So I Went to Bali

And it was phenomenal:

This trip was the result of a whim I had a little over three years ago. I believe this whim shortly arose after I had the belief paradigm-altering experience of witnessing who I now identify as Shiva and Shakti. My life has, of course, taken a few wild turns since then spiritually, adding the additional parts of Luciferianism and Buddhism. Back when this urge began, I may have known that Bali was spiritual or majority Hindu, but I did not know that its religion was essentially three-pronged between that triumvirate Hinduism (Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma), esoteric Buddhism, and indigenous Balinese religion. On that last part, my tour guides taught me contains the Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit as well as three realms (nature or animistic, ancestral, and divine). It's almost like between the point where I wanted to go to Bali and the point where I actually got to visit, I grew into a spirituality that I could see somewhat reflected in Bali's.

Bali, as my primary tour guide Yogi told my traveling group, possibly means "sacrifice" in relation to the daily offerings put out onto its "thousand temples" and in front of businesses every morning. These offerings contain five flowers to represent the triumvirate deities of Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahmin as well as Shiva names of Mahadewa and Ishvara. These offerings always had lit incense and some people like to put crackers or candy or seasoned rice balls on top of theirs as additional propitiation for the surrounding land spirits and "bad" spirits so that their malice would either be neutralized or turned beneficial.

The spirits themselves were palpable. The first hotel my group stayed at contained a large campus full of statues, most of which received offerings every day. When wandering around, I walked up to a pair on the far end of the campus that had none and soon backed off because their presence was still thick and staring back at me.

“Yes, I can’t sleep at the Arma,” Yogi later told me. Yogi was everyone in our group’s favorite, including mine. His other name is Indra so when we met I asked him if his scooter was his thunderbolt vehicle. He laughed and asked me how I knew that, to which I responded that I’m a Buddhist (the “Vajrayana” school is named for the god Indra’s thunderbolt vehicle). When he was younger, he wanted to go to the US and become an American. He ultimately has spent little time there, only a few hours in LA while working for a cruise ship.

We bonded over spirituality and our talk about it near the end of my trip was how I received the explanation about Balinese religion. Yogi has both the Good Spirit and Bad Spirit tattooed on either of his arms. The tattoo of the Good Spirit was recent—Yogi had told me that his viewpoint was that he had made mistakes in life, but that difficulties and mistakes create wisdom. In Balinese religion too, the good and bad are to be respected as they cannot exist without each other. Unlike in Christianity, the bad isn’t to be vanquished; the daily offerings in Bali are to placate surrounding harmful spirits and either neutralize them or convince them to be constructive. At one point when explaining this, Yogi stopped and said something to the extent of, “Ugh, they’re listening.”

The thing about Yogi that struck me most, however, wasn’t his spiritual connection, but how good he is as a person. At our second hotel, he offered help to a British couple in the lobby that were seemingly stranded by their driver and trip planners. At our last sightseeing stop at the Uluwatu Temple, where we watched a Kecak dance offering, he chased off a monkey who was chomping at a (fortunately empty) baby stroller. It was at this Kecak Dance that we watched an actor play Hanoman kick fireballs off the edge of the cliff where the temple stood in an illustrative effort to save Rama's wife Shinta from the demon king Rahwana. When I told Yogi later that my ishta devata (a term meaning "favored deity," apparently more a communal thing in Balinese Hinduism than a one-on-one connection) was Lucifer, he told me, "You know that Rahwana was historically just the king of Sri Lanka? The fireballs was Hanoman setting his palace on fire during India's war with him. History is simply written by the victors." In relation: "What if Lucifer was right?"

I've resisted the ideas of perennialism, of there being one truth or religion to this world, or one way forward. But after meeting Yogi, I think goodness and wisdom might be universal qualities that always express themselves in the same ways.

There were many experiences from this trip that I will always treasure. Receiving a traditional Balinese purification under waterfalls from a priest. Snorkeling for the first time in my life off the Gili Islands. Fulfilling a longtime wish to man a grill by cooking chicken satay during a cooking class. Mostly when I look back on them, freshly returned home, I feel supreme gratitude to all those people who provided those experiences for me and the others. Culturally, Bali has incredibly kind and relational people. They're not just well connected with the spiritual ecosystem around them, they're in tune with other people as well in a way that is not at all common in the US. In that way too they showed me something important; the types of ways I want to touch others as I build my own community at home.