I drew my shawl tightly around my shoulders even though the searing-hot desert sun ensured there was no chance of cold. I bowed my head and looked at my Reebok takkies and I could hear my mother chastising me about how awful it looked when I wore takkies with a punjabi. The stern note in her distant voice comforted me as I steeled myself to watch my first cremation.
There was silence, except for the wind, which caused the flapping of white shawls on several hundred people’s shoulders. Rajasthan is a semi-desert, mountainous state in northern India. I was 21 and on a spiritual retreat in an area known as Mount Abu, which is about as beautifully arid as a landscape can be.
The desolate, undulating terrain that was the cremation ground was broken up only by burnt rocks, which stood in stark contrast to the sea of white that had descended for the funeral.
Wearing punjabis, saris and kurtas, people from across the world stood in silence. Nobody cried. And the strangest thing for me was the complete lack of histrionics despite the fact that the person who had passed away was Indian.
I started meditating when I was 17, hoping that it would help me focus while studying for my matric exams; surprisingly, it did.
I did a free seven-day course with the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University and although it didn’t instantly change my life, it has been changing my life ever since.
The BKs, as they are known, are an interesting assortment of spiritualists and it’s the variety of people I encounter at their meditation centres that continues to draw me back to them every so often. People of all religions are BKs, including Hindus, Jews, Muslims and Christians.
It’s called a university because, according to them, spirituality is something you study and practice on a daily basis; it’s not a once-off everything-you-need-is-in-this-package deal. One of the aspects I appreciate most is the way in which you are supposed to relate to people as souls; if BKs were forced to describe someone by a racial definition, it’s the intriguing concept of a ”black-bodied soul” or a ”white-bodied soul,” and so on.
Hinduism was proving far too patriarchal for my liking, and though there are aspects of the religion I identify with, there were just too many things that confused me. Meditation offered a welcome alternative to calm my teenage nerves.
But it was only when I went to the university’s international headquarters in Rajasthan that I began to understand what spirituality was about and how easy it could be to live my life by simple principles such as the law of karma.
I was 21 at the time and an important administrative member of the organisation had passed away.
Of course, the foundation of Raja Yoga, the form of meditation the BKs teach, is that every person is a soul, not has a soul, but is a soul that resides in a body and obviously leaves that body after a period of time.
As a Hindu I’m accustomed to the idea of cremation, but had never been to a cemetery before, so an open-air cremation was quite something to witness.
At a Hindu funeral it’s customary to wear light colours, but the BKs wear white and on that day the entire village in Mount Abu was over-run with people all decked out in white.
A short walk through the village and we were at the cremation grounds where a pyre stood atop a small hill. I know it sounds weird, but few things I’ve seen were more beautiful than that scene.
An outsider would have thought the silence and the setting eerie, but it wasn’t to me.
I wasn’t very close to the pyre. I didn’t want to be, but when it was lit, I felt its heat. It wasn’t a fire that battled or stuttered to life. It was almost as if every piece of wood beneath her and around her on the 1,8m pyre was instantly ignited.
The pyre, which was about 2,4m long and 1,2m wide, was made up of neatly stacked, criss-crossing logs on to which the body was placed. A pile of thick, slow-burning logs was then placed on the body and after about six hours the ashes were collected and immersed in a river. You don’t see or smell the body because the pyre is usually drenched in oil, but I didn’t stick around long enough to watch the body disintegrate.
We stood in meditation for a few minutes after the fire was lit and then started to leave. As we walked through the dusty town back to the university’s headquarters, occasionally stopping to allow a jaded cow to make her way through the large groups of people, I realised that everyone was calm and collected. Contrary to most religions, there was to be no mourning period.
I know from BK teachings that we’re not supposed to grieve when a soul leaves its body, but that’s such a completely foreign idea. In theory it seems easy to accept, but in practice it’s nigh impossible. Three years after my spiritual journey I witnessed my only brother die and in November last year my father died. I wasn’t nearly as accepting of their deaths as I could have been.
In fact, I was a bit of a mess, but you wouldn’t have known because I’ve turned suppressing my emotions into an art form. Even if I had continued with daily meditation I don’t think I would have been able to let go of them any easier, so it does make me wonder how BKs achieve this elevated outlook.
One of the founding members of the BKs, which was established in 1936, was Dadi Prakashmani, who, together with the other members, helped build the organisation into one which has established over 6Â 000 meditation centres in about 90 countries.
Prakashmani was instrumental to the organisation’s growth, yet when she passed away a few months ago there were again no calls for mourning. Instead, a message was sent around the world to celebrate her life, to remember the sense of serenity with which she carried herself and to educate people about her life in the hope that they could extract something useful from the easy way in which she lived.
I suspect the BKs are on the right track despite my journalistic cynicism, which usually prevents me from believing in such New Age ideals. Their teachings and beliefs seem completely logical to me, but I know it’s going to take me a while to wrap my head around living a life in which I feel no attachment to people or possessions. Then again, maybe if I was a tad more consistent about daily meditation I wouldn’t be so intimidated by the idea of leading a slightly elevated life.
The Brahma Kumaris run free positive thinking seminars, meditation and self-empowerment courses. For information on their meditation centres throughout South Africa, check out the website: www.bkwsu.com