Eat, Pray, Love

Recalling these teachings as I ride my bike so freely in the sunset through Bali, I keep
making prayers that are really vows, presenting my state of harmony to God and saying, “This
is what I would like to hold on to. Please help me memorize this feeling of contentment and
help me always support it.” I’m putting this happiness in a bank somewhere, not merely FDIC
protected but guarded by my four spirit brothers, held there as insurance against future trials
in life. This is a practice I’ve come to call “Diligent Joy.” As I focus on Diligent Joy, I also keep
remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once—that all the sorrow and trouble of
this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-’n’-Stalin picture, but
also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes
of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to
those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and
self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you
out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only
then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.
At the moment, the person I’m enjoying the most is Ketut. The old man—truly one of the
happiest humans I’ve ever encountered—is giving me his full access, the freedom to ask any
lingering questions about divinity, about human nature. I like the meditations he has taught
me, the comic simplicity of “smile in your liver” and the reassuring presence of the four spirit
brothers. The other day the medicine man told me that he knows sixteen different meditation
techniques, and many mantras for all different purposes. Some of them are to bring peace or
happiness, some of them are for health, but some of them are purely mystical—to transport
him into other realms of consciousness. For instance, he said, he knows one meditation that
takes him “to up.”
“To up?” I asked. “What is to up?”
“To seven levels up,” he said. “To heaven.”
Hearing the familiar idea of “seven levels,” I asked him if he meant that his meditation took
him up through the seven sacred chakras of the body, which are discussed in Yoga.
“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 beauti-
ful 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,