that the
Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and
that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance’.
He saw, in his ‘performance
symbolism’ interpretation, the Balinese character structure to be fundamentally
choreographic in nature, a dance. Dance and ritual, I think were correctly
identified by Bateson as carriers of a broad intelligence, a cultural root understanding,
a matrix beyond words. Embodied cognition is what we could call this in modern
idiom, looking at a Balinese performance one can feel the fear, the magical
undercurrent, the transfer of a knowledge beyond words.
This
comes closer to acknowledging the fundamental defensive nature of the Balinese
culture, but is still a maybe overly positive interpretation, not looking at
the fear for nature, outsiders and demons that seems to lead to this tightrope
balancing.
The body positions, of many body
parts with each a specific position and meaning, down to the fingers and minute
details, were and this is what Bateson’s and Mead’s Balinese studies showed,
very structured and forcing the performers to be very ‘aware’ of all the
details, and of the relations and tensions between al the detail positions of
eyes, jaw, limbs etc. Not necessarily as a balance, but as a non automatic
magical act, stepping away from the normal and relaxed into an elaborate ritual
stance, maybe even pointing at the trance states also common in spiritual
practice in Bali.
In my view this resonates with the
building style of the temples and the focus on perfection, the fear to make
mistakes, not looking good (dadi), it’s a kind of fractal that shows up in all
aspects of Balinese culture. The hand and finger positions are less narrative,
and symbolic, and more magical, with a meaning not like a mudra or symbolizing
an animal, natural phenomenon or instrument intended for humans to understand,
but aimed at the otherworldly powers in a different iconic matrix. A matrix of
limited extent, in that sense it is rather ‘digital’ with rules and constraints
within a finite symbolic set and not ‘analog’.
As one of
my main focal points in writing is the innerchild-mask dichotomy, I tend to
look at this focus on perfection and ‘structural and performance magic’ as a
fundamental mask and cultural strategy hiding a deeper stance, some deep fear
and anxiety in real terms (for physical enemies and nature like volcanoes and
tsunamis) but also for magical, otherworld entities and sorcery. I try to
understand causes, not symptoms, see the ritualistic perfection and
artificiality as defense, as magical shields. But then magic, so obvious at
every level, has not been acknowledged as a real force by science, mostly it is
seen as superstitious, interesting but not real and effective. The Balinese
however, do take it serious! Their culture is not so much about relationships
with humans, but about relationships with the otherworld, the magical realm and
they use a language with a precise, hard, pointed and sometimes unnatural
character.
Bali is often
described as a cultural heaven, as a place where spiritual traditions are still
followed and religious practice upheld. This falling for only the nice picture
in most anthropological and tourist views of Bali is the same mistake as in
admiring the Ankhor Watt temples in Cambodia as the epithet of Kmer culture and
not as monstrous ego-monuments of ruthless rulers built at the expense of the
people and ultimate signs of disastrous decadence. Balinese culture was and is
seen as enchanted, magical, a paradise.
Even
today, and this is the dominant view supported by the tourist industry, one
should go to Bali to search your inner child, use yoga, massage, art and of
course low prices to escape your Western problems. Spirituality is still the
banner of Bali, although most young Australians at the Kuta and Seminyak
beaches find that in their Bintang beer bottles. And of course, Balinese women
spend sometime 30% of their time preparing offerings, placing them around on
all the power spots they can imagine and participating in prayer and rituals.
However, in the villages one can observe that these beautiful offerings are an
industry by themselves, with mostly older people involved, an economic activity
like tourism, handicraft and agriculture, but hardly figuring in the
statistics. Magic, rituals, offerings, they are part of the whole, and even as
the tourists interest has made them commercial,
-every hotel has offerings as part of the Bali experience, dances and
gamelan are entertainment- they offer also a way to understand the Balinese
soul and perceive how movement, placing, in fact the whole complex of costumes,
choreography and music influence the audience. Some deeper template, some
cultural matrix is communicated in a way the Western world is only slowly recognizing.
In ‘Systemic Constellations’ (Helleman) we now use similar place and posture
effects (but this originated in African indigenous traditions), mirror neuron
phenomena are studied and psychologist look at group mind effects, in Bali this
all is implicit in the culture.
.
I saw
this Balinese soul as far more defensive, far more focussed on shielding
against evil, danger and the magical powers of other humans than we usually
think. By looking at the Balinese temples I noticed how defensive they are, with
strong architecture and pointing details, straight edges on the corners, no
places to hide, entrances and portals of a specific form, copies of copies
everywhere. And why is every statue again protected or shielded by a sarong,
usually chequered for demonic statues, and white (with gold band) for more
pleasant deities?
These are
the temples of a fearful people, bowing to the outside pressure, pleasantly
merging with intruders and invaders, hiding their unconscious fears behind
smiles, great but not creative craftmanship, sticking to traditions that served
them well before. Not really bowing to the Hindu and Buddhist faith, but
merging, adapting, still retaining the old animistic and ancestor beliefs, much
like the Tibetans incorporated the Bon in Buddhism/Lamaism with all kinds of
demons, gods and deva’s. The Balinese are flexible, they adapt, like these days
the temple rituals are no longer strictly planned according to the astrologer’s
divination, but are in the weekends and after work hours. With all their modern
manners they are however still bound by the alliance they owe to family and
village (and no-one else, charity and social responsibility ranks much higher
with Muslims), by the need to marry and have male children. Premarital sex is
not allowed, but many wait to marry until a pregnancy guarantees a family
future.
Temple
energy
As I went
around the Bali temples I measured the energy (by divination this is quite
easy) and checked orientations, power spots and what objects had the most
energy. One of the findings was that the quite characteristic gate or portal of
Balinese temples, two adjacent pillars with complicated forms at the outside
but a sharp edge facing the inside, had quite a different function than what
the textbooks indicate (keeping the demons out, because often there is a
straight wall behind and demons are supposed to move in straight lines only) as
there is a distinct energy dip in the portal and it acts as a cleansing device.
Pass the portal and you have to go through a zero-energy field, that kind of
cleans your aura and soul. No water cleansing as in other cultures (the
Balinese have a healthy respect for what water can carry, they use holy water a
lot in rituals) but just stepping through the cleansing gate. The underlying
magical technology must be pretty strong as we found no gates without that dip.
However, when we visited a rather unknown pre-hindu so called Chandi (the old
statues are also indicated as Candi) temple near Ubud, it turned out that there
were earlier uses of the zero-field cleansing. At a very ancient riverbed site,
cut out from the rocks, the remaining statue in the middle had a similar
zero-energy cleansing effect. The villagers, respectful of the old site, went
to prey there standing before that image and ignored the two stone altars at
the sides. We checked the energy around and noticed that the old statues, from
those altars, were thrown into the river, by now unrecognizable except by
dowsing. My friend An-Jes felt they were thrown in the river at a time of utter
despair, as flooding and maybe other disaster made the villagers try an
ultimate effort to appease the gods. The settlement was probably there, in a
hidden bend, because the river contained silver or copper. This disaster
happened, I feel, somewhere in the 300-500 AD timeframe and it would be
interesting to check this against geological data, as a major Krakatau like
event might then have dramatically threatened Bali, but maybe also other
places. I have always suspected, that the relative dip in European history (the
fall of the Roman Empire) had something to do with a natural disaster, and a
major eruption could have had worldwide effects.
As we
checked the newer temple in the village, not more than a few hundred years old,
we found, like in many other temples, a few old stones in the northeast corner.
barely recognizable as statues, so old and worn were they. Neatly on their own
pedestal/temple, sometimes with sarongs but hardly part of the normal rituals.
Now the energy of these old stones was so high, outranking the normal objects
of devotion, that it was stunning. These were objects of worship and reverence
of formidable age, likely stemming from even before the Hindu waves from Java
in the twelfth century and later. A thousand or more years of human worship
(and the belief in the magical power of stone objects, so abhorred by the
decidedly anti-magical soenni Islam) had given these statues, now turned into
unrecognizable lumps, immense energy. Some of the Brahman elite must know about
this, as the stones are surely respected and attended to in some way, but the
common folks just do not know. Now there is much magic (guna guna) on Bali, and
it is still used a lot, and it partly explains why so much attention is given
to the five times a day offerings, but it is also very underground.
When we
went to another old temple, at Chandi Dasa above the newer village temple and
again not even mentioned as an important site, we found a temple built or
rebuilt in 1961, but with an altar containing one of those old stones of very
high energy, no demon statues, only white and gold sarongs and a magnificent,
quiet mood around, much “holier” than the major temples mentioned as tourist
attractions.
Ecology
The care
for the nature and the land is part of what in Hindu lore is called the
philosophy of “Tri Hita Karana”; dealing with the divine, the fellow man and
the world are the three pillars. Sounds great, has become official ecospeak,
but the reality of stinking rivers, inadequate sewers and dirty beaches weighs
heavier than the cheap labour sweeping and cleaning the fallen leaves in the
hotel gardens. The rivers, when then enter the sea, where filled with debris
and junk, the ecologically important mangrove swamps outside the tourist eyes
resembling junkyards and smelling really foul, as we noticed when we cycled a
bit off the tracks.
The
tourists on the one hand come to enjoy nature, but on the other hand the
hotels, roads and infrastructure are threatening nature and even existence, as
for instance water-scarcity is now a real threat. Too many villa’s and resorts,
many empty as the crisis also hits tourism and too many overambitious projects,
have taken too much land and damage the rural balance, notably of Subak or
traditional water-irrigation law and practice. However, there is hardly a
win-win scenario here, more tourism will hurt the ecology and the
attractiveness of the place.
The
visa issue
Too many
foreigners, who have a tendency to set up shop and milk their fellow visitors
even worse that the locals, using bribes and corruption even smarter than they,
have created a class of toeans, bosses like the plantation colonialist of
before. Ownership-limitations for foreigners have been circumvented in many
smart ways, against the original aim of such restrictions. Many expats married
to Balinese women, female beauty an export product like any, and were much
better than locals to efficiently set up hotels, resort, taxi-services, rental
operations and all kinds of tourist traps. Even the spiritual is effectively
exploited, yoga schools, healing classes, spiritual retreats, it’s big business
that has little to do with Balinese spirituality, but sells well. The book and
then the film version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat,_Pray,_Love (EPL), was a boon to this business,
attracting many tourist seeking an escape from the stressy West. Some of the
original Balinese healing and spiritual practice does reach the West, we
visited the ashram of Ratu Bagus, who teaches a kind of shaking meditation.
Day-to-day
running these enterprises the 30.000 or so new foreign colonialists and untold
Javanese investors leave to the locals, underpaying them, but Balinese are good
at following orders, they learn fast and don’t have the western notion of
initiative. Balinese cut wood, make Ikat or Batik textiles and serve in a
pleasant way, but are no entrepreneurs, they are too busy dealing with the
magical threats, the demands of the otherworld and the family and village
structures. It’s quite interesting, that the newly sprung up tradition of
making Ogoh-Ogoh images for the new year, grotesque statues that are burned or
thrown in the sea to fend off demons, has spread in the same time frame as the
new mobility. The western notion of competition has spread amongst the
youngsters, trying to best the other groups in the village with an even crazier
statue.
The
Indonesian state however, is kind of ambiguous about the foreign entrepreneurs
and expatriates. Apart from trying to squeeze more money, above or below the
table, out of them, they are definitely making it harder to exist here as a
neo-colonialist. I have no more than a hunch here, but suspect the Javanese see
this visa-meddling as an opportunity to get the businesses from the foreigners
too (at a low price), and they are of course closer to the politicians in
Jakarta. With more stringent visa-measures Indonesia forces expatriates to
shorten their stays on Bali, forces more trips away, using the concept of
reciprocality as a handy argument. But this is a dangerous and risky path. This
could lead to a collapse of the real-estate market, already dangerously at
risk. The Balinese could probably run the existing infrastructure, but not
creatively develop it further, and innovation would draw the tourists
elsewhere. The Indian government is doing the same, and there foreign
investments by individuals are dwindling, the attraction of huge profits
attracts big money, but it will leave as soon as it smells danger.
Contrasts
Going
from Sanur to Ubud, driving around to the North, East and West Coast, the
vulcano’s and old Aga village, the contrasts are enormous. Seminyak in the
South -West, the most rich beach area, is full with drunken Australian kids,
expensive shops and evermore villa’s and hotels. It’s a holiday place like
everywhere, beach (dangerous but exciting surf), shops, restaurants, disco, but
not very interesting for An-Jès and me. We liked the Ubud area (not the very
touristy main streets) and the somewaht hidden Michi Retreat http://www.michiretreat.com better, and
went to Sanur beach for the last few days, it’s a somewhat older and more
culture oriented crowd there. Bali is great, but hot and in this season very
humid, but with a airco car it can be done, the drivers are most friendly. By
talking with many people, visiting private homes and just observing we got some
insight in what makes Bali tick.We visited private homes, hidden very old
temples and filmed a lot, temple rituals, cremation/funeral, Ogoh-Ogoh puppet
making, Kecak dance, and even illegal cockfight from behind a wall.
Inner
child
The
culture of Bali is clearly more interdimensional, more in contact with the
otherworld, the unseen, the spiritual. For me this means, (in the context of a
rather complicated theoretical model of the psyche) that the Balinese are more
in contact with their inner child, with as result less need to act, to create,
to deal with the future. Their sense of time is different, with as a result
different ways of evaluating profits, they think short term, sell now at a high
price, if the customer never comes back is not a worry. It is also charming,
there is less need for durable masks, they are friendly now, but don’t need to
stick to that. On the other hand, their friendly stance, also borrowing from
their Hindu-Dharma spiritual practice, is a mask itself, an escape from a
sometimes grim reality. Escape from family, fate, caste, poverty is very hard,
tourism (or crime) or marriage outside is the only way. But what if you finally
manage to get a job on an international cruise-ship, earn 600 dollar a month to
save, but have to spend the proceeds of a year on your marriage when you
return?
As I
mentioned before, modern mobility (maybe 1,5 million scooters on 4 million
Balinese) could destroy this mindset, but the twenty years of mass tourism
seems not to have had enough impact to destroy the focus on the otherworld, the
demons and gods, the ancestors and the nature forces. Offerings everywhere,
every energy point has a shrine or small temple, every house, car or building
receives offerings. Beautiful, touching, and psychologically this means the
Balinese are much more in touch with the inner child (soul) than we (women up
to 35%, men 10% or less in Bali). In psycho-anthropological terms, this is what
sets Bali apart from our modern mindset, where we are less than 4% in that mode
(mostly in dreams and sex). This has an effect on the perception of time, on
the economic stance towards the future, and of course is related to accepting
what is as a karmic condition. In my view of anthropology the relation with the
“otherworld” is crucial, and this is mostly in the subconscious layers I call
inner child (higher self/soul). Recognising the mask(s) and child modes in individuals
as well as in larger society entities is essential to understanding them. As in
individuals, societies tend to ignore or deny their unconscious drives, the
trauma’s that have led to (sub)-personalities, but history again and again
shows these hidden energies as suddenly erupting and often decisive forces and
root causes of the big drama.
Now
looking at the Balinese they have an interesting mix of energies, quite
different from the other Indonesian people. One way to look at that is the
chakra focus of their religion and culture. The Hindu faith energetically
relates most to the third chakra (truth-power), while the Muslim (and Jewish)
are focussed on the fifth (voice, ruling the reality) and the Christian faith
has the fourth chakra (love, blood) as main point. So the Balinese combination
of animistic (first chakra), ancestor worship (second chakra) and Hindu(third)
indicates a fairly practical and survival stance on life, and yet the Buddhist
(sixth chakra) adds that visionary accent. All together an interesting mix,
quite different from the Java energetic spectrum, and the question remains
whether it will survive the onslaught of modern life, modern technology and
global tourism.
We can
learn from all this, I certainly did, a trip to Bali can be an anthropological
déja-vue and help to understand our own lives better, but this requires more
than just sitting on the beach, drink and enjoy the great food the island has
to offer.
Ir. Luc
Sala
March
2012
see also www.lucsala.nl/analogdigital.htm
(2015)