Sabu Oracle
Before the trek, we drive through a desert and past dozens of squatters' houses - in Ladakh, a squatter isn't someone who is living in a home that isn't theirs, but a person who builds a part of a house on a piece of land to claim that property on the off chance that development comes to it. The leaders have told us that we are going to visit the Sabu Oracle - essentially a woman who the Buddhists and local villagers believe has the ability to be possessed by spirits and then channel their supernatural powers to give advice to those who seek it.
We walk into a house that we've stopped at, remove our shoes, and enter a room with dozens of pots and pans hanging, mats laid on the floor facing incense burners and cups filled with salt, water, and candles, and a shaft of sunlight dropping through a hole in the ceiling directly onto where I choose to sit. A woman enters the room looking haggard and with her hair wet, and kneels in front of the incense. She lights the incense and starts to chant, and the room fills with the scent of cinnamon. She begins to chant, quietly at first and then building to shrieks interspersed with singing. She throws salt behind her to the left, water behind her to the right. She sways back and forth. The incense seems stronger now, the sunlight more obviously on my face - I'm engaged in the process of her possession. The oracle begins to sweat, her hair even wetter than it was. Suddenly she stops swaying and lets out what seems to me to be one tremendous shriek as she turns toward the group - her eyes seem to roll back into her head. All is quiet, and the incense much less strong than before. Our translator and coordinator Namgial tells us that she is ready for questions.
She gestures to the first of us and they go up - I wait my turn as I hear some people ask intensely personal questions and I wonder what i should be asking - I don't have any deep seeded issues with myself or others and I don't want to ask about the future...I want knowledge about myself. Eventually I just decide to come up with the question when I get there. The oracle gestures to me, and I scoot in front of her, careful not to rudely let the soles of my feet face her.
"What is your question?" asks Namgial...
Then it hits me, something simple but that I've been wondering about myself for a long time.
"I want to know why it was so hard for me to come up with a question for you, Oracle, why I had such difficulty thinking of something that was important for me to have answered or affirmed. how do I come up with the questions I should be asking myself?"
The oracle rocks back and forth, throws some salt behind her shoulder, and slowly speaks in Ladakhi. I listen to the syllables and try to find hidden meaning before Namgial translates. The Oracle and Namgial share a conversation before I hear my answer.
"She says that you have a curious and active mind," Namgial turns to me and says, "but that you have a flickering consciousness. For you to know the questions you must ask, you must be in touch with your inner consciousness before your mind. She says that you must meditate."
I lean back disappointed at my answer. I was expecting something specific, something deeply personal, an insight into myself that I hadn't already been told by another Ladakhi. But meditation is a standard Buddhist practice here, and I had heard it. My skepticism in the oracle is confirmed in that moment.
I move into an empty space and allow the next student in after I am gestured away by the oracle, and I sit within my mind for a while. and then I notice that the sunlight from the oracle's ceiling is shining directly on me again, but I'm sitting in a completely different spot and not much time has passed since when I left. I don't know what I feel about spirituality but I did feel power sitting in the shaft of sunlight, the sort of thing I sometimes get when i look at a flower in the wind and my body tingles for no reason. Someone else is crying next to me, and I put my arm around them and pull them into my shoulder. I decide to meditate every day as long as I see fit. Maybe things at the Oracle's aren't so bad after all.