 |
Extracts from Interviews:-
7. Hadijah joins Patricia in San Francisco
---------------------------------------
When I backed into Subud I was really not in any conscious way
searching for anything.
From then on, it was this woman who said to you that you
should come in to Subud through her boyfriend.
Yes. She actually was somebody who was opened in Subud and dropped my ex-husband when she started doing Latihan. She, I think, felt he was a good person and really encouraged him to get opened and he did get opened, and he really couldn't stand doing Latihan.
I really was going for the trip. I went - one, because it made me more interesting to my ex-husband; the fact that his ex-girlfriend was going to have me at her Newport Beach house for a couple of days, really made him pay attention. I also thought it would be something to do. I didn't think about what I was doing and I had no idea that Subud had anything to do with worshipping God. I had no idea what Subud was about.
So I got to Newport Beach...she picked me up at the airport....she asked, "Do you have a dress?"
I said, "No".
She said, "I'll lend you a dress.....I just made one".
We went to her place which was fabulous and her husband was
there and he seemed really nice. People were acting as if I
was really going to be doing something terrific. She gave me
a dress to put on.
Did she explain why you were to wear a dress?
She just told me I was supposed to wear a dress. I thought she could have told me. The dress she loaned me was really weird. It was one of those long, cotton, floral-printed ones that I would never wear in a million years. It was not my kind of dress.
She drove me very cheerfully. I could tell she was very excited about what was going to happen. She took me to a condominium in Newport Beach, California, which was unremarkable except that it was very expensive.
We walked into a living room and there were several women. There must have been 20 of them. One small, dark-haired, bright looking woman came up to me and said that she was glad to meet me, and that she understood I wanted to join Subud.
She told me to sit in the kitchen and wait while they did Latihan and they would would call me. I thought this was weird. These women ranged variously in age and shape and size. I mean I had never seen such a crowd of women I didn't know what to think. I felt in the pit of my stomach a sense of weirdness.
I went into the kitchen and I sat there. Then I started hearing all these noises. I thought, "Oh my God. If there is a God, get me out of here!"
I didn't have a car or anything. I mean I couldn't just walk out of the door. Then somebody came out and asked me to come into the living room and I walked into the living room. It was kind of dim. I looked around and the women were really scary to me because they were all looking at me. It just felt really strange.
The woman who had invited me into the room then said, "I'm
going to say the opening statement and then ask you to say in
your own words that you believe in God and wish to worship only
God. " And I really got scared!
What a jump!
I said, "Wait a minute! What does this have to do with God?"
Did you say this to yourself?
No. Out loud. She told me that Subud is surrender and worship of Almighty God. I asked what if I didn't believe in God. She said, "Well, if you did believe in God, would you be willing to worship God?"
I said, "Sure," at the same time thinking, 'get me out of here!' It was just so weird. I was totally freaked out.
So she said, "Now we want you to stand perfectly relaxed". I did what she said, hoping that I would live through whatever it was and get out of there and get back to Las Vegas.
The next thing I knew, I heard some voices which really sounded nice. It was all soft and really pretty. I felt my hand move. I sensed a kind of warm light and my brain said, "There's no warm light in here. You're standing in the living room of a condominium with half the lights turned off. This thing you're feeling is not in this room....or it's not the light (ordinary light of the room)."
I kept my eyes closed and I stood there and I could feel this
nifty stuff....there was a sort of warm breeze on my hair. Suddenly,
I saw red letters and, it was like a blimp that pulls messages
across the sky advertising slogans. In red letters, I read
"You will never expect a man to be God again."
Wonderful! What a relief!
I was really amazed. And then someone said, "Finish." I opened my eyes and I looked at all these women. I really was flabbergasted. They were looking at me, sort of strangely, and somebody asked me if I felt my opening. I said, "Yeah, I think so." I think I was even hugging people which was really kind of magical. I can't tell you how far I was from somebody who hugged people she didn't know. Or hugged anybody!
So then after things had settled down, I went back to Latifah's
condo and asked, "Do you have anything to read about this?"
She gave me Bapak's book Susila Buddhi Dharma. I took it to
bed with me and started reading it.
Like taking the Bible to bed with you.
I realised that I had somehow fallen into something very, very
peculiar and I thought - I really thought -that the author of
the book was out of his mind
What gave you that impression?
Susila Buddhi Dharma described, for example, the effects of eating bamboo....you know...or the effects of sexual activity on one, as if it was bad or could do something to one. There were things, there I couldn't stand to believe. I had to conclude, "This guy's out of his mind."
But as soon as I would think that.....the next sentence would
say that Bapak doesn't want you to believe this unless you have
your own experience or Bapak doesn't want you to take Bapak's
word for it. So I thought, "Well, at least he's not forcing
me to believe this. He's telling me, I don't have to believe
this stuff. And that's cool, because I don't believe this stuff!"
I got through Susila Buddhi Dharma. I read it all!
(Laughter)
I thought that whatever trip he is on, he is an Indonesian Muslim who has no idea about the rest of the world. That was okay because I had just had this Latihan where I had experienced something that was very amazing to me! Because ordinarily I didn't ever feel anything. It was a shock! I was dying to find out if this would happen if I was by myself.
So I think what happened, if memory serves, is that I stayed at Newport Beach and went to a group Latihan and then I went back to Las Vegas.
By this time I had been warned a million times about not doing too much Latihan and I had been told that if I did 'too much Latihan' and I could really get unbalanced.
So I got a kitchen timer, because I thought "too much Latihan"
meant 31 minutes instead of 30 minutes. As my brother would
say, I wasn't wrapped too tight at all! I started doing Latihan
with the kitchen timer so that a big ringing noise would stop
me at 30 minutes exactly. There was no chance of doing too much
Latihan!
You were very good to take that so specifically!
I did Latihan diligently! No matter where I went and no matter
what I ate or drank or did things with, I did my Latihan. And
I did my Latihan because I liked it! The fact that anything happened
to me thrilled me to pieces! That what I often experienced was
very heavy and scary and yet it didn't scare me, because I was
feeling something which to me was very exciting!
---------------------------------
followed by further extract
---------------------------------
Marston was probably the first single Subud man that I had met
in three years that I didn't think of marrying! To me he was
not from the same planet! My only thought about Marston was
that he was extremely talented and somehow had gotten lost and
was performing mime in the middle of nowhere.
You felt like he should have been on another planet?
He was really really really good at what he was doing, and I thought, 'Why do this in New Mexico where nobody can see you?'
Why would anybody put this much effort into performance art where
nobody will see you or care about whether you're good at this
or not?
Why had he come there in fact?
When he got out of graduate school, his mother was in fact threatening
to kill herself because she was so lonely. Like a good son, he
cared about her and went to live with her. Meeting Marston was
really a cataclysmic experience! I had never had anything like
this happen to me before, and I didn't recognise or understand
or comprehend anything. We were engaged to each other in less
than two weeks.
Were you just drawn together like magnets?
It was more like magnets who were pushing apart because they have
the same poles. Instead of opposites attracting, we were the
same things deflecting. We really are a lot alike.
And yet you're very different too though, aren't you?
He's never been through all of those scenes. Yeah. All of that stuff is very different. What is alike is core. After we got to know each other, which is really after we were married, I realised that he was the first person I ever loved. He was like my boyfriends when I was six years old. He was a natural for me. We were in some amazing way a perfect match.
Although on the outer, we came from different backgrounds, actually
we have a lot in common. Our value system really is both the
same. He never went through drugs and alcohol and the stuff that
I had been through.
It wasn't necessary for him, was it?
No. And when we married, and when I say married now I mean when we had intercourse together, it produced a crisis in me. Within two days of our going to bed with each other, I was in a real crisis. I couldn't get dressed. I couldn't stand up. I cried. And I rocked. And I cried. I just kept saying, "Don't let your mother see me. Please don't put me in a hospital."
He told me later that he received clearly that I was going to
be okay and that he shouldn't put me in a hospital. His receiving
kept him from panicking because he hadn't been in Subud very long
and he really didn't know what was going on. I was out there,
and I think it was probably two or three weeks before I could
get dressed, tie my shoes, be a wife.
------------------------
continued further on
------------------------
Assuming this is all being written down and there's going to be
a book and my story is going to be in it, I think all I can say
to anybody who's reading this book and wondering if Subud is for
them is that you won't know unless you try it...... and you won't
know unless you try it...and you won't known unless you try it!
---------------------------
