Subud-think
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1. Strange Encounters of the Subud Kind
For the first year after my opening in
1972, almost the only contact I had with Subud members was through attending
latihan twice a week at the group local to the University where I was a
student. The group were everything I had imagined that Subud members should be,
a cross-section of people from different classes of society, pleasant and
friendly, religiously broad-minded, enthusiastic to talk about their experience
of the latihan, without any overt prejudices, and above all straightforward and
normal in their thinking. I had not yet encountered anything strange.
After my graduation, I decided to travel
about and sample other Subud groups. A group in the south of England were
holding a summer garden-party. There were some Subud musicians playing at the
event and I was introduced to one of them. I mentioned that I also was a
musician and he asked me what sort of music I played. I said that I preferred
small ensemble work, classical chamber music or jazz, and had featured as
soloist in a number of concerts, upon which he immediately remarked that ‘we
don't do things like that in Subud’ and proceeded to lecture me on how Subud
musicians should ‘not be soloists, as we needed to be willing to learn how to
subsume our ego for the wider good’. This was my first encounter with what I
call ‘Subud-think’, a vague but pervasive pseudo-religious, pseudo-moralistic
and pseudo-esoteric sub-text that members are expected to uncritically adopt to
demonstrate that they are fully committed Subud members.
The first tenet of ‘Subud-think’, as I
encountered it at that garden party, is the importance of modesty — we should
take care that ‘we know our place’ and don’t stand out too much. I believe this
is one of the reasons why it is so hard to change anything in Subud. Anyone
campaigning for change is most unlikely to have their ideas treated
considerately. Much more likely is a knee-jerk reaction that the person is
‘suffering from a massive ego’, is ‘getting too big for their spiritual boots’
or is ‘merely a self-styled intellectual’, to quote three actual phrases that I
have seen used against more than one Subud author since we started the Subud
Vision web site.
Another thing that ‘Subud-thinkers’ do is
create a distorted and diminished view of the world, on top of which they can
then favourably contrast Subud’s supposed revelatory approach. In this respect,
the musician at the garden party was a perfect example of a Subud-thinker. He
was keen to impress on me that as a musician one should not push oneself
forward in ensemble playing, as if this were some kind of novel and exclusive
Subud discovery. But any reasonably decent player of, say, chamber music or
jazz, would already know this — it is the blend and interplay of the voices in
the ensemble that makes the performance — they don’t need Subud to tell them
how to do it.
Some months after the garden party, I
moved away from the University and joined a new Subud group. I was invited to a
social event. Arriving at the member’s house I apologised that I had caught a
streaming cold that day. He said, ‘It's not a cold; it’s purification!’ and I
could tell from the way he said it that he really believed that to be the case.
Despite the fact that it was Autumn, the weather was appalling, and probably
50% of the population were catching cold and spreading their germs about as a
result, I, as a Subud member, must be exempt from that common human condition.
Another member whom I knew at that time really believed that traffic lights
changed to green as he approached, to assist him when he was on the way to
latihan. These two examples of spiritual naivety from the early ’70s might seem
comical nowadays, but they are illustrative of a more serious and insidious
idea — the second tenet of Subud-think, which is that ‘matters are being
specially arranged for us’. The thinking here is that from the moment we are in
Subud, all events take on a special significance, that we are being specially
watched over.
The second tenet is another reason why it
is so difficult to get a movement towards change in Subud. People say things
like ‘Subud is a mystery’, ‘we must be patient’, ‘we mustn’t think we know
better than God’, ‘we must follow God’s
will’, ‘we must not try to go faster than God’, as if there is a plan there
that is going to be worked out despite what we do, or, rather, don’t do, with
the implication that we are effectively just passive robots who will eventually
be awakened from our spiritual doldrums and moved into effective action. This
second tenet also draws strength from another distorted world view — that all
action is evidence of control by lower forces, and is necessarily detrimental,
and therefore it is better not to act, but to wait and see. It is also a
distortion of the religious concept of God’s will, implying that because we are
guided by God, through the latihan, that we can bear no personal blame or
responsibility for what we do. This would seem to be in direct contradiction to
concepts in religion such as the importance of doing good works, avoiding sin
and so on. Yet Subud claims to be compatible with religions and not require its
members to adopt any outlook that would be in contradiction to their religion.
After I left college I transferred my
enthusiasm for organising student concerts and entertainments to organising and
taking part in Subud concerts and entertainments. This culminated in taking
twenty-five members to perform a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1975.
During the rehearsal period for the show, we received a long letter which
begged us to reconsider the venture and to perform at the upcoming World
Congress instead, arguing that it would be much better to go ‘out into the
world’, only after we had ‘performed in front of our brother and sisters’ and
had ‘got their love and support behind us’. This letter was an early example of
the third and fourth tenets of Subud-think.
The third tenet of Subud-think is the
importance to the success of Subud of support through universally shared
good-feeling. If we all take care to maintain good feelings then our ventures
cannot but be successful, the corollary of this theory being that the reason we
have not yet been successful is that we haven’t yet progressed enough
spiritually to be able to maintain harmony. This tenet is a major obstacle to
change for the better in Subud, because whenever anyone raises a problem that
should be addressed, it necessarily must create a feeling of irritation, maybe
sometimes even of revulsion, that a member should think it acceptable to rock
the boat in that way. There are those who prefer to stand their ground, strong
and calm in their inner feeling, waiting for the rest of us ‘complainers’ to
catch up. Then, they think, we will all be able to move forward together as
one.
Writers on Subud Vision have pointed out
the importance of the concept of harmony to Javanese society and have suggested
this is why Bapak emphasised the concept so much in his talks. I believe that
Bapak’s outlook was much wider than merely wishing to foist onto us concepts
that were peculiar to his own culture, and that ‘harmony’ in the sense that
Bapak meant it can only be effective in the wider sense of including respect
for the other person. However, there is no respect where anyone raising an
issue is regarded as being a self-centred complainer, or as supposedly
exhibiting personal problems that they need to address. Neither can there be
respect if attempts to raise issues in Subud are routinely patronised with an
attitude of mild, disengaged amusement, or, alternatively, labelled as a
passing anger that will eventually go away if and when the person calms down a
bit.
The letter asking us to postpone our
proposed Edinburgh Fringe performance also demonstrated the fourth tenet of
Subud-think, which is the idea that ‘we are not yet ready’ to go out into the
world. To make a musical analogy, children learning to play a musical
instrument are not kept away from performance until they have passed all their
grades; they are typically given the opportunity to perform right from their
first year of learning. It is only through the experience of performing,
getting feedback from audience and peers, that musicians can find out their
playing faults and refine their skills. Similarly, becoming more sensitive to
the way others see us, being less quick to dismiss outside criticisers as just
being ‘not ready to receive the latihan’ might help us to see a less favourable
side of Subud than we are currently prepared to admit.
Finally we come to the fifth tenet of
Subud-think, which is the most difficult to deal with and is the root cause of
all the others. It is based on the concept that there is such a thing as
spiritual ‘understanding’, a kind of inner wisdom that is deeper than and
superior to anything the mind can attain to. I have no problem myself with this
concept as such; where I think the problem lies is how Subud members try to
attain it in practise. They think there is a battle or opposition: ‘mind’
versus ‘true spirituality’, so the way to improve the balance is to diminish
the workings of the mind. Their reasoning is fallacious — taking a weight off
the left side of a pair of scales may change the balance, but it doesn’t make
the right side weigh any more, it only makes the left side lighter.
This tenet of Subud-think leads to a
disengagement from thinking and a fear of using the mind too much. One hears
phrases like ‘the restless mind’, or that we can’t expect to achieve anything
in Subud ‘just by using the mind’. Might I say for those Subud members,
including myself, who are keen on the explanations in Bapak’s talks, I believe
this fear of the mind demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the
explanations that Bapak gave. Bapak warns against ‘mixing’, the basic concept
of which is that members might be tempted to assist the latihan to go faster by
mixing other practises into the exercise. It seems to me that outside of the
latihan, denying the use of the mind is another kind of mixing: it is an
attempt to speed up the effect of the latihan on our lives by becoming
equivalent to those people Bapak describes in his talks who go off to a
mountain somewhere to quieten themselves in the hope that they will receive
something special. Also, Bapak describes
the lower forces and the heart and mind as tools we need for this life, but
that these tools are out of place, and that the effect of the latihan is to put
all these things back in their rightful place within us. So what is going on in
the latihan is a rearranging, not a diminishing. On the contrary I remember a
talk where Bapak warned that the lower forces would become stronger within us
and more effective as a result of the progress of the latihan. I believe that
Ibu Rahayu also made a similar statement in a recent talk.
Does Subud-think have any serious
consequences? I believe it does. Subud-think leads to a diminishing of
individual responsibility in favour of a higher power that is supposedly going
to lead us to do what we need to do. In many this creates an attitude of benign
passivity that is both tangible and measurable. I will give some examples.
In her article for Subud Vision, Hassanah
Briedis recalls her surprise when asking a chiropractor if he saw any common
characteristic with his Subud member patients, and he replied that ‘what he
noticed was that all his Subud clients had rather flaccid and passive muscles
and flesh, and that they seemed — and he searched for the phrase — as if they
somehow weren’t connected with… what was needed to be effective’.
I heard once of another therapist, very
popular among Subud members, who when asked a similar question, said that Subud
members all seemed to have in common that they never achieved very much in
their lives. Some years ago my then teenage daughters and I were waiting at a
railway station. It was summer and there was a Subud conference going on in the
area. Some men, who weren’t dressed any differently from the other
holiday-makers at the station, were getting into the back of a mini-bus. My
daughters suddenly started laughing and said, ‘They’ve just got to be Subud
members!’, and they were right — an unmistakable atmosphere of benign
ineffectualness was being exuded. I had a similar experience once when I had to
meet a Subud member whom I didn’t know in a crowded city street. From two hundred
yards away I spotted him with the thought that he wouldn’t be offering much
more than a lot of empty talk about the spiritual, and experience proved me
right. Someone else told me of a group they visited recently where the ladies
were all so ‘very Soo-bood’ that they were like clones of each other.
It shouldn’t be like this in Subud, that
an exercise supposedly intended for all of mankind should instead cultivate a
movement where people very much think and act within it according to a narrow,
rigid and predictable pattern. And it bodes ill for the future prospects for
the growth of our membership; there are only a limited number of people who
will tolerate being fitted into the ‘Subud mould’. We need to open out our
thinking and attitudes. We need to become less strange.
2. The Subud ‘Theory
Test’
Authors Lilliana Gibbs and Helen Bailie
each wrote an article for the Subud Vision web site and book, where, in their
different ways, they pointed out the contradiction between how Subud people try
to present Subud to others, and the actual reality of Subud as practised. I
have been surprised by the resistance to the points made in these very clear
and reasonably expressed articles, and think that maybe it is time to throw
down the gauntlet with some more specific challenges.
Helen entitles her article ‘Bait and
Switch’, saying, for example, that we draw the interest of applicants by
telling them Subud is not a religion, but after they have joined they find out
more and more how they are expected to adopt the sayings of Bapak as a form of
religious instruction. As an exercise I would like to imagine that we don’t
bait and switch but instead tell people up-front what they will be expected to
believe once they become Subud members. Suppose, in fact, that enquirers had to
gen up the theory and take a Subud ‘theory-test’ before moving on to the next
stage of fully-fledged applicant — a bit like (in Europe) where one has to get
a 90% pass in the ‘rules of the road’ test before being allowed out on to the
road as a learner driver. What would be our Subud ‘rules of the road’ on which
we would test our aspiring applicants?
I suggest the following:
Subud is a spiritual movement, therefore
members must understand the rules and beliefs of spirituality (as defined by
Subud) and, for their own good and for the good of their fellow Subud members,
must not deviate from these rules.
The rules and beliefs are:
1) Whatever
you believe through your religion or your personal understanding, when
interacting with Subud members you must believe the real reality, that there is one God and it is He who has sent the latihan.
2) ‘Patience’
is key in all things. If a situation in Subud appears to be bad or
unsatisfactory, do not try to fix it. Be patient. It will always come right in
the end.
3) God
has a plan. So even if things appear to be bad, that is no fault of Subud
members, it must be a part of the master plan. Any deliberate action that
attempts to change the situation can only come to grief, to show you that you
should not try to be cleverer than God, or go faster than God, or to act
without first seeking God’s permission.
4) Don’t
think about Subud. Keep your mind quiet on all Subud matters, even matters that
appear to be purely practical, and you will eventually come to understand why
things are as they are.
5) All advertising is propaganda and
necessarily suspect. Subud has a better plan. Eventually sufficient of us will
exude such a strong spiritual atmosphere that large numbers will join us. So,
it is out of place to want to spread Subud by any means other than by
diligently attending to one’s own latihan.
6) If
a mistake is made, be quick to ‘forgive and forget’: ‘forgive’ so as to
maintain harmony; ‘forget’ so as also to maintain harmony, by avoiding
confronting the problem. Don’t try to fix it for the benefit of the future.
Just leave it to the latihan.
7) Constant
good feeling is the primary requirement for success.
8) Action
is just evidence of ‘lower forces’ and the desire to act should be treated with
caution.
9) I
am sure this list could be made much longer and welcome suggestions in the
feedback to this article. Normally we don’t change articles after publication,
but I am hoping our publications editor will make an exception and allow this
list to be grown post-publication.
Now I am not saying that it is wrong if an
individual Subud member happens to believe some or all of the above. Saying
that we are not allowed to have such beliefs in Subud would be just as wrong as
saying the opposite, that members must adopt these beliefs. What I am asking is that we
acknowledge these things for what they are, spiritual ideas which are not universally
shared, and which we are in no position to insist are part of Subud, since in
Subud we claim that we have no teaching and that the latihan will lead us to
our own tailor-made understanding and guidance.
So if someone says something critical
about Subud, or makes a strongly felt suggestion for improvement, we should not
turn away in embarrassment as if they had let off a bad smell or done something
unclean. There are no sacred principles in Subud to be broken by discussion and
debate. There is no theory or code of behaviour to be measured against with a
pass or fail grade.
3. The Danger of Bapak’s Talks
In this article, I am not trying to
construct a solid theory about how Subud members think, nor do I wish to tar
all Subud members with the same brush. However, I do suggest that, for a
movement that claims not to have a teaching, there is more than a coincidental
sharing of specific ideas relating to spiritual concepts.
So where do these ideas come from? Subud has had certain primary influences, in
particular the influence in the 1950s of the high proportion of founding
members who were in the Gurdjieff movement, later the influence of Javanese
culture (selamatans, name
changes, rice fasts, and so on) and then the influence of Islam through the enthusiasm
of many members who adopted that faith, even if temporarily. However the prime
influence on Subud thinking must surely be the talks of Bapak.
The pros and cons of Bapak’s talks have
been extensively discussed on the Subud Vision web site, but I believe there is
one disadvantage of Bapak’s talks that has not been mentioned. (I speak as an
enthusiast for the talks, so I am not criticising the talks as such.) Where I
think there is a problem can be summed up by the phrase ‘a little knowledge is
a dangerous thing’. To put it bluntly, people get the wrong idea about what
Bapak is saying, weave a convenient, nice-sounding theory around their
misunderstanding, and if sufficient of them ‘just don’t get it’ the new theory
enters the popular culture and understanding of Subud members as if it were an
incontrovertible spiritual fact.
As an example, let’s take the idea popular
in Subud that we must be patient in all things. In his talks, Bapak certainly
warned that the progress of the latihan could be slow and that we should not
try to speed up our spiritual progress; it should be allowed to proceed at its
right pace. But this idea has been erroneously
carried sideways by Subud members to matters relating to the Subud organisation
— if something is wrong in Subud we should not fix it, but wait and it will
work out. Unfortunately, such
misunderstandings do not just have one cause. If they did they would be much
easier to correct. There is another idea going around, that Subud members are
guided how to act in Subud, like the way they are guided in the latihan. If we
are guided how to act in Subud, then being a Subud member must be just like doing
latihan all the time: in other words, God tells us what to do and we just
follow. So there can be no issues of members organising matters badly; it’s
just all part of a big continuous, collective latihan experience which we must
passively follow and wait for it to work its magic.
The validity of such concepts can be
seriously challenged by pointing out where they are muddled, muddied,
contradictory, insufficiently thought through, or just plain incorrect.
Unfortunately they are difficult to challenge in practise because
Subud-thinkers hold on to the belief that they are not using the mind at all,
that the ideas that they have picked up through contact with Subud are in fact
evidence of a growing deeper spirituality. As one of our editors commented “It's all thinking, even the anti-thinking. You can't get away from
thinking, so you may as well do it properly”. It
is about time we started to identify Subud-think for what it is —lightweight
thought, masquerading as deep understanding.