Clear the Path to the Latihan
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In order for Subud to operate in the world
with credibility, it needs to get out of its ‘spiritual egocentrism’ and
isolationism and start facing a world that tends to consider spiritual
movements with great skepticism and prejudice. We have to take this into
account, showing respect for others and for the ethical standards of society in
general and adjust our language and presentations of Subud accordingly. At the
same time we have to do this without compromising what we consider the core
values of Subud to be. The basic idea is that the presentation of Subud must be
adjusted to the nature of the audience—to the receiver.
—Recommendations
of the 2005 Subud World Congress Forum on Presenting Subud in the World: the
Image of Subud
The incredible shrinking Subud
Subud is not growing. Because it is not growing, it is
ageing. Because it is ageing, it will suffer a collapse in numbers over the
next ten to twenty years.
This fact is reflected in the statistics. The number
of Subud members over the last forty years has remained largely unchanged, at
10–12,000. We don’t know how many of those are active. Over the same forty
years, the population of the earth has more than doubled. Thus, although in
absolute terms Subud has remained static, in relative terms it is shrinking.
Subud stays the same, while the world around it grows.
This fact is also reflected in personal anecdotes.
Tony Bright-Paul, who wrote one of the very first personal accounts of Subud,
wrote recently of how many of the groups in the UK are composed largely of
members of his generation. He foresees that they—and their groups—will be gone
within ten years. He also tells of doing a telephone poll in the UK, calling
every group to find out how many applicants there were in the UK. The result:
in all of the United Kingdom, just one. In my group in Sydney, almost all the
members have been in Subud a very long time. Of those that are younger, almost
all are either the children of Subud members, or have come to Subud through
marriage. It’s very rare these days to meet a truly new member—someone who came
to Subud other than through family connections.
Subud’s Big Bang
The numbers and the stories suggest this: in the
beginning there was a Big Bang, during which Subud grew from virtually zero to
its present size.
One factor in the Big Bang was Coombe Springs. At
Coombe, a group of people who were waiting for something big to happen were
told by Bennett that Subud was that big something. They were opened. They
spread the news through their networks and families, who in turn became opened.
During this time, Bennett also wrote and lectured to the public about Subud.
Many of the personal accounts of Subud were written and published at that time.
These attracted further new members.
Another factor in the Big Bang was Eva (later Elaina)
Bartok’s spontaneous recovery from a condition that threatened the health of
her unborn child. Elaina attributed this recovery to Subud, and to Pak Subuh.
The story hit the cover of Paris Match.[1]
This was a boom time for Subud. Many people were
opened. At one time, the San Francisco group’s register of people opened
contained more than 5,000 names.
Through Bartok and Bennett, Subud was for a while in
the public eye. Because people knew about it, it grew. As Pak Haryono pointed
out in an article in Subud World News: this was really the only time it grew.[2]
After the Big Bang, Subud stopped communicating with
the world, and as a result entered into its long Steady State phase, in which
not much changed.
The marketing taboo
No matter how you cut it, people cannot join Subud if
they don’t know it exists. This brings us to a Subud taboo: marketing.
One reason it is taboo is that Pak Subuh issued a
number of injunctions on the matter of promoting Subud, and these have been
subject to numerous interpretations.
Another reason is that the standard descriptions of
Subud are not tuned to the place or the times. The explanations are framed in
terms of Javanese mythology and theology, and don’t bear much relevance to the
religious life of people in Chicago, Manchester or Kyoto. Now, you may say: ‘But
it makes sense to me!’ But you are the exception: the one that that joined; the
one that didn’t leave. Since culturally tuned explanations are thin on the
ground, people are more likely to remain silent rather than try to explain the
Seven Heavens and the Javanese Theory of the Nasfu to their co-workers down at
the office. Even ‘renewed contact with the Grace of God’, well: you could be a
Jehovah’s witness, couldn’t you? The thought of even trying to do so makes the
idea of marketing uncomfortable for many.
Yet another reason is that words like ‘marketing’,
‘promotion’ and ‘selling’ are haunted by certain false images. One image is of
the smarmy, foot-in-door, used-car-selling, slick and deceitful sales person of
Hollywood films. As one friend of mine asked, ‘What are we supposed to do? Go
round knocking on people’s doors?’ Happily, the answer is: no. As Isaac Goff
once pointed out: marketing is communication.
Construct a clear path
Good communication respects the audience.
In Subud, the purpose of the communication is to allow
people to walk a path. At one end of this path is a person who has never heard
of Subud or the latihan kejiwaan. At the other end is the experience of the latihan, and their own free
choice.
Respect means: no pressure, claims or propaganda.
These are disrespectful. It is also disrespectful to keep Subud a big secret:
who are we to hide what is good? It is disrespectful to describe it in a way
that makes the listeners’ eyes glaze over as they inch slowly towards the door.
Respect means providing a clear, well-signed path, free of hyperbole, free of
weirdness, free of obstacles.
Marketing is communication, and communication builds a
clear path. If we build a clear path, then Subud will grow.
This formula assumes the following:
1. The latihan
kejiwaan is or can be a good thing for some people—at least
more than the 10,000 or so who practice it today.
2. There are high levels of sincere interest
today in spirituality and spiritual practice. The absence of applicants and
stayers is not the fault of the world: it is a situation of our own making, for
which we need to accept responsibility.
3. There is so much garbage in the spiritual
marketplace, that people are wisely suspicious of grand claims. Grand claims
place obstacles between people and the latihan.
4. Few people walk the path to the latihan
because the path is so obscured, and so littered with historical, cultural, and
personal detritus that it’s almost unwalkable.
5. The latihan does not belong to Subud, it
belongs to humanity. Subud is only a caretaker of the latihan.
The rest of this article follows the steps an
interested person might take as she walks towards the latihan, and what
obstacles she might encounter. At each stage, I’ll suggest why the obstacles
are there, and how they might be removed.
STEP ONE: FINDING THE SECRET SOCIETY
Let’s imagine the spiritual seeker who is just like us
but without the accidental benefit of a relative or a John Godolfin Bennett to
introduce them to Subud. How might they find Subud? Put yourself in their
shoes, in the world somewhere, with this question:
“I am looking for a spiritual practice
which doesn’t come with any teaching to which I have to listen or guru to whom
I have to kowtow, which doesn’t attempt to interfere with my existing beliefs
or disbeliefs, and which doesn’t attempt to pick my pocket. Where do I find
it?”
The fact that there is a Subud page on the web doesn’t
help you, because you don’t know to google ‘Subud’. The fact that Subud is
listed in the phone book doesn’t help you, because you don’t know to look under
‘S’. There are 6.5 billion people on earth, and only 10,000 members, most of
whom keep pretty quiet about Subud—so you’re unlikely to find Subud by word of
mouth, either.
Obstacle: Subud’s culture
of secrecy
Subud tends to be secretive, beyond the
bounds of ‘no propaganda’. In fact, in so far as ‘propaganda’ means attempts to
make claims or sway people, Subud makes some fairly high-falutin’ claims, often
invoking God’s Will and miraculous events, when it does bother to publish.
These publications are, however, placed so that no-one is likely to find them.
There are a number of possible historical
reasons why this secrecy might have come about. These include traditions of
secrecy in Sufism, Gurdjieff, and Silat, all of which have had an historical
influence on Subud. The most compelling, to me, lies in the battle on Java
between two forms of religion: ‘abangan’ Islam and ‘santri’ Islam.
Abangan Islam is also called Kejawen,
Agama Jawa, or ‘the religion of Java’. It is the indigenous syncretic religion
that developed on Java over centuries. Like a layer cake, it it is constructed
from various influences, one on top of another. The oldest layer is the animist
layer, which gives us ‘life forces’ and various ancestor beliefs. When the
Hindu and Buddhist expansions washed over Java, the Javanese aristocracy added
another layer (‘jiwa’, ‘sukma’, the wayang
kulit with its Hindu gods). Later came the Sufi
missionaries—the famous ‘wali songo’ or ‘nine saints’—who brought not Islam, but Sufism, which incorporates
Islamic elements, but has otherwise long been in tension with Islam. Each of
these influences added to the religion of Java, without displacing the earlier
influences. Thus, we have in Kejawen the selamatan (from the animist period), the wayang
kulit (Hindu), samadi (Buddhist), and the hierarchy of heavens: material, vegetable, animal,
etc. (Sufi).
Finally, in the middle of the 19th
Century, traders, often back from Hajj, brought Meccan Islam to Java. Meccan
Islam did not assimilate into the Javanese religious melting pot. Rather, the
new Muslims saw this mixture as apostasy, and made religious war against it. On
its side, Kejawen continued to assimilate, pulling elements of Islam into the
mix, but giving them a uniquely Javanese ‘twist’. An example is Pak Subuh’s
stories of Sang Hyang Sis. ‘Sis’ is the Biblical and Qur’anic figure Seth.
‘Sang Hyang’ is an honorific given to Hindu gods!
Thus arose the split between the two forms
of Islam in Java: santri (purist) and abangan (traditional indigenous).
Pak Subuh was an abangan Muslim. He mixed Hindu theology and myths
with Islamic theology in his talks. He held selamatans. He hosted wayang kulit performances. He incorporated into his talks abangan myths about the Queen of the South Seas, and Anwar and Anwas. He gave
Subud a Hindu name. He claimed the title ‘Raden Mas’, a priyayi title from the upper crust of abangan society.
The conflict between santri and abangan was often violent. It culminated in 1965, when the Indonesia military
orchestrated the murder of between five hundred thousand and a million people.
Although nominally the massacres were against ‘communists’, in the political
divisions of the time, the PKI (Indonesian communist party) had attracted
primarily abangan followers from among
the rural poor. What started as a political battle, turned into a religious
massacre of santri
against abangan.[3]
As a result, abangan Muslims were deprived of their right to practice their religion, and forced to declare allegiance to one of the
officially-recognised religions, which included Protestantism, Catholicism and santri
Islam—but not the indigenous religion.
Pak Subuh’s explanations are steeped in abangan, in Kejawen.[4] For this reason, he would
have had to adopt a low profile to avoid this communal conflict. He would have
had to keep his talks secret, for members only, and avoided any form of
publicity. Consider the case of Ibu Lia Aminuddin, the leader of a small abangan group in Jakarta. She claimed to have
received the wahyu, and
to have channelled the Angel Gabriel. She was tolerated by the authorities and
the community, until she made the error of advertising her movement through a
local letter-drop. Her santri Muslim neighbours then became enraged, pelting her house with stones.
She was arrested, charged with blasphemy, tried and imprisoned for two years.
This is the reality of abangan-santri conflict in Indonesia.[5] And Pak Subuh’s necessary stance against
advertising would have influenced Subud around the world.
Indonesia’s history is indeed unfortunate.
But that misfortune should not determine the way we operate in the rest of the
world. Clearing the path to Subud means formulating our own communication
policies and strategies, country by country.
Obstacle: The myth of the
chosen ones
There is a common myth that you don’t find
Subud, Subud finds you. God picks you out and lays down a series of breadcrumbs
that leads you to Subud. This myth is supported by the ritual of the ‘joining
story’. ‘I was in a book store and saw a book about Subud, but didn’t buy it,
and then the very next day a friend of mine said, “You know, I’ve had this
strong feeling that I must tell you about Subud!”’
This myth absolves everyone of any
responsibility to be good neighbours to their fellow humans by providing timely
and appropriate information. That becomes God’s job.
To dispel this myth take a look at the
racial make-up of your country. Ask yourself if God is colour-blind. Then
figure out how many people of each race God would choose, if She were
colour-blind. For instance, in Australia, about 2% of the population are
Aboriginals. But 0% of Subud Australians are Aboriginals. In New Zealand, 28%
of the population are Maori. But I know of only one Maori in Subud New Zealand.
In the United States, 11% of the population are African Americans. In forty
years, I only ever met two African Americans in Subud, amidst hundreds of white
Americans.
Unless God prefers white people, this is
difficult to understand in terms of a divine trails of breadcrumbs. It is easy
to understand if people are joining Subud through diffusion of information
through personal connections—in other words, through earthly communication
channels. Clearing the path to Subud means taking personal responsibility for
constructing these channels, and not delegating or relegating them to God. That
in turn means making the channels more
democratic, more available, less dependent upon being a friend of a Subud
member.
Proposal: Modest
information through appropriate channels
The
10th Aim of Subud is: “To make available information concerning the Latihan
Kejiwaan of Subud.” Information is not available if it’s locked in a Subud library
in a Subud Hall. Information is not available if it’s on a web page lost among
100 million other web pages. Nor is it available if it’s pushed at people that
don’t want it.
Providing
information consists of two steps:
1. Analyse where interested persons are
likely to be, and how they like to receive their information, and then provide
them information in that way. This is the process of identifying appropriate
channels.
2. Provide the information in a form that is
simple, modest, and respectful of people’s existing religious beliefs or
disbeliefs. This generally involves being modest, and very cautious in the use
of religious language.
Example: In Sydney, cafés often post a wide range of
information about what’s going on in the city. Many organisations print
postcards and small brochures and place them in cafés. It’s a good place to
leave information, because people in cafés are often in the mood to read
something. Placing information there is respectful of the mood and comfort of
the reader. It is non-obtrusive. It is neighbourly.
STEP TWO: EXPLANATIONS
Somehow, our interested person—that person
just like us, but without the happy accident of the right friends or family—has
found some modest mention of Subud. The interested person then wants to know
more about what it is. We enter the realm of explanations.
Explanations are matters of the mind. They
are framed in languages, which are learned. Using language, we express beliefs
about the way things are. Those beliefs that we can support with publicly
accessible evidence we call ‘facts’. Those beliefs for which we have only
support from our feelings we call ‘faith’.
There are a dozen major religions and
thousands of minor and local religions on the face of the earth. There are
apparently 30,000 Christian sects alone. Each has its own explanations of human
life, the cosmos and human history.
Subud is not a religion. Subud is not in
conflict with any religion. Subud is not a set of teachings or beliefs. These
are our publicly stated values: our promise to the world. Therefore, it is not
appropriate to offer explanations about the meaning of human life, the cosmos,
or human history, as these will certainly conflict with one religion or
another.
Here are examples of disrespectful
communication: telling a Buddhist that meditation would be ‘mixing’ and
forbidden; telling a Muslim that Pak Subuh repeated Mohammed’s ascension;
telling a Christian that the spiritual universe is composed of a series of
worlds or realms called Nasut, Malakut, Jabarut, Lahut and Hahut; telling a
Hindu that yoga is ‘mixing’ and forbidden — or should only be practised for
health purposes; telling a secular humanist that the latihan is ‘the grace of
God’ or ‘a manifestation of the Great Life Force’; telling a Baha’i that their
religion is incomplete without the latihan kejiwaan.
It’s a minefield, and there is evidence
that we haven’t trodden it very well. Membership of Subud has been ruled
inconsistent with being a member of the Baha’i faith. In Malaysia, Subud has
been ruled to be a ‘deviant sect’ of Islam. The Catholic Church has ruled Subud
to be a religion, and ipso facto inconsistent with the Catholic faith. And
we’ve accomplished all this despite our small numbers and very low profile.
Some people blame ‘intolerance’ on the part of various religions and countries.
We have no control over the attitudes of others. What we do have control over
is our own actions and publications, and we can ensure that we do not—in
accordance with our stated aims and values—use them to promote particular
religious beliefs or viewpoints.
Obstacle: Kejawen
One obstacle in treading the minefield is
that we draw no clear lines between the latihan and Pak Subuh’s explanations of
the latihan. As a result, we publish talks and articles that are full of
Kejawen myths, cosmology, theology and symbolism, and put the Subud symbol on
them.
Here are some Kejawen concepts you may
recognise. From Kejawen's Sufi roots: Sharia, tariqa, haqiqa, marifa; a seven level cosmology; souls emanating from God and returning to
God; Nasut, Malakut, Jabarut, Lahut, Hahut; ‘roh’ and ‘nafsu’;
material, vegetable, animal, human souls; al-insan
al-kamil; fire, earth, air and water as elements; a universal
mystical core to all religions. From Kejawen's earlier Hindu roots: jiwa; sukma; susila, budhi and dharma; rasa, or ‘inner feeling’; Anwar and Anwas. From Kejawen's earliest animist
roots: rajahs, selamatans, connections to dead
ancestors; testing; ‘tofakur’; prihatin; Monday–Thursday
fasting; creation as filled with ‘life forces’; significance of names; the idea
of God’s power as something that is channelled through people, can ‘open’ other
people, and can reside as ‘content’ in objects like buildings and krises.
Imagine if instead of being born in Java
the founder of Subud had been a Roman Catholic. Imagine then that, when asked
by members to give explanations of the latihan, he’d responded by describing
the latihan in terms of prayer, contemplation, the Son, the blood of Christ,
the body of Christ, the trinity, sin, redemption, confession, priests, bishops,
the Pope, saints, churches, angels, archangels, seraphim and cherubim, heaven,
purgatory, limbo and hell. Then, that we carefully collated these explanations,
printed them, bound them, even produced Special Editions, and put the Subud
symbol on the front. Finally, we took these off to Malaysia, where we made them
available to the Department of Islamic Progress. We would not be surprised,
then, if the Department were to deem us a Christian sect. When we do the same
with Kejawen, we shouldn’t then be surprised that the same Department judges us
a ‘deviant sect of Islam’.
Obstacle: Ignorance
One way to tread the minefield might be to
frame the latihan for different audiences: one version for a Christian
audience, another for a Muslim audience, and so forth. There are some basic
problems with this approach. It would work with the religions that flow from
the Indian and Chinese traditions, because they are inclusive. Being a Buddhist
does not preclude one being a Taoist, a Confucian, or even a Christian.
However, the Abrahamist religions—the other 50% of the planet—tend to be much
more exclusive. And google would quickly reveal to a Christian any alternative
Islamic explanation. Nonetheless, it seems like a noble experiment to overtly
frame the same spiritual exercise in the language of different religions, and a
natural way forward for a movement that makes the claims that Subud does. The
main obstacle here is that many Subud members came to Subud out of rejection of
‘organised’ religion, and so we don’t have many members who are also deeply
informed and practising followers of a major religion. Any attempt to move in
this direction would have to be accompanied by a widespread impulse to actually
get to know the major religions, in depth.
Proposal: Empty or full
There are, it seems, two
ways of treading the minefield, which I’ll call ‘empty’ or ‘full’. The ‘empty’
path is similar to that of the mystical via negativa, the theology of negation. It says: since the latihan is an exercise
beyond the mind, any description of it is basically false. Therefore, to
mislead as little as possible, we should be absolutely minimalist in our
description of it.
When I propose this, the first reaction I
receive is often, ‘But then why would anyone come?’ In 2005, I attended a
workshop run by Harlinah Longcroft, which asked people to describe the latihan
out of their own experience. There were about forty people there, including
people who had been practising for thirty and forty years and more. But when
Harlinah asked, ‘What can you honestly say about the latihan?’, the most common
answer was: ‘It’s a mystery.’ I think that for many people a mystery that they
explore themselves will be more appealing than an exercise with a fully
developed theology attached to it.
The alternative is to take a ‘full’
approach—the via positiva—to describe the latihan in the terms and world-views of each religion,
separately. I think this can only be a long-term project. It requires a deep
understanding of the religions or world-views involved, and can only be carried
out by people who are deep followers of these religious traditions. Since these
are few and far between in Subud today, it’s best, I think, to focus first on
the ‘empty’.
STEP THREE: THREE MONTH’S
WAITING
This step is an obstacle in itself. In
Christianity, there is no waiting period. No one tests your sincerity.
Similarly with Islam, you recite the shahadah and that’s it. If we look at other spiritual exercises, such as qigong, or meditation, or the Jesus prayer, or
the Sufi dhikr—there is no waiting
period. I monthly receive emails from the Sydney Sufi Centre to come join them
in reciting the dhikr. The
very odd fact is that—despite the enormous taboo surrounding any talk of
eliminating this practice, it is surely a relatively late innovation. When Pak
Subuh went to Coombe, there was no waiting period. When he went to Chile, there
was no waiting period. Nor Mexico. These I know from witnesses. In Pak Prio
Hartono’s account of his own opening, we find again that not only was there no
waiting period—he wasn’t even asked if he wanted to join.
But at the same time as these mass
openings, there emerged the threat to Subud of lawsuits, associated with
‘crisis’, and ‘Subud psychosis’—as it was noted in the medical journals of the
time. Though I’ve not been able to track down the exact time at which it was
introduced, it does seem that the promulgation of the waiting period was
associated with this threat. This practical prohibition seems to have involved
into a ‘sincerity’ test, whereby those who have access to the latihan
administer a qualification test on those who wish to access it. The latihan
then is far from ‘free’.
Proposal: Continuously
re-evaluated policy
At the time, the three-month waiting
period was an appropriate policy response. It represented a change in the way that Subud conducted itself.
If things can change one way, they can later change in another way. What is
done can be undone; what is considered can be re-considered; what is made can
be re-made. Subud is not served by policies that are set in stone.
The policy should be re-evaluated, with a
completely open mind. Above all, we should subject the policy to a different
kind of testing: against reality. Are all the imagined risks still in place? Are
people really going to sue Subud for being opened? Is it really our job to
check on peoples’ ‘sincerity’. Is 2007 the same as 1957?
STEP FOUR: LIVING WITH SUBUD
In various places I’ve seen estimates of
the number of people opened. The low is 200,000. The high is one million.
Roughly, the current membership is 10,000—which means that between 95% and 99%
of all people who go through all the trouble involved in being opened, turn
around and walk away. This is extraordinary. Look at the trouble they’ve gone
through: finding Subud, listening to explanations which may not gel with their
beliefs, and then a three-month waiting period which is supposed to test their
sincerity (but in this light, would appear to fail on a massive scale). After
all that, they walk away.
By many accounts, this process is still
being repeated today. It is commonplace. People go through the lengthy
rigmarole of joining Subud, hang around for a year or two, and then evaporate
again. Subud USA’s recent ‘Outreach’ research confirms
this pattern: 2000 long-time members, with about 150 new members opened
every year, who don’t stay.
Why are they leaving? Theories abound.
Unfortunately, facts are in short supply. There is no register kept of why
people leave. This is ‘not required’. Yet from an ethical perspective, it may
well be required. If we see ourselves as caretakers of a spiritual exercise
called the latihan, and believe that the latihan is of value to human beings,
then it is our responsibility to find out why people walk away.
Why? To ensure that it’s not us. What if
it is us—our behaviour, our language, our lifestyle, our inter-relationships,
our actions, or our inactions that drive people away? Then, by our own lights,
we are guilty of a terrible act. In order to ensure that we are innocent of
that act, we need to track the facts, and find out the truth behind this
extraordinarily high rejection rate.
Possible Obstacle:
Fundamentalism and Evangelism
The reason why people leave is still a
mystery—and not of the good, intriguing variety. But there are many stories of
people leaving because of individual opinions about Subud and the latihan
rigidly held, and forcefully put forward. When this happens, we have within
Subud an internal fundamentalism (‘my way or the highway’; my reality is ‘the’
reality), and an internal evangelism (allow me to convert you to my point of
view).
On the one hand, these are natural human
activities that occur everywhere. On the other hand, these are activities that
one does not expect to encounter in a Subud hall, having been told—among many
other things—that there is no dogma, no teacher, no teaching, and that in the
Subud latihan every person experiences what they need for themselves, in their
own way. With promises like that in hand, one should not then be subjected to
either fundamentalism or evangelism.
Possible Obstacle:
Boredom
I can hear an invisible chorus of ‘heart
and mind!’ when I mention the word boredom. And certainly, all things that are
worth doing require some patience and persistence. At the same time, however,
‘spiritual growth’ is about change. One can understand if no change is apparent
after one year. Even two. But after ten? or twenty?
I’ve been told the story of a person (his
name was given to me) who after being absent from Subud for twenty years went
back to where he was opened—a major metropolitan group. There, he saw the same
people doing the same latihans they had been doing twenty years before. This is
not evidence. But it’s a good parable. If we talk about ‘spiritual growth’ but
in fact little or nothing changes—who are we trying to kid?
Here are sources of dogma that are worth
inspecting: the virtue ‘patience’ interpreted as laziness; the exercise of
‘submission’ interpreted as passivity in life; the aim of ‘harmony’ interpreted
as ‘no one say anything controversial’; the practice of ‘consensus’ interpreted
as ‘tyranny of the minority, no matter how small.’
Proposal: Actively promote the recognition
that every person’s personal belief—even when Pak Subuh agrees with him or
her—is still his or her personal belief. It is not Subud. Create a culture in
which fundamentalism and evangelism are not allowed to enter our halls. To
combat boredom, develop a culture of evaluation, in which we regularly ask
ourselves: how are we going? Are we changing; if so, how? If not, how? Even
asking the questions creates the ground for change.
Asking questions does not mean forcing
solutions. It means keeping the questions alive, instead of letting them sleep.
The poet Rilke knew this. In his Letters to a
Young Poet, he wrote:
Have patience with everything that remains
unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms
and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers.
They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a
question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps
you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the
answer, some distant day.
The Genius of ‘And’
The alternative most commonly cited marketing model is
what I think of as the ‘fruits of the latihan’ approach. The model here is that
when we manifest some evidence of the benefits of the latihan, people will go
‘gee, that’s interesting’ and walk the path to the latihan. I have some doubts
about this theory. First, it’s been pursued for thirty years, without much
evidence that it works. Second, in the centre of Jakarta the founder himself
built the nine-storey PTS Wijoyo building. It is difficult to imagine a more
public manifestation. Yet decades later, the membership of Subud Indonesia is
largely unchanged. Third, it is too ambitious. What Subud Bank will ever
compete with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank? If shown the two, most
people are likely to say, ‘I’ll have some of what the Grameen is having.’
Fourth, it doesn’t jive with history: most of today’s members weren’t brought
in by projects: why should anyone else be? And, finally, marketing is about
communication, and the proposed channel of communication is very expensive,
roundabout, and unclear. It’s as though I wanted to communicate the benefits of
Vitamin E cream by applying it to my face, wandering around, and waiting for
someone to notice. Much simpler: let people know it exists, and let them try it
themselves with no hassles.
None the less, there are different
approaches in every community, and for good reason: many approaches pursued
together represent less risk than all the eggs in one basket. As the authors of
Built to Last, on
the longest-lived companies, wrote:
‘Shun
the tyranny of “or”; embrace the genius of “and”.’
For these reasons, I’d recommend that
Subud pursue both strategies at the same time. By all means: manifest the
benefits of the latihan. It can only help. And at the same time: clear the path.
* * *
In this article, I’ve proposed a number of
obstacles that may sit on the potentially clear path to the latihan. You may
think of others. You may disagree with these. What seems certain, though, is
that there are obstacles. Return to the central image of this article: on the
one hand, 6.5 billion people; on the other hand, the latihan, which we believe
to be a good thing; and in between, a trickle. If you consider each and every
one of those 6.5 billion people to be a sincere, good person—as sincere and
good as yourself, yes, maybe even better..., why the trickle?
Either the product’s no good, or the path
is not clear.
Clear the path to the latihan.
Notes
1. For this story, see http://www.undiscoveredworldspress.com/cschapthree.html>
http://evabartok.tripod.com/id40_biography_9_10.htm
http://evabartok.tripod.com/id48.htm
2. How basic can we go back to basic? By
Haryono Sumohadiwidjojo
Subud
World News, Volume III, No. 6; May 2000
3. Aspects
of santri-abangan conflict:
…long-standing tensions aligned with
political antagonism created deep hatreds between groups so that the killings,
when they came, were not directed simply at destroying communist leaders but at
extirpating whole communities. In East Java, where such antagonism was
strongest, santri communities,
represented by the NU youth group Ansor, waged a sustained campaign of
destruction against their abangan neighbours.
<http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0810849356>
These categories became politicized,
hardened over time by political competition, and eventually bloody. The
culminating episode was the massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands in
1965–6. Since many abangan nominal Muslims had supported the Communist Party and the left wing of
the Indonesian Nationalist Party, they were the objects of violence inspired
and condoned by the Indonesian military and often carried out by Islamic
militants.
<http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/ralectures/lecture2.htm>
Although many Indonesians now describe the
episode as a simple struggle between Communists and anti-Communists, the fury
of the killings reflected ancient religious and social cleavages. In Javanese
society, there has long been a division between the santri, the minority of Moslems who take their faith quite seriously—making
pilgrimages to Mecca, and regarding religious rules as their guiding
principles—and the abangan, the much larger group for whom Islam is a nominal religion, grafted
onto the older traditions of the island. The santri tend to include merchants and traders who live near the coast; the abangan tend to be peasants who work the inland
rice paddies. The Communists had found many members among the abangan, but most of these people took the teachings
of Marx about as seriously as they had taken the refinements of the Koran.
After the attempted coup, members of these two groups went on rampages against
one another.
<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198206/indonesia/2>
4. For
a brief survey of the Kejawen influence on Pak Subuh’s talks, see:
<http://www.sitekreator.com/demystifysubud/index.html>
5. <http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2006/1464/>