'Not chakras,' he said. 'Places. This meditation takes me seven places in universe. Up and up. Last place I go is heaven.'
I asked, 'Have you been to heaven, Ketut?'
He smiled. Of course he had been there, he said. Easy to go to heaven.
'What is it like?'
'Beautiful. Everything beautiful is there. Every person beautiful is there. Everything beautiful to eat is there. Everything is love there. Heaven is love.'
Then Ketut said he knows another meditation. 'To down.' This down meditation takes him seven levels below the world. This is a more dangerous meditation. Not for beginning people, only for a master.
I asked, 'So if you go up to heaven in the first meditation, then, in the second meditation you must go down to…?'
'Hell,' he finished the statement.
This was interesting. Heaven and hell aren't ideas I've heard discussed very much in Hinduism. Hindus see the universe in terms of karma, a process of constant circulation, which is to say that you don't really 'end up' anywhere at the end of your life-not in heaven or hell-but just get recycled back to the earth again in another form, in order to resolve whatever relationships or mistakes you left uncompleted last time. When you finally achieve perfection, you graduate out of the cycle entirely and melt into The Void. The notion of karma implies that heaven and hell are only to be found here on earth, where we have the capacity to create them, manufacturing either goodness or evil depending on our destinies and our characters.
Karma is a notion I've always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I believe that I used to be Cleopatra's bartender-but more metaphorically. The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western psychology, by the way)-take care of the problems now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven.
But here Ketut was talking about heaven and hell in a different way, as if they are real places in the universe which he has actually visited. At least I think that's what he meant.
Trying to get clear on this, I asked, 'You have been to hell, Ketut?'
He smiled. Of course he's been there.
'What's it like in hell?'
'Same like heaven,' he said.
He saw my confusion and tried to explain. 'Universe is a circle, Liss.'
I still wasn't sure I understood.
He said. 'To up, to down-all same, at end.'
I remembered an old Christian mystic notion: As above, so below. I asked. 'Then how can you tell the difference between heaven and hell?'
'Because of how you go. Heaven, you go up, through seven happy places. Hell, you go down, through seven sad places. This is why it better for you to go up, Liss.' He laughed.
I asked, 'You mean, you might as well spend your life going upward, through the happy places, since heaven and hell-the destinations-are the same thing anyway?'
'Same-same,' he said. 'Same in end, so better to be happy on journey.'
I said, 'So, if heaven is love, then hell is…'
'Love, too,' he said.
I sat with that one for a while, trying to make the math work.
Ketut laughed again, slapped my knee affectionately with his hand.
'Always so difficult for young person to understand this!'
88
So I was hanging out in Wayan's shop again this morning, and she was trying to figure out how to make my hair grow faster and thicker. Having glorious thick, shiny hair herself that hangs all the way down to her butt, she feels sorry for me with my wispy blond mop. As a healer, of course, she does have a remedy to help thicken my hair, but it won't be easy. First, I have to find a banana tree and personally cut it down. I have to 'throw away the top of the tree,' then carve the trunk and roots (which are still lodged in the earth) into a big, deep bowl 'like a swimming pool.' Then I have to put a piece of wood over the top of this hollow, so rainwater and dew don't get in. Then I will come back in a few days and find that the swimming pool is now filled with the nutrient-rich liquid of the banana root, which I then must collect in bottles and bring to Wayan. She will bless the banana root juice at the temple for me, then rub the juice into my skull every day. Within a few months I will have, like Wayan, thick, shiny hair all the way down to my butt.
'Even if you are bald,' she said, 'this will make you have hair.'
As we're talking, little Tutti-just home from school-is sitting on the floor, drawing a picture of a house. Mostly, houses are what Tutti draws these days. She's dying to have a house of her own. There's always a rainbow in the backdrop of her pictures, and a smiling family-father and all.
This is what we do all day in Wayan's shop. We sit and talk and Tutti draws pictures and Wayan and I gossip and tease each other. Wayan's got a bawdy sense of humor, always talking about sex, busting me about being single, speculating on the genital endowments of all the men who pass by her shop. She keeps telling me she's been going to the temple every evening and praying for a good man to show up in my life, to be my lover.
I told her again this morning, 'No, Wayan-I don't need it. My heart's been broken too many times.'
She said, 'I know cure for broken heart.' Authoritatively, and in a doctorly manner, Wayan ticked off on her fingers the six elements of her Fail-Proof Broken-Heart Curing Treatment: 'Vitamin E, get much sleep, drink much water, travel to a place far away from the person you loved, meditate and teach your heart that this is destiny.'
'I've been doing everything but the vitamin E.'
'So now you cured. And now you need a new man. I bring you one, from praying.'
'Well, I'm not praying for a new man, Wayan. The only thing I'm praying for these days is to have peace with myself.'
Wayan rolled her eyes, like Yeah, right, whatever you claim, you big white weirdo, and said, 'That's because you have bad memory problem. You don't remember anymore how nice is sex. I used to have bad memory problem, too, when I was married. Every time I saw a handsome man walking down the street, I would forget I had a husband back home.'
She nearly fell over laughing. Then she composed herself and concluded, 'Everybody need sex, Liz.'
At this moment, a great-looking woman came walking into the shop, smiling like a lighthouse beam. Tutti leapt up and ran into her arms, shouting, 'Armenia! Armenia! Armenia!' Which, as it turned out, was the woman's name-not some kind of strange nationalist battle cry. I introduced myself to Armenia, and she told me she was from Brazil. She was so dynamic, this woman-so Brazilian. She was gorgeous, elegantly dressed, charismatic and engaging and indeterminate in age, just insistently sexy.
Armenia, too, is a friend of Wayan's, who comes to the shop frequently for lunch and for various traditional medical and beauty treatments. She sat down and talked with us for about an hour, joining our gossiping, girlish little circle. She's in Bali for only another week before she has to fly off to Africa, or maybe it's back to Thailand, to take care of her business. This Armenia woman, it turns out, has had just the teensiest bit of glamorous life. She used to work for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. Back in the 1980s she had been sent into the El Salvadoran and Nicaraguan jungles during the height of war as a negotiator of peace, using her beauty and charm and wits to get all the generals and rebels to calm down and listen to reason. (Hello, pretty power!) Now
