War of Ideas against Islam Chapter # 9 The Story of Subud (Pronounced soo-bood) There is another argument against criticism of Islam which, for some people, is all that is necessary. It is more important than anything else. This is "argument from authority." The views of the powerful may be half baked, flat out wrong, or be based on a misunderstanding, but the fact that a president or potentate says something and the pronouncement is all one needs to know. It is "truth" by virtue of who is saying it. Nothing illustrates the point with greater clarity than the example of Barack Obama, the most pro-Islam president in US history. The mythology of Barack Hussein The problem is the critics of Obama, with almost no exceptions, know so little about religion that they miss what is obvious in order to focus attention on what they do know -which, for most Americans, is something about Islam, or something about economics. Religion as a field of study isn't on their radar; they don't see where it is relevant. After all, "religion" means catechism or a literal understanding of the Bible, or various mythic stories, and little else. What's there to study? Like the reporter who visited Liberty University and asked some Baptist students he met whether they attended "mass" on a regular basis. Clearly the reporter knew all there was to know about religion. No wonder so few journalists take an interest in something so beside-the-point in the modern world. That is, to drop the sarcasm, most journalists wouldn't recognize a hot religion story if it bit them on the ass. The most persistent myth about Barack Hussein Obama is that he is a closet Muslim. And there is no question about it that, in his youth in Indonesia, he attended a Muslim school, that he is generally sympathetic to Islam, and that most of the African members of the Obama family are Muslims. Besides, what else could he possibly be? The only other possibility is Christian and, also obviously, his interpretation of Christian faith is no-one else's interpretation except that of people on the farther Left. Actually there is one additional widely recognized possibility, that Obama is a secret Communist. Not that it is possible to be completely certain but these views miss important dimension of Obama's documented life story. The right question to ask is: "What makes the most sense?" That is, what makes the most sense to someone who is willing to do the necessary research and who actually knows the subject of Comparative Religion? Exploring Subud A number of well-meaning people have hit upon what clearly seems to be the best answer but, because of their ignorance of religion, have not been able to do anything convincing with their conclusions. They don't realize that they are essentially uninformed. An example is found at a blog called We the People of the United States. "Some Thoughts on Subud" was published on January 23, 2014, posted by "Miri." It is one of maybe a dozen websites that identify Obama's religion as Subud. And as far as basic facts are concerned, Miri is accurate enough. The facts may leave you scratching your head but these are various Subud beliefs: * "Central to Subud practice is the latihan," which has some resemblance to Transcendental Meditation (made famous by the Beatles in the late 1960s) and which includes such things, as described by a New Zealand researcher published in an unnamed journal of the American Psychological Association, as "uninhibited weeping, shouting, writhing, moaning and speaking in tongues ” and that “laughing, jumping and dancing can occur.” All of this is referred to as “getting opened.” * The founder of Subud compared himself to Jesus and Muhammad and other selected religious figures of the past.
* Members of Subud are given spiritual names that replace their previous names in all religious contexts. This much is factual. Where the difficulties arise is with how these facts are taken. Miri wanted to identify Subud as a "cult" (boo, hiss, BAD) and make sure everyone understands that it is not a Christian faith. But nowhere does Subud present itself as a Christian organization. And the word "cult" does not need to mean "an evil group based on folly." Clinically a cult is any non-normative religious group that has no direct ties to any of the major religions of the world. At one time Christianity would have been considered to have been a cult. The same was true for Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and most of the rest. Here is how Miri summed things up: "Subud is inconsistent with Catholicism (and with other Christian faiths, as well). That the founder of that cult was believed by some to be the second coming of Jesus Christ should certainly turn inconsistency into absolute dichotomy." The horror, the horror. Buddhism, despite similarities to Christian -specifically Catholic- morality isn't Catholic, either, nor is Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Judaism, et. al., but so what? Yes, Virginia, there are many non-Christian religions on Earth. You might suppose that by this time in history nearly everyone in America or most other nations would simply take this for granted. But Miri isn't the only critic of Subud to take exception to the fact that it exists and isn't Christian. However, based on available evidence and Barack Hussein's reluctance to say much at all about his religious beliefs, hence some inescapable uncertainty, to identify him as a Subud devotee makes the best sense. It certainly would explain Obama's values and the characteristic mistakes he makes when he discusses Islam. What is Subud? We are talking about one of the "new religions" of the 20th century that became popular, as popular as it was going to get, in the 1960s. In this case the new faith had its start in Indonesia, on the island of Java. Exactly when in the 1920s the founder, _Muhammad Subuh, began to have_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Subuh_Sumohadiwidjojo) what he called 'spiritual experiences' isn't certain but by the 1930s he had attracted a small following of people interested in taking part in a practice called latihan, a sort of group Pentecostal gathering -which, apparently, was at least partly derived from its Christian counterpart. There certainly were similar emotional 'wonders' supposedly induced from "the Power of God." In lieu of reference to God, sometimes this was referred to as "the Great Life Force" in deference to people of Buddhist, Confucian, or Taoist backgrounds. Remember that in those years Indonesia was a colony of the Netherlands, known as the Dutch East Indies, and Christian missions to the archipelago were welcomed. In the case of some islands, especially Java with its heritage of still very much alive Hindu and animist traditions, it had n ever been thoroughly Islamized, and pietistic Christianity had made significant inroads with its relative openness to interfaith ideas and gatherings. A worthwhile study of these things can be found in an article published under the auspices of the Asian Center for Pentecostal Theology, an April 10, 2016 composition by Gani Wiyono entitled "The beginnings of Pentecostalism in Indonesia." However, what should not be overlooked was the important role played by new versions of traditional 'Paganism,' which was everywhere, never far from the surface. The problem is that people tend to be so invested in their own religion that objectivity about other faits is virtually impossible, yet objectivity is essential if we are to understand what actually happened in history or, for that matter, what is happening now. Muslims are especially susceptible to this problem but most Americans will be far more familiar with its Christian manifestation in the form of religious narrow-mindedness reinforced by customary ways of referring to non-Biblical religions. Hence the word Pagan, or Paganism, should be capitalized since it is a proper noun referring to some form of polytheistic religion, but which Christian believers habitually spell using lower case to communicate their value judgment that Pagan faith is fraudulent. For a similar reason the word Goddess is spelled with a lower case "G" so that readers will understand that Christians do not accept female deities as genuine, while historians use capital letters to designate major deities in a religious pantheon and lower case to indicate minor deities, woodland spirits, and the like. The point is that actually understanding a religion is made more difficult if you cannot actually read about it except by way of language use that casts extreme doubt on its value. There also is the matter of vested interests. Why give credit to a rival faith is you are a missionary seeking to discredit another religion in order to promote the virtues of your own belief system? This may be understandable but it does not allow for objectivity except maybe at some superficial level. In any case, the story of Pentecostalism in Indonesia cannot be told to best effect strictly from a Christian perspective even if that kind of outlook may make sense in America, or formerly made sense in American history before the 1960s and 1970s. Reference is to a 2011 anthology edited by Michel Picard and Rémy Madinier: The Politics of Religion in Indonesia: Syncretism, Orthodoxy, and Religious Contention in Java and Bali. For the rise of Subud did not take place in a cultural vacuum nor only in terms of Pentecostal Christianity vs. all other "false" religions. What we learn is that there were various new religions of the time when Muhammad Subuh was creating Subud in the mid 1920s. These included the Buddha-Vishnu religion, the Religion of Majapahit, a new version of Tantra, plus a number of mostly Sufi derived quasi-Muslim religions. Indeed, there were so many neo-Islamic groups which sought some kind of synthesis with native spirituality that an organization was founded in those years called the Congressional Body for Indonesian Kebatinan. These were also the years when the Baha'i Faith began to spread globally as did Theosophy which, while of peripheral interest in our time, once was an important part of the religious picture in many countries. Ahmadiyyat Islam also spread internationally in that era, a new kind of Islam that came after the rise of Baha'ism and which clearly seems to have borrowed various Baha'i ideas. The exact sequence of events in Indonesia told from a Baha'i perspective is clear enough for the period from about 1930 onward but is murky before that. The best source I have been able to locate is a study of 1993 by Will C. van den Hoonard, "Netherlands: History of the Baha'i Faith." There were Dutch Baha'is as early as 1925 but the first Indonesians to make the faith their own seem to date to some time in the early 1930s. That would have been sufficient time for Subuh to have made at least a few Baha's beliefs his own before Subud became a distinctive religion on its own after World War II. But we should not shirt shrift the significance of native religions on Java in the colonial era in Indonesia, nor in our epoch. But the existence of local faiths is masked by the fact that official government policy only grants recognition to a small number of major religions; for this reason traditional Pagans are often classified as "Hindu" even though there may be very little in common between native religions and actual Hinduism as found, for example, on the island of Bali. While Indonesia is generally regarded as a dominantly Muslim nation we need to understand the fact that Islam is more-or-less a patchwork in the Malay Archipelago; it is a thin veneer in some locations, deeply entrenched in other places, and everything in between. Moreover, during the years Obama and his mother lived in the country there was no such thing as a Muslim revival anywhere with some exception for Pakistan. Otherwise Nasser was in power in Egypt and he was a secular leader, much the same could be said for Turkiye, Syria, and so forth. In Indonesia there was a strong movement to sidestep Islam and create a new state ideology which, while including Islam, gave it no preference and recognized several other religions as co-equals. Hence the form of Islam that Obama would have known as a youngster still in grammar school was "mild" by modern-day standards and in some respects could hardly be considered Islam at all. And if it is the case that Obama learned about Islam via Subuh's teachings in the Subud religion, and if these ideas were internalized -if they "took"- then what Obama thinks he knows about Islam essentially is a fiction. Especially given the important role that Pentecostalism in all likelihood played in the formation of Subud. The first Pentecostals in Indonesia arrived in 1911 from Holland and native converts came along a few years later. By 1921 there was a nascent Pentecostal denomination centered in the Jakarta area where Obama eventually lived. Several American Pentecostals -like the Groesbeek and Van Klaveren families from Seattle- also arrived in 1921 and something of an American character was added to the movement. In addition, Indonesian Pentecostalism would have an ecumenical agenda from almost the start inasmuch as its missionaries tried to interest as many non-Muslim minorities into their faith as possible, understating traditional Christian doctrines and emphasizing Jesus as healer and focusing on spiritual experience rather than "correct beliefs." And where contemporary Christians overwhelmingly tend to downplay or totally ignore those parts of the New Testament that talk about demons and forces of darkness and so forth, the Pentecostals gave these features emphasis, in the process appealing to people with roots in native religion with its supernatural outlook in which spirit beings, unseen or not, were regarded as part of daily life and often regarded as evil. Pentecostalism presented itself as a means to defeat these malignant beings and, in the process, find salvation through powerful emotional wonders. Subuh's message certainly was congruent with basic Pentecostalism but at the same time it dovetailed with a specific kind of native religion in which the individual was visited by a good spirit sent by divine agency -call if God or whatever word choice seems best to you- that would take control of one's life entirely for the good. According to Subud theology what was happening during spiritual gatherings was the transmission of energy -called latihan kejiwaan- to the believer who was then under moral obligation to use his or her new powers for human accomplishment. Subuh called this an "inner teaching." He also claimed that he could "open" other people to the same kind of experience. Whatever the explanation, by the end of the 1930s the nucleus of a new religion had taken shape. Subuh, known since about 1950 as Pak Subuh, or simply Bapak, meaning "father," organized his growing religion as something needed to revive Indonesian pride and sense of national purpose. However, in 1956 he was invited to Britain by J. G. Bennett and the nest year he traveled there to meet with a small group who had been persuaded of Subud teachings. That was the start of conversions of Westerners -including Americans and Australians- to the religion where, by the 1960s, the group had grown to approximately 20,000 members worldwide. Bapak's view that latihan should be made available to people of all faiths fit right in with New Age spirituality of the period and the influence of Subud spread to the celebrity set and to various intellectuals. It also included Rock stars David Crosby, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, and Top Topham, the British guitarist with the Yardbirds. Not that Rock musicians were all that observant to their religions of choice, and some, like Wilson, were attracted to an ever changing mix of faiths, but in the following cases Subud was important at least for a few years. Subud also had the attraction that there were few "thou shalt nots" in its teachings. For example, although fasting is demanded of all Muslims, Bapak said that it was optional for Subud followers. This was true for himself even though, officially, he was Muslim. You can read Subud literature and find members who did keep the fast of Ramadan, others who followed the rules for Lent very rigorously, but you can just as well find members who dispensed with any kind of abstinence from food. What was crucial was participation in latihan, the Pentecostal-inspired spiritual practice that Subud followers claim is life changing. But no-one needed to convert to any particular religion. In Baspak's view a Subud member should affiliate with any faith that meets his or her spiritual needs, in most cases the dominant faith of one's country of birth. Hence there are Muslims who follow Subud, Buddhists, Christians, Confucians, Hindus, Jews, and others. About the only generalization that can be made is that members who had no formal religion to begin with became Muslims more than anything else, doubtless because of Bapak's example. As an aside, for some unknown reason there is more of a Buddhist influence within Subud than is generally acknowledged. Why this is relegated to near insignificance is a mystery. However, the word "Subud" itself has Buddhist origins. Subud happens to be an acronym; it stands for three _Javanese_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_language) words, _Susila, Budhi, and Dharma_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susila_Budhi_Dharma) . These terms are _Sanskrit_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit) in origin, and two of them, Budhi and Dharma, are Buddhist concepts. Buddhist? For several centuries Indonesia was a Buddhist -or Buddhist / Hindu- country. Anyone who wants to affirm Indonesia's history necessarily needs to include its Buddhist heritage. And there is a Buddhist minority in the archipelago today even though most are Chinese. What is strange is that Bapak surely had the original Sanskrit definitions in mind just as Americans may well make use of Latin words and know exactly what they mean. Then at some point Bapak modified the meanings of the three terms. Here are the original definitions : * Suśīla: "well-disposed", or"good-tempered". * _Bodhi_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi) : (_Buddhahood_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhahood) ), often translated into English as "_enlightenment_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_in_Buddhism) " or "awakened." Bodhi is a form of knowledge based on insight. * _Dharma_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma) is cosmic Law -in the sense of natural law and permanent moral law that is objectively good for all people. These became, after Pak Subuh changed the meanings: * Susila, good character as expressing the will of God on high. * Budhi, the inner self or life force * Dharma, surrender, submission to Allah. What had been Buddhist was transformed into a sort of combination of Christianity and Islam and Indonesian Pagan religion. Not just any form of Christianity, something Pentecostal in character, and not just any form of Islam, specifically the Sufi version At this point an essay by Dirk Campbell should be cited, the exact date of publication uncertain: "Subud and Sufism." And right away we are presented with another mystery. As Campbell noted, the similarities between Subud and Sufism are obvious; moreover, a number of entirely reputable writers have made the Subud/ Sufi connection, Ann Bancroft and Idries Shah most notably. Yet Bapak strongly denied any Sufi influence at all, which is preposterous. Why the denial? The best explanation probably is the one offered by Campbell: Subud claims to be unique; it claims to have been 'revealed' whole cloth with no connections to anything else. It also claims -which is historically false- that no previous religion has offered believers access to divine power that anyone at all can make their own. Supposedly all previous systems only allowed specially authorized individuals like priests to have access to this power. But "if Subud can be proved to be no more than a Sufi spin-off, then we must...question the idea of an entirely new dispensation or new model of spiritual transformation." What we have, in other words, is something more-or-less common among founders of new religions, that is, religions that have come along in the past century or thereabouts; indeed, you can see this in the further past as well. Namely, someone has a vivid spiritual experience which is taken as self-justifying. There is no need to study much of anything. The founder has absorbed various ideas from popular culture and makes generalizations accordingly, based on personal preferences and his (or her) judgement about how the new religion should tie things together. That is, ignorance plays as large a role in determining the outcome as the founder's knowledge. And clearly Bapak's claims simply do not hold up to scrutiny; it is up to the more sophisticated followers to explain away all the inconsistencies. There also are psychological factors to weigh. This is in reference to an aphorism by Nietzsche, to the effect, "my pride says I could not have done this, my memory says I did; eventually one's pride prevails." Indeed, when your ego and your self image are in conflict with your memory it is an unfair fight. The result is what might be called "selective memory syndrome." You remember what supports your image of yourself and forget the rest or, at most, minimize everything that does not harmonize with your preferred narrative of your life story. To take Shakespeare one step further, not only are we actors and the world is our stage, we are actors and the brain is our most immediate stage, in which we create roles for ourselves based on our own -preferred- scripts that we write ourselves, erasing what we don't like in the process and writing-in "truths" about ourselves that may be nothing but fictions in fine costumes. The problem is universal but it seems to be worse when discussing someone with substandard education who has few intellectual resources to cope with mental conflicts, no background in psychology, no knowledge of basic rules of logic taught in philosophy, and nothing like an adequate knowledge of hard facts about the religions of the world on which to base sweeping generalizations. For insight into how a variety of mental limitations can play a major role is the processes being discussed here, see Shankar Vedantam's 2010 book The Hidden Brain. His focus was on politics and everyday life but the principles involved are directly relevant to questions about founders of religions like Bapak, aka, Pak Subuh. The primary point is that we are conditioned by society to believe that we operate just about entirely on the basis of reason and rational choices. Which, of course, is a noble idea and one we should strive to live up to. But that is not how we usually operate. The conscious and rational part of the brain is only half the story, if that. Your hidden brain, what Freud called the unconscious mind, is never far from the surface, and it makes many decisions for us, including leading us to make any number of mistakes based on false assumptions or faulty memories or irrational processes we think are logical. With no interest in being self-critical (speaking of self criticism in an analytical sense) there are few checks on making bad mistakes, or reaching unwarranted conclusions. Vedantam also made a discovery about mental regressions. In times of stress, which might be due to shock or exhaustion or unmet survival needs, et. al., the hidden brain may look for a solution to a problem in the recesses of memory, especially memories that we cannot access consciously but that are there, nonetheless, locked away for a rainy day. Suddenly you -anyone- may find your mind under control of your four year old self, or the you that you were at age 8 or 10. Which certainly seemed to be the case for Bapak at different points in his life. How else to explain his bizarre experience in his mid twenties when, perplexed by trying to find the meaning of his life in a time of uncertainty, he felt that, a ball of white light fell out of the night sky and entered his head, transforming him from a seeker of truth to someone who was in possession of spiritual truth he could then share with others. The immediate question is this: When did he first learn of this concept? For what Bapak described was a fairly commonplace kind of Shamanistic experience that was part of Indonesian Pagan religious lore. It was anything but unheard of, quite the contrary, it was stock-in-trade among traditionalist Indonesians who had reputations as "holy men." For a detailed discussion of this phenomenon see David Week's article, published at Subud Visions, "History and Myth." As Week put it, "the story of ‘wahyu’ falling from the sky is no rare event in Java —it is part of a widespread pattern to account for why a person is authorised to lead or to teach. Very many people in Java experience ‘wahyu’ and see falling balls of light." The myth that Subud's experience of this phenomenon was unique, is false. That Bapak, still a practicing Muslim, may not have wanted to ascribe anything good to a Pagan faith may be understandable and just as understandably he may well have (as seems to be the case) suppressed the accurate memory of when and where he learned of the phenomenon because he could not, as a Muslim, do otherwise. Kafir religion is "bad" or "evil" by definition within Islam. But the memory persisted nonetheless within his hidden brain to emerge in a time of stress when his 5 year old mind kicked in, or his 7 year old mind asserted itself. His experience seemed unique but it wasn't even if he had no idea in his conscious mind of where it came from. Which is not to say that all religious experience can be dissected this way, or should be debunked on rational grounds, but a lot of it should be, and this seems to be a case where it is a very good idea to do so. The pretensions of religious leaders do not impress me unless the claims they make can stand basic empirical tests. This rule is hardly limited to Bapak, but it certainly includes him and there is no good reason to say something else. There is another model of how a founder of a religion does things. This is in reference to founders who also are scholars and are able to make good use of their wealth of knowledge and ideas. For example, whatever else you may say about him, Martin Luther was well educated to the facts and beliefs of other religions in his world, and to historical religions that were discussed in classical literature. Luther also was analytical as much as was within him to be, and unusually candid for anyone in his era, the 1500s, indeed, by modern standards as well. Also very well informed for his time was Kobo Daishi who was something of a student of Comparative Religion long before the discipline was invented. Kobo Daishi lived in the 800s AD. The Shingon sect of Buddhism which he founded rested on a solid foundation of knowledge of alternatives, and he felt completely free to offer his criticisms of rival schools of Buddhism, of Hinduism, or Confucianism, and everything else he knew about. More recently, speaking of America, Martin Luther King, Jr., while not the founder of a religion, certainly assumed a prophetic role in re-channeling black Christian religion in the United States in a new direction. Which he did while influenced not only by the principles of his Baptist faith but by the example of very Hindu Mahatma Gandhi. King also was a student of Zoroastrianism and his dedication to uncompromisingly fighting evil obviously had something to do with Persian stress on exactly this. Scholarly acumen is no guarantee of success, of course. While the "Mission of Maitreya" in Albuquerque carries on with its calendar of spiritual events borrowed from a dozen different faiths, and while "the Maitreya," as he styles himself, has made a careful study of other religions, clearly his approach has not "caught fire;" from every indication it isn't going anywhere even if it has sufficient gravitas to persist as a functioning but small new religion. The most promising new religion does not claim to be a religion; this is the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, with its world headquarters near Pondicherry in southern India. But there seem to be built-in limits to Aurobindo's system as well, despite the fact that there are maybe 100,000 followers around the world. In any case, believers are well aware that Aurobindo studied a large number of other faiths, incorporated elements of Christianity and Buddhism into his own spirituality, and some kind of future seems assured for Integral Yoga. Subud may be relatively new but its foundations are shaky and after it went through a sort of boom after it first became popular in 1957, it began a slow but steady decline from about 1970 onward when it still had close to 20,000 members globally. Today the best estimate is approximately 10,000. Subud is going the way of Theosophy. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to radicalcentrism+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
