An Alternative Explanation of the Subud Exercise
in Psychological Terms
By Merin Nielsen
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Table of contents
Foreword
Section 1 Where
a person lives — and the reality beyond
Section 2 Old
and new — humanity came from an earlier species
Section 3 What
happened — the possible cost of becoming human
Section 4 Better
connections — adjusting to the system upgrade
Section 5 Human
nature — analysing and maybe tweaking it
Section 6 Instinct
versus intuition — and higher guidance
Section 7 Rationalities
may compete — yet work together
Section 8 Rationality’s
motive — needing to be useful
Section 9 Practising
the latihan — how it compares
Section 10 Dissociation
— letting the non-conscious be revealed
Section 11 Experiencing
the latihan — what it’s like
Section 12 Evolution’s
legacy — summarising the situation
Afterword
Appendix 1 Physicalism
— without trying to prove anything
Appendix 2 The
experience of whom — or what?
Appendix 3 Reflecting
reality, self-reflecting — and free will
Appendix 4 A
skeptical aside — the glamour of the guru
Appendix 5 Semiotics,
explanations — and having faith
Appendix 6 Pak
Subuh — Caracas — 1 April 1959
Foreword:
What’s in an explanation? It’s an answer to what, how
and why questions, attempting to understand complex phenomena in terms of
simpler ones. But explanations needn’t be ‘true’ — merely satisfying. They may
refer to entities and processes which are observable or unobservable, metaphorical
or allegorical. They may expediently deploy pre-defined concepts that are
selected from traditional belief systems, or else laboriously delineate new
concepts in terms of not-so-traditional understanding. The point of an
explanation, though, is to satisfy. We all possess our own spiritual, cosmic or
‘nature of reality’ belief systems, which in the long run might matter less
than we are inclined to imagine, but questions like what, how and why can keep
on being posed in response to every answer — until at some point the questioner
is satisfied.
The latihan needs no explanation in order to be
practised, but I’ve been very dissatisfied with Pak Subuh’s explanation of it,
and so have gradually developed my own, presented here in case anybody else
finds it satisfying. I don’t claim it’s true, just that it seems reasonable to
me, so I’m open to considering other approaches. It will be declared that this
or that account is ‘all in the mind’, ‘from the material level’, ‘limited to
the physical’, ‘rationalising away proof of the inner’, misguided, impious,
arrogant, ungodly and so on. Such responses, though, emerge from alternative
mental frameworks simply created by differently contrived explanations of how
the physical and spiritual facets of reality exist together.
An acquaintance recently summarised Pak Subuh’s
explanation to me. In fifty words, it goes something like this:
People possess souls that may become subdued by the
basic ‘forces’ of life, whereas those forces should be servants of the soul.
The action of the latihan gradually puts them back in their right places,
thereby allowing the true soul or human essence to be given control and
manifest appropriately.
I hesitate to judge the validity of the above, but
this article isn’t primarily about Pak Subuh’s theory, which is an entirely
personal, optional ‘extra’ for Subud members. My explanation is summarised here
in a hundred words:
People operate with two cognitive systems for
addressing needs — one ‘rationality’ from Homo erectus (maybe), which works more
graphically, plus the linguistic Homo sapiens version that employs concepts and
speech, but is necessarily based on the older one. This new system is so
advantageous that evolution never had to guarantee integrating it smoothly — so
blending the rationalities has awkward side-effects. While the older mode is
submerged into functioning non-consciously, it often conflicts with the new
one, especially because of socio-cultural factors. By facilitating expression
of the non-conscious rationality, practice of the latihan helps them appreciate
one another and integrate better.
My article develops this explanation pretty gradually,
covering different aspects in turn. I hope that interested readers will pick up
the gist of the overall idea even though I haven’t provided authoritative
references or many examples.
Section 1: Where a person lives
— and the reality beyond
It seems that the reality in which I mainly live is
basically the one that I understand — generated by reasoning in much the same
way that a map is created — filled with consistent, relevant and interesting
relations between the experiences that I’ve had, then somehow ‘represented’ and
subsequently labelled. In fact, it’s a world largely made of labels, words,
concepts, descriptions, syntax, logic and other interconnections between hosts
of mental entities, rules, principles and locations that have become densely
and intricately established within my own portable ‘symbol-based-map’ of
reality. This is not the ‘real’ reality, but it is very valuable — being the
kind of reality that we can share with each other through speech, and which
thus makes us human — having the capacity to mix and match labels around and so
imagine bits of reality that aren’t actually present, and talk about them —
collectively processing acquired information and speculating.
So, where has the real reality gone? Nowhere, except I
cannot think about it because the only way I ever actually think is with labels
and so on — ‘reasoning’ through my conceptual, symbolic reality. As soon as I
try to explore reality at all, the undertaking is enveloped by my mental map of
components and relations — sets of mental representations of all my experiences
and inferences about just what is real, literally speaking. Behind the labels,
though, is the real thing which is also encountered, but only fleetingly during
the moments before I constantly compartmentalise it. In the end, this is all
nothing but my life and its surrounding universe, which is a contiguous,
intrinsically non-compartmentalised whole. Yet to consciously encounter this as
real reality might be to experience it via what the mystics call ‘non-duality’,
rather than through symbolic representations. Being in this state isn’t
necessarily useful, however, since it appears that human beings can’t readily
operate that way on an everyday basis. Within this context, our societies
function most effectively as belonging to a species of conscious symbol users.
The central point of the unreal reality is that it’s the shared mental world in
which humans get along together best by jointly processing information in the
format of linguistic symbols.
Thanks to this remarkable facility of language and
conceptualising that we possess, the real reality appears always just out of
reach. It’s paradoxical. Language and imagining supply us with an astonishingly
great wealth of resources that we’ve turned into culture, civilisation,
technology and social wisdom, but symbolic reality simultaneously forces us to
direct ourselves away from real reality! Motivated by its own symbolic
reasoning and connections between labels, my imaginary ‘self’ asking questions
about life is automatically immersed in the symbolic domain from which it was
born.
Section 2: Old and new —
humanity came from an earlier species
We notoriously sense that we are somehow out of touch
with our true nature or reality. An intriguing though almost clichéd
speculation, often heard in New Age circles, is that our prehistoric ancestors
might have been more in touch with the real reality. And maybe we still are,
but with our linguistic-symbolic veneer hiding or submerging it. Just as modern
people navigate our everyday lives consciously with the help of the expedient
system of speech and symbolic rationality, our ancient ancestors navigated life
with some different kind of rationality, relying on another sort of map. This
doesn’t mean a ‘physical model’ of the world in anyone’s head, but a system of
mental connections that functions like a map. (In this article, the term
‘rationality’ is often interchanged with ‘world-model’, ‘map’ or simply
‘mode’.)
Half a million years ago, they engaged in highly
complex social interactions, but their mode of rationality must have involved a
non-symbolic scheme of assimilating and responding to environmental data. In
evolutionary terms, it held sway a short time ago, but with regard to the
development of society, it paved the way for humanity’s modern systems of
communication and thought. Whatever its character, it probably lacked that
‘magical filter’ of language, conceptual imagining and abstract reasoning that
appears to both bless and curse people today. This, on the plus side, affords
the capacity for us as individuals to manipulate linguistic symbols, sharing
and jointly processing arbitrary information.
While there are various theories, in the end we can
only speculate about the precise nature of humanity’s rationality that preceded
the current form, and which took our ancestors all the way to complex
vocalisation and stone-age technology. It might have been comparatively
‘graphic’, with profound implications for how ‘attention’ — our focus on what
seems important — was directed. There’s theoretical cause to suspect it was
more of an empathic, big-picture pattern-matcher, mostly simplifying reality by
approximation. Our modern version of rationality would in contrast be more of a
‘logoic’, small-picture pattern-maker, inclined to simplify reality by encoding
it. To this extent it’s equipped with the upgrade of symbol manipulation
abilities and consequently far more powerful data processing.
Section 3: What happened — the
possible cost of becoming human
It’s really not hard to suppose that the previous
system remains present, constantly supporting our conscious, symbolic
rationality ‘behind the scenes’. In fact, there’s a fair chance that our
creation of symbolic reality depends on maintaining a comparatively concrete
template or substructure ‘underneath’ — some primary map of reality that’s more
immediately ‘perceptual’ and less ‘conceptual’ or interpretational. It would be
always working within each of us, while not necessarily participating in our
subjectively aware processing of worldly data. This raises the matter of how
deeply integrated any newer, conscious system might be in relation to any older
system, which could be relegated to a different status.
Whenever evolutionary change occurs, a species
naturally limits its investment in organisms to the sorts of biological
infrastructure that supply some ecological or reproductive advantage, and that
reduce disadvantage — as demanded by natural selection. With humanity, however,
something unusual took place — an adaptation leading to the capacity for
extraordinarily pervasive environmental ascendancy. This must have dramatically
re-focussed the factors that drove evolution down-the-line, giving greater
precedence to ‘sexual selection’ without necessarily compensating for minor
drawbacks buried within the context of individual psychology. In other words,
provided that a species as a whole can thrive on the strength of a certain
add-on facility, this need not be most efficiently integrated, as long as any
residual, trivial unease among individual organisms can be accommodated with
negligible impact.
Therefore we have cause to suspect that our older and
newer models of reality may not mesh all that well. The resulting
misalignments, and the possible foibles inherent to any system upgrade (like
the latest ‘beta version’ of recently released software), might go far toward
explaining our strange inclinations to believe in higher powers and
preternatural realms. This could be thanks to experiencing a range of
psychological phenomena that are culturally disposed to be interpreted as
mystical, spiritual or religious, at the same time having to cope with degrees
of subtle psychological dysfunctionality. I don’t insist there’s any particular
problem in having supernatural and/or religious beliefs, but it’s conceivable
that our species’ newfound capacity for symbol manipulation is related to our
verbal-cultural reality maps entertaining a certain range of ‘exotic’
components. After all, symbol manipulation supplies not just language,
imagining, abstraction and the ability to reflect on memories. It also permits the
suspension of disbelief through the sharing of powerful descriptions, lessons
and stories which tend to influence us in profoundly emotional and
transformative ways. While lending itself to stupendous cultural riches, this
set-up also means we readily become befuddled as memories get modified,
perceptions get altered by strongly held beliefs, subjectivity is confused with
objectivity, and imagination gets mistaken for reality.
Section 4: Better connections —
adjusting to the system upgrade
I think the older mode of rationality must constantly
have input into any context within which it isn’t actively overruled by the
dominant newer mode. Perhaps the older scheme can be conscious only to the
extent that the newer mode, which emphasises labels and symbolic
representations, is not. For instance, whenever someone is engaged in a mainly
physical activity, and it’s impractical for bodily movement to be guided by
conscious reasoning, the older mode might undertake almost all immediate
decision-making in combination with a background, ‘strategic’ understanding of
broader aims and purposes, which may be consolidated consciously as well.
(‘Automatic’ motion appears to be a separate affair involving no ‘rational’
data processing.) However, are there any other decision-making occasions when
our non-symbolic mode, instead of our symbolic mode, would be worth following?
And if so, how might such ‘inner guidance’ be recognised?
First, the older mode is likely to be the more useful
whenever the data processing of the newer mode depends on some part of its
symbolic reality-map that’s evidently askew or awry in terms of reflecting
reality. In this case, for the sake of the whole human being, the older mode of
rationality might be moved to step in, assuming that its alternative guidance
had a chance of being followed. The probability might be boosted if and when
the symbolic mode is relatively relaxed or somehow preoccupied such that
another context becomes available to ‘intervention’ by our non-symbolic
rationality. A further possibility might involve the newer mode actively
‘listening’ for prospectively useful guidance to arrive from the older mode —
provided that it had some innate or learned capacity to tune-in accordingly.
One thing that could help here is an exercise like the
latihan, which appears to be initiated non-consciously rather than by a
conscious act. The first time anybody practises the latihan, their older mode
could activate it subsequent to simply observing (visually through body
language, aurally or otherwise) what’s happening among other practitioners. It
would then engage in activity of the same nature by (non-consciously) entering
that same mental state. Humanity’s older mode of rationality most likely had
significant capacity for imitation, but exactly how the non-conceptual
world-model shifts the brain into that activity or state is necessarily unknown
to the conceptual world-model; this being the big mystery of the latihan. All
that the consciously conceptual rationality has to do is relax and let that state
be engaged in.
Or perhaps, to start the exercise, the older mode only
needs to be inspired. This may well happen indirectly via thought, whose
symbolic meanings would be translated into suitable terms for the non-symbolic
mode to grasp. Conversely, the latihan might allow our conceptual mode, in
time, to become familiar with feelings or signals arising non-conceptually —
and heed them more whenever these come across as ‘urgings’. The latihan may
give our non-conscious mode practice at prioritising and so influencing
attention, while the conscious mode practises ‘letting go’ — detaching or
disassociating from all the motivations that it’s usually busy prioritising. In
the same process, as the newer rationality affords the older one authority to
‘move’ and guide the human being, the exercise may diminish some of the
acquired misalignments that inhere between the two reality maps. The conscious
one is founded on the non-conscious one. While our non-symbolic mode tends to
be naturally subliminal, calling it an ‘inner’ self seems inappropriate given
that it must nevertheless take part right up front in everything we do.
Metaphorically, I’d describe it as more of a ‘between the lines’ self.
Section 5: Human nature —
analysing and maybe tweaking it
For the sake of clarity, I will avoid referring to
‘the mind’. I separate ‘rationality’ from ‘motivations’, and propose that
humans possess the two forms of rationality described above. Non-symbolic
rationality is probably rather old in terms of human evolution, whereas
symbolic rationality is a fairly new sort of supplementary scheme overlaid on
the other. Each corresponds to a semi-independent approach to how the world
works and how people fit into it, but the key point is that the older form has
never left us. It’s always at work, almost invisibly, underneath the new,
conceptual rationality. These are obliged to work together, but have different
mechanisms that are typically not all that well integrated. In fact, they
frequently disrupt, impair and distort each other, although the overall value
to the species of symbolic rationality is so considerable, with regard to
information sharing capacity, that its advantages easily outweigh its few
disadvantages.
The rest, ‘motivations’, are our instincts, drives,
passions, feelings and emotions. Of course, these can be categorised in many
ways. One is the material-vegetal-animal-human system. I don’t consider that
system ‘wrong’, but find it not very useful. Some motivations are of course
oriented toward physical maintenance; others toward biological relations;
others toward social standing; others toward noble causes like self-sacrifice
or whatever; but I don’t see a great deal of value in listing them that way. We
all possess much the same types of motivations, but with subtly different mixes
and balances determining our individual ‘prioritisations’, amounting to
personality. Various systems of personality-typing have been invented to
categorise people. Maybe the oldest system is the one connected with astrology,
but today we also have the Myers-Briggs and Jungian systems, the Big Five
system, the Enneagram system, the Psychoanalytic system and others.
Rationality, however, is the servant of all human
motivations. It functions to satisfy them, but the clarity or strength of rationality
is not the primary factor that makes a person any more or less compassionate or
self-sacrificing. The issue is which motivations, within an individual’s
world-model, get the top priority in terms of rationality’s services, and which
come first in guiding attention and behaviour, especially with respect to our
own social groupings — where all personal identity arises. While the latihan
might help integrate our two types of rationality, I suspect that, overall and
as a result, it also automatically tends to re-prioritise our motivations in
directions that are gradually more altruistic, compassionate or
community-oriented. This may happen just because our older, non-conceptual
rationality comes pre-equipped with a deeper appreciation of personal identity
— something like conscience.
Pak Subuh’s view differs greatly from mine. His system
categorises motivations into various levels, and postulates each having
separate and autonomous access to the attentions of rationality. It also
hypothesises only one form of rationality. In terms of the proverbial human
condition, this leads to the notion of a solution through purifying one’s
prioritisations and attaining ‘higher levels’, with everybody potentially
connected to these through a theoretical entity called the soul. For me, no
levels are involved. There are just the two types of rationality, both
functioning to resolve motivations, but not very well integrated. Another area
for improvement is that catering to our needs and desires in socially useful
ways could be better prioritised. It appears to me that though the latihan
assists in alleviating both of these problems at once, the development of
spirituality isn’t about lifting us closer to divinity. Rather, it’s more like
remedial therapy.
Section 6: Instinct versus
intuition — and higher guidance
Instinct is inherent or inborn behaviour involving
unlearned, fixed responses to stimuli. Intuition is different, although it also
apparently helps us to make efficient decisions on the basis of minimal
conscious information. Conceptual thought involving conscious reflection is
more cumbersome than either instinct or intuition if and when it involves
weighing up abstract consequences. Abstractions are generally complex concepts
that get mapped out or created over and above the objects and properties of the
physical world. In this light, our pre-human and human rationalities vary with
the types of reality-maps they are based on. Pre-lingual rationality could be
viewed as a kind of intuition. While devoid of symbolic reasoning, it is far
more than instinct, even so. Otherwise my cat, for instance, would be unable to
learn about her world and make discretionary decisions. She displays curiosity,
is prudent in caring for offspring, observes towards inference, and visibly
takes time to make choices, assessing the outcomes — yet she’s a non-lingual
creature. Scientists who study horses, wolves, dolphins, primates and so forth
nowadays discuss the diverse cultures of separate groups within various
species. The societies of our pre-human ancestors were certainly rich with
culture — sharing food and shelter, caring for the hurt and the old, playing
together — all activities of non-humans, but very much socially and
collectively oriented.
Instincts represent one kind of motivation, but
rationality responds to all kinds. Pre-human rationality could have been more
creative in some ways, satisfying needs and desires by weighing up indexical
signifiers, instead of manipulating discrete symbols according to rules. It
wouldn’t have reasoned via abstractions like causal principles or morals. It
may have had a more holistic prioritisation scheme, less bound by conditioned
responses — interpreting data and assessing situations on a more case by case
basis. It may be seen as more instinct-oriented insofar as it did not involve
layers of symbolic connections, but its underlying map would still have
incorporated sophisticated, acquired wisdom. Our new rationality mode, on the
other hand, may be more procedural in mapping reality — taking relations
between first order elements (which the older mode operates with directly) and
labelling them as second or third order elements — thereby building a hugely
intricate network of concepts. We rely heavily on both rationalities, even
though they often conflict with each other, and only the lingual version
typically involves conscious states. Neuroscience offers strong evidence that
various subconscious processes work constantly behind the scenes to shape our
actions, thoughts and feelings. Of course, what all the latest research means
is subject to much more investigation, but to me it indicates that, depending
on context, perhaps just a superficial and relatively small fraction of human
rationality is ever conscious.
Some people consider that, because practising the
latihan is supposed to enhance decision-making, it must incorporate ‘higher
guidance’ or a ‘higher power’. I accept that the premise might be statistically
valid — that decision-making might be somehow enhanced on average — but I think
this is more likely to be simply because our ordinary decision-making processes
are substantially regenerated or rehabilitated by whatever takes place through
the latihan. I see no necessity for explanations invoking mysticism, since
merely subconscious or non-conscious intelligence would appear to suffice as a
useful and frequently wiser adjunct to our conscious intelligence. ‘Inner
guidance’ could emerge from information being gathered and processed by
non-conscious observation and rationality, which later on slips through the
separation between these two domains of knowledge. It would depend on recording
processes that were non-conscious just at the time when the relevant
perceptions occurred. Whereas conceptual thought tends to depend on word-like
representations, our older style of normally unconscious information processing
would be non-verbal. The obvious differences between these modes of recording
and assessing data go a long way toward accounting for the ‘barrier’ that
divides them.
Section 7: Rationalities may
compete — yet work together
By ‘rationality’, I mean the sort of
situation-analysing cognitive system that most mammals (at least) use to guide
their interactions with their surroundings, to fulfil their needs. (Sociopathic
murderers may be rational in terms of how they go about behaving, yet be
classified as clearly insane.) Both kinds of human rationality conduct
analyses, but while the newer one uses symbols, concepts and syntax to do so,
the older one would rely mainly on graphic representations.
It’s necessary to distinguish between the innate, full
capacity for symbol manipulation and an ability to merely connect symbols with
particular outcomes through reinforced association. The latter operation,
performed by many animals, is basically ‘indexical’ rather than symbolic. It
could be called ‘thinking’, depending on your definition, but I propose that,
while facilitating presumably conscious problem-solving and reasoning, it’s
essentially non-symbolic. Among humans, the usually non-conscious mode I’m
talking about does all these things, albeit without genuinely linguistic
ingredients.
I’ve said that our generally non-conscious world-model
is the more graphic one, although it’s plain we can manipulate not only symbols
consciously, but mental pictures as well. This conscious activity, however,
generally remains under the guidance of the symbol-equipped rationality, rather
than the non-conscious mode. The main point here is that they have different
‘priority templates’. With respect to acting in the world, which aspects are
most crucial (and why) to the newer mode differ from which aspects are most
crucial (and why) to the older mode. They have differing grounds for and
manners of dealing with the innumerable motivations that the organism
constantly develops and/or maintains.
Because rationalities can have different characters,
the world that a person knows is a product of both ‘what is out there’ and ‘how
it gets registered’. So, according to my view, each person simultaneously lives
in (at least) two worlds. For the sake of establishing a stable perspective
amidst the minutiae of complicated prioritisations and decision-making, one’s
older mode tends to preserve a broader appreciation of the background relevance
of situations. Alternatively, the newer mode codifies things, but is disposed
to pigeon hole them into narrow contexts which are normally defined according
to socio-cultural conditioning. The upshot is that each mode of rationality has
its own means of determining how attention should be prioritised, and therefore
how the world seems, and therefore how attention should be prioritised, and so
on.
Section 8: Rationality’s motive
— needing to be useful
Rationalities ‘serve’ motivations whether noble or
mundane, but they too must have some underlying drive of their own. While their
job is to restore equilibrium to the organism by resolving general needs, they
themselves have to be in some ‘disequilibrium state’ for that to occur — as
they are essentially mechanisms. Their equilibrium gets restored if and when
the organism’s other equilibrium states are restored, so they need to be useful
in this sense. However, our non-symbolic rationality seems to ‘appreciate’ the
situation, and express its need to be useful, a bit more naturally and directly
than the symbolic rationality. Taking a ‘big picture’ view, it appears to more
clearly model the fact that its own usefulness could be significantly enhanced
by developing smoother teamwork between the two modes. Moreover, it possibly
has greater capacity to answer the call for this prospectively closer
integration — via certain exercises such as the latihan.
So neither mode can be fully, objectively value-free.
Each is foremost a kind of map or guidance system, but maps vary greatly in how
they are constructed and deployed. A street directory is used rather
differently from how you’d follow a GPS, for example. Both forms of rationality
constitute world-models, even though one of them is built upon the other. In
this sense they both embody ‘beliefs’, which are often naturally about
emotions. For the usually non-conscious mode, beliefs are basically relations
between sensory data, including direct recognition of the body’s various
metabolic states, inferred and represented iconically. For the linguistic mode,
however, beliefs mostly correspond to relations that stand among more basic
relations, amounting to concepts, labels and ideas that are inferred and
represented symbolically.
Why doesn’t the newer mode map the world in as broad a
context as the older perspective? As discussed in Appendix 3, I see ‘free will’
as an illusion — a model of something that’s not real — which results from the
appearance that motivations arise out of nowhere. In response to this
disconcerting incongruity, our usually conscious, newer world-model employs its
conceptual skill to invent a hypothetical entity labelled as ‘the self’, and
maps this into the situation. However, doing so greatly blurs the reality that
the map itself, the symbolic rationality, is independent of the needs and desires
which it has the job of dealing with. It consequently labels itself as the self
— the imaginary source of motivations — overlooking the circumstance that it’s
there simply with the task of resolving all those wants and necessities.
Section 9: Practising the
latihan — how it compares
The latihan appears to be unusual and potentially
useful, but nonetheless natural. It provides for possibly profound and subtly
transforming experiences whose character depends on each individual who engages
with it. I regard Pak Subuh as having naturally interpreted this phenomenon
according to his own cultural and religious background. However, are its
supposed effects genuine or only imagined? Perhaps neuropsychology will answer
this question in due course. The latihan seems to be somewhat
psycho-therapeutically beneficial, depending on each person once again, just as
various different spiritual practices similarly appear to be. There are
persuasively credible links between the latihan and other ‘inner energy’
processes or practices with spontaneous manifestations, as reported in
traditions such as (but not limited to) Sufism, spontaneous qigong, kundalini,
Kriya yoga, shamanism, Zen (well, maybe) and, of course, Pentecostal and
Charismatic phenomena. These all involve pursuing no goal and hence no use of
‘the mind’ during the practice-time.
Meanwhile, Subud members understandably tend to
suppose that the benefits of practising the latihan are accumulative or
progressive, but there’s no clear evidence of this. Even if the perceived
benefits were somehow accumulative, there’s even weaker evidence that any
progression comes with objectively distinguishable stages of development (as
per levels of the material, vegetal, animal, human and more). Moreover, I
suspect that there’s no deep-down feature of the latihan to distinguish it from
outwardly similar-looking exercises. In any case, contextual differences make
it pretty impossible to compare these things rigorously — especially
considering how the context must affect a person’s attitude or approach toward
any exercise of this general type, which is apt to be central in terms of how
the exercise then proceeds.
The Subud exercise is presented as more or less
inherently beneficial, and (of major significance) progressively more beneficial
— leading to the proposal that it should be practised many times over on an
ongoing basis. In other scenarios, such as a self-awareness group or theatre
improvisation workshop, for example, any similar exercise is far more likely to
be presented as a one-off, possibly enlightening exploration of an individual’s
human nature, rather than intrinsically useful. It’s also notable that latihan
sessions typically go for thirty minutes. So, as somebody practises this sort
of exercise regularly, which Subud members tend to, it’s conceivable that its
character will alter in such a way that the practitioner senses the development
of a particular, distinctive, inner relationship with it. To the extent that
the brain is ‘plastic’, its neural pathways may well develop accordingly over
time in response to any regular exercise, much like muscles.
Section 10: Dissociation —
letting the non-conscious be revealed
The latihan apparently involves what could be called
‘dissociation’. Psychologists use this word to refer to the feeling of one’s
conscious self being detached from one’s own physical surroundings, bodily
sensations, emotions and maybe even attitudes and thinking processes. In normal
everyday life, these tend to be naturally integrated, but certain occasions can
result in a weakening of this interconnection. Such instances are well known to
include traumatic or stressful situations, when the dissociation is
involuntary, although the state of withdrawal itself might be further
debilitating. In these cases, it’s likely to be symptomatic of an impending
threat to the conceptual world-model’s coherence, when dissociation’s role is
to suspend the symbolic modelling of metabolic or sensory input that is
potentially destabilising. However, it appears to be also induced through
deliberately adopting certain mental states. During the latihan it seems that
one’s conscious, conceptual rationality deliberately disengages itself to
varying extent, but in a relatively smooth way, from involvement with other
facets of subjective experience. For me, one consequence is that the latihan
underscores who and/or what my conscious, conceptual rationality is not! That
is, any component of my humanity from which it can dissociate is plainly not ‘it’,
given that it is the component that’s instigating the dissociation — in
traditional Subud jargon, ‘surrendering’.
Why might this be useful? Well, as I mentioned at the
end of Section 8, the symbolic world-model has a conundrum to deal with; the
invisible source of the motivations which it has the job of resolving. Needing
to somehow represent this, it generates the symbol of ‘free agent’ and
nominates itself as corresponding to the result, which is a reality distortion.
Although the symbolic world-model is indeed affected by socio-linguistic
interactions and environments that strongly condition personal motivations,
this occurs in relatively narrow and superficial ways. The naturally integrated
human, on the other hand, is far more complex; rich with instincts and
emotional responses of much broader and deeper origin. For a species
characterised by collective information processing, the social and biological
features cannot be separated readily. Notwithstanding this fact, unless the
socio-linguistic and pre-linguistic influences are disentangled within one’s
symbolic rationality, it will be liable to prioritise attention on the false
premise that, as a free agent, it is inherently self-conflicted and accordingly
in need of self-suppression. One possible bonus of dissociation during the
latihan, therefore, is that the symbolic rationality comes to appreciate how
there is actually no free agency or ‘selfhood’ of the sort which it’s been
inclined to represent. It gradually gets to see that it is not the body or
instincts, not the emotions or cognitions, nor even the socio-linguistic
affectations that help to shape it — which all sounds rather Buddhist, doesn’t
it?
Does the latihan show me anything on the positive side
regarding who I am? Well, the issue seems to involve personal identity, and I
suspect that mine has changed because of practising the latihan. In this
context, I interpret identity as the sum of whatever matters to an individual.
Whatever is most important to someone is where his or her identity resides.
Accordingly, I think someone’s identity changes as their values or personal
priorities change. It’s possible that changes in personal identity go
hand-in-hand with dissociation, but possibly not. These psychological and/or
spiritual concerns are extremely subtle and slippery to grasp and dreadfully
prone to over-simplification. However, I like to suppose that, aside from
helping me understand who I’m not, practising the latihan has blessed or
burdened me with different values than those which I previously incorporated,
making me a slightly different creature. This isn’t necessarily something to be
thrilled or excited about, as there’s nothing immediately either good or bad
about being whoever one happens to be. Good and bad are relevant only with respect
to prioritising the resolution of one’s motivations in the context of society.
In the sense of comprising a second-level world-model
that is ‘once-removed’ symbolically from the analogue or ‘real’ reality, the
conceptual rationality is unsurprisingly equipped to dissociate from its
circumstances. Taking advantage of this, as a spiritual phenomenon, the latihan
would seem to intrinsically incorporate a particular variety of dissociation.
During the latihan, for example, an intense emotion may arise so that, for a
few seconds maybe, a major proportion of my whole being seems engaged with it.
For those seconds, that emotion effectively is ‘me’ — dominating the attention
prioritising procedures of both my conceptual and non-conceptual rationalities.
If I dissociate from the state, however, with attention being governed
minimally through my conceptual rationality, then that emotion may well be even
more maturely expressed. As I sojourn within conceptual reality, my humanity
unfolds its own real reality. Again, this is an issue of identity; of who is
present. As long as my linguistic self remains not ‘identified’ with it, the
state is allowed to be expressed as ‘me’, though independently of the
conceptual me, and thus can be experienced deeply as never before. For most of
us, latihan experiences are generally not too disturbing or disorienting, but
at times it may be quite useful for practitioners to be aware of the roles of
other kinds of dissociation in everyday life. Dissociation is something that
all humans, but possibly more often latihan practitioners, spontaneously
encounter in daily activities at various levels without necessarily recognising
it as such, albeit with pathological connotations in some situations.
Section 11: Experiencing the
latihan — what it’s like
In relation to spontaneity, the exercise seems deeper
when the source of movement (or motivation) is more completely non-conceptual.
If this is the case, then it might be highly significant whether the exercise
is consciously associated or connected with any aim or goal. It’s very
plausible that approaching it with an essentially aimless or goalless attitude
— perhaps by viewing it as ‘worship for the sake of worship’ (or whatever
metaphor might suit each individual) — would enhance the results by
circumventing, sidestepping or at least dampening any participation or
manifestation of symbolic rationality. Then attention remains present, but
engaged in no conceptually mediated process of monitoring, assessment, feedback
or moderation that might be intended to enhance things, but ultimately
interferes with the moment-to-moment direction. In other words, by more
thoroughly adopting the passive mental state that’s commonly recommended for
the latihan — ‘trust, patience and sincerity’ — it is possible that one’s
symbolic rationality somehow allows the non-symbolic jurisdiction more freedom
to move the whole being, with perhaps useful or healthy consequences. While it
seems to be unnecessary to regard the exercise in any religious terms
whatsoever, seeing it as a divine dispensation is one approach which appears
likely to cultivate an attitude that’s amenable to entering this ‘receptive’
mental space.
How do the latihan’s spontaneous movements, feelings
and inner experiences show that attention has been handed over to the
non-symbolic mode? Well, attention is never directly controlled by either mode.
It simply follows priorities that the two rationalities set differently. The
latihan entails the conceptual mode stepping back in this regard, though
usually not entirely, with the result that attention has to be ‘shared’.
Nonetheless, in the relative absence of prioritisation coming from a symbolic
world-model perspective, the movements and feelings that arise during the
latihan could well represent expressions of the older rationality’s
prioritisation processes. Other emotional and mental experiences which arise
might similarly represent which facets of life and the world are highlighted as
critical within the non-symbolic world-model.
Attempting to surrender in the latihan is weird. In
the broader scheme of things, after all, it’s impossible not to connect some
sort of goal with an optional exercise like practising the latihan — which
corresponds to the reason why someone goes along to latihan sessions in the first
place. In this regard, a person must have some personal concept of what good
the latihan is — adopted from some explanation or other. During an actual
latihan session, however, the less immediate one’s agenda, apparently so much
the better. Nonetheless, any intention to allow the exercise to be
intention-free is still a form of intention. It’s hard to be certain, but
during the thirty minute exercise, any feeling of complete ‘agenda-lessness’
for three minutes, or maybe even thirty seconds, is something I doubt that I’ve
ever truly encountered. The latihan is evidently quite ‘forgiving’ in allowing
me to vacillate up and down among the depths of intentionality while imposing
no obvious ‘switching-off’ threshold. It merely continues to wait for my brief returns
from either shallow meanderings of attention or bizarre efforts to be present
while making no effort. In the meantime, the latihan seems to gently shake out,
clean up and gradually re-integrate my perceptual and conceptual processes at
pretty deep levels, helping to establish what feels like a bit more coherence
and equanimity toward life and relationships.
Section 12: Evolution’s legacy
— summarising the situation
From what I’ve heard of the current consensus on human
evolution, the evidence points to little physical change since around 200,000
years ago, but before that a significant genetic change may have occurred with
regard to the brain and our capacity for fully-fledged language. Complex
vocalisation may well have already existed, but this conjectured add-on
facility would be what permits mental abstraction — which is the freedom to
assign symbols to the relations standing between more basic meanings, which
amounts to generating a reality that’s filled with concepts. So our species
gained something quite unusual — language. This is based on the symbolic
manipulation of meaning by allocating new, freely selected labels to the ways
in which more primitive signs, such as ‘icons’ and ‘indices’ (semiotic terms;
see Appendix 5), are linked. Our ancient ancestors must have already possessed
some animal-conscious system for navigating everyday life, but as this new
development explicitly involves conceptually labelling or symbolising each
mental representation of experience, it very conceivably submerged our older
system of rationality into non-consciousness.
The acquisition of this capacity, introducing Homo
sapiens, may have been relatively sudden, heralding what would eventually
become a remarkably overwhelming environmental dominance. The evolutionary
survival-benefits that it conferred must have dramatically overridden any
drawbacks. Since it offers such a very powerful edge in coping with our
environments, there could not be any further evolutionary pressure for its
operation to be refined past the point of mastery to which it led us. Therefore
no surprise that its manner of integration with earlier forms of rationality
(based on non-symbolic data processing) remains a bit ragged and wrinkly. This
would surely help to explain why individual human beings occasionally feel just
a little uncomfortable with who we are — confronting inner conflict, angst or
even ‘divine discontent’. All of us occasionally suffer from various neuroses,
inhibitions, compulsions, delusions and other debilitating psychological
imbalances that can arise from the awkwardness of reconciling our formal,
civilised, socio-linguistically defined reality (burdened by verbally derived
labels, norms and customs) with the more fluid, analogue reality of social and
physical relations that are more directly accessed without intermediary
conceptualisation. For me, the latihan offers a way to better assimilate the
older and newer modes of rationality so that I feel more comfortable!
Like those animal cousins which are also cognitive, we
constantly rely on our portable, mental reality-maps, but if this account of
mine is valid, then humans possess a lingual map that’s overlaid upon a
pre-lingual map (assuming genuine language is defined by symbol usage). The two
systems operate together seemingly in synch and adequately well most of the
time, but inevitably with points of inner conflict or tension. These crop up
especially when the rules and niceties of linguistic social conditioning grate
disturbingly against our far older, non-symbolic mapping, constantly
functioning with vital importance. (Concepts like ‘sinful’ and ‘impure’ come to
mind.) Practising the latihan may help to realign and reintegrate the systems,
progressively coordinating the non-symbolic and symbolic processing of
priorities and mental subroutines to form a more coherent, cohesive ‘joint’ map
of reality. It irons out some of the wrinkles left by evolution, which didn’t
bother about being neat and tidy. A smoother integration of the rationality
modes is sure to be beneficial, and the latihan might simply be an exercise
aiding that — just as jogging may assist in coping with a sedentary lifestyle.
And just as jogging is only an aid towards healthier living, the latihan might
not be any form of end in itself. While its practitioners tend to ‘turn off’
their thinking in favour of ‘feeling’ during the actual exercise, the sheer
ability to achieve this general state of being is not a sensible aim, in my
view. A reasonable hope is just for the conceptual mode of being and thinking
to eventually become more productively engaged with the non-conceptual mode
throughout everyday life.
Some say that the latihan’s nature can’t be
understood, since its effect is to raise us ‘higher’ than conceptualisation
goes, to a level beyond dependence on conceivability — which is ipso facto
‘divine’. A consequent dilemma is that, by putting this whole assumption to the
test, one risks appearing impudent. Rebuffing this deterrent, however, I
conclude that the latihan’s nature may be conceptualised. My conclusion might
be wrong, but its flip side is that the latihan doesn’t lift us higher at all.
Rather, it just re-wires the connections between the conceptual and
non-conceptual faculties of cognition.
Afterword:
Returning to explanations about the latihan in general,
I particularly object to one aspect of Pak Subuh’s description – that it lends
itself to an unhealthy attitude. It suggests that some people are somehow more
spiritually advanced and so ‘higher’ than others. It’s easily taken to imply
that gaining spirituality, especially through the latihan, is about becoming a
nobler sort of person. This means practising the latihan would be good for
virtually anybody, and that it’s therefore a shame if more people aren’t
attracted to it. It also means the growth of Subud would necessarily be good
for humanity. Readily reinforced by Pak Subuh’s Javanese-Sufi account, such
assertions are distressing. Wanting our organisation to grow most likely
signifies pretentious egotism based on supposing that Subud is divinely blessed
or special. The same goes for imagining that ‘the right people’ will be drawn
toward it. The concept that latihan practitioners are privileged, or that some
people can be holier than others, is terribly conceited. Maybe it’s fair to say
that some individuals appear more compassionate, knowledgeable, creative or at
peace with themselves than others seem, and that aspiring to such qualities is
legitimate, but it’s offensive to identify particular people as inherently
superior human beings. This kind of thinking is poisonous, and it’s sad that
the latihan is occasionally entangled with perspectives along these lines.
So if the latihan doesn’t lift anyone up to purer,
higher or wiser levels of existence, then what is it good for? I suggest that
it’s preferable to describe the latihan as essentially no more than a certain
psychological and/or spiritual exercise from which some people say they find
individual benefit. Outwardly, it’s a spontaneous, dynamic form of meditation
that involves no sense of goal or aim while in progress, but which generally
appears to offer some personal benefit — according to each practitioner’s own
interpretation. Furthermore, it’s important to recognise that practising the
latihan might actually be of no benefit or use, and could even be detrimental,
to any particular person. It’s therefore extremely inappropriate to coax or
persuade anybody to practise it. In my opinion, the latihan should in fact be
advertised so that more people hear of it, but with absolutely no claims about
specific benefits of any kind — merely with the observation that it has many
practitioners who obviously must feel that they get something useful from it.
This approach may seem pathetically deflating to some Subud members, but
perhaps our egotistic Subud balloon needs to come down to earth.
It’s good for the latihan to be made more available in
case other people would like to try it, but it is very presumptuous to say that
anybody should be interested. Based on Pak Subuh’s explanation, the latihan
comes from God and so it must be a grace or blessing which improves people’s
lives. In the light of other accounts, however, the latihan is much more akin
to practices such as, say, aerobics, yoga, flying a kite, push-ups, tai chi,
crosswords, Sudoku, bushwalking, poetry, pottery, massage, celibacy, disco
dancing, archery, hacky sack or singing in the bath — potentially beneficial
exercises that each might be suitable for some of us but clearly not others,
and which are rather plainly not the sort of thing that ever makes a person
intrinsically better than anyone else.
Yes, the latihan really needs to be made more
available, but not because it makes anybody special. It needs to be made more
available just because some of our fellow human beings might also be glad to
practise it.
* * *
* * * * *
Appendix 1: Physicalism —
without trying to prove anything
I don’t call myself an atheist, as it seems nuts to
identify my worldview or spiritual belief system in terms of what it isn’t — as
non-theism. It’s physicalism — the notion that all that’s real is the stuff
studied in physics. This means I disbelieve in an individual afterlife. As I
see it, just as an organism’s existence is clearly ‘confined’ within space —
which never seems to raise many complaints — it is also confined within time —
complaints about which seem equally unjustified in the end. Physicalism is
philosophical, not scientific. Science is technically about proposing and
refining ‘reasonably approximate models’ of mechanisms that generate the
patterns observed in nature’s phenomena. To qualify as scientific, such models
must be ‘in-principle-falsifiable’ or testable, but physicalism isn’t very
testable. It’s kind of scientific in spirit, in relation to Ockham’s Razor, and
while it’s not provable, neither is any scientific hypothesis. Anyway, I don’t
go around asserting that theism or whatever is wrong. All I say is that
physicalism looks to me like a more satisfying model — and also more ‘potent’.
Potent explanations are those that, if falsified in any respect, tend to be
overturned entirely. Physicalism can be seen as automatically pantheistic and
mystical. It entails that, despite everyday appearances and our built-in
perceptions of personal selfhood, this whole universe and every person are
always ‘one’. For me, the latihan seems to confirm that.
Some may argue that physicalism is indeed falsifiable
— like if it were revealed after death that we were always spirits residing
only temporarily in the material realm. I find this image incoherent, since if
there were two or more literally, wholly separate types of reality-stuff, such
as matter and spirit, then logically they could not interact. They would be
mutually intangible, and thus non-existent with respect to one another. On the
other hand, if they could interact at all, then there would be no justification
for calling them distinct types of reality-stuff. They would be mutually
detectable, making them all part of physics. Brain activities while dreaming,
for instance, mean that ‘the stuff of dreams’ is really physical. This is an
age-old philosophical argument for discarding dualism. (Incidentally, when
describing one’s own views, I assume it’s unnecessary for each statement to be
prefaced with ‘in my opinion’, as it stands to reason.)
It’s arguable that levels of being exist in line with
the ideas of people like Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, E.F. Schumacher, Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin and Pak Subuh (influenced by Sufism — so indebted to
Neoplatonism). The evidence resides in certain distinctions which seemingly
correspond to grades of complexity, such as non-living vs. living,
non-cognitive vs. cognitive, non-linguistic vs. linguistic, and (speculatively)
mortal vs. immortal. This idea of hierarchical progression may offer to make
some sense of life by imbuing it with ‘higher purpose’. However, the scheme
suffers under scrutiny. Mother Nature yields exceptions to any pattern of life
forms that one might try to pin down. Moreover, it is misleading to insist that
animals in general embody some crucial feature that plants lack, because many
plants possess remarkable features manifested by no animal, nor any other
plant. Similarly, though humans alone have a clear-cut propensity for speech
and symbolic imagination, many animals have faculties entirely absent in humans.
Stemming from our symbol usage, the development of the dominance of human
societies over local ecologies does appear unusual in terms of the biosphere,
but there’s no objective warrant for counting this as some specific stage in
any pre-ordained cosmic process. In other words, the traditional demarcation of
levels emerging over time seems likely to represent a biased perspective.
Evolution by natural selection has no intrinsic end-goal. It is basically
opportunistic, ecological continuance where the persistence of each species
depends on the ever-changing character of the whole, integral system of species
in relation to the biologically modified physical environment. ‘Higher’
evolution is simply a common illusion.
Appendix 2: The experience of
whom — or what?
Take away the world, and what remains? To be more
precise, take away all experience of the world, and what remains? Some say it
would be the soul. There is an independent ‘experiencer’ in that cognitive
organisms process environmental data within ‘portable world-models’ or ‘maps of
reality’ according to their immediate priorities, as established by internal
states of disequilibrium. On a basic account, it seems reasonable to speculate
that the experiencer just is the organism’s map of reality, which is physically
constituted. This map is constantly cross-checked against the world (via
attention), whereby its contents are modified or updated, and the activity at
this map-world interface often gets falsely interpreted as a rather odd kind of
substance — the ever enigmatic ‘consciousness’. The conjecture goes roughly as
follows.
(1) When consciousness is occurring, one’s world-model
directs attention to elements of reality that are sensed as either external or
internal (to the body or else to itself). This directing of attention is
determined automatically, depending on the organism’s current situation and
contextual priorities (ranked from among all of its possible motivations,
emotions, instincts, interests, anxieties, concerns, and so on). With narrow to
wide-open focus, attention is turned to whatever has the highest priority,
fundamentally for the sake of restoring some aspect of metabolic equilibrium —
in relation to which there’s almost always one or another aspect of
disequilibrium calling for attention. The sources of disequilibria need not be
consciously recognised as they appeal for resolution, adding up to constant,
often subliminal demands for prioritising of attention. The ‘monkey mind’
incorrigibly checks all around for anything to worry about.
(2) When attention is directed externally, this
happens thanks to the world-model generating an internal representation of the
relevant external situation — complete with modelling of ‘possibilities’ or
‘expectations’ (which are also weighted as probabilities) — but what does
attention get directed to exactly? It gets directed to the features of any
situation about which there is some element of doubt — where the resolution of
that doubt is currently prioritised. Thus, the function of attention is to make
a comparison between the relevant ‘in-doubt elements’ of the situation and the
relevant ‘contingency components’ of one’s world-model. In other words, based
on its current priorities, the world-model is in the business of actively
checking ‘what’s out there’ — comparing itself against external reality and
updating itself, and/or filling in gaps — thereby to more expediently guide the
organism’s actions in its environment.
(3) When attention is directed internally to the
world-model’s own components, we have ‘imagination’ and/or ‘thought’ and/or
‘communication’. Particularly when a person engages in speech, attention’s
focus darts around in the network of concepts and linguistic codes which
constitute the symbol-rich, thought-sustaining higher orders of their
world-model. Thought involves very powerful symbolic or linguistic modelling
and representation of elements of reality as concepts, making it a function
within the world-models of people, but much less (if at all) within those of
animals. Thought and imagination both facilitate processes of analysis and
inference, however, which involve the modelling of relations that appear to
exist between more basic ‘sensory’ components of the world-model. Thought and
imagination also allow the world-model to compare sets of its components
against one another — essentially cross-checking for self-consistency.
(4) The world-model’s own prioritisations are part of
the internal reality that it models. This involves becoming aware of and
comparing alternative courses of action in terms of the outcomes of mental
simulations. As disequilibria occur among thought processes (from curiosity to
anxiety) attention may be reflectively directed to the contextual weighting of
priorities itself, especially with regard to ‘higher order’ consequences;
strategically valuing imagined situations that are conducive to basic,
first-order equilibrium. This refocusses attention in terms of longer-term or
broader priorities, including morals and social norms; the whole procedure
being modelled in conjunction with the concept of free will.
In summary, suppose that a modelling mechanism is
suitably equipped to map its environment, including the ‘possible’ relations
it’s currently in. Suppose it has overall situational priorities, and that to resolve
these it progressively updates itself (while cross-checking the contextual
consistency of its priority weightings) against the most relevant features of
its immediate environment; in order to act effectively to restore internal
equilibrium. Such a mechanism delineates the ‘interesting’ from the plausible,
narrowing the modelled possibilities of what’s present. I’d say it has genuine
subjective awareness, whether rudimentary or profound, depending on the
organism. ‘Consciousness’ appears to be often intuited incorrectly as a
passive, data-receptive state of being. I submit that it is really an active,
data-inquisitive state of doing. Rather than a pure, sublimely poised,
autonomous property that is somehow innately possessed by conscious entities, it’s
an extremely specific, powerfully coordinated, integrated process happening
imprecisely inside conscious entities. Moreover, as the brain embodies the
model’s activity, it’s incapable of modelling the activity itself other than
through inference, and so infers that its own activity is self-originating,
whereas the activity arises from the physical universe. The puzzle is how
physical stuff could ever ‘feel’, but I think all feeling is ultimately just
the prioritising of attention.
Appendix 3: Reflecting reality,
self-reflecting — and free will
As cognitive organisms, we possess numerous,
ever-present disequilibria that are queuing up to be rationally resolved. Since
our cognitive mechanisms can’t deal with them all at once, however, a
prioritisation system is needed — focusing rationality on the issues of
disequilibria that have the highest priority, which can be called one’s
dominant motivations at any given time. As these arise, they serve to focus or
prime attention, which thus gets continuously redirected to the most
contextually relevant contents of consciousness. (The most workable meaning of
‘conscious’ gets widely debated, but I accept the notion that we perform
thousands of actions and process millions of data every day non-consciously —
with or without attention being directed to them — as opposed to engaging in
‘deliberate’ behaviour or thought.)
Whenever somebody pays sensory or mental attention,
it’s because, due to their current priorities, they are interested in certain
aspects of the respective environment (physical, metabolic, emotional, mental,
social or cultural). These would inevitably be aspects that, to the individual,
are relevantly uncertain or at least subject to variation — since there is
little purpose in paying attention to what matches or is wholly consistent with
the contents of one’s world-model. Due to the presence of uncertainties, we
benefit from scrutinising our surroundings, informing ourselves in order to
respond more effectively to the circumstances that we are liable to find
ourselves in, and duly recording ‘equilibrium relevant’ issues. According to
this theory, attention gets directed by automatic prioritisation processes.
Given the organism’s situation and its pre-existing world-model contents, the
issue comes down to which contingencies, embodied by both physical (external)
and mental (internal) environments, possess the highest personal priorities for
being cross-checked. This is addressed by the world-model providing a schematic
sub-model of the organism’s current situation, incorporating the uncertainties
of relevance. These uncertainties (by which I also mean ‘possibilities’ or
‘known unknowns’) are exactly the facets of the situation that attention is
paid to — and which the organism is consequently conscious of.
In fact, the environments which we explore include
those of our own world-models, as we discover or re-confirm the myriad
abstractions formerly established among their contents. Self-reflection means
attending to one’s metabolic or mental states in this context — comparing their
conceptual relations from a ‘higher order’ perspective. This comprises
secondary representations of primary representations — schematic sub-models of
schematic sub-models and so forth — with attention flowing from one to another,
depending on the weightings of uncertainties between them. I wonder if many
‘mystical’ (not to mention perhaps schizophrenic) phenomena could be
attributable to non-symbolic rationality subconsciously ‘straying’ into the
symbolic domain so that concepts get confused with percepts. Although real
reality isn’t directly accessible on conceptual terms, our somewhat unreal
socio-linguistic constructs, which we’re obliged to inhabit, are never entirely
divorced from the real world, anyway. They can also be fascinating, expansive,
rewarding and socially valuable. On the other hand, the fluidity of our
symbolic worlds means they need to be firmly grounded both in the bodily senses
and through ongoing communications with a broad range of other people.
World-models have at least two main kinds of building
blocks — icons and symbols (described below in Appendix 5) — forming vast
networks of weighted links between mental states. While these sets of
connections are based on neurones, no state necessarily entails specific neurones
firing. Icons are approximated ‘sensations’. The registration of how these link
up affords their semantic interpretation as ‘perceptions’, and non-symbolic
rationality has an iconic, analogue basis. This puts it more directly in touch
with reality, but for managing large amounts of data it’s less efficient than
its modern counterpart that uses discrete symbols. These are constructed from
icons; links between icons; other symbols; and links between other symbols.
Imagination recombines both icons and symbols in modelling explorative
simulations of reality, but the symbolic mode’s reliance on abstractly
categorised ‘conceptions’ makes it prone to distortion in mapping reality.
Symbolic information-processing is normally so
effective that we employ it almost all the time. It’s the foundation of human
speech and of monologue thought, but our underlying pre-linguistic,
pre-conceptual world-model still has vital functions beneath the linguistic
one. Out of these two mechanisms of rationality, we tend to be conscious only
through the latter. The non-linguistic one, probably millions of years old,
provides a sensory basis for the latter, grounding it in reality, but operating
at subliminal levels of which we’re usually not aware. The linguistic
world-model, meanwhile, is full of socially framed beliefs and story-based
symbols and concepts. These allow us to efficiently share huge sums of
information, but are prone to distort reality. In the latihan, as the
conceptual world-model takes a back seat, attention’s prioritisation seems to
switch over (incompletely and intermittently) to a non-conceptual mode. This
delivers a chance for the non-linguistic, more picture-oriented world-model to
pay attention to the symbolic substructure that it provides and on which the linguistic
one depends. Through a kind of iconic review, re-construction and
re-consolidation of this platform, it gradually diminishes any reality
distortions among the linguistic world-model’s components, helping us to
function better. In the process, it actively engages with lots of those
story-based symbols and concepts. These include our culturally derived
interpretations and depictions of morality and spirituality, along with their
emotional impacts.
Prioritisation factors may be incorporated (to arbitrary
accuracy) in the overall world-model as features of the person’s own physical
and psychological nature, but no currently operative attention-prioritising
factor can itself be prioritised for cross-checking. To do so would involve a
sub-model (representing part of one’s character) embodying uncertainty, leaving
nothing for it to be cross-checked against. Attention exists only because the
organism’s immediate path toward resolving some disequilibrium incorporates a
range of situational possibilities, and attention’s function is to reduce this
range in order for more efficient action to be taken. As a result, whenever
somebody self-reflects, their in-the-moment, innermost motivations can never be
immediately and directly scrutinised. In other words, it must always appear to
the individual that he or she is spontaneously directing attention based on an
undetectable, intangible locus of autonomy — which is symbolically labelled as
free will. This conceptualisation is essentially a shortcut means of ignoring the
reality that attention gets directed in the way described above, via automatic
internal prioritisations, established in the context of the person’s relevant
uncertainties and pre-existing world-model. Within the narrative of the
resolution of disequilibria, this illusion is likely to be helpful for
attention to operate. As prioritisations are continuously reconfigured,
attention’s focus and direction constantly change, but it can never be directed
toward its own current prioritisation processes.
Appendix 4: A skeptical aside — the
glamour of the guru
Some say the latihan is divine in origin, and the
notion of Pak Subuh’s talks being latihan-guided creates an impression of them
as divinely inspired. Some say that just by reading or listening to the talks in
a suitably receptive state of being, our inner lives can be nourished; and if
the talks were divinely inspired, it’s gravely held that they simply must be
true. Though there’s no objective evidence that Pak Subuh’s talks are
spiritually special, a sense of earnest gratitude lingers, inducing the pious
acceptance of his tale of becoming the conduit for the exercise. However,
there’s no good reason to abandon our modern tradition of questioning
contentious ideas with respect to evidence. In skeptical terms, it’s likely
that aspects of auto-suggestion are in play whenever people solemnly and humbly
attend to ‘sacred’ texts in a tranquil, contemplative, yet non-analytical frame
of mind with the preconception of privileged access to a precious revelation.
Whichever half-venerable guru it might be, anyone entering into such a deep
interaction with his or her words, heeding them in a deeply receptive state, is
liable to come away with self-fulfilling confirmations of spiritually edifying
benefit.
Intense disciple-guru relationships involving certain
charismatic qualities and levels of devotion can generate what are loosely
called mystical experiences. These may readily take on forms that match the
guru’s accounts of spiritual reality, including the value of the relationship.
This effect varies greatly among people, but if even a few disciples report
such phenomena, then social reinforcement of the disciple-guru relationship can
occur across a wider population. As gurus typically encourage disciples to
engage in inner practices, the propensity for mystical phenomena is enhanced
and the reverence factor is compounded. The guru may be expected to supply some
spiritual theory based on suitably mystical terminology. He or she may profess
to be intimately familiar with relevant spiritual realities that are
inaccessible to the disciples, who accept the details of the relations between
theoretical entities on trust. Provided that the overall account is basically
self-consistent, this will satisfy the more reverent followers. The guru’s
authority is amplified, however, if the disciples are led to understand that,
through their humility, sincerity, diligence and merit, they too could
eventually become directly acquainted with the realities as described. This
echoes the Emperor’s New Clothes. The weavers of the cloth claim it’s invisible
to anyone who’s incompetent, but magnificent in the eyes of everyone else — at
which all of the courtiers are intimidated into obsequious adulation. Weavers
of spiritual theories may likewise placate doubt by saying, ‘You’ll be unable
to verify these truths for a while, but they’ll become clear as your
spirituality advances.’
When physicists, say, use Einstein’s tensor equations
of General Relativity to explain inferences of Dark Energy, we’re free to be
skeptical. On the whole, however, we tend to trust that they know what they’re
talking about, despite our not recognising their technical terminology; neither
the entities referred to, nor the mathematics relating them. Our trust is based
on the scientists’ reputations. We also observe that, at least in principle
(given enough textbooks and free time), their mysterious pronouncements are
checkable by anyone. Similarly, a spiritual leader may promise followers that a
doctrine is checkable provided that they commit to the disciple-guru
relationship, are patient in their practice, and are blessed with sufficient
spiritual capacity. That’s good enough for many, but another option is to
investigate the theory. Scholarly research, wrestling with the cultural,
religious and esoteric technicalities, may cultivate an informed view to at
least authenticate the theory’s credentials and relevance to the inner
practice. Unfortunately, this is inclined to look like seriously hard work,
especially since, via the recommended inner practice alone, one supposedly has
the prospect of automatically gaining acquaintance with these matters in
conjunction with spiritual progress. Besides, as the guru may have mentioned,
inner reality is beyond the mind’s ability to grasp, so no amount of study can
ever shed light on the explanation presented. Needless to say, as a strategy of
boldness goes, this is convenient with respect to securing unquestionability.
It demands no mental labour, offering an interpretation of spirituality which
is claimed not only to transcend the intellect, but to manifest itself to
anyone who humbly, sincerely and diligently undertakes the practice.
Appendix 5: Semiotics,
explanations — and having faith
The study called ‘semiotics’ draws a useful distinction
between three possible ways of transmitting or communicating information —
icons, symbols and indices. An icon is some direct, physical form of
association to represent something. For instance, a photo of my cat sleeping on
the bed pillow tells me that she’s been there (again). A symbol is a wholly
indirect indicator for representing something, perhaps chosen by social
conventions lost in history, or even arbitrarily. For instance, a handwritten
note concerning my cat might afford the same information. Most linguistic
sentences and ordinary words are symbols. An index is in-between — somewhat
iconic, but also requiring some process of inference that’s based on the
situational context. For instance, had the bedroom door been open, cat hair on
the squashed pillow transmits the same message as before. Among humans,
however, relevant information might be conveyed indexically only thanks to some
non-symbolic social convention. For example, my cat being locked in the garage,
along with her water, food and litter tray, could be a message to me about
closing the bedroom door before leaving the house. As in this example,
metaphors use symbols to represent ideas, including other symbols, on the basis
of icons and indices.
The significance of symbol manipulation is immense to
the point that it virtually defines our species. A major advantage of it is
that, employing metaphor, we can describe, name and record things, processes
and encounters that have not been previously described, named or recorded.
Whether a culture is comprised of a hundred people or a billion, it will change
profoundly as its ‘concept set’ develops; similar to an individual person.
Taking full advantage of symbol use, however, may require some readiness to
uncritically suspend disbelief – to ‘see through the eyes of another’ as he or
she describes what they have seen. Combined with our natural curiosity, this is
a blessing when, say, children are guided by the words of a parent or other
trustworthy adult, but credulousness, or perhaps ‘faith’, may cause problems if
a trusted story-teller’s narrative is perhaps misleading, deceptive or
unusually exotic. Explanations can easily come to be accepted as absolute
truths, despite the conceptual meaning of truth itself being determined by
socio-cultural conditioning and expectations.
Human communication is chiefly about words and
phrases. A species using a symbol-based language assigns meaning to these
through some form of social agreement. However, it’s practically impossible to
do this (especially as children) unless each individual recognises that others
also possess portable, mental worlds within which they too are capable of
freely assigning meanings to symbols, as well as modelling others’
world-models. Symbol-based language implies thus appreciating that other people
have their own separate viewpoints, and an ability to imagine oneself in
somebody else’s shoes. Moreover, if a narrative or account concerns experiences
that the listener hasn’t had, then allocating meanings to words and phrases is
likely to take place more efficiently if the listener tends to automatically
adopt or identify with the perspective of the speaker or protagonist. With good
story-telling, we tend not to participate as passively disinterested
bystanders, but actively visualise ourselves wearing the shoes of the person
portrayed as having the experiences.
I suspect that evolution made us very receptive to
coherent stories, whether or not these are intended as explanations. For
hundreds of thousands of years, humans listened at the fireside to others’
tales of ‘what is out there’ — anticipating edification and/or entertainment.
During the last few thousand years, this process came to include reading, where
the story-teller is physically absent. Now it covers cinema, TV and video games,
but it’s always about our willingness, or even eagerness, to suspend disbelief
and put ourselves in the hands of some narrator or advice giver — trusting him
or her to suitably stimulate our imaginations with scenarios that we find
pleasure in visualising, creating mental worlds that can be wider and richer in
significance than familiar environments. Such receptivity can backfire if and
when the stories replace direct experience of life — which seems to occur,
sometimes sadly — but it lets individuals and societies benefit massively
whenever it adds enlightening perspectives or understanding to our direct
experience of life.
If our receptivity is hard-wired by evolution, then it
must be conducive to our species’ survival. This may seem trivial, as it’s
easily taken for granted, but every primordial human social group, on the
whole, would have benefitted from its members attending to narratives,
absorbing both information and ‘feelings’. While language transfers learned
wisdom among individuals, human communities also formalise it to establish
cultural institutions. Anthropology scholars talk about the commonality of
certain ‘mythic’ themes among diverse societies. These may have local motifs
but universal benefits in relation to expressing natural laws, supporting the
social order or conceptually guiding individuals through the stages of life.
The image of the hero, for instance, as developed and conveyed to young males
(sexism noted) over the course of some half-a-million years – whether verbally
or graphically, via narrative, metaphor, allegory, ceremony or ritual – should
be expected to have inspired them ‘to boldly go’ and achieve useful outcomes
for their social groups.
So it would appear that we are primed to respond to
narratives as motivating forces — potentially valuable for building social
cohesion. The solidarity of human communities often plainly hinges on a common
sense of identity, reinforced by joint trust in a particular source of stories
or explanations — and hence mutual trust. This is because seeing through the
eyes of the same narrator or advice giver is to share that perspective. Our
innate capacity for symbol manipulation therefore supports the tendency to
cleave tenaciously to any systems of concepts which characterise our social
groups. Moreover, our emotional interdependence may incline us to buy into
socially endorsed, ‘manufactured’ realities based on good story-telling, which
may elicit communal hope, but also possibly conceit. There can be a lot of
peer-pressure alongside, and shrugging off that collective investment could
well be interpreted as a sign of individual unreliability.
Appendix 6: Pak Subuh — Caracas
— 1 April 1959
Ladies and gentlemen, this evening Bapak would like to
explain about the spiritual training of Subud, our worship of the One Almighty
God, which all of you have experienced.
The spiritual training is a training of the content of
our human self, whose working in our being we have long been unaware of. As you
know, when we were new-born babies we were still in contact with the state of
our inner self. That is why, as babies, our face would often show expressions
of happiness or sadness, or sometimes disappointment. The fact is that those
expressions of a baby reflect a state of reality; but we grown-up people, who
are able to use all our five senses, are unable to know what a baby is feeling
and what a baby knows at such moments.
However, as the days, weeks and months go by, the
baby’s senses begin to get closer to the influence of the world. For example,
the baby begins to be able to see the shapes that are in this world and to hear
earthly sounds. The baby’s contact with its soul gradually closes. So when the
baby has become a grown child, the child is more familiar with the condition of
the world outside than with the condition existing within its self.
The bigger the child grows — the more the child sees
and studies and experiences things in this world — the closer he or she comes
to the influences of the world and the further from influences from within the
self. You could say that what comes from inside has been closed up completely.
All the five senses: the heart, the desires, the brain and the thoughts have
become filled with influences of the world, and obtain no spark or content
whatsoever from the child’s soul.
Consequently, when such people come to think and
ponder about the nature of life after death, they can only do so by adjusting
it to experiences they have had in the world. It’s not impossible that they may
think or wonder, ‘What is paradise like? What is God and what is He like?’ When
they think about and consider such things, their imagination compares them to
what is in this world. In reality however, we cannot compare life after death
and God to anything that exists on this earth. Yet that is really what people
do when they grow up and become adults, because they have long forgotten the
way of knowing that they possessed when they were small and still closely
connected to the life before they existed in this world and the life after
death.
Now you are just beginning to experience how you were,
when you were a baby. Now, tonight, that ambience has begun to open up so that,
little by little, you can connect with your soul again, and you can connect
with states from before the world influenced your physical parts or your five
senses. That is why when you receive this latihan it is not necessary for you
to think. You should not use your brain, heart or desires, lest they form a
block or obstacle to your receiving from the contact with your soul, which the
power of God is bringing back to life.
It appears to me that Pak Subuh spoke most directly
about the latihan back in the 1950s. He indicated many times that the latihan
could raise its practitioners to a purer, higher level of being — which is
typically supposed to be desirable — whatever ‘higher’ might stand for. In this
relatively early talk partially presented above, he was more explicit about the
latihan’s possible results, but still didn’t say ‘how’ it is supposed to work.
Maybe Pak Subuh didn’t know, or maybe it’s just an unfathomable ‘divine gift’,
or maybe its best chance of being effective is if one simply doesn’t theorise
about it. In any case, the religious style of language he used to describe the
latihan can readily be replaced by psychological or philosophical talk, while
keeping the pragmatic meaning intact. Each person’s reaction to this will
depend on just what styles they’re familiar with, and how flexibly they can
recalibrate the medium of the message. Paragraph by paragraph (skipping the introduction), the above highly
metaphorical passage is more satisfactorily understood by me as follows.
The Subud exercise involves our non-conscious human
nature. As you know, when new-born, we are devoid of symbols and their effects.
We are more like our ancient, pre-linguistic ancestors were for their whole
lives. That is why as babies we show expressions of feeling like animals show —
with these feelings not being motivated or determined by socio-linguistic
influences. Such expressions reflect a state of reality that is free from
conceptualised thought, a state that is based on mental representations that
are much more direct than those that come later, when symbols and abstractions,
including words, ideas, descriptions and conceptual systems, come to dominate
our perceptions of reality.
However, as time passes, the baby’s own senses become
mediated by language. For example, a baby begins to see shapes as having
labelled identities that are presented by parents and other family members
around them. These identities come to be symbolised by gestures, signs,
signals, words and various other linguistic elements. The baby’s contact with
its original socio-iconic, analogue representation of reality is gradually
superseded by many socio-linguistic levels of interaction and understanding
based on communal processing of verbally discretised information.
The bigger the child grows, the more it sees and
studies and experiences worldly things in socio-linguistic terms, and the
closer it comes to the influences of linguistically founded social norms and
rule-oriented methods of thinking and conceptualising. You could say that the
socio-iconic level of perceiving the world becomes thoroughly submerged beneath
the vast complexities of syntax-based rationality and symbolically rule-based
living. Perceptions, emotions, ambitions and thoughts all become concept-driven
and constructed, with the result that the emergent, semi-autonomous processes
and pressures of verbal society become dominant among the child’s motivations.
Consequently, when older people come to think about
the meaning of life, they arrive at all sorts of ultimately implausible,
quasi-mystical notions that actually derive mainly from accidents of social
history, geography and culture, and the individual’s socio-linguistic
dependence on the contingencies of widely variable social norms. In reality,
however, one’s life as an individual in the world of socio-linguistic labels
and concepts is very different from what life would be like without such a
syntactic-symbolic emphasis — corresponding to a way of knowing reality that babies
have, and which our pre-linguistic ancestors had.
Now you are just beginning to experience how you were,
when you were a baby. That contact with your more iconic, less symbolic way of
thinking and being in the world is beginning to be made available to you, and
you can connect with states from beyond the socio-linguistic world’s influence
upon your being. That is why when you receive this latihan it is not necessary
or useful for you to conceptualise. In the latihan, you should not indulge your
intellect or emotions or goals or beliefs because these have been already
shaped and directed by the socio-linguistic world of conceptualising things
symbolically, and will form a block to your sense of that pre-linguistic
appreciation of life which continues to reside deep within you.