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Subud Vision - Discussion

Sahlan Diver - Subud-think?

Green Lights from God. From Raphael Skerratt, October 6, 2009. Time 6:18

I liked the bit about the traffic lights turning green. That happened to me too - only joking.

Raph


From Sahlan Diver, October 6, 2009. Time 7:29

This weekend on Sky they were celebrating 40 years of Monty Python. They showed excerpts from that notorious confrontation between the Pythons on one side and a bishop and Malcolm Muggeridge on the other side arguing that the "Life of Brian" was blasphemous. One clip from the conversation they showed, which I hadn't seen before, was John Cleese complaining about a sermon in which the bishop described seven attempts they made to take Christianity to Tibet. First they were driven back by floods, then by snow, then by disease etc etc. Finally "God triumphed and they got through." John Cleese said that he thought the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the story was that God had been doing his level best to try to keep Christianity out of Tibet :)

Sahlan


From Philip Quackenbush, October 12, 2009. Time 13:34

Hi, Raph,

Well, it happened to me, in a way, and I'm NOT kidding. I was under the delusion at one point early on in my decades in Subud that I was being protected in all things by "God", so I stepped out into traffic against the light a couple of times after "latihan" to test my "protection". Looking back, I think the reason I didn't end up in a hospital or a cemetery was simply because, unlike me at those times, the drivers were alert.

Not that I'm that much more awake and alert now compared to then, but I may have learned a couple of things since through life experience that includes the "latihan", but I don't attribute all of my learning to the "latihan" any more, as I once tended to do under the influence of the founder's lectures, which, as a "helper", I felt obligated to follow unless experience proved otherwise, as set down in the "helper's" manual (the infamous Blue Book that tells you what the going rate is for a given belief, but nobody seems willing to kick the tires before buying).

Well, one thing I learned was that "Jesus" was right in supposedly saying that we are what we believe. If something goes against our beliefs, the brain seems to be constructed to justify any folly, no matter how illogical or absurd (as neuroscience has evidence to show), so that, as the New Agers say, you construct your reality. It would be more accurate to say that your perceptions of "reality" are constructed out of distortions of the perceptions filtered by your thoughts and the beliefs they coalesce into. Consequently, I found myself for a long time looking for items in the founder's lectures that would justify either his own non sequiturs and ad hominems and just plain ignorance where he feigned knowledge from "God" or to justify my own belief in his pronouncements contrary to common sense, so it took me many years to get away from some of the more absurd beliefs engendered by adherence to that attitude, and I may still have a few to deal with yet. I could be, of course, that the founder of Subud may have been absolutely correct in all of his assertions, but the probability of that is so close to nil as to be not worth taking into consideration in any evaluation of them, which, of course, we, as "good" Subud members, are admonished to not think about, as Subud-think would have it.

Peace, Philip


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