The Mysterious Creature

Catapulted into global consciousness by Eat, Pray, Love and populated by seekers, healers and floating yogis clutching green juice, I arrive in Ubud fully aware of the cliché, trying not to be too icky about it.

I haven’t come to Bali to find myself or to have a spiritual experience.

My belief has always been that Life itself is the ultimate Mysterious Creature: a sentient force that presents us with experiences and obstacle courses, highs and lows that refine and transmute us during our brief walk on this earth. It exists everywhere … not just in India, or churches, or temples, or Bali.

That said, it’s impossible to ignore that this island carries a deep, ancient and finely tuned spiritual tradition. One that seems to encode the principles of magic … a way of communicating with that Mysterious Creature.

These principles are choreographed into daily life, practised collectively, and the compounded energy of them pulses from every shrine, temple and volcanic stone statue.

This interests me, partly because I can feel the potency of it. Partly because I want to understand this particular magical language.

Partly because I want to plug into the circuit board and feel the electrical current.

“How do I get inside it?” I ask Sally on our first night in Ubud.

Sally is John’s sister. She has lived and worked in Bali for over twenty years, her life elegantly woven into the fabric of this land and its people. She moves respectfully with tradition while stitching her own philosophies into the gorgeous champur patterning of her life here.

“I think you need to do a water ceremony,” she says. “It’s for purification, and it’s a good way of connecting with Bali, of respectfully letting it know you’re here.”

The next morning we rise early and travel to a place most tourists will never see: a hidden temple, deep in a jungle gorge, used for hundreds of years for prayer, meditation and purification. We’re allowed to enter only because Sally’s children are Balinese, family opening a door money can’t.

The path begins quietly. One moment we’re standing among banyan and frangipane trees, wrapping ourselves in sarongs and sashes. The next, prayers and offerings have been made at the gateway and we’re descending a snaking stairway into the jungle.

With each step down, the sound of the world softens. Human voices fade, replaced by water, insects, our footsteps on stone.

I feel watched, as though the trees are observing us.

We reach a ledge where water pours from the wall into a pool. Dupa smoke curls through the humid air. Prayers are whispered. Offerings placed. Sally shows Reid and me how to take handfuls of water, splashing face, shoulders, lips. At each stage, each offering, each gateway, she explains how we are moving deeper into the layers of Balinese magic.

At the innermost shrine, we’re guided through the final ceremony: embedding negative energy into a small cone of blossom and pandan. Holding them tightly, we wade into a pool formed by two waterfalls bursting unapologetically from the rock.

I wait my turn.

Feel weirdly nervous.

I watch family members duck under the falls, one by one, releasing their cone, then bracing themselves against the rock. I see how they tilt their faces forward to create an air pocket, resisting a death by waterboarding.

Then it’s my turn. Pressing the cone between my palms as Sally and her son showed me, I step forward and duck under.

In a split second the cone is torn away.

Gone!

Never to be seen again.

The force of the water anchors my feet to the pebbled stones. It engulfs everything … pummelling my shoulders, thwacking my skull, hammering my skin.

It isn’t gentle and seductive like a Timote ad from the 80s. It is authoritarian. Powerful. All business.

It scours me like a woman scrubbing laundry against a rock. I am the laundry.

It scrapes like a blade being sharpened on leather. I am the leather, my surface almost violently worn away.

The water feels as though it’s stripping not just this life from me, but hundreds before it, flesh, bone, memory.

I feel grief.

A lot of grief.

Then I wonder how long I’ve been under.

Then I decide it’s time to come out.

We climb back up the hundreds of steps in silence. I feel empty … not hollow exactly, but still. And clean. Grateful to have been allowed inside the ceremony. Beyond that, there’s just the quiet.

I assume the purification is over but it isn’t.

In the days that follow, the mindsets that seemed to have been torn from my hair and fingers don’t return. I try to put them back on (my usual goals, ideas, ambitions, thought habits) but they just won’t stick.

It’s as though my Western mind, everything I brought with me from the UK, has been bleached. When I try to pull it back on like an old pair of socks, it simply falls away again.

What I hadn’t realised was this: just as each shrine acted as a gateway, a threshold deeper into the temple’s magic, the entire water ceremony itself was a much larger gateway … one that opened into something far bigger.

Which brings me back to where I began.

I still don’t believe the Mysterious Creature lives ONLY in jungles or water temples … as sacred as they are … but I’m now convinced more than ever that they act as a powerful and functional entry points / gateways that make accessing it easier to penetrate that field.

The prayers, smoke, offerings and movements acted like an activation code, amplified by the number of people who have completed the process over hundreds of years. The “ceremony” seemed to initiate a larger purification, one that might allow a closer, clearer relationship with that great Mysterious Creature that moves through everything.

(Not just here, but everywhere.)

And the fact that I’d now been rinsed, bleached, battered and psyche-scrubbed meant I could take a step closer to plugging into the current, right?

Erm, no.

Ubud wasn’t done smashing me about yet.