The Antidote stories

Battles Galore

Salamah Pope (Indonesia)

The Subud latihan seems to be a very natural thing. At least, it seemed like that to me at first: simple, easy, and natural. It felt - and still feels - 'right' and, to that extent, 'natural'. But what Subud has done for me since I was opened has not been simple, nor easy to accept, and probably not even natural, either.

When I say 'Subud', though, I don't mean the organisation or the people in it: I mean the gentle energy that I allow to work in me, in the latihan. This has given me the physical experience of the presence of the power of God; the strength - the 'fuel', as it were - over and over again, to do what I hoped was right. In effect, it has stopped me, often, from doing the natural, instinctive, thing and enabled me to do the right thing. My Subud story is therefore largely one of constant battles - within myself: battles not to do the natural thing!

Take our marriage for example. Few in this collection have more than mentioned the effect of the latihan on their marriages, yet for me this has been one of its major accomplishments. Given the right attitude (that marriage is a lifelong contract) it seems to me that the latihan can not merely 'save' marriages but completely rejuvenate them.

In our case, when Bapak first arrived in England in 1957, we had been married for two years, and before that we had been living together for a year or so. And before that I had been, 'naturally'. fairly promiscuous. By the time we joined Subud, our marriage was on the rocks. I was sleeping with another man, and Hugh (my husband) was making preparations to do the over-land trip to India with another woman in search of a guru. We were still more or less living in the same flat together - but that was all.

We were polite to each other, though; we were English and we didn't like nasty scenes and expressions of ill-feeling. Nor did we even seem to have any strong feelings about each other. We were just two totally different, and indifferent, people who happened to be living in the same place. I had once broached the matter of divorce to my mother, but she had said, 'Well, you made a promise, when you got married. Could you break that promise?' So there we were, still, not too unhappy, but stuck.

We were opened at the same time - and that was the end of our polite non-relationship. I began to yell at Hugh, and within a few weeks had become a vicious termagant. Hugh's method of attack was simpler: always a quiet man he simply lashed out and hit me. The latihan had opened our Pandora's boxes and the furies were unleashed. We were down to naked war. If it hadn't been so agonising to see the mannerly English veneer removed and the violence and hatred revealed beneath it, it could have been funny. I'm even smiling as I type this - but at the time it was, literally, venomous.

By this time, though, hundreds of people were hearing about Subud and wanting to be opened: and the organisation of Coombe Springs, never efficient at the best of times, was breaking under the strain, so we were terribly busy. And, too, with all the furies, there was Hope. There was a grand excitement in it all. The latihans were splendidly dramatic, there was talk of the New Dispensation and saving the world from materialism. There was a self-importance-boosting feeling of being in at the beginning of the Second Coming. Amidst all this, our personal problems seemed relatively unimportant. In addition, we had promised Bennett - and ourselves - that we would try this new thing, Subud, for six months, together, to see if the latihan would change things and bring us back together.

In the meantime, we managed to see something of Bapak. One evening after latihans were over, we plucked up courage and went upstairs to the sitting room and found several people sitting and chatting with Bapak. After a while, and feeling frustrated with all the chat, I looked around to see if Hugh wanted to leave. But just then, out of the blue and the cigarette smoke, Bapak asked at large, 'Has anyone seen a man, in the latihan?'

I kept my head down. Everyone must have seen a man in the latihan. I thought - wasn't that part of it? I certainly had. No one spoke, though. Bapak took another puff of his cigarette, looked around the room and, with a different emphasis this time asked again, 'Who has seen a man, in the latihan?' Now I looked around. Everyone was shaking their head, no, no. This was so unbelievable that I stuck up my hand and said, 'I have, Bapak', waving wildly from the floor. Everyone, including me, was surprised. Everyone (except me) began to laugh. I was hideously embarrassed, but I couldn't take my eyes off Bapak. He was young, in those days, and beautiful. I was overwhelmed with the kindness in his eyes. 'Who do you think it was?', he asked.

I have to go further back now to what had actually happened. I was in the hall doing latihan one evening, a few weeks after we were opened, and I - or at least my body - was lying on the carpet writhing and, wrapped in a kind of hellish miasma all of its own, performing strange contortions. That was one part of me: that was my physical body. There seemed to be another part of me, though - which was also me - and this part was kneeling calmly, praying, in front of a man. He was just standing there, in front of me, white and shining and perfect, and I was kneeling there, adoring him.

I don't know how long that lasted. It was one of those events when time seems to stop and you occupy some eternal dimension. And there I was, kneeling in front of this shining, glorious man, while my body writhed and screamed on the carpet. It didn't seem the slightest bit strange. Nor did it seem strange when soon there appeared a third part of me, my critical mind, perhaps, that was looking on and saying, 'Who on earth is this?' Afterwards, I had decided it could only have been my father. He was the most wonderful man I had ever known. That satisfied me - us - all of me.

But it didn't satisfy Bapak that evening, though, when he asked who I thought the man was, and I answered, 'My father'. There was a pause. Then Bapak smiled broadly. 'No,' he said gently, 'Not your father: your husband, him, ' pointing at Hugh. 'No, Bapak,' I declared, too loudly, in horror, 'It was not Hugh. It was my father.' Bapak shrugged his shoulders, as if to say: Have it your own way. And I did, for several years.

In those days our married life, such as it as, was not unbearable because we spent so little time together; there was just so much work to be done at Coombe. Even so, whenever we were together, we argued and quarrelled - and by that time we hadn't had sex together for two years. With the long eventful hours at Coombe our marriage seemed almost incidental. All the same, time was passing, and we had promised that we would give it - this new thing, Subud - a trial period, to see if it would help our marriage.

Six months from the day we were opened, we sat down facing each other across an empty table. Should we get a divorce, or not?

• Hugh (miserably): What are we doing to do?
• Me (irritably): I don't know. It's ghastly.
• Hugh: Well, the latihan has changed things a bit.
• Me: Yes, it's made things far worse.
• Hugh: Well, it's stirred things up; but it may be better this way, in the long run.
• Me (grudgingly): So you want to give it another six months?
• Hugh: I think so. It might change things even more, and in some other way too. Let's give it that chance. Just another six months. If it goes on changing...

After that first six months, though, as the novelty and excitement at Coombe wore off, it became almost impossible to keep going. I needed a friendly hand, a shoulder to weep on, and one day when Icksan Achmad wandered into my office at Coombe I poured out my troubles to him. Icksan and his wife Ismana had come with Bapak and Ibu Subuh from Indonesia and he was our age and marvellously normal. He listened to me, now, with a scowl of honesty on his face. His English was minimal and he couldn't have understood a tenth of what I said, but he obviously grasped the overall situation.

When I had run out of 'Hugh is impossible' stories, Icksan bent down and picked up a bit of dried mud off the floor. 'This, you' he pronounced. putting it on my desk. ''This, Hugh,' he said next, picking half a dead matchstick out of the overflowing ashtray. Then: 'GOD', he said, making huge circling gestures in the air with his arms. I got the picture: I was a tiny bit of mud, Hugh was a broken dead match, and God - or whatever It was Out There - and (presumably) in the latihan - was a vast and omnipresent Something. 'God want you together, God bring you together' - Icksan nudged the two bits of stuff together. 'God want you separate, God separate you,' and he swept them off the desk with his arm. 'You, do nothing. God do it. ' That suited me very well. I was absolved from all responsibility for the decision. I sat back, content, and waited for Hugh to die.

Another evening we ventured upstairs to Bapak's sitting room and again sat as inconspicuously as possible on the floor. Bapak was talking to a friend of ours whom he had earlier advised to emigrate to America, and this friend was showing Bapak his airline ticket as proof that he was actually going. There was a lot of joking, and then into a pause I heard Hugh's voice ask, 'Should we got to America, too, Bapak?' Bapak's face collapsed into that relaxed state of quiescence that it did when he was receiving an answer. 'Go to California,' he said at last. 'Go to California, settle down, and work.' This was good news, for me. I had always longed to go the States, especially California, and I didn't mind going there with Hugh. Besides, I thought, hopefully, a new life, a clean sweep, and perhaps even a 'new' married life together.

It didn't work out like that, though. You don't leave your troubles behind you when you travel - and it intensified ours. Flung together in an alien environment, culture shocked and with no escape from one another, we spent our first weeks in New York in trivial arguments or sulky silences. However, I discovered Hugh's latihan was strong, so I began to respect him ... a little.

Some months later, settled in Los Angeles, one of the young couples we had become friendly with in the Subud group there asked us about their own marriage. They were on the verge of divorce. They asked us what we thought and felt about it. I have no doubt we offered them a great deal of advice we could not take ourselves. I do remember telling them the story of Icksan and the broken match and the piece of mud. 'So, if God wants you to stay together,' I concluded, 'You'll be given the strength to stick it out till it comes good. If not God will separate you.'

Two weeks later, the husband was killed outright in a highly improbable traffic accident, while no one else was hurt.

It began to dawn on me that we were playing with fire, this latihan, and that I'd better be a bit more careful. Suppose God wanted me dead, and not my husband. All very well, this Subud 'better out than in' philosophy, and letting rip with one's feelings in the name of 'purification', but - was this always so? I slowly began to realise that I was, by nature, plain nasty. And that perhaps it was up to me to improve myself, somewhat. Try and curb my nature, so to speak.

At this stage I hated myself, I hated the Americans, I hated America, and I hated Thomas, as he now was. I saw all this hatred, and it wasn't only in me, it was me; there didn't seem to be anything else. So, although I still regarded myself as an atheist at heart, I began to pray. Not regularly, and not on my knees or anything, and certainly rather sceptically - but prayer it was. 'Get me out of this mess,' I prayed, 'Get all this hatred out of me. Please.' That was all I could bring myself to ask. Over and over again, when I remembered.

We had a cheap and ugly little apartment in Highland Park, Los Angeles, but it had a wonderful garden. One day I was sitting alone and bored and looking out of the window, quite relaxed, watching the little humming birds on the apricot tree, when the latihan came on me without warning. And without any drama or trauma I simply 'saw' that the sole cause of all our marital problems was me. I was not a woman. I was not in touch with my feminine self at all. So I wasn't Tom's wife but his enemy. I was trying to change him, make him into something he wasn't, and castrating him in the process. I was wearing - or trying to wear - the pants.

I saw, too, in the moment of revelation, that if I could bring myself to support him, and trust him, and become womanly, then all our problems would dissolve. Ah, at once it all seemed so simple! I got off the couch filled with a new resolve, and went to cook him some supper, as a start.

But after he'd been home from work for half-an-hour or so I was at it again. I couldn't leave him alone - let alone totally change myself overnight. Having seen what I ought to do was one thing: doing it was obviously going to take a lot of hard work - more battles with my own natural self. Looking back on it, I don't know how Tom stood it - or, rather, stood me.

The next pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was our fractured married life was given to me by one the helpers. A couple we had known in Europe, Leonard and Irene James, came to stay with us for a holiday. I respected Irene; there was a quality of gentle 'authority' in here that I felt was genuine, and there was no hypocrisy in her. So while they were staying with us I asked her what she thought it meant, to be 'a woman', and 'a wife'. 'Well, for a start, you must sleep with him,' she said. When I protested that I absolutely couldn't, she said firmly 'Then you have to force yourself. That's what a woman can do. If she can't, her husband has every right to look elsewhere.

I saw the justice of that. I saw, too, that for several years I had put Tom through hell purely for my own benefit. I didn't want him, but no one else could have him, either. He had been looking after me - and I had been looking after me, too. That wasn't fair. So, I decided I would force myself to make love with him - and did! I found it was certainly possible, and not too unpleasant. And, along with the physical side, I tried to work at 'being a woman'. I didn't even know what that meant.

Three years later, and after our first child was born, we visited Indonesia - and there I found out what it meant, 'to be a woman'. Women, natural women, that is, were soft, and they were strong. They put up with things; they bore them, They bore children, and they bore their husband's short-comings, too. They didn't argue or quarrel with their husbands, or never in public, nor did they nag. If they saw room for improvement they prodded their men in more subtle, manipulative ways.

It was no more ethical than constant argument and nagging - but men found it a lot less unpleasant, and a lot less destructive of their manhood. Surprisingly (to me) these women were not repressed, or suppressed: they were just utterly different creatures from men, and functioned better in certain domains. They often worked, sometimes outside the home, and if there was enough money for the children and the home, then women went out and did welfare work in the community because they cared.

On the other hand, women could be malicious, too. With servants to do the housework there was plenty of time to sit around idly and discuss other people's characters and other people's business, behind their backs. To this day I see these two same feminine facets in me: the nurturing - and the destructive. Both are natural: both are transcended by the supra- natural impulses from the latihan - when we pay heed to them.

We had gone to Indonesia in 1962 for a three week holiday; we have been here, on and off, ever since. Unlike our entry into Subud, it hasn't been easy, it was never simple, and it is (for a Celt like me) entirely 'unnatural'. We were sick, constantly, in the first few years, perhaps due to the tropical climate, or the food, or perhaps it was purification. We were lectured, constantly, by the Indonesia Subud members that sicknesses helped to purify the sins of our ancestors - and our own. I didn't believe them, then, but I went along with it as if I did; given that we were living near Bapak, there wasn't anything that I wouldn't have put up with. And by this time I had no illusions left about myself anyway. I knew I was a mess, a mass of nasty, evil even, impulses - and that there was nothing in me that I could pin and say was 'I, my Self' - but, I thought, so what's new?

What was new, around this time, was a gradually awakening sense of the reason for at least some of this nasty stuff in me. I have always enjoyed the company of men. I had been fairly, but not wildly, promiscuous, before - and after - we were married, and had felt no guilt. On the contrary, as sleeping partners were rare in those days (the early 50s) I had been deliberately generous with my body, feeling at the time that I was doing some good in the world.

Now, 10 years later, I realised, in the latihan. that each and every one of those men had left his own distinct imprint on, and in, me. I was full of 'foreign' material. How, then, could I be myself? As the process of spiritual purification went deeper, it had to disturb those long forgotten imprints, and bring them up to consciousness again, before they could be erased, and purified out of me.

When that began to happen I became, of course, suicidal. I now had a child, though. I plunged into a period of total despair in which I spent with one vital question in me: would it be selfish of me to deprive her of her natural mother, or would it be noble of me to remove my befouled influence from her life? The helpers seemed uninterested in my state or, when they did notice my misery, laughed cheerfully and said, 'Heavy purification, yes? That's good!' My agony was complete, my 'dark night of the soul' was on me. I was imprisoned in a cell full of excrement of my own gathering.

It didn't disappear all at once, my darkness. There were no sudden flashes of light or beatific visions; and in fact it took months for my depression finally to lift. But from that moment on I knew that the core of the thing had gone, and that there was Hope, again, in the distance. All I had to do now was to work at it, to 'work out my own salvation with diligence', and endure gladly the suffering that I had, in years gone by. brought on myself. I found it difficult, especially the being glad bit; but as. one by one, traces of the men I had slept with were brought to the surface and erased by the latihan, it got lighter and lighter as time went on.

At the time we were unbelievably poor. Tom, an architect, was working for the Indonesian government and earning a government salary, about the equivalent of $100 a month. After my various bouts of sickness seemed to have come to an end and the worst of my depression had lifted, I thought I'd look round for a job. We had a maid who could look after Maria, our infant, and bilingual secretaries were apparently in demand in Jakarta. Or I thought I might teach English for a change. When I mentioned it to Bapak, though, he didn't seem to approve.

'You can, if you want to, of course,' he said. 'But really, it's like this: the woman is the pillar of the family, the foundation on which everything rests. If the pillar is not there, or gets tired and wobbly...' I got the message - and I didn't go out to work. We lived, and went on living, in poverty. It seemed to be better that way.

Periodically, though, over the years and in between babies, I asked Bapak the same thing. And the answer was, invariably, that my main work, at this time, was to look after Tom and the children. This is my rightful function. After he'd told me this a good many times, over a good many years, I finally accepted it. I had absolutely got to look after Tom and learn to be a better wife and mother. Thus (so I reasoned) if I must do that, then I'd better do it properly instead of inwardly fighting it. So I threw my whole Tauran nature into it, then, and charged. My task, obviously, was to put Tom's concerns before mine, to cherish him as my son, as my brother and as my father, and to trust him, support him, and follow his lead. In short devote myself, fully, to looking after him.

Tom didn't know what had hit him of course. From being critical, nagging him still a lot, being argumentative and often just plain rude to him, and inwardly blaming him for everything that appeared to go wrong with us - once the decision was made everything changed. And I take no credit for this; it was 'done for me', so to speak. Perhaps, at last, it was time.

I learned to hold my tongue. That was the first big change. I learned to shut up and just keep quiet. The second thing I learned (or perhaps was taught, from inside) was to let him do the talking. If he came home quiet and gloomy I would try and ask him questions to make him talk; I learned to ask the right questions, and I was taught how to listen. Now that may not seem much, but for me, with a head full of ready answers always, it was a lot. Nor did the questions, or the listening, seem false: it was just something that began to happen in me, spontaneously.

I began to remember that Tom was an intelligent man - it had been so many years since we'd had reasonable conversations that I'd forgotten how clever he was. It was like a minor revelation, to discover that again. I began to like him a little better, and - very differently - to respect him more. Being stuck at 'home' (one room) all the time wasn't awfully interesting, so Tom's life, however harrowing he found it, became a source of wonder for me. I also discovered he had rather interesting views on history and politics; in fact whatever I could get him to talk about he produced what were, to me, novel ideas - and about all kinds of things, he wasn't a bore, after all: he was quite an interesting guy! I was constantly surprised.

We gradually became friends. I think that's the best way of expressing how we felt during that period; we liked each other now. That was a big change. Our sex life improved. We had another baby. We became Muslims, and were given new names, and the weather seemed all set fair. Phew, I thought, our problems are over, hurrah!!!

It couldn't last, of course. The nature of the latihan seems to be that, once you've overcome one obstacle, either in oneself or in life, God presents you with another even bigger one. In my case it was sex again. I began to find first one, then another, of our men friends excruciatingly attractive. I was well aware this was lust, but it was almost as delicious as love, and the temptation to let go and give in to those feelings (not 'do' anything, of course, just thinking things through) was almost overpowering. Again I struggled and battled with my natural self. Nothing worked. In desperation I began to pray again: let me be delivered from this feeling, let me not show by a quiver of a finger that I am in anyway affected by this man's presence; let me get over this with my heart intact and my husband undisturbed.

Somehow or other, either with the help of the latihan - whether in answer to those 'prayers' or not I do not know - or because of my endless commands to myself to stay firm, I survived. No harm seemed to be done, none of the men ever appeared to notice anything untoward, and my battles with myself gained a new dimension. I kept myself intact in all but some actual passing sensations. And even they went. In fact, after this had happened with yet a fourth or fifth man, it began to be downright amusing! And, with that amount of detachment from one's (naturally) treacherous body and heart, one has a great deal more self-control. Metaphorically I heaved a sigh of relief and settled down again into a nice, quiet life.

By now it was 1970. We had three children, we had formally entered Islam a couple of years before, and Thomas was now Abdullah and I was Salamah. Things were getting ready for the fourth Subud International Congress in Indonesia the following year, and Abdullah was busy designing and supervising the building of the new latihan hall. We also had a little bit more money coming in from another job he had. I got pregnant again, and loved it, and retired into myself for the duration.

Two months after the congress the child was born dead, and exactly three months later (forgetting that, as I was not breast-feeding, I was not infertile) I got pregnant again. That one I lost at six months, in June 1972. Whatever the physical - or spiritual - causes (and we became aware of these), they were extraordinary experiences, filled with significance and meaning for both of us. And, in the time-span of their happening, Abdullah and I became closer than ever.

The second miscarriage, especially, induced a radical change in our relationship. Before the foetus was born I had had three months in bed. haemorraging profusely. I grew weak and sensitive, so much so that there were only two women I could bear to have come near me. Mariam Kibble and Margaret Wichman used to come and do latihan with me twice a week, while I lay in bed, too weak even to sit up. I was 'seeing things', too, even outside the actual latihans. With two exceptions, this was the only time in my whole Subud life when I have seen full-scale, technicolour visions, and no questions about their authenticity. I felt burdens, both ancestral, inherited, and Abdullah's, lifting from me - burdens I hadn't even been aware of carrying.

For two months I was in a state of almost continual ecstasy. Physically I grew so weak I could hardly lift my head off the pillow but inwardly I was floating, bathed in bliss, and aware of angelic presences. Once the foetus was born, though, my health picked up quickly and within a month or so I was back to my ordinary, pragmatic self again. There was one big difference though: I was now part of Abdullah.

This is difficult to explain, and I found it somewhat odd at first. It felt as though I had no separate existence of my own any more. I was, for better for worse, no longer an independent person in my own right. My soul, or some other very interior part of my being, belonged to, and was actually an integral part of, Abdullah's being. That took a bit of getting used to: but, like it or not, it seemed to be an immutable fact of our life.

We were - and are - one. Not the same, not even similar: but two distinct and complementary opposites within a greater whole. Just as day and night, and yolk and white of egg, belong together inseparably as wholes, I now had no existence other than as Salamah-as-part-of- Abdullah. Then I understood, and full well, why a woman traditionally, and symbolically, takes her husband's last name when she marries. Well, we had now been married some 17 years, but, owing mainly to my almost incorrigible self-will, we were only now at long last, really man and wife.

Paradoxically, though, I was now free. Having at last been made, by the latihan, into Abdullah's wife and bound inextricably with him, I was, then externally, free. And, in its wake, this vast and profound change in our relationship brought within me a deep and lasting gratitude for all that had happened to us, through the agency of the gentle Spirit in the latihan.

And even that was not the end of it all, of course. In the years that lay ahead I had to learn how to handle that freedom wisely, in order to retain that new-found unity and purity, and with it, my own true inner Self. But for now, healed at least after so many years of fragmentation, both in myself and in our marriage, our marriage had become the wholesome institution that it is surely always meant to be. I actually enjoyed - and still do so! - being a wife; our sex life improved, and it has since then grown even more meaningful. Sex in marriage, we discovered, was the ultimate worship of God.

So, looking back now, in my fifties, to the torment of our once impossible marriage, I know now that, given the commitment of submission to the power of God in the latihan, miracles and wonders of change abound. Bapak used to say, sometimes, that 'God can do the impossible'. Now I know he is right.

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