Subud Publications International

Preface to the combined version of A Reporter in Subud and Assignment Subud, entitled A Reporter’s Assignment in Subud (1971)
A Traveller’s Tale
FOR ten years, between 1960 and 1970, I spent most of my time travelling from country to country, from city to city. I logged so many air-miles that some airlines tagged me as a CIP – a rather low-grade VIP, a Commercially Important Person. I learnt a great deal about the world during that time. But there were two worlds to experience wherever I went – the world of newspapers, foundations, seminars, politics and economics, and the Subud world. At first, these two worlds were distinct and even mutually exclusive. My professional life and my spiritual life were separate, even contradictory, existences. I moved from one to the other, but often with some confusion at the threshold. After a week with Bapak in Tjilandak where I had lived in a world where angels were vibrant presences to some, if not to me, and I flew away to Hong Kong or New York or London where man’s work in the shape of Hilton Hotels and rocket engineering was tangibly and abundantly evident, I often wondered what was reality: the invisible world which can only be experienced in the feeling, or the visible world in which there were rotary presses and prestressed concrete buildings, overpasses and underpasses, the value of which may not be measured in terms of feeling, but in utility.
I used to ask myself when my plane landed in one of those great cities if what I saw around me – skyscrapers sprouting up where there had been only a bungalow or a two-floor store when I had passed by only a year before – was not more real than the sweet beating of butterfly wings in my feeling and on my skin that I experienced in the latihan. At such moments I even wondered whether I had imagined the ecstasy and the sadness, and the irresistible clarity of our way of receiving guidance in testing, of receiving “proof” as Bapak often put it. The Outer World was so solid that it was evidently real to a mind that had been taught to respect and hold to a scientific attitude towards life, that is to say, to value what was consistently logical and to remain constantly sceptical about my experience or knowledge that was not measurable on the evidence of the senses. The Inner World, as I had been taught to think, was inhabited by silly old ladies of both sexes who started life believing in Santa Claus and ended it believing in Sunday newspaper astrologers, in flying saucers and in ESP.
To my journalistic mind one of the “difficulties” of spiritual life was that its most ardent devotees were the kind of people who were ready to believe that (a) John F. Kennedy must have been the victim of a Texan conspiracy; (b) that when the Pope comes to his senses and publishes the Fatima document, the Second Coming will be revealed; and (c) that if Neil Armstrong had not met little moon men wearing goggles and spiral-wire antennae it is because he is one of those who hath no eyes to see nor ears to hear and not because they weren’t there. Another difficulty for me was that many of us who had come to Subud because we had been repelled by the bigotry and dogma of priestcraft had ourselves become bigots and dogmatists.
But, as the years passed and Bapak’s words, repeated over and over again with new weight and fresh nuances, began to reach us, we began to understand that Subud was not Sunday morning piety, not just a Monday and Thursday evening romp. It was a total experience, enveloping, interpenetrating and pervasive to the extent that we were willing to let it, and we were able to take it. Bapak had spoken of Inner and Outer. To me this was a very useful mental split which enabled one to begin to know about the nature of things and people. Everything and every being had an Inner and an Outer. Every man had an Inner self and an Outer self. Even a word had its Inner and Outer. It had a shape, a sound, a size and it had a meaning. And there were Inner meanings to words and Outer meanings. The Spiritual world was the Inner and the Material world, the Outer. My world of journalism and politics was the ambience in which my Outer self lived and the latihan was helping me to find my way about my Inner world of feeling. In my travels I recognised this distinction. I had known London for years as a city of clever, exciting people and places marvellously absorbing until
I came to know Subud London which captivated me almost completely because there I met people who related to me through the feelings and not with the cleverness and the mannered outer personalities of Fleet Street and the West End.
This increasing appreciation of the essence of life made many of us retreat from the Outer world of what most people knew as “Real Life”. And increasing numbers of us became lay hermits – we dressed “normally”, we rode in cars and airplanes as “normal” people did, we married and raised families “normally” (perhaps not so normally) but we accepted the world in which all this activity went on only as an outer shell in which our Inner lives were to be lived. We imagined that we were different from “normal” people – and a bit superior because, even if we knew our Inners to be stinkers, we were “better” than “nice” people who lived only in their Outers. But we were behaving very much like these “normal” people who divided their world into We and They – In groups and Out groups, U and Non-U, the Beautiful and the Damned. We were rejecting the Material world – or claiming to – in our journeying through the spiritual world.
This was why so many of us found it hard to understand why Bapak watched television, why Bapak was such a natty dresser, why he preferred a Mercedes Benz to a horse and buggy, why the Subud Brotherhood needed buildings for its International Spiritual Centre when the Buddha was reported to have attained the highest state of enlightenment among men under the shade of a Bo tree. Having been city gents we were now becoming city saints – or, at any rate, sounding off as such. We were ignoring the marvellous polarity of everything in this universe. We forgot that one couldn’t lift a broom by its “clean” end without also lifting its dirty, working end.
It took many years for most of us to begin to open ourselves to another insight Bapak had been giving us whenever he had spoken of Inner and Outer. He told us that Subud did not reject the material world which was also God’s work, that through Subud the material world would take its due place in our lives, be under man’s feet rather than on his head, that through the practice of the latihan we would be able to send material forces out to work for us. And he had told us, so often, that Inner and Outer “must come together”. Our Inner and Outer lives needed to be brought together. Our Outer lives needed to be increasingly Inner-directed. He once told us that even a bank teller could worship God while doing his job and Bapak rifled through an imaginary bundle of dollar bills counting – one, two, three, four, Allah, Allah . . . I roared with laughter because my first real job was that of a junior accountant in the Bank of Ceylon and one of my duties, once a week, was to check-count the currency notes in the vault. The rupee notes were in bundles of 50 and I counted one, two, three, four . . . and always ended in 51 or 49, never 50. If I’d been an inner-directed banker I would not have been under the constant threat of dismissal as I was in that job.
Bapak is the embodiment of this principle of the essential one-ness of the Inner and Outer. Bapak the farmer, Bapak the company director, Bapak the constitutional lawyer, Bapak the boxing fan, Bapak at the football stadium, Bapak at our latihan, Bapak testing us, Bapak explaining the nature of man and man’s relationship with God – was always the same Bapak. For the first time in the spiritual history of man Subud asserts this principle clearly and without equivocation. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s is not a plea for a schizoid existence in two worlds in which we may substitute Harvard Business School ethics for the Commandments, but an assertion that Caesar is also God’s creature and would be doing His work if he would only let himself be guided from within.
Recently Bapak gave us the most poignant reminder of this principle: We can do nothing without God, he said. We need God’s help to live human lives in a material environment. And God is willing to come to our help if we would only let Him. The guideposts to worship that Bapak has given us – Patience, Sincerity and Submission – stand on this single requirement: Let Him.
Ay, there’s the rub.
Varindra Tarzie Vittachi