Subud Vision - Discussion

Lilliana Gibbs - But what IS Subud

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From Edward Fido, January 9, 2008. Time 21:57

Hi Philip,

Your last post, enlightened and humorous, cheered me up immensely.

In the last analysis I think it may well be a positive, but slightly sceptical approach to things long concretized into de facto 'Divine Writ' in Subud which might save the day.

Baby and bathwater. Well, we certainly seem to have a lot of the latter. It is also very murky. Hard to see most of the baby. Fortunately the head seems to be above the bathwater and it's still alive!

I am sure that these pages are trawled by 'concerned Subud members' who work themselves into frenzies over 'the heresies' contained herein.

Personally I find these pages helpful because they allow people to say things which are often felt but never voiced.

My gut feeling is that the next twenty or thirty years will be 'proof of pudding' time.

If Subud continues the way it seems to be following it will be dead in the water.

Pak Subuh kept saying that Subud was God's work not Man's (or Woman's).

If a real qualitative change comes I am sure it will sweep away all the parody Orientalist, Gurdjieff and 'Melbourne Theosophical Society circa 1950' nonsense and the spiritual Edna Everages and Sandy Stones with it.

Hold on to your seat. It could be a rocky ride!

Regards,

Edward

From Philip Quackenbush, January 9, 2008. Time 22:39

Hi, Edward,

You said:

"My gut feeling is that the next twenty or thirty years will be 'proof of pudding' time."

Enough time for the Old Guard to fade away.

"If Subud continues the way it seems to be following it will be dead in the water."

Dunno 'bout dead, but certainly reduced to a small school of fish out of water, and it doesn't take long for the fish to die in that situation.

"Pak Subuh kept saying that Subud was God's work not Man's (or Woman's)."

Well, I used to believe that nonsense when I believed in "God", but four decades in the cult cured me of both illusions.

Well, they can still be a part of the cult, but if it's ever going to be other than a cult, then they'll simply be a small part of a growing number that has a less skewed view of the universe. At this point, though, the organization, promoting as it does the skewed views of the founder, is bound to continue to either tread water or go under, since so many of his views were obviously based on ignorance from the rich but odd culture he grew up in that most people apparently either find silly or offensive, since so few remain members of the cult, either taking the "latihan" with them to practice on their own or assuming that it's not worth much because of its cultish setting.

Peace, Philip

From Edward Fido, January 9, 2008. Time 23:24

Hi Philip,

As I said previously, your posts cheer me up. Immensely.

One of the problems most of us who came into Subud have are that we are not Javanese.

Nor did many of us come out of Gurdjieff.

I think it is very much a question of 'Do not look at my outward appearance but take what is in my hand.'

An increasing number of people seem not to be taking the administo-religious organisational bullshit and doing their own thing, either inside or out.

Deanna Koontz seems to be one of those forced out to individuate.

We need individuals. Not sheep.

Most of the contributors to these pages are not sheep.

Without going overboard, I think members or ex-members individuating and getting on with their own lives heralds a new beginning for Subud.

I consider myself a 'recovering Subud member'.

After 35 years in the show I finally walked. I had tried to do so a few years previously but got lured back.

At the moment I wouldn't touch Subud here.

What I feel about the local situation is in stark contrast to my memories of contact, relatively brief, with Pak Subuh and a feeling that 'something else' exists.

Regards,

Edward

From Philip Quackenbush, January 10, 2008. Time 7:13

Hi, Edward,

You said:

I consider myself a 'recovering Subud member'.

After 35 years in the show I finally walked. I had tried to do so a few years previously but got lured back.

At the moment I wouldn't touch Subud here.

What I feel about the local situation is in stark contrast to my memories of contact, relatively brief, with Pak Subuh and a feeling that 'something else' exists.

=====

Well, it took me over 35 years to finally get a handle on what was going on in the organization and my "latihan", some of it involving rather painful withdrawal symptoms, since the "latihan" can become addicting when one doesn't have an alternate to the "fix" it offers. Because of a number of fortuitous life circumstances (which I didn't regard as such at the time, being a fairly thoroughgoing Subietrubie), I first became aware of an alternative in my job at the library when a book crossed my path on qigong and I tried a couple of the suggested "forms" during a time when the local group had dissolved because the people who came up with most of the hall rental had moved out of town, it being a rather poor group otherwise.

My marriage was dissolving at the same time, and I soon found myself living elsewhere and figured out other means of supporting myself, which included busking at an open-air market where one of the former guides to the Forbidden City had a food concession. I asked him if he taught qigong and he said yes, but I had already established a routine of going to a nearby park in a position hidden by surrounding vegetation to practice what I already had learned from the book, which was probably one of the first books on qigong to be published in the US. One day, while doing what is known as the energy microcircuit "exercise", I suddenly found myself in a situation that verified for me better than I had ever had it in "latihan" that I was one with the universe and there were no boundaries to my "self", which was both inside and outside my body, with no center. Later, when my new friend (who moved here a year after I did) gave me a lesson or two on qigong (trading them for guitar lessons), it was reaffirmed for me that it was possible to literally do anything that other beings in the universe didn't oppose. I found further affirmation of that in the book on chaos that I just recently finished.

When the Subud group re-formed (I originally wrote reformed, but they didn't) I went back to doing "latihan" and gave up the qigong practice.

When I moved here, Hadrian (who's written an article on this site) told me about Subudtalk, and I learned a great deal about the sub rosa shenanigans of the organization from posts there, eventually officially asking to stop being a member, since I felt it hypocritical to continue as one.

When I returned two years or so later, I had tried another version of qigong that turned out to be virtually the same as the "latihan", less the mumbo jumbo, and that's the "latihan" I continue to do, "receiving" guidance and perhaps greater physical and mental health in the same manner without any interference from an imagined "God." If anything, it's been better than before. I just have to take the founder's advice and not pay attention to those "exercising" around me during grope "latihan" (or get drawn in or attached to their attitudes before and after). The other benefit for me, of course, is that I can still schmooze with the people there I want to socially, which wasn't possible much as a semi-"isolated" non-member.

What I've tried may not work for you, but it did for me.

Peace, Philip

From Andrew Hall, January 10, 2008. Time 21:41

Hi Philip,

I really appreciate your reply to Edward and the story you tell about your experience of the latihan.

I admire your sharing this and your courage to say your own truth. I am surprised that my heart feels great relief after reading it.

I hope I can become as honest and willing to talk about my own latihan experience since I find myself fearing it will be judged by others as "inferior" and "wrong".

Bravo and thank you! I hope Subud Vision and our Subud community become places to share and hear more of our individual stories.

Regards,

Andrew

From Edward Fido, January 10, 2008. Time 22:3

Hi Philip,

Many thanks for your post which I appreciated.

I have actually done tai-chi for a bit over a year. This particular school also includes lotus and lohan (qigong).

Bodhidharma - a Buddhist monk from South India - is supposed to have introduced the lohan exercises to the monks at the Shaolin monastery. (As you know all this is shrouded in myth and semi-history as in Java).

I remember, in one of his books, Prio Hartono saying something about people receiving their own martial art after being enlightened.

Pak Subuh is reported to have received pencak silat teaching from a mysterious boatman.

It all gets highly allegorical!

I think I am working through my stuff in my own way. Which is what I think you and a few other brave souls have or are doing.

It seems to be a case of 'Work out your own salvation with diligence. Buddhas do but point the way.'

Regards,

Edward

From Philip Quackenbush, January 10, 2008. Time 22:53

Hi, Edward and Andrew,

If there's anything that's valuable for a person in life that can be used in later life (and, something not entirely to be discounted from a scientific stance, though there's little, if any, "real" evidence for it, "life after death"), it has to be one's experiences. There's nothing "right" or "wrong" about one's experiences, but if someone just goes through them, whatever they are, with no attempt to learn from them, then, in a sense, one's life could be said to be wasted.

On the other hand, I wake up every morning at my age (I just did it again), grateful that I'm still on the "right" side of the grass. Having almost died three and a half years ago from internal bleeding (I highly recommend it as a way to go; entirely painless), I can tell you it's no big whoop, but there's something to be said for just being alive, so I'm not about to complain about my situation in life or Subud, but just state the facts as I see them, which, admittedly is a personal view that won't necessarily be accepted by everyone. And so it goes. But I am encouraged to find out there are people in the cult who don't just blindly accept the Party Line. Almost every week, it seems recently, there's another that I encounter. It's being open about my own attitudes, I think, that creates a situation in which others can be open about theirs.

A couple of days ago I stated somewhere on this site that I was planning on writing a book to help "save" the world. Yesterday I realized that I wasn't really fully prepared to do so, but that it didn't matter that much. By simply being who I am, at peace with myself as I am, I create what's known in chaos theory as a strange attractor which affects everyone and everything around me (getting gung ho about anything, as I did about the projected book, just creates a turbulence in the strange attractors that may become unmanageable, like a hurricane instead of a wind tunnel experiment). Enough people like that will change the world for the "better", IMO.

If there's any "real" benefit to "doing" the "latihan" that may affect the world, that's the direction in which it lies, I think, and my observation is that at least some of the practitioners of the SUBcult's version of relaxation response have gone in that direction over the years. All this preaching at each other reminds me of a cartoon I saw the other day of a woman being harassed about her body language and raising an appropriate finger in response, to which the harasser said, "Well, I see you have that part of it mastered."

Peace, Philip

From bronte, January 23, 2008. Time 1:51

All this discussion about what Bapak said, and it's relevance, seems to be ignoring one of the more important things about life and Subud.

How do we treat each other?

And how do we behave ourselves?

Is it OK for a person, Subud or not, to come rushing up to someone and, in a fierce temper, tell them they "don't belong here", "are a sick person" (i.e. mad), and so disturb them extraordinarily. Or to come rushing out into an open space, shouting angrily that "You are a liar"

Although these are experiences personal to me, are they appropriate for someone who has been in Subud for a long time?

Is that the bahaviour to be accepted by people from helpers in Subud?

And as to personal morality, sexuality, and honesty, what of that?

Is it OK to hide the facts to save face? Is it OK or not to even accept a criticism, because "one should not criticise?"

These thing matter to me more in Subud than many of the things that are being discussed under the subject of "What is Subud"

If being in Subud is about being hurt by all the self important people who also ar "in it", then long may it die.

If it is about learning to be a more caring helpful understanding human, then long may it live. Till then, I shall keep more my own counsel. I can get all the hurt I need outside of Subud, without being subject to soul-destroying damnations from the people in Subud.

As to insanity, we've seen the real thing here. And who defines it anyway?

Thankyou.

From Sahlan Diver, January 23, 2008. Time 11:1

Bronte,

Your comment seems fair to me. Of course one problem we have in Subud is that we are supposedly not hierarchical. If an incident like that happened in a Church it wouldn't be thought inappropriate if a priest took the person on one side and had a quiet word with them about their behaviour, but in Subud we don't want our helpers to be like a priesthood or our committee to be like a superior hierarchy, so who is going to deal with inappropriate personal behaviour?

In the early 1970's I was spoken to in a very inappropriate way, by a helper, which greatly upset me. Simon Sturton, who was a helper in that group, told me about an incident he had witnessed where Ibu, Bapak's second wife, had upset one of the lady members. Simon said "There's no doubt about it, what Ibu did was a mistake - she was wrong!" That made me feel a lot better - if Bapak's wife could get it wrong, it didn't seem so bad that some relative beginner of a helper could also make a mistake.

Now here's the curious thing - a year later I visited the group again and spotted across the room the helper who had spoken to me badly. I experienced a instant feeling of love and affection for the man, which I couldn't explain, until a few days later I came across an article by him in the group newsletter where he admitted a catalogue of his faults that he said he had suddenly come, through the latihan, to realise. I was on good terms with the man ever since that. It seems the latihan can make very big changes for some - for those that it doesn't, they are the losers, not you, though I certainly sympathise with the hurt such behaviour causes,

Sahlan

From stefan, January 23, 2008. Time 13:37

Hello Bronte,

I want to add something to Sahlan's response to your questions:

*Is it OK for a person, Subud or not, to come rushing up to someone and, in a fierce temper, tell them they "don't belong here"? ... Is it OK to hide the facts to save face? Is it OK or not to even accept a criticism, because "one should not criticise"?*

It's courageous of you to voice this, and very saddening that you've had harsh and judgemental accusations thrown at you by fellow latihaners. Two thoughts come to mind.

First is about projection:

I learned from my youngest step-daughter that what riled me most was her blatant expression of everything I was in denial about. Her behaviour was angry, passionate, impulsive and confrontative. I wasn't able to play the wise father role because all the same feelings were seething in me (unacknowledged then) and only barely repressed! Sometimes I "lost it" and exploded like a volcano - something I deeply regretted later. Perhaps your honesty has been a trigger for certain people to "project" their disowned demons onto you! OUCH!!!

Second is about spiritual pride:

Catholic priests have only recently been made accountable for abuse, and their organisation shamed for covering it up. I learned recently that Tibetan Buddhist monasteries sometimes hush up poisonings and dagger vendettas for fear of losing their public standing or funding. I'm sure this applies to other groups who have "an image" to maintain.

Misapplying Bapak's advice to be "harmonious" is not the only reason that Subud finds it hard to acknowledge criticism. It's also a typical organisational self-defence mechanism. Fear of loss of face prompts a short term cover up that inevitably backfires in the long run.

I notice a worldwide demand for open discussion in Subud with a serious review of our current "norms". Honest dialogue is on the rise. Repression and exclusion will no more go unchallenged. Dare I hope this will bring palpable improvements in our collective?

Stefan

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