Rant: Closed Minds are a Wonderful Thing to Lose

[melayneseahawk]

So, today in music we watched this video about world music, i.e. the traditional stuff unpolluted by Western. . .oh, let's call it culture. One part showed this Tatric Buddhist ritual in which two girls are temporarily possessed by goddesses to chase pestilence away from their town. They go into a trance and then, with their eyes closed, do this dance both on the ground and in the air on people's shoulders before running through this fire and putting it out. The music is the driving force behind all of this, and helps the goddesses stay inside of the girls for the necessary amount of time. The whole thing is a little Twilight Zone-ish, since the girls do this dance almost in unison with their eyes closed and having never been taught it, balance on the men's shoulders with just their feet and no other support (not even hands on their ankles), and run through the fire with long robes on without getting burned. Two girls behind me (names not mentioned to protect the ignorant, close-minded, and stupid) could not understand what was going on. Now, this wasn't "I don't understand what the narrator is saying"; this was "How is this possible, this makes no sense!" They couldn't just open their minds to the possibility that there is something out there, something that doesn't fit what they've grown up with. I wanted to yell at them about it, but I realized there was really no point.

And don't even get me started on the Western sex phobia.

/rant