The Antidote stories

Good Health

Anon.

Few people in Subud talk about their experiences of the effects of the latihan on their health. I think perhaps there's a bit of superstition left in us, or is it just a healthy respect for the unknown, unseens? At any rate, a friend of mine called Sophie was cured of cancer - though she still won't talk about it. And there was the original case of Eva Bartok's miracle baby and all the publicity early on in Subud. Everyone seems to have some fantastic story - if you push them hard enough to tell you. Unfortunately, though, few people living through these things ever documents them. Miracles happen, and one learns to shrug one's shoulders and accept them, gratefully.

Today I enjoy good health. It hasn't always been that way, though. Many periods of my life have been spent enduring long, drawn-out illnesses. Not much pain, thank God, but plenty of discomfort and weeks in bed. For years after I was opened I seemed to get sick all the time; periodically I had asthma attacks, fevers, bronchitis, pneumonia, and my skin was subject to endless nasty infections. Finally I ended up with hepatitis and diabetes. Like the writer in the last article, I attribute many of these to the workings of the latihan process in me. Not their beginnings, of course, because these were inherited tendencies and weaknesses: but their re-appearances after I was opened - and their eventual disappearance.

'You have to get worse before you can get better.' This seems to be a general pattern in Subud members' experiences of illness. In my own case, as a child I had weeks off school every winter with asthma and other bronchial problems. My father died eventually of diabetes - and in my thirties I developed that, too. For years, even when not definitely 'sick' I was listless, lethargic and prone to catch everything going. After a full-term pregnancy I bore a still-born child, probably because of the diabetes.

That was too much. I was sick of begin sick. I got hold of some 'natural health' books and others on nutrition that I had ignored as cranky, and became a full-time crank myself. It didn't do me much good though. I still caught everything going and 'natural health', even with the latihan, seemed an illusive dream. Somewhere along that road, and feeling very sorry for myself, I realised that I'd just have to accept ill-health as a fact of my life and do what I could to be gracious about it.

Today, at 55, as I said earlier, I am healthier than I have ever been before. And no, I don't jog, or take any extra exercise at all. 'Extra' exercise, you note - what exercise I do take is all during the latihan itself. I learned to let my body go, and do latihan badan (body training, literally) either at regular group latihans or sometimes in my bedroom if I feel stiff on waking.

In addition, after 25 years in Subud I have learned, at long last, to use the latihan: to use it to find out what I should, and should not, eat. So now I 'eat well'. To me, this means three things. First, I use the latihan to tell me what to buy; I sort of feel whether this is the right thing. or that is the right thing, to buy today. Next, when I am preparing food, I can feel the latihan going on, in me, and 'pouring' vibrations into the food. And third, when I am actually eating anything, whether raw or cooked, I become aware again of the latihan in me - I connect up with it, again - and I taste the food, consciously, as I am chewing it in my mouth,

The latihan has sharpened my senses, too. I not only see people but I see into them; I not only hear voices but I hear behind the voices to what people may be saying unconsciously; I even smell things in odd ways! When women have been promiscuous they give off a faint, vile, foetid odour; when someone is perhaps psychotic, neurotic or even temporarily disturbed, there is another, subtly different, almost bitter smell about them. But then, to make up for all this, there are delightful times when wisps of light, flowery smells seem to emanate from people - people who have perhaps come through hard times, and have reached some purity or rightness in themselves. A good, trustworthy, person smells nice, on this odd wave-length of 'spiritual' smells.

This often can be quite startling to people when they join Subud. Soon after they are 'opened' and begin to practise the latihan regularly, they begin to find - at least I did - that they are not only plugged into God, but into other people, too. You feel what other people feel, headaches and all. It doesn't last, and it is not too unpleasant - but it is a nuisance to be sitting on a bus next to someone who has indigestion. Yet although it isn't always pleasant, to be so connected, it is a way of knowing other people inwardly, perhaps intuitively, behind the outer facade of appearances. This seems to be a natural phase of the latihan process - and it leaves most people, at least the cases of extreme sensitivity, after a while. But not for nothing do you hear people say, 'There are no secrets in Subud',

Another folk saying in Subud is that 'Everything in you comes alive, meaning that each part of your body, separately and in its own time, receives its own special cleansing by - and in - the latihan spirit; it gets a sort of thorough 'spring clean' as it were - becomes sensitised, refreshed, and rejuvenated in an indescribable way.

I think the purpose of this process, glibly called 'purification', is for our bodies to become fit receptacles for the spirit. From the moment we are conceived we are subject to emotional and physical influences; and by the time we reach puberty we are a more or less fully formed and moulded human being. Fully formed and moulded in the likeness of our family and our socio-cultural background, that is! No wonder, as the phrase has it, we need to 'find ourselves'. And this the latihan induces in us - through the process of purification.

This starts first (usually, that is - and there are always exceptions to the pattern) with the physical body and in the typical case - of which there is not one, I'm sure - moves on to the emotions and feelings, then to the mind and thinking. It is a very complex and subtle process, and what we ourselves experience individually seems to be the not always pleasant results and side-effects of that process, that spiritual work-out. In putting ourselves under the influence of the latihan, the spirit, we cannot expect to understand its workings - all we perceive is the foam at the edge of the ocean. In other words we experience the ups and downs, the apparent return of illnesses and the physical symptoms: but the greater, overall, unseen process of revitalisation of every part of our body goes on without our consciousness.

Good health means, to me, to be comfortable in my body, to be aware (but not excessively so) of my friends' and neighbours' states and conditions and moods - and above all to be sensitive to the promptings of the spirit in my daily life. In this way my body is a tool for learning about myself and the world, and for perceiving the workings of the spirit at large.

So for all those years of sickness I am, in a very simple way, grateful, because they enabled me to go through the processes of change that I needed in order to become whole.

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