Although a number of famous American beatnik writers made Buddhism the focus of their spiritual quests, with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac being the most notable among them, this certainly wasn’t the only avenue of religious pursuit to be explored by the European-wing of post-war drop-out youth. A good number of European beatniks wanted to come into knowledge of God. As a consequence one of the things that came up in conversation as they sat around getting stoned was Subud, a syncretistic movement that can be traced back to the mystical ecstasies a Javanese man called Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo experienced in 1925. After taking on an institutionalised form and acquiring the name Subud around 1947, the movement was brought to Europe in the 1950s. Thus by the 1960s some beatniks – including my mother Julia Callan-Thompson – had involved themselves with Subud.
Regardless of whether or not the word Subud was chosen for its similarity to founder Pak Subuh’s name, it is usually explained by initiates as being derived from the abbreviation of three Sanskrit words: Susila, Budhi, and Dharma. Susila requires that followers lead a life in accord with the Will of God. Budhi represents the inner force to be found within all men and women. Dharma indicates submission and surrender to God. Subud attracted my mother and 1965 marks the onset of her seven year flirtation with the movement. Subud’s proponents claimed it wasn’t a religion but to non-initiates like me it appears to most closely approximate a cross between Islam in its heretical Sufi form and Buddhism in its Zen manifestations. Thus the term Subud is perhaps most easily explained as a contraction of Sufism and Buddhism, even if this definition will be found wanting by converts.
In Subud the specific spiritual practice of its initiates was called the latihan, which entailed spontaneously achieved contact with God. Initially someone who has already established contact with God’s power transmits this experience across to the new human receiver. Experienced devotees are able to do latihan alone, although the number of sessions per week is stringently restricted. Perhaps unconsciously revealing the Islamic roots of Subud, contact with God through latihan is described as an act of submission, which can be halted by human acts of will and volition – but never initiated by such means.
That said, my mother’s circle believed that drugs were of huge assistance in achieving these higher states of consciousness. One of the things my mother liked about Subud was the value it placed on the teachings of all the great world religions. In this Subud, like political doctrines such as Bolshevism, was entrist; but for my mother the opportunism that I might read into a stance of tactical pantheism was of absolutely no significance, since it was a theological position that opened up the beginnings of a rapprochement with a Catholic upbringing from which she felt estranged.
I’m not particularly sympathetic to the ‘new’ religious movements with which my mother involved herself; Subud, followed by seven years of deep immersion in Divine Light Mission activities. However, in a comment appended to an earlier blog on this site, I invoked the famous quote from Marx about religion: “‘Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.” Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
I went on to say: “Marx is clearly talking about organised religion not other states of consciousness, and mysticism can be about either one of these, or both! But when mystical experiences are enjoyed away from organised religion, they enable us to experience at a higher level the states of consciousness enjoyed by man in primitive communist societies. The idea that mature communism is only going to replicate at a higher level the modes of social organisation found in primitive communism is clearly ludicrous, it must also be about regaining lost states of consciousness. Anything less would be a failure to break with bourgeois modes of thought and shallow rationalism.”
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!