Sailing
to Ithaka
Anniversary Reflections
By Marcus Bolt
Click
this link to read the PDF VERSION of this article
Click
this link to SEND FEEDBACK on the article
Click
this link to VIEW FEEDBACK on the author's articles
Part 1: An
Ongoing Odyssey
On
Friday, the ninth of October, 1968 at 8.00 pm, I entered the rented, octagonal
Quaker Hall located in Stevenage (UK), took off my shoes and glasses, and,
while attempting to ‘ignore those exercising around me’ as requested, was duly
opened in Subud.
Despite
our being aware nowadays that measurement of time can never be exact and that years vary in length, anniversaries, it
would seem, still help to satisfy our desire for order and meaning (hence
annual celebrations of birth, wedding and Holy days). And it is a
well-documented phenomenon in counselling circles that anniversaries of
personally important events often bring up a wealth of emotional baggage and,
if the events were traumatic or life changing, can give rise to much
soul-searching.
The
forty-third anniversary of my Subud Opening is, for me, no exception and the
soul-searching question I’m asking myself is, ‘Has the Subud latihan delivered
what it promised on the label all those years ago?’
While
floundering for answers in a sea of uncertain memories, confused feelings and
conflicting understandings, I serendipitously came across this remarkable
little poem. It’s called ‘Ithaka’ and it reprises Odysseus’ journey as an
allegory of human life. It was written in the early 20th Century by the Greek
poet Constantine P. Cavafy and translated by Philip Sherrard.
As
you set out for Ithaka
hope
your road is a long one,
full
of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians,
Cyclops,
angry
Poseidon — don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll
never find things like that on your way
as
long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as
long as a rare excitement
stirs
your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians,
Cyclops,
wild
Poseidon — you won’t encounter them
unless
you bring them along inside your soul,
unless
your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope
your road is a long one.
May
there be many summer mornings when,
with
what pleasure, what joy,
you
enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;
may
you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to
buy fine things,
mother
of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual
perfume of every kind —
as
many sensual perfumes as you can;
and
may you visit many Egyptian cities
to
learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep
Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving
there is what you’re destined for.
But
don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better
if it lasts for years,
so
you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy
with all you’ve gained on the way,
not
expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka
gave you the marvellous journey.
Without
her you wouldn’t have set out.
She
has nothing left to give you now.
And
if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise
as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll
have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
As
I read the poem, it became, for me, a near-perfect analogy for my latihan
journey to date. Having a teleological mindset, I too perceive ‘Ithaka’ as a
goal. When I first started latihan forty-three years ago, this goal was simply
to find my true self; and when I first joined, it did indeed seem like arriving
at a new port, packed full of fine things and sensual perfumes. But then, as
time passed, I bought into the Subud culture wholeheartedly, because I needed a
sense of family, a sense of belonging, a sense of meaning and purpose to my
life — and I needed to feel special. Subud delivered in spades — it was
glorious and I loved being a member of the tribe, convincing myself I was,
after all, special and chosen. Ithaka then became a future Abrahamic-style
after-life — actually attainable by my soul as long as I did my latihan
regularly over the years to come with ‘patience, acceptance and submission’ and
followed to the letter what the Divine Will pre-ordained for me. I believed
that what that actually was would be rolled out in due course.
In
fact, since being opened I have done two or three latihans a week without fail
— that’s about six and a half thousand — completed some thirty-six Ramadan and
a few Lenten fasts, read most of Bapak’s talks and probably every book written
about Subud, even written one myself and, most of the time, I’ve been a helper
or held a committee role. No ‘Divine Will’ in
the Subud sense has thus far been delivered.
I
did bring things with me ‘inside my soul’, for many years mapping my new
experience over my old, hanging on to such concepts as the perversely punishing
yet loving God of the Abrahamic religions, plus the lack of self-worth created
in my childhood — the Sufic/Subud ‘lower forces’ construct exacerbating the
innate Christian notion of being born in sin. Thus I convinced myself I was on
a low level and only years of latihan purification would take me to the true
human level and eventually raise my jiwa, my soul, to perfection and
guaranteed entry into the after-life. But, over this half-a-lifetime-plus, and
despite my diligence, I’ve had no spiritual revelations, no out-of-body
experiences, nor have I done any astral travelling; I’ve never seen an angel,
had any visitations or contact with dead relatives, seen any blue lights, felt
any inner vibrations — none of the plethora of documented Subud experiences.
So,
I began to ask myself if this meant I wasn’t made of the right stuff, that I
was too deeply flawed, too ‘dirty’ inwardly, or that my ancestors had been?
According to the Subud canon, that would be the case. But now, paradoxically
thanks to the latihan, I don’t believe that for a moment. I’ve never been
particularly promiscuous, I’ve never hated or wished anyone harm, nor robbed a
bank…. I’m OK, basically. And today, after a long journey, indeed ‘full of
adventure and discovery’, I perceive Ithaka as simply arriving at the moment of
my death with no regrets and a sense of having done my best. Perhaps this will
change yet again and I will, eventually, ‘have understood by then what these
Ithakas mean’.
The
‘arrival at new harbours’ I interpret as the discovering of fresh ideas and new
concepts; the collection of ‘fine things’ I sense as the gaining of wisdom
(through the experience of mistakes made as well as the grasping of both
contemporary and classical concepts); the finding of ‘sensual perfumes’ I intuit
as the enjoyment of all life has to offer: creativity, culture, sex,
friendship, close family and even my unique self. And I do think I am ‘wealthy
with all I've gained on the way’, believing that my latihan experience has made
me realise I am rich in my own, unique way, and that the reward is the journey
I am on — my life now, not an imaginary future state of bliss.
So,
now, forty-three years after being opened, what have I got to report? There has
been much inner change in terms of personal psychology, in that I no longer
feel a victim or, when things don’t go according to plan, that an avenging God
is punishing me. Happily, I can say there are still ‘summer mornings when, with
what pleasure, what joy, I enter another harbour I’m seeing for the first
time’: a new place, with different and more exciting fine things . In other
words, life is still inspiring, creatively stimulating and well worth
living. One ‘fine thing’ that has taken
me completely by surprise is the development within myself of empathy to the
point where watching the evening news can be too painful to bear….
So,
yes, Ithaka has given me a marvellous journey and I do feel wealthy with all
I’ve gained on the way, particularly all the positive changes within me, and I
would recommend the latihan experience and its individual process to anyone,
and in that sense, the latihan has delivered what it promised on the label.
But,
hey! I’m reading the poem this way, correlating it to my latihan experience and
making the associations and assumptions I’m making, because that’s the way I
am; and I am the way I am in my seventieth year because of what I have
experienced on my so-far lifetime’s journey to my personal, and ever-changing
Ithakas, interpreted through my conditioning. It couldn’t be any other way.
A
theoretical physicist would tell you such an interpretation is bordering on the
anthropic (the cosmological principle that we see the universe the way it is
because, if it were different, we would not be here to observe it). But that’s
to be expected; it’s what humans do. We’re hard-wired to create meaning out of
chaos, but the meaning we create can only relate to the program that’s been
uploaded in our genes, through our ancestry, our culture and our familial
upbringing. The whole is then constantly modified by our life experience ‘as we
go’.
Thus
I’m certain we all create meaning from the raw material ‘out there’ through our
inherited and experience-tinted lenses and, in particular, our ‘culturally
translatable replicators’ — our language — whether we be Christians or Baha’is,
Danes or Australians, football fans or academicians, peripheral or
fundamentalist Subud members.
In
my world, it appears that those with a religious bent, those used to, or
believing in (or even expecting), religious epiphanies, angelic visions,
manifestations of the spirit etc. will indeed experience these through the
latihan process, but again, only in relation to the depth of their belief (or
surrender). While, those who came into Subud through psychedelic or ‘mind expanding’
drugs, deeply imbued with Zen Buddhism, will be searching for and expecting Zen
moments of spontaneity, of selflessness, of
‘At-one-ness’ — and they will find them. Similarly, those with a more
psychological take on things will experience the latihan and subsequent inner
change as psychological events, catharses, or breakthroughs in self-realisation
on their personal road to individuation. And so on — all the multifarious
variations of experience depending on an individual’s mindset, adopted or inherited
belief system and cultural filters.
Basically,
what I’m saying is, in direct relationship to how deeply one can let it be so
(believe, surrender, submit), it seems to me now that the workings of the
latihan can be interpreted as whatever you perceive or want them to be. In
turn, to my mind, this broadens out the latihan, making it bigger than any
‘religion’. It becomes an aspect, mechanism or tool of Creation — call that
what you will: the Power of Almighty God, The Will of Allah, Dharmakaya, Tao, Prakriti…. Perhaps too, it’s what
Bapak meant when he said, ‘Everything is in the latihan.’
The
Subud Belief System
So
far so good… The latihan has done wonders for me in my own terms and I feel
full of gratitude for it (but to whom or what, I have no idea).
However,
I also sense a huge disappointment over the development of a restrictive and
narrow belief system within the Subud organisation, one which begets an
unwillingness to embrace the possibility of change and improvement through
analysis and questioning of its outer modus operandi — and I find this
ironic for an organisation that, on paper, is dedicated to change for the
better.
Most
older members still believe in, as I did for several decades, Bapak’s highly
seductive Sufism-based thesis that the world is constructed of four forces: the
material (which is responsible for our thinking), the vegetable (responsible
for our emotions), the animal (drives and passions), and the human (apparently,
a lower and a higher human force; Bapak is not clear on what part of our makeup
these are responsible for, but I would assume any quality that animals do not
possess — compassion, for example).
The
theory is that any one of these forces driving our mind, feelings, passions,
etc. (collectively called ‘nafsu’) usurps the role of our jiwa (inner
nature, or soul), which should be in control and fuelled by higher,
angelic/spiritual forces. The a priori assumption is that most humans are on
the material (or satanic) level and have undeveloped ‘jiwas’. This situation,
it is believed, has come about through the inheritance of past (ancestral) sins
and our own wrong behaviour. Thus the latihan becomes the instrument of
purification of an individual’s collective wrongdoings. The more one is
purified, the more one is able to receive guidance through surrender to
Almighty God, the ultimate aim being to become a true and noble human,
exemplars being Jesus, Muhammad and Bapak, able to follow unerringly what the
Divine Will prescribes for them while on this earth.
Consequently,
progress towards this ideal is judged by the faithful through the cultural
screen of Bapak’s and now Ibu’s talks, Varindra’s and other writers’ works and
a wealth of documented Subud experiences — plus an admix of the ancient
writings of the various Holy Books, with their confusing and sometimes
conflicting blend of traditional wisdom, folk lore and superstition.
Subud
has also developed, in line with all the New Religions, a tribal mythology that
believes it is the only true way and is sent by Almighty God to save the world.
These ‘moving forward while looking in the rear-view mirror’ attitudes (thanks
to Marshall McLuhan for that metaphor), coloured, highlighted, deemed important
or meaningful by the religious-minded, would be no problem if restricted to
individuals — but when the thesis is presented as mainline Subud, as a ‘one
size fits all’ tribal belief system, something has gone horribly wrong. Then,
to me, it’s as though Subud, the organisation, becomes merely the box that an
exciting gift once came in.
To
my mind (or should I say my cultural
filters) it seems as though, since Bapak’s death in 1987, the Subud
Association, as a corporate whole, has slowly metamorphosed into an entity
reflecting the more obvious aspects of Bapak’s outer persona, presenting
itself, metaphorically, as an elderly, eastern gentleman, with all the
religious trappings of unshakeable and unquestionable belief in an Abrahamic,
punishing/rewarding God and deep reliance on the Holy Books for a narrow, black
and white morality. Not in itself a terrible thing — better than a Torquemada
or a Hubbard, I suppose. But, if Subud is essentially about change for the
better, about finding one’s own, unique self (which is how it was originally
sold to me), this restrictive, homogenising, Bapak-centric and religious view
of the latihan is surely counter-productive, particularly if one of the beliefs
is that the latihan is for all humankind.
I
think it unfortunate, or perhaps inevitable, that those who enjoy power, or the
organisational side of things, generally seem to perceive the latihan as
something of a religious nature. Consequently, their view, their take on
things, becomes the dominant ‘flavour’
in our outer dealings.
Such
attitudes within the Association do not affect me personally (to each his own),
except when I am asked about Subud. Then I can only describe my journey in my
own psychological/metaphysical terms and say how good the latihan has been for
me, asserting that I believe the organisation should be neutral in its presentation
of the latihan, and then feel obliged to warn that the Subud organisation,
having set itself up as a closed-loop, self-congratulatory system with its own,
narrowly defined, second-hand religious Ithaka ‘has nothing left to give me
now’ on a personal level… but it may, of course, hold something for them. So,
it’s a case of caveat emptor… you have been warned.
PART 2:
Arriving at a new harbour
‘We
are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.’ [Oscar Wilde]
While
I was struggling with this article, the term ‘universal intelligence’ came into
my mind. I had never, to my knowledge, come across the term before, so I
Googled it. The concept of ‘Universal Intelligence’ was first expounded by D.
D. Palmer in his 1910 book, The Chiropractor’s Adjuster in which he
wrote:
As
the Intelligent Energy that operates the human machine is derived from an
Infinite Source, the Universal Intelligence, and is, therefore, limited only by
the capacity of the brain to transform and individualize it, it is evident that
any excess, deficiency or irregularity of action, either of which is a form of
disease, must be due to some mechanical obstruction which prevents its normal
transmission. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._D._Palmer]
When
you clean out all the religious references within the Subud canon, you are left
with a philosophy that concurs fairly exactly with the above.
Before
I’d managed to lace all this together, I realised I had been thinking along the
same lines. To me, the term had meant the ability of energy, whether in human
or animal, insect, plant or material form, to organise itself in relation to
its environment. Everything that exists, it seems to me, is a manifestation of
an Intelligence that is superior to the organism’s comprehension, whether
individually or grouped. Everything in the universe chemically interacts,
reproduces, finds sustenance and manages to survive (or evolves to a surviving
species). It would seem that everything is in
contact with a universal intelligence that knows what to do….
Theoretical
physics today posits that before the existence of the universe we know, energy
was in equilibrium, or symmetry, as anti-matter constantly cancelled out
matter. Somehow, the symmetry was broken and all the matter that exists was
created in the Big Bang, initially as elementary particles. From this developed
giant clusters, which collapsed then exploded, forming more and more complex
atoms, then grouping into suns and galaxies and planets, creating ever more elaborate
molecules until life developed, eventually giving rise to sentience and
creatures such as ourselves with the ability to observe, measure and
conceptualise our own existence. It’s all so stupendously intricate and clever;
and had the Universal Intelligence got it wrong by a billionth of a fraction of
a degree, it could never have happened.
I
recently watched a TV programme about yellow slime mould (Physarum polycephalum). When placed on a sheet
of glass and presented with oat flakes matching the towns surrounding Tokyo, a
blob of this single-celled, brainless slime mould constructed a network of
nutrient-channelling tubes almost identical to the existing, highly efficient
rail network which was painstakingly created from the ruins of the war by a team
of talented engineers.
Then
I saw a clip on You Tube: a bird was being fed bread in a garden; the bird took
the bread and dropped it into the fishpond; when the fish rose to nibble the
bread, the bird snapped up the fish….
And
then there is the placebo effect. For example, in 2002, group of patients with
serious knee cartilage problems underwent a common type of knee surgery known
as debridement at the Baylor College of Medicine, but some were given ‘real’
surgery, others ‘placebo’ surgery (i.e. the placebo group were also
anaesthetised and the same key-hole surgery incision made in the knee, but no
actual procedure carried out). Throughout a two-year follow-up, the 180
patients in the study were unaware of which procedure they had received; those who
received actual surgical treatments did not report less pain or exhibit better
functioning of their knees compared to the placebo group. In fact, periodically
during the follow-up, the placebo group reported a better outcome compared to
the patients who underwent actual debridement.
These
stories stick in my mind, all seemingly having a common thread running
throughout, stimulating my cultural filters to now interpret my latihan
experience and the apparent cleaning up of my psychological act — all done by merely singing and dancing
around a hall for half an hour, twice a week over the last forty-three years —
as the most sophisticated placebo effect, but one that not only works on my
body, but also on my mind, feelings, emotions and innermost parts. In turn,
this sophisticated placebo effect appears to me as a mechanism of Universal
Intelligence — that which ‘knows what to do’ — whereas my mind alone most
certainly doesn’t.
Looking
back, I can see now that when I joined Subud forty-three years ago, I was
unknowingly seeking to re-contact that Universal Intelligence, that I already
‘knew’ that it existed and that I had lost contact with its guidance, but could
never have expressed that even to myself.
As
a corollary, I can only surmise that there must have been an element of wish or
desire to be opened already within me (interpreted in Subud helper terminology
as ‘readiness’). In turn, this leads me to believe that nothing whatsoever was
‘passed on’, but a self-permission was given for me to contact and release that
which was already there, and had been since conception, but was hidden under my
socio-cultural conditioning.
So,
that’s where I am today. You may not agree with me, you may pooh-pooh my idea,
you may already know more than I do, but it’s where I’m at. However, at least I
recognise that my understanding may change yet again, for my journey to Ithaka
is, I sense, far from over.
Coda
Last
night, during the emptiness that sometimes comes at the end of a physical
workout-style latihan, I became aware of myself looking up inwardly, directing
my awareness to where I guess I imagine my Creator resides…. It suddenly
occurred to me that I have done this throughout my forty-three years of latihan
experience and that this looking-upwardness is a deeply ingrained fixation
originating in my Christian cultural upbringing. Churches have steeples
pointing heavenwards, priests raise their arms in supplication, hymns proclaim,
‘Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! /Early in the morning our song shall rise
to Thee’ and classical religious paintings invariably show light and angels
descending from above and Saints gazing up to Heaven. And our language is
riddled with phrases such as ‘Heavens above’ and ‘it smells to High Heaven’.
I
then slipped into becoming aware for the first time that what I was attempting
to connect with was already within me, inexorably connected, because, just as
everything is, I and my Creator are one and the same thing.
Later
that night, I stayed up to watch ‘Beautiful Minds’ on BBC 4. This particular
programme was about Professor Jenny Clack, the world-leading paleontologist,
who made the breakthrough discovery that tetrapods (four-legged animals with
digits) evolved from fish-like creatures while still in the water, not on land
as has been assumed for a century or more.
She
ended the riveting account of how she tracked the fossils down by stating that
(I paraphrase), ‘What I constantly remind myself is that we, the human species,
are only temporarily here’, implying that we too will eventually evolve to
extinction and another species will rise in our place. When questioned on this,
she thought that perhaps the next species to rise would be the rodents.
Again,
I saw the Universal Intelligence evolving itself, rising to sentience in one
form, then another. What fun it must be (or we must be having) to do that over
and over across such an enormous time frame….