Religion in Kali-fornia

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Jai Ma. Nice writing.

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FINDING MY RELIGION

Author Erik Davis on his new book and California's spiritual

landscape

By David Ian Miller, Special to SF Gate

Monday, July 31, 2006

miller (AT) sfgate (DOT) com

 

[Edited for brevity

See mention of the Laguna Beach Kali Mandir

near the end of the article.]

 

For the full article:

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-

bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2006/07/31/findrelig.DTL

 

 

If you're looking for a religion to call your own, chances are you

can find one in the sacred bazaar that is California.

 

Since the 19th century, California has been home to a myriad of

transplanted and homegrown spiritual and religious movements.

Writer Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner explore this

marvelous mystical mess in "The Visionary State: A Journey

Through California's Spiritual Landscape" (Chronicle Books,

June 2006). Davis' text delves into the history of religion,

California-style, and Rauner's photos capture the state's sacred

landscape, natural and man-made.

 

Davis, a San Francisco-based writer and culture critic with a

spiritual bent, is the author of "TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and

Mysticism in the Age of Information" and lectures frequently on

topics ranging from electronic music to the evolution of

consciousness. I [the interviewer, David Miller] spoke with him

last week by phone from San Diego.

 

[....]

 

Q: It's interesting that you decided to focus on physical places --

buildings, locations -- rather than on people to tell the story of

California's spiritual history. Why not the other way around?

 

It was important to me that the book had a strong historical arc.

I was as interested in telling stories from the 19th century as from

the 1990s, which meant that a lot of the people I'm writing about

were gone.

 

And I'm a huge spiritual tourist. I like to travel and go to sacred

sites. I've been all over the world -- to India and China and

Burma and all through Europe. There is something kind of

atmospheric about just encountering the places and the traces in

the landscape and the architecture that people, many of whom

are gone, have made. To me, it offers a more direct communion

with a particular spiritual or religious sensibility.

 

Q: And yet it's the people who built these buildings and who

sought out California as the place to pursue all these different

spiritual paths. What did you learn about them from studying

these places and their history?

 

Certainly in the 19th century, and through the 20th century as

well, California attracted a restless breed. These are people who

were interested in novelty, who came out here expecting there

not to be a dominant way of doing things. Instead it was more of

an open, do-it-yourself kind of environment.

 

California was one of the most cosmopolitan places on the

planet in the mid-19th century. You had people from China,

South America, Eastern Europe and the East Coast of the

United States. And suddenly they found themselves having to

interact in a world where there was no dominant belief system.

They needed to get by, and so a certain pragmatism about belief

and practice entered into the cultural bloodstream, if you will,

and that was followed by successive waves of people coming

here for health, to escape tradition, to find their fortune and to

dream their material dreams.

 

[....]

 

Q: Do you think that California has its own religion? If so, what

is it?

 

I would answer that in more of a cultural way, which is that

throughout much of the 19th and the 20th centuries and even

today, California has played a very important symbolic role in

American consciousness. It has played the role of simultaneously

being a kind of arcadia and a dystopia.

 

It's been a place of natural wonder -- when people talked about

the redwoods back in the 19th century, they were always

described as these Gothic cathedrals. There was something

about the religion of nature that manifested itself here as it did

nowhere else. And then in the 20th century, it's just the culture of

openness, of freedom, of invention, of the body, of youth, of

great weather -- all of these things created what you might call it

a pagan fantasy about the state and about the way people could

transform their lives when they came here. So there is a kind of

overt American religion of California, if you will, in the sense of

its role as a symbolic place.

 

Of course, the other side of it is that the opposite is true:

California becomes a dystopia. There is a Christopher

Isherwood line: "California is a tragic land, like Jerusalem, like all

promised lands." And the tragedy of California, or you might say

the tragicomedy, is part of its teaching. It's part of the deeper

core of its religion. The surface religion is endless summer. The

core religion is about the insufficiency of endless summer, about

engaging with restlessness, about what it means to be a modern

person seeking religion, seeking spiritualism but not being able to

tie into the [religious] traditions with a capital T.

 

[....]

 

Q: What did you discover while working on this book that

surprised you?

 

I was surprised by how long California has been the site for this

kind of different sensibility.

 

[....] The established Eastern states with their Protestant work

mentality didn't quite get a hold here in the way you might have

expected. San Francisco, for example, is the only city in the

history of the country that has basically escaped a Protestant or

Puritan influence. It's always been that way.

 

Q: Of all the spiritual sites you visited, which one sticks out in

your mind as being particularly special?

 

There is a temple in Laguna Beach that's dedicated to Kali,

[http://www.kalimandir.org/homepage.asp] the most fearsome

goddess on the planet. You know, the Hindu deity who is usually

pictured with fangs and a red tongue and a necklace of skulls.

And it's in a very humble little kind of California cottage, painted

yellow from the outside. What's interesting about the place is that

in the '70s all the Hindu temples or neo-Hindu temples that were

founded by white people were always based on a guru and a

bunch of acolytes. It was all about following the teacher, and

then building these places where followers used to gather.

 

But Kali Mandir is much humbler. It's [run by] a couple of

monks. They do the pujas (rituals), which they have learned from

India. And it's very traditional practice, but there is no guru.

There is no teacher, no induction, no kind of regulations. And the

door is open. So all these people come through -- other neo-

Hindu people, Christian priests, hippies, neo-sadhus and lots of

South Asians. They are coming to a temple that's open and

American in a sense that most South Asian immigrant temples in

California and the country, which are based on regions and

languages, are not.

 

Q: What does that say to you?

 

To my mind it represents the sort of ethnic and spiritual diversity

of California all coming to worship this incredibly exotic

goddess, who herself represents a very deep strain of California

exploration into Tantra, into the body, into goddess energy. And

yet it's all packaged in this very charming, very ordinary humble

California bungalow in this beautiful little canyon. There is

something about all of those elements together that for me really

struck a note, both about the reasons we still practice religion

and the power of gods and goddesses who still call to us even if

they come from across the planet.

 

[....]