9. Halimah meets Patricia in California

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And at what point did you marry Waqid?

It was 1969 and again I was singing with Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks , a fairly upcoming popular group in the Bay Area. We were just starting to travel out of the area, going to LA and different places. Singing had been my ambition, my calling in life, always.

When I was about 8 years old, I decided I wanted to be a professional singer. My father was a professional musician and we always had musicians around and stacks of 78s. I spent lots of time singing in all kinds of groups. At home, I'd sing when I cleaned the house. I sang in every dance band, trio, quartet... I was a soloist singing with a jazz band. Everything you could do, I did.

I was at the peak of my career in 1969 and Bapak came to town. He came to the California Hall where we were doing Latihan. He did this amazing testing. Just the simple testing he used to do, like "How do you use your eyes? How do you use your arms?" and all that kind of thing; It was the most free experience I may have had in all my life and I've been in Subud over 30 years. I tested with Bapak a number of times, but that time I was like a puppet "You tell me and I do". It was so absolutely amazing.

Then a group of us had formed a choir to sing for Bapak. I thought "How am I ever going to be able to sing?" I can't make myself do anything! You know, because I was just there. I was being, in that true sense of being. Well, we had a wonderful time because we opened our mouths and the sound came out. God was filling us with the content.

That night after that particular incredible evening, I went out with a Subud friend. We drove out to a nearby mountain area and talked about the wonderful experiences we were having and he started to talk to me in a different voice.

It was my first experience of someone speaking from God, you know.......God was really speaking through him and, as he spoke, I saw a vision of what was being said. He told me I was walking along a fence and I saw myself walking along this fence, and I was dipping one foot into the world of the ego, which is the world of the music business and the other foot was in the world of the true self and the inner and the spiritual. It was now time, he said, for me to decide which world I wanted to live within as I could no longer walk in both.

What was the name of this young man?

His name was Raphael and he lives in Los Angeles now. As he said all this, my visualisation made me understand that I had to walk along one path. And, as he said that, I went "Oh well I guess I'll have to leave the music business".

It was no decision; it was an awareness, an understanding of what I had to do next. So, what was good about it for me, was the fact that it seemed it was God showing me, and it was not a decision I had to make.

So here I am 27 years old, and suddenly, I'm leaving the music business at the peak of my career. The next day we were having a rehearsal with Dan Hicks and the group. I knew that I would have to be very careful laying this bombshell on him after two years' singing with this group because Dan was a fairly neurotic person....he could be awkward and difficult...and, unless I said it in the right way, I could have a real problem.

So I prayed during the whole rehearsal. I said, "Please God show me the right time. Let me wait for the right moment". At the end of the rehearsal, everybody had gone except Dan and I, and we were on his houseboat in Sausalito. We were standing out on the deck on a beautiful day. I'd already changed my name. I was Halimah by then.

So I said "Dan, I'm going to have to leave the band" and he said "I can understand that". If you knew Dan, it was such an amazing thing for him to say because he could have been really depressed and really annoyed and really upset.

I said "I just feel that I need to leave the music world - its just too crazy for me now - and I want to live a more simple life". He said "Will you stay on until---?" (We were going down to Los Angeles to do a really important performance, a weekend booking one club). I said "Sure" and so I rehearsed for the next three weeks and then did the performance, had a great time and left the band.

Good Lord! And why did you think it was a crazy world?

It was full of drugs and drinking and sex and ego and I used to feel that being around all that would make me strong (laughter). Yes! Well yes. I learned a lot but I wasn't really strong enough as a human being. Look at all the people who are involved in the rock business. I knew all of them. I knew The Byrds and the Jefferson Airplane, and I don't know if you've heard of The Grateful Dead but Jerry Garcia was a member of The Grateful Dead. I knew all those people . I sang with all those people and went around with a lot of them to a certain extent.

It was a crazy lifestyle and a lot of people died from it. A lot of well known people died from drugs and overdosing etc. Until one is centred as a human being, it's very hard to deal with the forces and the energies of that lifestyle. There's always someone trying to convince you that everything is fine.

Walk into a club and you're just an ordinary person and you go up on stage, and suddenly you are a star and even if you don't become a star you're a celebrity and everybody wants to talk to you, and everybody's into you and touching you. You know when one is mature, it doesn't affect one but when one is insecure about oneself, it bolsters the ego.

Did you ever hear what Bapak said about the 60s and the flower people?

I don't know that I did.

He said that the flower people were really the incarnation of the Red Indians who had been slaughtered by the whites. They had come back to be reincarnated amongst whites, to try and show the world that they were really good people and they really came back to show us something. Harlinah has got the whole story. I hope she writes it up one day.

That's interesting because even though the medium was drugs, and when I say drugs, for me it was really marijuana and LSD, and those are kind of mind-expanding drugs, they weren't depressive or heavy drugs like heroin and those kind of things.

They were into expanding their consciousness into feelings and love and really sharing. My whole feeling was loving people, and it still is my feeling. I'm still a flower child, but I use a spiritual life now for altering my consciousness not drugs.

Well maybe that's what Bapak meant one had to do, to pay the debt for having killed the Indian people who had these qualities of loving each other. I'll have to find out more from Harlinah.

Yes. Anyway, I left the music business and around that time I met Waqidi whose last name had been changed to ..…….. the original family name.

Waqidi was very enamoured with me and I liked him very much. He was a good person. He had incredible intelligence and a great sense of humour.

We should have maintained a friendship but I was very much at a loose end, and he was very much in love with me at that point, and felt that we were truly meant for each other so I went along with it. I thought I would learn to love him, and I thought it was God's Will but it really wasn't a match made in heaven.

One of the great things to come out of our marriage was not only becoming close to his mother but having six months in Indonesia in 1970/71 and that's where I met you.

Waqidi went back to England and went to the Architectural Association where he did very well, didn't he?.

That's right. He went to the Royal Architectural Association.

He's got on very well in his architectural work since then, hasn't he?

Yes.

So it was OK for him too, then.

So it was great to be in Indonesia. I always had to be doing something: I took my crocheting and my knitting. I learned how to just sit and be still and to listen to a tape and I could be off into another dimension.

I learned how to be quiet. I learned how to 'not listen' and this has lasted me. I mean not hearing people gossip. People always gossip. They want to tell stories. There are people who will define gossip as 'any time a person talking about another human being and they're not present'.

But my mind just turned off and it was wonderfully liberating because I didn't have to get caught up in the politics and those kind of things and I have found that has worked in my life.

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