Can paradise ever be present in a world of seemingly never-ending battle? That is the query the essayist and journey author Pico Iyer poses in his newest guide, The Half Identified Life. People have lengthy deserted the thought of a bodily paradise (on a latest journey to Nigeria, my late mom’s devoutly Christian cook dinner was shocked to find that Jerusalem is an actual place, not only a metaphorical or fabled locale), but some proceed to battle for possession of sure conventional “paradises”, fuelled by non secular ideology. Iyer – a well-liked TED Discuss speaker and good friend of the Dalai Lama – takes us on a world tour of locations so contested that they’re now the very reverse of heavenly as he explores the idea of paradise and the way we outline it.
His prose is a balm, wealthy with references drawn from literature, faith and philosophy, that are woven into journey vignettes. In Iran, the land that gave us the phrase (paradaijah), he finds ambiguities and competing visions of paradise: whereas the ayatollahs declare that it lies in heaven, the place martyrs relaxation, Iyer sees atypical residents discovering their paradise in romantic canoodles in public gardens, or in unlawful intoxicants. He additionally meets a person who sneaked into Europe through traffickers and rhapsodizes concerning the pleasures of western life. But Islamic devotion compels this man to tiptoe again into Iran to go to a holy shrine: he’s a deeply Islamic soul who didn’t want to reside in an Islamic Republic.
People are a contradictory species, projecting their contradictions and interior conflicts onto their notions of paradise. We are likely to demonize the unknown, but we regularly imagine that heaven should exist on the opposite, unseen facet – the fourteenth-century fabulist journey author Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo each pretended that they’d seen Sri Lanka’s legendary sacred mountain, Adam’s Peak.
Locations could be thought-about heaven and hell concurrently, and Iyer witnesses this duality wherever he goes: sectarian Belfast is the setting for Van Morrison’s nostalgic lyrics; Kashmir, the splendorous valley admired by the traditional Persians and Led Zeppelin, is choked with barbed wire and armed patrols. In Jerusalem varied Christian sects come to blows over the Chapel of St Michael. That metropolis serves as a warning about what occurs after we assume we all know all of it. “It was dangerously straightforward to imagine that what we do with heaven is much more necessary than what heaven does to us”, Iyer writes. Attempting to know the whole lot, or insisting that we all know the solutions, is our nice folly, the very seek for paradise usually aggravating our variations.
The pursuit of happiness is sensible to Iyer when seen via japanese ideas of paradise, which differ from western concepts of linear progress in direction of a greater future. “A real paradise has which means solely after one has outgrown all notions of perfection and brought the measure of the fallen world.” He cites Adam and Eve, who needed to go away Eden after succumbing to the lure of the serpent; and Buddha, who needed to stop his childhood palace with a view to confront illness, outdated age and loss of life.
A stage of asceticism is vital. When a hearth destroyed Iyer’s home in California, he lived in a hermitage and located a “paradise of readability”. The absence of possessions and selections was paying homage to his joyful college days, in all their restriction and ease. Within the Australian outback he finds Aborigines who don’t perceive why Europeans enter a particular home to attach with God, when the “Promised Land” is solely the terrain surrounding them, a “scripture, throughout which they wander”. They’re subordinate to nature, accepting of its cyclones and venomous snakes, in contrast to the Europeans who publish warning indicators about each environmental hazard.
Iyer goes on to discover attitudes to loss of life, stopping off in Varanasi, the Hindu centre for pilgrimage, loss of life and mourning. Right here, loss of life is confronted frankly and fearlessly amid burning corpses – it’s a place the place sadhu holy males paradoxically discover purity and holiness in foetid river water. These individuals don’t flee from sorrow and trauma; they embrace it. So too does the Dalai Lama, who has no real interest in “paradise”; he prefers to steer a lifetime of service to others and discovering which means in what we are able to do right here and now. “You bless your self along with your actions”, he says.
Recalling how the Zen trainer Eido-roshi, referring to Jesus on the cross, stated “The wrestle of your life is your paradise”, Iyer decides to let life come at him “as it could”, having realized that he has by no means had management over the sources of his fortunes or misfortunes. He admires the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who discovered this spirit within the Buddhas, “smiling at the whole lot, questioning nothing, realizing the whole lot, rejecting nothing”.
Is that this a revelatory outlook? For some, maybe, although one senses that it applies extra to those that have company. From the Dalai Lama and the jet-setting center courses to sadhus in Varanasi and hermitic monks in Japan, Pico Iyer’s exemplars have the privilege of selection, to some extent. What of the trafficked intercourse slaves or the person who witnesses the slaughter of his whole household – can they discover paradise anyplace apart from the afterlife?
Noo Saro-Wiwa is the creator of In search of Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, 2012
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