Subud: the Tribe
By Deanna Koontz
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Two years ago, after actively participating in Subud
for thirty-one years, I left. I did not want to leave. In fact, I was poised at the brink of a
significant psycho-spiritual crisis and urgently needed support. It wasn’t the time to leave. I had grown up
in Subud and it had been my primary community for my whole adult life. Subud was my foundation. But although I
desperately tried to get the support I needed, I could not and was forced to
seek help elsewhere.[1] In the midst of
the crisis, I did not understand what was happening to me. Having passed through it, I now do. It was a complex crisis and I will not air
the personal aspects of it. But I can
say, generally, that I simply grew out of Subud. Subud could no longer support
my individual growth.
“But wait,” you might say. “Subud is all about
individual growth! The latihan is completely tailored by God to the needs of
the individual. It has no limits!”
I agree. The latihan does support individual
growth. However, past a certain point,
the culture of the Subud organization does not. Rather, in practice, the culture exerts pressure on the
individual to line up with a central authority. It does this by providing no mechanism for (and to some degree by
suppressing) public questioning and doubting and also through the centrality
and authority of testing and the way that it is understood and practiced. If
Subud is to thrive, these factors need to be examined and corrected.
Stages of Faith
But before we look at how Subud is not able to support
all stages of individual growth, we need some idea of what those stages are. Stages of Faith: the Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for
Meaning by James Fowler and Finding
Your Religion by Scotty McClennan outline six stages of
spiritual growth that span from two childhood stages (“magic” and “reality”) to
three stages that most adults live in (“dependent”, “independent” and
“interdependent”) to a final stage that few fully experience (“unity”). Below, I have paraphrased the three most
common adult stages, which are the ones that concern us.
Stage 3: Dependent/Conformist
In this stage, individuals’ inner lives play out
within the context of a tribe. They
adopt the tribe’s perspective and embrace it as their locus of authority. The tribe is an extension of the family and
is structured like it. The mystery of the divine world is made concrete by also
structuring it as a family, with a personal, parent-like deity who takes an
interest in the lives of individuals.
The tribe may have little awareness of the metaphorical nature of its
myths and may hold its truths to be absolute.
Individuals tend to be conformist in that they are acutely tuned in to
the expectations and judgments of others in the tribe. The work of this stage
is to begin to develop autonomous judgment and individual identity. To move to
the next stage, the ego must be strong enough to withstand independence from
the tribe.
Stage 4: Independent/Individualist
In this stage, individuals withdraw from the tribe and
become focused on self, transferring the locus of authority to the self. The
work of this stage is to consolidate the sense of an individual identity,
reflect on tribal beliefs and construct an individual worldview better aligned
with personal experience. Often, this work is done through contrast with the
tribe—either/or thinking: “The tribe is/believes X, so I am/believe not-X.”
Through either/or thinking, the divine world may be rejected altogether, or the
deity may be reconceived as an impersonal force. Individuals become aware that worldviews (including their own)
are constructed. They also recognize that myth is metaphorical in nature. They
are relatively unaware of unconscious aspects of themselves that color their
perspective, thereby influencing judgment and behavior. In order to move to the
next stage, individuals must trust themselves, their experience and their
ability to align their worldview with their experience. That trust must be strong enough for them to
be able to re-open themselves to the perspectives of other people.
Stage 5: Interdependent/Holist
The work of this stage is to soften the boundaries of
the ego self consolidated in the Independent stage, and to develop the courage
to both be open to the perspectives of others and also tolerate ambiguity and
paradox. The newly emerging higher Self becomes the locus of authority. From a strong sense of Self, individuals are
able to be more vulnerable to and interested in the viewpoints of others,
including that of their childhood tribe.
They become able to see multiple sides of an issue, developing a
holistic, interdependent point of view.
Those in this stage see truth as relative to experience. They may return
to the faith of their childhood, better able to hold an individual viewpoint
while simultaneously living within the tribal structure. An increasing ability to tolerate mental
uncertainty opens up their perspective to a higher order logic; not only can
they tolerate paradox, ambiguity and mystery, some may delight in it. Life
itself may become a paradox in that they live their own beliefs fully while
simultaneously understanding that they may be incomplete and inaccurate. Myths and religious symbols de-mythologized
in the previous stage take on new spiritual power. For some, the divine is conceived of as both personal and
impersonal; others acknowledge the divine but are content to live without a
fixed image of it. Awareness grows of previously unconscious factors that color
their perspective. As these are worked
through and let go, the individual becomes more able to live in the here and
now and to accept what is and see it clearly.
My growth in Subud
Looking at my own development, I’d say that at the
point that I entered Subud, I was Tribal in some ways (in relation to my
family, not to a larger tribe) and Independent in others. It is hard to say. My parents had clear beliefs about having an Independent
perspective and strongly encouraged it in their children. But beliefs handed
down to children are necessarily dogma, because dogma is belief handed down
from a central authority. Children need to test out dogma before it becomes
true belief. It is impossible to say when some of my family’s beliefs truly
became mine. But for most of my early
Subud life, I was primarily Independent.
Later, I moved toward Interdependence.
The biggest rub for me was the way the divine is
modeled in Subud—as a personal God that has a will for individuals. I was an agnostic when I was opened and
continued to be for many years. I always felt very out of place in Subud in
that way. I felt no sense of a personal God, yet all of the people around me
(including my family) seemed certain that one existed and cared about us and
even had a will regarding us. Growing
up, I had little exposure to other models of the divine. For me, the choice was
this God or no divine, and I couldn’t make the choice for no divine. I needed
to think that the divine was at least possible because (I now know) I felt it
on a regular basis (though it didn’t feel personal). Although I occasionally acknowledged that I was an agnostic, I
generally kept quiet. When everyone around you seems to feel something that you
don’t have the capacity to feel, you think something is wrong with you. (This
is clearly Tribal thinking, although being true to my own experience was
Independent.) In other ways, I was able to be Independent, but in this way, I
was not.
About twenty-five years into doing latihan, to my
great happiness, I finally sensed the presence of a personal God. It was a
tremendous relief to finally be able to take part in discussions about this
God. (I had continued to do latihan not to come to this point but because I
enjoyed latihan and felt it tuned me up and nurtured my spirit.) But then about six years later, I realized
that I no longer felt this presence, but rather, strongly felt the absence of
it. This absence was a large part of the crisis that led to my leaving Subud. I
hit the point where I just really needed to be completely Independent and
needed support in order to align my beliefs about the divine with my experience
of it. I knew I couldn’t get that in Subud.
Before I left Subud, I was operating in many ways from
the Interdependent perspective. One
important way was that I was becoming increasingly aware of previously
unconscious aspects of myself. This new
experience was completely at odds with the notion of a personal God that cared
about me. I experienced great psychic tension because my understanding of God
was Tribal in nature, while my experience brought me to a stage of development
two steps beyond Tribal. As I see it,
the cultural insistence on modeling the divine as a personal God with a will
for individuals (and my own over-developed ability to doubt myself) held me
back from my own individual path. Had
there been positive cultural support for different understandings of the divine
in Subud, I not only would have been saved a good deal of pain, I would probably
still be in Subud. (And I believe it is Subud’s loss that I am no longer a
member—although I sometimes miss doing latihan regularly.) As it was, my crisis was like a slingshot
that propelled me from that held-back state through finishing up the Independent
work I needed to do and landing me squarely in the Interdependent perspective.
I live in that stage today quite happily and free of terrible psychic tension,
embracing its work with alacrity.
I want to emphasize the notion of “psychic tension”
here. In my experience, when the concepts the mind has to interpret experience
don’t line up with experience, and when the culture does not support a free and
easy atmosphere for discovering new concepts, it can create terrible psychic
tension. In a state of psychic tension,
the pain you feel is much worse than it otherwise might be. Now that I am in a place where my concepts
and experience align and I have support for working through any misalignments,
when I feel pain, the pain is less complex and it is easier to embrace it and
just feel it. These days, I actually don’t mind feeling pain. At times, I can
even appreciate the beauty of it. Not only that, psychic tension really drains
your energy. I am sometimes amazed at how much energy I feel these days, now that
I am in better alignment. My emotional energy levels are so high that I’m
having to learn not to take on more than my physical body can handle. Subud loses an awful lot of energy to
psychic tension. Think what more could
be accomplished with all of that lost energy.
Where is Subud?
While the latihan itself is not limited to any of
these stages, the culture of Subud is primarily Tribal and thus ill-equipped to
support the growth of those beyond the Tribal stage. A great deal of support for growth in Subud is done “in the
closet” by individual members, out of the sight of the official culture.
What makes Subud a tribe? Tribes conceive of the divine as a personal God that takes an
interest in the lives of individuals. God, or a person or group authorized by
God, is the central authority.
Individuals order their lives according to scripture or myths linked
with that central authority, and also according to group expectations; they are
conformist in nature. Independent
thought is discouraged, often through promoting the fear of terrible
consequences for leaving the group. Sometimes, the group believes that
something about them sets them above or apart from other groups—a correct way
of living or a special relationship to God.
The name Subud, Susila Budhi Dharma—“right living
according to the will of God”—suggests that the Subud tribe has a special
relationship with the divine, in part, because it has direct access to the
divine. For some, Bapak and Ibu Rahayu are central authority figures and their
writings have become scriptural resources for finding out what “right living”
is. For others, only God is the central authority. Testing is seen as a direct
line to God, so the fact that helpers in the hierarchical structure are tested
in makes it seem that they have God-given authority. This is especially true because those testing them are in a
higher position than they are. If they were tested in from below, things might
be different. The authority of individual members might be validated more.
As a direct line to central authority, testing has
become Subud’s central procedure. (In terms of the organization itself, because
almost all positions are tested in, testing has supplanted the latihan as
central.) What checks and balances are
in place in regard to testing? There
are none within the organization. How do you audit a test result? The only one I know of is trying out the
results of testing in the world. But by
the time you try out the results and they fail, you may have wasted a lot of
time and energy. The checks and
balances in place in regard to testing are all about “mental
interference”. In order to mitigate
against it, it is held that one should test with a group of people. In that
way, the different answers may add up to something closer to the actual will of
God. This process lends itself well to tribal “group think”. Whatever you do to get around “the mind’s
interference”, it is still felt that testing reveals the will of God, with all
the authority that that has. Once, when I showed doubt about the results of
testing, a helper who had on other occasions acknowledged the mental
interference factor told me that if I weren’t willing to follow the results of
testing, I shouldn’t test in the first place. In other words, there was no room
for questioning the results of testing, because it would be questioning the
will of God.
There really is little official room for questioning
anything in Subud. Not only that, questioning is suppressed by Subud’s cultural
bias against critical thinking. “The mind” is Subud’s bogeyman. Unlike many tribal groups, Subud does not
inhibit the questioning that might lead to Independence through creating fear
of terrible consequences. Instead, it
demonizes one of the faculties through which a growing spirit can seek the
space and nurturance it needs. My sense of it is that officially, no one
intends to use this anti-mind bias to keep people in Subud through suppressing
questioning. It is an unintended consequence of a bias based in the mind’s
interference with receiving and in misunderstandings of the mind’s role in
spiritual growth. But whatever the
intention, the anti-mind bias has the effect of supporting people in the group
still solidly in the Tribal stage and silencing those who are beyond it. Those who feel the impulse to accuse feel
little cultural pressure not to say, “You’re in your mind!” Those so accused feel little support for
countering the accusation. To do so makes you sound like you are more “in your mind”
than ever, so you tend to just shut up. It is nearly impossible to defend
against this allegation.
Subud can also exert tremendous tribal pressure to
conform to group expectations. Two stories illustrate. I generally avoided
large gatherings, where I encountered the Subud tribe in its most oppressive
form. A few years before I left Subud,
after another helper in my group convinced me that things had changed, I went
to a helper retreat. There, I witnessed a frightening scene—an act of violence,
as I now see it. An international
helper was leading some testing. During
the testing she made it clear that, in order to function effectively as a
helper, we had to feel a personal connection with Bapak. (Already
frightening—sounds exactly like fundamentalist Christianity.) I was shocked and did not feel that I could
speak out against this idea. No cultural support exists for speaking out
against an international helper (quite the opposite). A young woman, new to being a helper, became very upset because she
didn’t feel this connection. (I didn’t feel it either, but having been an
effective helper for many years without it, I knew the idea to be
hogwash.) The international helper
proceeded to form a small group to do special testing with the woman. I joined
the group, in horror, thinking that I might be able to talk to her later in
private and do some damage control. At
the end of the session, she was calmer.
The next morning I did manage to talk with her. When I brought up the subject, it became
clear that she had had a “conversion” experience. She now felt the personal connection with Bapak, so my
reassurances were not needed. A
born-again Subud member! She declared adamantly that this was all literally
true and became upset when I suggested it might not be. I let it go. It was clear it would do no
good to press the matter. She wanted to be where she was.
When the young woman’s experience had told her one
thing, the international helper told her not to trust her own experience and
then, through testing, produced for her a different experience. Under cultural
pressure, the young woman accepted the new experience as necessarily more valid
than her own. It was clearly important to her to be in Subud and so she changed
her own reality in order to fit in.
What this international helper did was an act of violence against the
young woman’s own process of growth and development. It was, in my understanding, abusive. It was accomplished in a
very caring, kind, calm manner. But it
was violent and abusive nonetheless—even more because it was done under the
guise of love than it would have been had it been done baldly and
honestly. At least then the violence
would have been more obvious. I wish I had had the courage to speak up, but I
did not. I would be able to today.
The other experience happened later, on the final
evening of the retreat. People sat
around in a large circle sharing. A
national helper described a receiving in which she was a part of a large chorus
of harmonious voices. The
conductor? Bapak. She did not preface
this description by acknowledging that this receiving was specific to her. Instead, after telling us her story, she
looked around at everyone, smiling, as if we were all singing together in her
chorus. A man on the regional committee
spoke up and said, “Well, I think of it more like jazz—we’re all improvising on
a chord progression.” I felt grateful
to him for speaking for the authority of the individual and against the
pressure to conform to Bapak as a central authority. The next morning, as we
were all preparing to leave, I found him and thanked him for what he had said.
I don’t remember his exact response, but I do remember clearly that he backed
off from what he had said. I also remember being very upset that I hadn’t found
the ally he had appeared to be. After
my experience with the born-again Subud member, I badly wanted an ally. Although he had shown courage the night
before, for some reason he could not accept my offer to be his ally against
this pressure to conform. Instead, he gave into it himself.
I never went to another retreat or congress.
Because Subud is a Tribal culture that offers the promise
of sure knowledge of God’s will, it attracts people in the Tribal stage who
need the security of certainty. And
because they are more in the ego stage of development, they have a greater need
to prove their worthiness through attaining high office and may end up running
the organization. In their hands, all of the ideas and practices that would
support a more Independent faith become a new kind of dogma (despite the claim
that Subud has no dogma). And a dogma that purports to be all about Independent
faith, a stage of faith in which dogma is left behind, can be very confusing
(especially to those like myself who grew up in Subud and had less exposure to
other faith systems). What people in
that stage of faith (and beyond) require is a process that supports individual
growth, not a new dogma about individual growth.
At the same time that Subud’s Tribal aspects attract
Tribal members, it also claims to have no dogma and touts the latihan as
completely individual in nature. Since
it appears to be at the Independent stage, it attracts people in that stage and
beyond. They are in for a big surprise.
Upon returning from her first and only congress, one woman in my group
exclaimed, “My God! I didn’t know Subud
had a Pope!” These people may stay for
a time, but more often than not, they leave. Those who stay may feel the need
to keep their spiritual individuality in the closet.
Where should Subud be?
In order to serve the needs of most adults, Subud
should be in the Interdependent stage.
What would that look like? Most
importantly, the Interdependent culture would create the conditions in which
individuals with diverse points of view could be safe in being who they are,
wherever they are on their spiritual journey. They should not be exposed to the
psychic violence required by conformity, but rather, to a culture that nurtures
spiritual individuality. It should
create many opportunities for safely and appreciatively sharing understandings
based in personal experience and bring in ideas about the life of the spirit
from a variety of different sources.
Above all, there should be lots of public space and encouragement for
questioning and experimentation, which bring fresh air and dynamic energy into
stagnancy.
Where I am now
As it happens, I am now an active part of a spiritual
community that, broadly speaking, is making the transition from the Independent
to the Interdependent stage. After my
crisis forced me out of Subud, I found an excellent, spiritually oriented
therapist to help me during my difficult passage and joined the Unitarian
Universalist (UU) church, where I found supportive companions for the
journey. I have been very active there
and was recently elected to the board of trustees. I say this not to tout my “success”, but to say that, as a board
member, I am in an excellent position to see the whole church, warts and all.
(And we do have warts.) Although in the
U.S., we are united by the UU Association of Congregations, UU congregations
are autonomous (Independent stage).
From my perspective, the programming of my particular church does a
solid job of supporting through the Interdependent stage within the church, but
it has not been able to effectively move out into the community at large to
support the process of faith development in society at large. (I suspect that moving out effectively into
the world at large is a stage 6 activity.
According to Fowler, activists like Gandhi and Martin Luther King were
stage 6.) But perhaps some of my
experiences in the UU church might be instructive.
In UU, we cultivate an ethos in which questioning and
doubting are recognized as playing a significant role in the process of
spiritual development, and thus encouraged.
We also do the “no dogma” thing better than Subud does. We do have seven principles that we
“covenant to affirm and promote” (see the appendix). But these principles do not guide our beliefs. Rather they attempt to set safe and
nurturing conditions in which members at all stages of faith development may
thrive. Through joining the covenant to
affirm and promote the seven principles, we support one another on our
individual (and collective) spiritual journeys. We describe ourselves as a
“covenantal” religion, not a creedal one. But we eagerly welcome ideas and
beliefs from any religion as possibly helpful or valid.
A big part of the UU ethos is that we all have a right
to believe and think what our conscience tells us to be true, but that the
search for truth is continual in nature. To continue that search, we come
together in small groups of various sorts and talk about our spiritual journeys
and how we understand them at the moment (which I’ve taken to calling “sacred
conversation”). But we don’t argue or
try to convince one another that we are right or someone else is wrong.
Questions about whether ideas are “right” or “wrong” are almost always seen as
off the point. Nor do we offer unasked-for advice. Like Twelve Step programs, we tend not to engage in cross talk. Like Twelve Step programs, we tend to focus
on ourselves and our responsibilities and understanding. The conversations tend to focus on the
bigger questions of life rather than discussing the intimate details of our
life problems. (And endless conversations about life problems were a constant
irritation for members of my Subud group who wanted something more. UUs who need to discuss personal problems do
so in private conversations.)
Another important aspect of the UU ethos is that we
must listen attentively with open minds and hearts to one another. We listen in
order to support one another. We listen
to one another in order to learn from and about one another. We may not always agree, but we believe that
“we need not think alike to love alike”. (Ferenc David, 1510-79—founder of
Unitarianism in Transylvania) And love
is the absolute center of the ethos and belief system. We try to listen and speak in love. We question and we doubt in love. There is a reason why affirming the inherent
worth and dignity of every person is our first principle.
In this open and supportive atmosphere, I was able to
question, doubt and explore new ideas safely.
After a time, I restructured my belief system in a way that better
aligns with my experience and supports my spiritual health. My experience is that something that feels
Divine to me exists in all living things around me. But I see no reason to
posit this Divine as in any way separate and above all that is around me, or to
think that it cares about me or has wishes regarding me. I also would never insist that this Divine
that I sense is real. It may be that my
felt connection with the Divine is a particular state that my brain gets into
that is good for my health. It doesn’t
matter if it is “real” or not. (And questions about the “real” are relative to
what kind of reality you are thinking about, anyway.) What matters is how the experience that I think of as feeling the
Divine around me supports me in living fully.
My experience says it is good and satisfying to be alive to this Divine
in all—to be here, now. My experience
says that it is wonderful and satisfying to embrace everything that life
offers—the “good” and “bad” equally—and live it vibrantly, but not be attached
to it, to let it go when the time comes. When I was in Subud, I pursued the
“good” and tried to avoid the “bad”.
Testing was used for those purposes all the time.
Oddly, now that I don’t test, and now that I really am
open to and accepting of most of life’s experiences (I still resist the most
difficult), guidance does come to me at times, in a way that I never felt when
I was in Subud. (At odd times and places, and never when I am seeking it.) And guidance always comes in a way that
challenges me to move further on the journey, not in a way that tells me it is
okay to limit myself. I don’t know
where my guidance comes from. I don’t feel a need to interpret it through the
lens of a particular belief system. (It may be coming from my subconscious mind
or from a disembodied spirit guide.... Who knows? Why would it matter?) I
do know that it always leads me to greater levels of aliveness, although that
may mean giving up an attachment. But the thing is it always comes at just the
moment when I am ready to give up that attachment. And by giving up the attachment, I gain something even greater.
From the perspective of doing latihan (which is, after
all, what Subud is supposed to be about), I don’t see any reason why someone
like myself should not be able to do latihan and not only fit comfortably in,
but be supported by, the culture of Subud.
I don’t see why an atheist should not be able to do latihan and not only
fit comfortably in, but be supported by, the culture of Subud. I see latihan as an altered state that is
good to be in and that supports the journey of the spirit (and you don’t need
to believe in any sort of God to know that we have a spirit that can
develop). Once you let go of the need
to securely know “the will of God”, you don’t really need to interpret the
experience of the latihan in any particular way. Just do it and experience its
benefits.
Besides that, I was told that Subud brings the
underlying reality of all religions back to the practice of the religion—that
the belief system of the religion was a blueprint and that adding the
experience of the latihan could make those beliefs into a three dimensional
structure. If this is so, it makes a
lot of sense to try to understand the spiritual journey fostered by the latihan
in terms of various religious beliefs.
While none of these viewpoints is in and of itself absolutely correct,
when you add them together, you might begin to approach something closer to the
real truth of the matter. Whatever it
is, it is certainly more useful to individuals to be able to sit and hash out
understandings themselves than to be fed understandings from some authority
figure.
In my UU community, I revel in an atmosphere that
promotes healthy questioning and in which conflict is seen as a healthy and
necessary part of growth. I love being
in a community in which I can easily speak up and point out to the minister
that he made an error in judgment, watch him realize the truth of my
observation, receive an immediate and sincere apology, and then thank him for
the beauty of his apology. I also love
receiving clear and honest feedback and offering beautiful apologies of my
own. Conflict is seen as a way for the
community to progress, as well.
Recently, in a small group situation, someone made a comment that hurt
my feelings. Comfortable with my open
and supportive group, I began to cry. I
could see from her response to my tears that she hadn’t wanted to hurt me and
had only overstated her wishes. The
group responded in a way that supported me, yet did not punish the woman for
her mistake. My hurt quickly
faded. I could see that it pained her
to have hurt me and was able to reconcile with her immediately and tell her how
much I valued her. I feel that our
group made real progress together through this simple, pure and beautiful, if
somewhat painful, event. In my
experience, such events rarely happened in Subud.
In sharing all of this, I am not trying to gain
converts to UUism, only to offer ideas for solutions to Subud’s problems. I would love to be able to rejoin group
latihan, but will not do so while Subud’s culture is unhealthy and
stagnant.
How can Subud get there?
Question everything, with particular emphasis on “why”, which gets at the meaningful heart
of the matter and “how”, which can lead to different, higher-order ways of
being. Ask: “Why do we do it this way,”
“Might this way harm or limit someone’s growth,” and “Is there a different,
less limiting way of doing it?”
• Question the uses and functions of testing. Why do we test about the things we test about? Why do we test so much? What would it feel like not to test? How could we accomplish the same ends
without testing?
• Question the organizational structure and the meanings of the
positions. Do we really need
helpers? How would it be if we just had
“timers”? How would it be if we allowed
members to gravitate naturally toward their own mentors? How would it be if we allowed leadership to
arise from the membership through demonstrated ability rather than being tested
in from above?
• Question the organization’s name.
What if, rather than “right living according the will of God”, the
foundational phrase were “living vibrantly and well, in balance with the web of
all life”? Have fun brainstorming new
central phrases to describe the organization’s goal.
• Question the need for an official version of God. Why do we promote only
one version of God and suppress others?
Find out more about other ways to conceptualize the Divine.
• Question what testing and the latihan would look like in a belief system
that did not attach them to “the will of God”.
What might be lost? What might
be gained?
You don’t always need to find specific answers to
questions. Sometimes just asking the
question creates needed movement.
Experiment.
• Try a moratorium on testing for at least several months. See what testing withdrawal feels like. See if you can find other means for the same
ends.
• Brainstorm a set of principles that creates safe conditions for people
of all stages to latihan and grow spiritually.
Try it on for a while. Tweak it when the need arises. If it doesn’t
work, try something else.
• Try coming together for sacred conversation. For a time, gently ban
Subud dogma. Start by noticing when it is used. As you become more aware of it, try to find more inclusive ways
of speaking. Doing so will help you become aware of it and its prevalence and
power. Read and discuss texts from various faiths. How do they relate to your
journey individually and collectively?
Remember that in doing the above, you are promoting
the growth of Subud’s collective life force.
Do it all in a spirit of play and fun.
It is serious work, but when you approach it in play and fun, you detach
from outcome and open up wonderful possibilities.
Above all, embrace one another tenderly, fully and
vibrantly, warts and all.[2]
..................
Notes
1. In
fairness, I want to state that I am positive that the individuals involved did
not understand what was happening to me, nor did they understand the depth of
my vulnerability. I am certain that
they did the best they could and do not hold them individually responsible for
the fact that I left Subud.
2. I’d
like to figuratively thus embrace the editors of this publication and add a hearty
thanks to them for opening up the space Subud so badly needs for questioning
and experimenting.
Appendix: The
Unitarian Universalist Principles
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian
Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote
• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our
congregations;
• A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our
congregations and in society at large;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a
part.