There's a 155 acre plot of land just outside of Akaroa, on the Banks Peninsula, that has some basic housing, a communal kitchen and classroom area, and a temple for meditation. At 6:45 every morning, before the sun comes up, a candle burns in the middle as a small group gathers around it, chants a surprisingly harmonious “Ommmm,” and visualizes the soul sitting outside the realm of the body before practising tai chi. And that's just before breakfast.
If ever there was a time when it's appropriate for you to shake your head and say, “What has he gotten himself into this time?”, it's now. I'm sort of wondering the same thing.
I left
Methven on Sunday afternoon, driving back towards Christchurch and up
a highway full of loops and twists. It's not particularly far to
Akaroa, but I had to keep my speed somewhere in the vicinity of 40 km
an hour, so it was dark by the time I saw the twinkling lights from
the top of a hill looking onto the bay. I've heard the drive to the
small coastal town is pretty special – given the steep climbs and
the wet, dark, foggy night, it felt more like the drive to the
Overlook Hotel. I got myself mildly lost amongst the French rues
in town, until I found Long Bay
Road, a middle-of-nowhere backroad that my headlights could barely
penetrate. I got even more hopelessly lost than before, possibly
driving onto a hiking trail at one point, before I found the
nondescript driveway amongst the trees.
You're
thinking it, aren't you? What has
that silly, strikingly handsome Canadian gotten himself into this
time?
I came into a full kitchen: the caretakers, Orest and Julia, and their visiting friend Ara. A few pleasantries about where I came from, and then they're taking guesses at my Zodiac sign and chatting about the etheric body, a network of electricity in all living things that's just one layer of personality.
I should explain. The College isn't your typical college – granted, it's still in the development stages (the eventual plan is to implement a five-year residency degree program), but even so the curriculum is what some (most) would call . . . different. The basic philosophy comes from theosophy and the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom, passed down to a few different women in the last hundred years through supposed channeling. The most notable of these was Alice Bailey in the mid-twentieth century, who ended up writing 24 books (The Blue Books) that laid the foundations, delving into death, astrology, and how this all ties in with the Seven Rays.
It's all about spiritual enlightenment – outside of the physical body (the soul's vehicle) sits the personality (in three layers – the etheric, the mental, and the emotional, what they mean when they talk about your aura), and floating above that and permeating all is the soul. From there, we have a group soul, a collective human consciousness outside of everything but present everywhere. The idea is that all souls are in a constant quest for the answers to the big questions: Is there a God? What's my relationship to Him? Where did I come from? What's the meaning of it all? Y'know, the things that people have been wondering since it all began. Anyway, this mortal life is one stage of the soul's development, and once we die our soul is reincarnated, but it stills maintains some knowledge of the big spiritual revelations we accumulate in a lifetime. Eventually you get to a stage of enlightenment, and that's when you join the Spiritual Hierarchy. Christ occupies a significant spot in that hierarchy, but the teachings aren't Christian (they're more or less a boiling down of the common beliefs of all major world religions).
That explanation probably made things a bit more unclear and a whole lot weirder. I'm not here because I've had a New Age spiritual revelation – I'm WWOOFing here, doing typical stuff like chopping wood and washing dishes, but it's in this context. And even though I say I haven't had an epiphany of the soul, let me be clear – I'm not making fun of this place or these people's beliefs, nor am I dismissing it with complete detachment either. It's all totally different from anything I've ever been exposed to, an unorthodox cloister outside of “normal” society, but what an experience. I grew up in what felt like one of the most complacently Christian parts of the world, where even considering something beyond the Bible was looked at as strange and deviant (unless the alternative you were dabbling in was Atheism – that was acceptable, and I suspect a decent chunk of my generation identify that way because of sheer frustration with the dogmatic institution we're brought up in). Part of that frustration spurned a generalization that established religion is a plague on happy, healthy society, but an unfortunate offshoot of that is a complete ignorance to the multifaceted (and, quite frankly, pretty interesting) religions that exist in other parts of the world. And that sucks, because I think that understanding a particular society's religious values are absolutely crucial to understanding that culture, because religious histories and norms are so deep-rooted. I can't tell you a whole lot about Buddhism, I know next to nothing about Islam, and Shinto could be a philosophy or something on a Japanese restaurant menu for all I know.
What I do know is that my ignorance of those beliefs is a limiting reagent to how I interact with the global community, and that I have a desire to at least start to understand. There's a library here, wall-to-wall of books on astrology, numerology, world religions, rituals, and anything else considered to be Occult – but it's far too daunting and superficial to sit down and read them. The best way to learn is to do, and whether I believe that meditating for 45 minutes, three times a day, is going to bring my soul one step closer to enlightenment or not, I can assure you that I'm doing it, and asking a lot of questions along the way (that burning curiosity was pointed out, incidentally, and attributed to the stars and planets I was born beneath – I'll get to that).
The first time I meditated in the temple, I had no idea what to expect. The only other time I've done meditation in the past was when I led a Reflections session at summer camp, and that was just the first one I could pull off the Internet. It was probably about a stream – before this week, I thought they were all about a stream. The atmosphere was very symbolic – walking silently around in a circle before sitting down, around a candle on a marble tiled floor looking through clear windows at Akaroa Harbour below, everything from the number of walls (8) to the sides of the roof (6) representing something. A bellowing chant echoing in the small, open-space enclosure. Focusing on your breath for ten minutes.
Now, I didn't saddle up to the high seat of enlightenment this time. If you've ever had the pleasure to sit through a movie with me, you probably know that, like as not, I'm going to start fidgeting before the end. And if it's annoying for you, imagine how annoying it is for me, when I'm overly conscious of my elbow to the point where it starts to freak me out a little bit. Anyway, my mind wandered a bit, and no matter how hard I tried to bring everything back and focus on a pulse of light, I started squirming near the end. Thank God I never thought about having to pee (like I inevitably will tomorrow, now that I've said that).
At 7:30, Orest was leading a session on tai chi, the age old Chinese martial art form. A lot of moving the body in alignment with a partner, something of a bodily orchestration that relates back to the electrical currents of the corporeal form and balance. Hot porridge and coffee followed, a brief repose before the Bach flower remedies.
Lawson,
the director of Christ College, trained as a psychologist before
getting involved in astrology, and eventually yoga and the Ageless
Wisdom, followed
by a Ph.D. in Esoteric Psychology.
For him, it's about the spiritual reality, but it all comes from a
genuine interest in people. This homoeopathic method has something of
that psychological background, although there's quite the mystical
twist. Basically, the guide is looking for psychological issues in
participants and seeking to remedy them, but he does so by waving a
pendulum over a strand of hair plucked from their head – with the
other hand, he goes over a few rows of tree extracts, and when the
pendulum changes its rotation, it means he's arrived at the right
bottle. That bottle is the remedy – two drops in water, sipped over
a few days. I have two drops of willow and two of chestnut bud in my
water bottle, which correspond to an anxiety over the role of fate in
my life, a failure to learn from past mistakes, and self-pity.
Before lunch, we went through another meditation. Before you start assuming that this whole WWOOFing gig is a façade, and I'm really just sitting around focusing on my inner thoughts and talking about the soul, let's be clear – we worked hard in the interim, swinging axes and loading wheelbarrows for a few hours, until my arms were sore and I had blisters on my hands. We had a class on the basic setup of the Ageless Wisdom (one of the most important ideas to emerge is that the proponents of this belief system don't agree on everything, and that this is largely seen as just a model, not bonafide truth) before another mediation, and then dinner.
There's a balance, and the work of the mind is balanced by the work of the body. Fitting, considering that Tuesday marked the sun's ingress to Gemini, the twins in the Zodiac. We had a sunrise mediation, but also a special one just past 9:00 am, marking that moment in time. Lawson drew up an astrology chart, explaining why this was a particularly significant moment in time – from what I could wrap my head around, Pluto and Uranus, on opposite ends of the symbolic spectrum, are currently in a state of flux, shifting places over a nine year period that began roughly around the time of the Wall Street collapse, and came to an alignment at the same moment as the ingression. The last time they frigged up the cosmic system like this, it was in the 60s, allegedly playing a part in the radical changes that occurred – the thought is that a similar thing could be happening right now, and we're moving forward into something of a new world order. The two planets (as far as the symbolism is concerned, Pluto is still a planet) are due to align in a similar manner seven times, seven being the big number of high significance – apparently unprecedented in history. It doesn't mean a whole lot to me, but it'll probably be the setup to a Dan Brown bestseller soon enough.
I wonder how I'd feel about this whole experience if it was being led by a bald monk or an Indian guru on some snowy mountain in Tibet, rather than a white guy with an American accent and jeans?
After that meditation (this schedule is getting a bit intense for me – the founders of the school have followed this routine every day for four years, which sounds a bit numbing, just two days in), we had another group lesson, this one on astrology. Having already given our birth information to Lawson, right down to the minute we were born, he had drawn up our natal charts, a wheel interspersed with planetary symbols, numbers, and lines linking up different areas. This isn't so much a horoscope as a psychological personality assessment – the explanation is that, sitting in the womb waiting to be born, we had nine months of darkness, and a steady thump thump of a heartbeat. In other words, we were meditating, and when we came out into the light, that was traumatic as hell. That moment left a psychological imprint, the way that the planets and the moon and the energy of the solar system was aligned, and even if it doesn't dictate everything we do and say, it's in our mental framework and there's no way to get rid of it.
Besides for the fact that I'm a bit uncomfortable reducing my personality to the position of the planets right from the moment of birth, I'm skeptical towards astrology because it's so easy to read about yourself with a bias. A statement like “You are a great leader” is one of these that pretty much everyone agrees to, whether there's an ounce of truth in it or not. It's too general and it's too subjective.
At any rate, this is my star chart, and what some of it means. For the most part, I do agree, but remember that there's that tendency to find a way to apply everything in some way to your own life not to mention the fact that Lawson, a psychologist in his earlier years, interpreted this for us, having spent a bit of time with us already (it would be an interesting experiment, to draw up these charts for complete strangers, read them out, and see if the participants could accurately identify which one they are).
Right, so my moon is in the sign of Leo. That's my unconscious nature, the stuff I don't even think about. Leo's a fire sign, which means that I want to be doing something and engaging with my environment. Fair enough, but then it's also a fixed sign, which means that I'm more likely than not to get comfortable and want to stay there. Last week, I was driving up the West Coast and sleeping in a car. A week before that, I was bungy jumping, and before that I was somewhere in Fiordland, climbing a mountain. Right away, that looks to be a pretty inaccurate assessment, but it's subconscious – and, like or not, I do get comfortable fairly easily, and even though I'm in a state of flux, there's always a bit of reluctance to leave that comfort zone when I find it.
The other major thing that's happening with my moon is that I'm squared with Pluto. I might look calm, cool, and collected on my exterior, and people might be able to come to me for advice, but when I get emotional, I get emotional, and it can be with the sudden intensity of a train derailing.
As far as my sun sign is concerned, the typical astrological imprint we all know about (whether we believe in it or not) and that operates on a conscious level, I'm an Aries. That's the start of the Zodiac, and it tends to be an initiator. That's the positive spin on saying that I'm also a bit impatient, and don't always consider everything before I rush into a situation or make an impulsive decision. Again, fair enough, that always annoyed my parents, even when they figured out that it's my nature. Aries is a masculine sign, governed by Mars, the God of War – and a fire sign as well, which means that I'm good and stirred up, most of the time.
Does that sound a bit like me? It's hard to wear a natural expression while looking into a mirror.
The weather has been damp and foggy since I arrived in Akaroa (where are those Seven Rays breaking through?), and now it looks like the afternoon will be spent inside with a hot cup of tea and a book. I don't know that I've had any profound insights into who I am as a person (in this body or otherwise), but I can tell you that the gears in my head are grinding in a much different way than they have before. This little commune isn't a spot where they force any belief system on you, but they do expose you to an alternative lifestyle in a very intense way, and through osmosis you take in a slew of new experiences and thoughts that inevitably leave some impression, even when your mind wanders during meditation.
Then again, I'm pretty sure that my real meditation started the moment I stepped off that plane in Auckland, and the drifting in and out is just part of an out-of-body experience on the other side of the world.
Cheers,
rb
No comments:
Post a Comment