Subud Vision - Discussion
Stefan Freedman - Subud at Middle East Spirituality and Peace Festival
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From David Week, April 29, 2008. Time 8:15
Hi Merin
"You explain why the exercise is a good idea -- since it helps restore the capacity for 'flow' -- if the flow itself is desirable. You describe the flow as representing unreflective naturalness, 'high immediacy', fluidity of being and spontaneously 'doing the right thing' among one's activities, without their being distorted by base impulses or reflective thinking. This sure sounds desirable, but you also indicate that 'doing the right thing' is developed in relation to outer training, determined according to the adopted framework upon which one focusses. But are there any criteria for the rightness of frameworks, or can 'the right framework' (on a case by case basis) be selected naturally and spontaneously?"
Yes--but only among frameworks that you have access to, in other words to ones that you know. Let's say that Christianity offers a toolset, and Zen, and Aristotle, and suburban America. And you are conversant with all of these. When something happens can you select the correct tool from the right toolset? I think so. I hesitate to use the word "in my experience", because of its funny Subud connotations... but in this case in my experience, too. But where in order to get it "right" you have to be familiar with not just the tools, but the context. In Pak Subuh's lectures, he thought you could go to Dayaks and--without knowing anything about them--just do the right thing, just fit in by "receiving". Neither he nor his followers were able to do that.
"Flow" is not a substitute for experience and understanding gained through living and learning.
Best
David
From Merin Nielsen, April 29, 2008. Time 12:58
Hi, David,
Okay, but when it comes to 'doing the right thing', only a given framework makes it 'the right' thing to do. So, what about when it comes to comparing and selecting between frameworks in which to develop competence? It would seem that the 'right' framework gets selected, spontaneously or otherwise, on some basis other than that of any framework.
Likewise, there appears to be no toolset available, with which one could be familiar, to guide the selection of the right toolset to employ with respect to any situation. If the capacity to spontaneously 'do the right thing' is developed through familiarity with a context-dependent toolset, then on what grounds may one 'select the right toolset'? Do we each inherently possess some 'master toolset' / 'meta-framework' performing this function, or is it here that reflective thinking necessarily plays a role?
Regards,
Merin
From David Week, April 29, 2008. Time 14:39
Hi Merin
"Likewise, there appears to be no toolset available, with which one could be familiar, to guide the selection of the right toolset to employ with respect to any situation. If the capacity to spontaneously 'do the right thing' is developed through familiarity with a context-dependent toolset, then on what grounds may one 'select the right toolset'? Do we each inherently possess some 'master toolset' / 'meta-framework' performing this function, or is it here that reflective thinking necessarily plays a role?"
Well, if we take continental philosophy as a guide, there is a 'master toolset', in the sense that each of us has a background framework which is so much part of who we are, that we rarely become aware of it (usually only when it is about to change.) But a better name for that that frame is 'the background', rather than any kind of master meta-frame. The background is: (a) always shared, (b) always historical, (c) always perspectival. Another name for it is "our shared practices". How do you know that incest is wrong? Because of shared practices. Is incest always wrong? No: in some cultures it's not. At some times in our own history it's not been wrong. So all our judgment not only of what is write or wrong, but also what's what and how things work, comes from this shared background. How do you know that a hammer is for hammering? Predicate logic? I don't think so.
So the background is highly situated, and highly relativistic--but that doesn't make it arbitrary: not at all. It's the set of shared practices, including linguistic practices, that we've evolved which allow us to makes sense of the world, and to live in the world. Nothing arbitrary about that!
But I do remember Hubert Dreyfus talking about a student who finally got the point that what all that means is that there is nothing more permanent or stable against which to judge or understand things than our shared social practices--and who then went out into the hall and threw up. And I also remember a passage in Descartes where he describes the nauseous anxiety that grips him when he things of the possibility that there may be no firm footing beneath him.
On the other hand, the Buddhists would say: get used to it. That's the way it is. And once you understand that, you'll realise that it's just fine.
Best
David
PS: There are two terms which are useful here. One is the idea of the "Archimedian point". The idea here is there is no point outside the world, from which you can look at the world. You are always in the world, and surveying from some point within it. Where you are, shapes what you see. The desire for an "Archimedian point", on the other hand, drives us to imagine that there is something outside our embodied being in the world, from which we can finally see it "as it really is." That might be Reason, or Nature, or God, or the Source. But that seems to be just a fantasy driven by a fear of groundlessness.
The other term is "incommensurability". It refers to the relationship between two fully formed worlds: say of Zulu magic, and Western science. You can compare them, but only from within one or the other. If you think that you've found a place from which you can compare the two "at arms length", all you've done is found yet a third world. To say that two worlds or backgrounds are "incommensurable" is to say that there is no unworldly measure or standard by which we can compare them. We can only measure them against the background of yet some other world.
Hope this makes some kind of sense!
From Philip Quackenbush, April 29, 2008. Time 16:44
Hi, Merin,
You asked:
"In your paragraph about the scientifically-based meditation that you're trying, the prospective effects sound quite desirable, but I just wonder if they represent distinctively 'spiritual goals'."
What is "spiritual", anyway? It's a label that's been applied to far too many phenomena or imagined phenomena. That's why I always prefer to put the word in quotes. The effects I cited in my own case could be labeled as "spiritual" and well might be in an earlier era, but science has explained them in physiological terms, so there's no necessity, IMO, to go to the woowoo word, "spiritual", in this case, to describe them.
"What I'm getting at is whether such things as 'spiritual goals', like 'enlightenment' or 'synchronising with the Source', exist as real phenomena."
That would depend on what you categorize as "real phenomena". Again, I've put those words in quotes because they're what people have reference to from commonly-used or studied systems of thought, such as Buddhism or philosophy. The phenomena themselves are, or supposedly are, experiential, and therefore may vary widely from individual to individual, and are largely anecdotal until put under scientific scrutiny, which, in the case of the "latihan," has seldom been done (and even then remain somewhat anecdotal, since they are probably not statistically very significant or easily replicable). Your experience of the color blue, for example, may differ from mine, and there's no way to know other than to probably put us in a lab and measure our responses to various light frequencies (and that would only be one aspect of our experience, leaving out the subjective aspects). And, of course, neither of us would likely be able to describe to a blind person the difference between aquamarine blue and turquoise, any more than we could to a sighted person without showing them a chart of the designated colors, which any of the people involved might not have a memory for, anyway (there have been found to be millions of distinguishable, mostly-unnamed, shades of green, for example).
" In another paragraph, you mention "paths" like Zen's "gateless gate", Christianity's "narrow way", the "goal-less goal", the "way out" of the labyrinth of deceptions maintained by the ego's mental matrix, and an 'unhindered' state of living in Reality. Assuming that they are real, are such goals 'spiritual' somehow, or are they simply, naturally desirable for everyday reasons?"
Again, that's up to the individual to decide whether they are desirable for whatever reason. I'm simply doing the best I can to describe my experience and suggest possible access to such in words, which is the worst form of communication available to us, but which is the only one available on this forum (I think, unless the editors have a way of placing attachments of photos or videos, for example; maybe we all need to find out how to do U-Tube entries and links to them).
Peace, Philip
From Philip Quackenbush, April 29, 2008. Time 16:55
David said,
"....the Buddhists would say: get used to it. That's the way it is. And once you understand that, you'll realise that it's just fine."
Actually, sometimes it's pretty coarse. And that's just fine, too (on another scale; fine sandpaper is pretty coarse compared to, say, #400 emery paper).
Peace, Philip
From David Week, April 30, 2008. Time 2:46
Hi Merin
I agree with Philip. What is a "spiritual goal". Please define.
Best
David
From bronte, April 30, 2008. Time 5:11
All this talk about what is and what is perceived reminds me of the dilemma of "being awake"
If i want to persuade (?) some children of a friend of mine that they are actually "being asleep" because they watch lots of TV, and spend much of their time playing computer games, do I simply tell them it is stupid?
No
Do I ask them what alternative things they might be doing?
Do i ask them if they feel they are "in control" of themselves, or being controlled by others?
Time will tell.
These unusual kids actually belied in NOT going to school! And they manage it too, by being home educated.
We, the people who "joined Subud" stepped into a "spiritual world" which includes people, and beliefs, about "waking up", or "becoming aware”, or "being saved".
As such, we admitted, by default, that we are "asleep", "unaware" "unsaved".
OK, no one writing here has admitted these things that i have noticed.
But "spirituality" seems to me to have lots to do with becoming aware, awake, or something like that, which admits, in my view, two main things.
The first is that there is something more than our normal or usual lives to which we can become aware. Natural laws fall into that category.
The second is that we may, or do, need to be "saved" from ourselves. Our unconsciously harmful behaviour, our failure to do what is best for us, and for the people around us.
All the materialistic thinking, science not withstanding, has only reached out towards this awakeness.
Religion, mysticism, Subud(?) all claim, more or less, to start from the other side. Awareness, wakefulness, being alive.
Do we want to become alive?
Or are we happy to watch TV, play Nintendo, and accept that the world is really as we see it, each in his own small corner, and all is right with the world?
I don't think I ever did.
And I still believe the latihan of Subud, if not some of it's kindred practices (really?) are what we all need in order to wake up.
I hope you do not find me to have been TOO divergent from the point here.
Love,(Oh, I forgot that's not allowed in Subud. Probably gets about a 000001% reference in all Subud literature. And Bapak once said something about the emphasis on love being a feminine thing, the Christian way....... Oh well......)
Bronte
PS Some wrong things don't work. The results speak for themselves, eventually.
Finding which things are wrong because they don't work is really quite a task. I'd include a huge number of man-made laws in that category. And religious guidance that is wrong simply must fall apart, the sooner the better.
From Philip Quackenbush, April 30, 2008. Time 6:3
Good points, Bronte,
However, being awake is simply that; there's nothing "higher" or "lower" about awareness. Either (I am or) you're awake (i.e. aware of something) or (I'm not or) you aren't. The suffering around awareness comes when you (or I) want to be aware of something that you (or I) aren't aware of. But that's basically impossible, because, if (I'm not or) you aren't aware of something, it's because (I'm not or) you're not aware of it, and as soon as you (or I) become aware of not being aware of something, the moment is past to be aware of it as it was in that particular time/space moment. When the opportunity is present to direct (my or) your awareness towards something specific and you (or I) have the biochemical energy available to do so (i.e, your [or my] nervous system is firing on enough cylinders to allow that to happen), fine; but don't beat yourself up if you can't do that all the time [I try not to], because the brain has to rest, so it goes out of beta rhythm into slower ones, like alpha and theta, which don't allow for that much "willpower" [a Subud trance being usually alpha, which is highly suggestible, and therefore not recommended to remain in during listening to "explanations" by anybody, if you {or others} want to be able to discriminate about what's being said; virtually the same trance state as what is seen in those kids watching TV {which is why advertisers really don't have to use subliminal advertising to sell their stuff; it would only put them deeper into trance}, which is why Subud members like it so much]).
Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit, once wrote that the basic criterion for "spirituality" was awareness. When asked what he meant by that, he said, "Awareness, awareness, awareness." I've found that the basic criterion for awareness is health, which Da Boo Da said was the greatest of treasures. When I'm feeling good (i.e., healthy, physically, mentally and emotionally, though the three are not really seperable), my "awareness quotient" seems to go up compared to when I'm feeling ill or angry or fatigued. I think that the basic criterion for when a person is at least beginning to be "enlightened" is when that person realizes that this location and this moment is all there is and acts accordingly. All you (or I) can be conscious of is what you're (or I am) conscious of; that's your (or my) reality, so you (and I) might as well accept it and be happy with it, cuz there isn't anything else for you (or me).
Peace, Philip
From Merin Nielsen, April 30, 2008. Time 9:41
Hi, David,
>> .................... Hope this makes some kind of sense!
Yes, it's all good -- the background of shared social practices / the Archimedeam Point / the incommensurability. But I have another query. Can one 'flow' in terms of acting in accord with shared social practices?
Hi, Philip,
>> What is "spiritual", anyway? ........... ETC..........
I like those answers, thank-you.
Hi, David,
>> I agree with Philip. What is a "spiritual goal". Please define.
I too agree with Philip. I introduced the term in response to Philip's impressive list of phenomena that are usually labelled 'spiritual' -- though not by Philip. I like your definition of an imaginary "something outside our embodied being in the world, from which we can finally see it 'as it really is'."
Hi, Bronte,
>> ....... But "spirituality" seems to me to have lots to do with becoming aware, awake, or something like that, which admits, in my view, two main things. The first is that there is something more than our normal or usual lives to which we can become aware. Natural laws fall into that category. The second is that we may, or do, need to be "saved" from ourselves. Our unconciously harmful behviour, our failure to do what is best for us, and for the people around us.
I think there's something very important to what you say, but I think it's not 'spiritual'. I see it differently -- As we grow up, we might develop an uncomfortable realisation that there's much about ourselves that's invisible, perplexing and generally problematic. We might also come to detect the existence of some possibility to remedy this discomfort by discovering what's hidden. Finally, we might set out to do so by undertaking this or that practice or discipline.
Hi, Philip,
>> ............. I think that the basic criterion for when a person is at least beginning to be "enlightened" is when that person realizes that this location and this moment is all there is and acts accordingly.
But providing that allows pursuing long term goals.
I notice the Jesuits are at it again. Philip Kapleau tells this story in "The Three Pillars of Zen":
One day a man of the people said to the Zen master Ikkyu: “Master,will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?”
Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word “Attention.”
“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more?”
Ikkyu then wrote twice running: “Attention. Attention.”
“Well,” remarked the man rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written.”
Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: “Attention. Attention. Attention.”
Half angered, the man declared: “What does that word attention mean anyway?”
And Ikkyu answered, gently: “Attention means attention.”
Cheers,
Merin
From David Week, April 30, 2008. Time 10:6
Hi Merin
"Yes, it's all good -- the background of shared social practices / the Archimedeam Point / the incommensurability. But I have another query. Can one 'flow' in terms of acting in accord with shared social practices?"
Of course -- in fact only in that way. Imagine the baseball player who thinks he's in flow, but the audience think he's an a state of flow; the pianist which hears the audience thinks is cacophany; the speaker who imagines he is flow but bores his audience to tears... Now, there are revolutionary players, and pianists, and speakers; but even their revolution is intimately related to the shared social practices.
From this I exempt the latihan, which is not real flow: just practice flow.
"But providing that allows pursuing long term goals."
The Shakers had this saying: "Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow."
David
From Merin Nielsen, April 30, 2008. Time 10:32
Hi, David,
Thanks -- the concepts are getting clearer. However, can one flow in terms of reflective thinking, as a shared social practice? What is the status of reflective thinking in this respect?
Regards,
Merin
From bronte, April 30, 2008. Time 12:57
Again, all theory.
We, supposedly "have" the latihan.
In the other world out there, where devoted believers do what Bapak advised, religiously, and unquestioningly, there is something I believe is called "The World Latihan"
I NEVER do it.
I just don't believe in it.
But should I?
I don't believe in or practice fasting, or ramadan, or any of that stuff that derives from non-Christian religions, mainly, and never managed to do much of what I learnt in the Christian faith either, but that is another matter.
But, when I manage to, I do the latihan, alone per-force.
Now, if we all share that principle, why do we no just agree to do a latihan, for a specific purpose, at a set time, and find out, by experiment, if there is a difference between, say, typing away here to express our views while we maintain a remembrance of and, hopefully, a connection to, latihan, and doing it all without the latihan.
If this site is about anything, it is, I believe, about finding a way forward for Subud. And some people actually believe there is a way forward, even if it is only the youngsters (David- your children's peers?) who can't wait for us oldies to die off and get out of the way so they can get on with latihan without all the baggage they see hanging around our necks.
So what shall the experiment be?
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