NOTE: I am just going to jot down what I've seen on the topic so
far...I have no big conclusions or stuff and the post might turn
long. But I am hoping that if I write things down it will bring some
clarity on it to my head also :)
Religion is a big thing here. I am assuming it is in all of South
East Asia, but the fact that in Malaysia you have so much ethnic and
religious diversity, makes things more complicated. Or more
interesting. Depending on how you want to take it.
One of the things that I really like about the environment that I
am currently in, is that it gives me the chance to talk and get to
know locals from all layers of life. The students here are coming
from villages in the middle of the jungle and are Orang Asli. Some of
the teachers around are people from poor backgrounds that have gone
through the program of the NGO and have now reached a better status
(for them I mean:)). Some of the people working in the organisation
(in proper jobs in functional departments) are highly educated
people, very worldly and having been exposed to many many different
things. Getting to know people here is somehow very easy, so you can
end up talking politics with your Uber driver quite naturally. Yes, I
am a big user of Uber nowadays and I must say that one of the reasons
is also that the drivers are generally middle class people that are
very willing to talk and share stuff. Also, it feels safer than the
taxi. Much safer :) Then there's other people we met through going
out and stuff. My point being: the exposure to the local feel has
been much greater than I had anticipated.
Throughout all the meetings, conversations and such, a topic kept
coming back. First it was mainly among the foreigners working for the
organisation. I kept finding myself in situations where "ghost
stories" would be told. By quite pragmatic and not easily to
influence people. I sort of dismissed it in the beginning but I found
it very odd that three days in a row, with different groups of
people, the conversation would turn to ghosts and spirits.
When I visited the centres, things started to make sense. The CDO
at the last centre (a Serbian guy mind you) started telling us how
spirits have utmost power in his village. How people just leave his
classes all of a sudden because a spirit has been unleashed (he does
not always figure out how that happens), how they get scared all of a
sudden and tell him to go inside also, how they always burn incense
and how the shaman in his village does not want to talk to him about
such things (as it is not to be spoken of!). It started becoming
clearer...people were always talking about spirits because they were
being constantly exposed to such beliefs in their communities.
That was all very nice and interesting, but I also had a
dismissive attitude...people in villages have the strangest beliefs,
after all! :) So I was really surprised when on Friday, a guy from
Indonesia started telling us very seriously about the spirits in his
home town. We had been mentioning that we would like to visit him
there - he went on seriously about how it depends on the period. How
you would not want to be exposed to spirits you cannot handle and so
on. My first reaction was making fun. But I realised that the
university educated, IT programmer, living abroad guy was actually
very serious. The NGOs IT manager joined in the conversation...by
this point I had a million questions that I just fired away (I still
need to learn that bluntness is not as appreciated here as it was in
NL :)). Their point of view was that they are not religious but they
do believe in various things gathered around from various religions.
Not the type of "I'll take what suits me best from each of these
religions" thing, but more the "I've seen, read, listened
to, talked to various people and here are the conclusions I've
reached so far" thing. As a consequence I got to hear the story
of the pragmatic guy going to the shaman and trying to explain to me
why he was doing that. The story of relatives of theirs going in
trances and not remembering things afterwards. Stories of how they
were affected by random things that they could not explain.
The whole evening and the conversation was surprising and
conflicting on some level. I am still not sure why, but some of the
things I tracked down are:
- The conversation is carried out at a totally different level
than in Europe, and definitely than in the Netherlands. I don't even
mean a higher or lower level, just different. There is so much more
direct contact with various forms of beliefs and religions here, that
the discussion even starts at a different point. Christianity is
almost the boring part of it and everybody knows so much about all
sorts of different types of beliefs and religions.
- Things are blurrier here. In Europe I had the feeling you got
the believers and non-believers. The grey area here is much
larger...first the question of which ethnic group you belong to comes
into play. Then the “what religion you have?” appears (by the
way, I was reading a story of how you always need to tick a box with your
religion here when filling in admin papers – the option of No religion does not
exist :) YOU MUST BE SOMETHING!!!). Then the “I believe that from
that, and the other one from that, and some more from that” thing
appears.
- I got intrigued by the spirits and shaman stories. In Romania
you would have people possessed because of bad deeds they or their
ancestors did. Here you have spirits being taken on by specially
selected people as part of rituals, good spirits that come if you
pray for them, evil spirits that actually take over your body and
mind due to something you did in a past life - there's also some
interesting theories about how that comes to happen. It seems people
actually sort of choose their spirit, in the sense that the spirit
stems from weaknesses of the person's past life, or from events that
the person has not learned what they were supposed to.
- I am sooo ignorant! :) Most of the things they were talking
about, I sort of had some knowledge of. But I realised how limited my
understanding is. And how unused to having such conversations I am.
It made me wonder if I would have understood better, had I not spent
so much time in NL. By that I do not mean that the experience in NL
has been in any way bad. Just that it seems that the exposure to
spirituality there is very different. Maybe only because it does not play as essential a part there as it does in every day life here, or
even in Romania.