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n su now depkeu, mhd¢ ommasin hso teqhpwV×
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September 22, 1995
Gloria-
Congratulations after another year! I hope that
all is going well with you and that the year that
is arriving will be better yet! I was less
depressed this year than in the previous two. I am
working hard and the relationship with Maria has
improved. She has returned to being a dear after
the confusion.
Now I guess the dust is settling and it's possible
to see the effect you had on me more clearly. As I
wrote on March 19, 1992:
I am still trying to understand what happened but at least now I am not as sad as some years ago. As far as I can tell this is an expression of the process that I described in a chapter in my book, Serve the Harmony, that I gave to you:
That's the way it is. It is impressive how my feelings and attitudes have changed during the last four years. I would hardly even recognize myself coming from there to here, the associative and existential change has been so great (technically speaking, it was a painful transition from standing as an open being with closed participation to becoming a totally open being). However, now that the storm has passed, it is possible to investigate the most obvious suspicions calmly. As the Javanese warn, one thing that has to be taken into account in any profound passion is that "love" and "hate" often get confused. As I wrote in my diary on July 7, 1993, the problem is that:
Now that the crying has stopped and I have
finally come out of mourning, we will see what has
really been going on. Love: how it is diabolical
and incontestable when the expression is absolute.
At times, I have to admit I think that you are the
most complicated and powerful and self-defined
person I have ever met. While I was working the
love, my middle chakra was liquidated, an
exaggeration that I had never seen before.
According to Natural Law, somebody is still going
to pay on that one, Gloria.
Maria is well and very busy with work. She still
has more or less the same group of Japanese wives
and children for students. I showed her the letter
I sent you last year because I feel she should be
kept informed about the process involved in as
much as it involves her as well.
Jennifer is well too. She is in the phase of
discovering boys now and at times she spends a
long time on the phone with a masculine voice on
the other end. She is doing well at school. She is
a bit lazy for my taste but I guess it's a
function of age. She still has no idea about what
she wants to be. I think it would be a good idea
for her to become a dentist but she is more
interested in psychology.
Now, how are you and Beryl? I imagine that she is
doing well in school and that she has become a
beautiful girl just like her mother.
NOTE: The following collection of names is a marker of the pain that Gloria has been to me in my own experience and the ceaseless agony I have as a result. It is a kind of poem, not a love poem this time but a hate poem, expressing the feelings she has left me with. The names are a mixture of foul, vile words of hate, hatred, loathing, betrayal, treason, oath-breaking and violation of trust as well as some of history's darkest individuals and others I have run across in powerful fictional studies of evil that fit her so well she might well have inspired them personally. A parallel to this list is to be found in Tolkein's description of the Ents' long 'name' for the orcs in The Lord of the Rings.
In proper terms they are an application of the confrontational technique described in Robert Louis Stevenson's character Jennet Clouston:
as well as the style of presence associated with Jane Austin's Fitzwilliam Darcy,
my favorite characters in all of Western
literature. Pain and the hate that results from
prolonged pain and abuse properly express
themselves this way, as we all know if we just
examine the way we have responded to prolonged
abuse ourselves with the curses and oaths and
words of deprecation that come out of wars and the
like. This list started off with a few apt
descriptive phrases but was obliged to grow to
these dimensions by the unbelieveable pain that
has been involved in all this.
Therefore, in my presence these titles and
associations and attributions are to be applied at
all times in all contexts by all beings and Beings
in relating to Gloria Isma'ili and must be
presented aggressively such that she record the
pain she is to us all properly and come down to
the ground where the agony of being here with her
will begin to diminish and we can all begin to
recognize our real responsibilities and true
interests more accurately and behave properly as a
result:
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It is hard to understand how anyone could be
unaware of the character of this relationship. I
was already working the duplicity of Gloria's
being and confronting its complexity with
considerable effect as of:
January 18, 1993
I cried the new year in calling Gloria's name,
but in general the situation has gotten stabler
and more satisfactory for me. I developed a
Three-Point Program and a Counsel designation for
Gloria. The Three-Point Program is: 1) I want
Gloria dead as quickly as possible and feel the
wrath rising within me about her; 2) I wish her to
personally apologize to me for the confusion she
initiated by cutting me off; and 3) I still want
her back and would like to marry her. Obviously
this is an emotionally defined program and
reflects the state of my sense with and relative
to Gloria.
Just so that we all remember where we stand:
As I wote in The Book of Being on June 4,
1993:
"We in open union will never suffer the return
of any of the closed beings and will suffer their
pain with them whenever they try to reestablish
sense linkage with us in order that we never
forget what has happened to us or what they truly
are." No being will ever be allowed to work in
association with us while carrying unconfronted
karmic pain. Such pain leads only to more pain and
ties up the energy of being in keeping track of
injustice.
As I wrote in The Book of Being on July 7,
1993:
I came to Brazil in full surrender, rather
hunting to find something or someone to justify
the pain of being here. I long assumed I would be
inspired to introduce Sumarah here but that did
not develop. I still struggle with my work on that
and try to open it to the local sense but nothing
much has come of it so far. However, with Gloria I
found myself fully realized and all of my years of
preparation suddenly became relevant. However, the
two of us had radically different perspectives on
the sense and rasa we experienced.
From Gloria's perspective I was such a fool
that there was no way to keep her from dividing up
the spoils while I was still on the hoof. When I
said, "Eu näo penso mais" she just saw this as an
opportunity to make a real kill in that my
apparently unmanaged being was immense. A lot of
our love affair constituted her laying claim to
and trying to sell off parts of my being and
trusting my goody-goody attitudes never to respond
to the offences she promoted both in the
relationship and in her pursuit of the sense. As a
result of the heavy hand she laid on my
experience, there are some activities and
capacities that I still don't have back yet.
From my perspective, she was highlighting and
helping me to eliminate improper participants like
my father and brother that I had in fact dipped
down into dark silence in order to avoid direct
contact with since they are both "floaters" like
Gloria, suspended in the pain they have caused to
others in seeking to get their own way. I came
prepared for whatever happened but apparently was
thinking in terms of a "sea bass and hooked a
marlin", which has meant a "long afternoon of work
to pull her in". The catch is now up close to the
boat so we're working her in to pull her on board.
The feeling underlying my love for Gloria is my
profound hate for what she is and has done to
those I share sense and rasa with. The joy that
came to me in association with the love, and
shocked me in into silent subservience, is the
infinite pleasure of being exposed to a real evil
multiple sense being, harboring bonded opens and
maintaining a complicated closed system of sense
management that is reflected in her multiple
personality approach to existence: she can run
through three personalities in a period of ten
minutes sometimes. The interface that I
experienced in our relationship came out of the
bonded beings that she has in her being and though
I bore it, I never shared common sense with her
calculated base sense. She is as I often noted a
cruel, almost sado-masochistic person, seeking to
cause and experience pain and her real
satisfaction would have required going in that
direction. She is a floater and is far too high
for me to rest with in that her perspective
involves a level of perceptual selection and a
power rush that I cannot touch. Under her
confusion she is a hard, cruel sense trying to
control and use and define the world to her
hedonistic purposes. I guess I should know; I've
seen her in action with the pain she has defined
and nurtured in me and watched the way she played
the relationship to produce as much pain as
possible by calling me in and denying me entry at
the same time.
As I have often said, there are two kinds of
"love": the first is based on true exchange and
rests in the celebration of the common sense the
loving beings share; the second is based on hating
the other greatly and the joy of finally getting a
clear shot at exposing and destroying the being
involved.
Last night I had a dream with Carol in which I
laid out the whole situation. I told her something
like: "Things are simpler now. We're not worried
about simplistic criteria of good and bad. We are
concerned with open and closed beings and Natural
Law. Open beings will be gathering and going on
together; closed beings will be going on into the
specific hells they have defined for the rest of
us. Gloria is a closed being, so she'll be going
that direction." (September 24, 1995 Unless she
cleans up and comes open. So be it. What she does
rests with her not with us.) The description in
the dream was really rather better than this but
that was the gist of it.
In general, I should say that Brazil remains a Criminal Society inhabited by "facedancers", witches, and evil scum of various other types, mostly just garbage that needs putting out. This Society has not grounded in five years; that is why I am being forced to ground it myself and you will all be obliged to accept the consequences.
May 13, 1992
We will follow these into extinction very
carefully indeed. There are those who just do what
they wish and hope that they will be able to tie
into a positive natural response to their
behavior. It would appear that the only positive
response to some such deliquents is their own
extinction.
September 25, 1993
This morning Clima and True (Clima, now
carrying her own) and Megaera (carrying her own)
and Alecta (carrying her own) and Tisiphone
(carrying her own) and I made love.
We are working on distroying an enormous
Illegal Device that Gloria left in my middle
chakra region. Clima is in charge of the operation
and it's going well. The Illegal Device is a
modified Kree nightmare being with 8 witches (?)
inside and was designed as an unlimited power
slaving module. They have a little problem at the
moment however. Since it has an unlimited and free
power call capacity, when we put Water of Justice
on it it called on all energy it needed to keep
from disintegrating and the call has just
heightened and heightened. Last night it was
vibrating with power and this morning it got hot
when we watered it again. The witches or whatever
that are inside appear to be in an agony and claim
that Gloria betrayed them. As soon as the support
structure defining the energy flow and resistence
of the evil be involved begins to collapse, the
nightmare being should puff out (disappear) and
the witches should stand exposed. We'll pick them
up and see what they have to say before putting
them into the hoosegow with Hecate and Kali and so
on.
September 26, 1995
The witches involved in the slaving module
plopped out and I spoke with them last night. One
is now a red and the others are whites. It would
appear that they will come clean and be going on
with us, at least that is their avowed intention.
You never know with closed beings. Ho hum.
I'm going to show the letter to Lalia today.
Let's see if her protestations as to the
responsibility of her being and its placement in
the local legal being have any substance.
When Gloria and I started I was already an open
being and in order to lift me she was obliged to
make oaths of obedience and loyalty and eternal
love and absolute cooperation. She promised to be
absolutely and totally true to me for five years
and have no other sexual partners for that time at
the very least. I fought and wrestled with and
worked out the relational contract myself and
established it in great detail so I should know.
For obvious reasons I did not trust closed beings
in general or particular. I was the Devil then
just as I am the Devil now. Nothing else would
satisfy me but a tightly and carefully drawn
contract giving me absolute power to satisfaction
because if I was going to be betrayed I wanted it
down in "black and white" what the conditions
being betrayed were and I wanted the being the
contract expressed to be open and absolute and to
rest well below the ground, where closed arguments
would have no appeal and the being present would
see the situation clearly and unequivocally. This
was the basis of the "Relational Contract
Binding David Gordon Howe and Gloria Isma'ili For
Now and Forever", an incredibly lengthy
document outlining all of the forces and beings
present in defining the "love". The contract is
now openly expressed and available for examination
by any and all. Gloria obviously betrayed the
contract as soon as she had me committed to it but
I have honored it ever since. Open beings are like
that. We take our commitments seriously, otherwise
we would become closed beings, which doesn't suit
us since that would mean losing everything we
love.
It is obvious that the closed hierarchy had become
aware of the fact that I had prepared to take the
whole mess to hell with me and was planning to
sort it out there. As a result they decided to
make a last stab at destroying me under the
pretense of cooperation and eternal love. The only
thing that surprised me about the betrayal was
that it went to a depth of evil that served
absolutely no one and that the weaponry to which I
was subjected was totally inappropriate for use
against a human. It reduced those that used it to
a level of evident evil such that they will never
be trusted by anyone again. It would be impossible
to: they are pure betrayer being. Obviously I am
now interested in satisfaction and am intent on
eliminating Gloria's middle chakra just as mine
was eliminated, just for starters. I have a long
history as far as getting satisfaction. I have
never missed. NO MERCY! I DON'T GET MAD, I GET
EVEN!
November 6, 1995
Now for the Chrismas letter which is intended
to establish the ground in full open sense and
state my being with Gloria so that she can't keep
running around on me and pretend I approve of it.
November 27, 1995
Dear Gloria,
Today marks three
years since the last time I saw you and you
scolded me up and down for loving you the way I do
and missing you so much. I'm not reasonable I'm
sure, but I think we had a communications problem.
Sorry. I still don't know what I wrote or did to
excite such a violent explosion. All I really
wanted was to be somewhere in your life and to see
you from time to time. Love is cruel, Gloria; I
found that out for sure!
Anyway, good luck
understanding this letter because I am not willing
to struggle with Portuguese in relating to what I
have to say today. Portuguese is good enough for
the crying and mournful lover but English and
Javanese serve much better when the tears stop and
I rise to go on with the love and hate of a
passion like mine for you quiet and grounded. I
will now reveal to you what I have been doing and
how I have seen you for the last four years. I
hope it will be of interest to you though I
suspect some of it will surprise you. But even so,
please read this little thesis. I'm sorry it's so
long but there is a lot to say because it is time
for the evaluation I predicted when we argued
hotly and broke up on February 21, 1992 before
Beryl's birthday party:
First, at year-end
I generally do my personal accounting and check to
see where my friends and loves have wandered
during the year in relative (nglengganani)
and absolute (eling ing djiwa) and pure (sedjatining
eling) awareness (you can look these terms up
in Serve the Harmony if you so desire but they
refer to levels of contextual sensitivity and
grounding): that means I check to see how I feel
about you all at various levels of receptivity.
Clearly I have to accept limitations with you that
do not suit me (I admit to remaining profoundly
jealous about you for obvious reasons) but believe
me I keep track of you in my heart and my soul and
in open being. You will always find me watching
over you like a hawk, in that in my heart I am
still obliged to consider you a wife (perkawinan
ing djiwa) in many ways due to the level of
emotional and experiential communion I experienced
with you. When I asked you to marry me, that's
what that was about. Believe me, I meant it! Can
you imagine how much I hate "marriage" as a result
of all the jealousy and pain I have suffered? Now
that should be challenging for you!
In your own little
way, Gloria, you have betrayed me from the very
beginning and never really gave our love much of a
chance: it was all just a game for you, while I
have found myself indelibly committed to bringing
forth the love I feel for reasons evidently lost
on you. This is Reality. I still love and serve
the Beauty I have found in you but I violently
hate your lack of honesty and purity and your
defiance of responsibility. After the sweet and
loving and respectful period when you seduced me
and got me committed to your being (and set me up
for a long fall), when it was patently too late
for me to emotionally disentangle, you loudly
proclaimed, "Eu näo vou assumir!", leaving
me with the whole burden to emotionally and
experientially ground while you went off playing
stupid. I have never played with you. But as you
openly told me many times from the morning of
April 4, 1992 (after you had deigned to sleep with
me following a four-month hiatus) until I revealed
the whole mess to Maria, "David, eu estou só
usando você! Eu faço com tudo mundo. Minha
terapeuta me mandou parar." I was your friend,
Gloria, something I take very seriously, Gloria,
and I was trying to help (Do you remember the
letter for confronting Miguel I brought you that
day?). It occurred to me that I was in real
trouble at that point but evidently it was too
late for me to do much but bite the bullet, in
that I had already assumed responsibility for
loving you (because I wish in my heart to ever be
a true friend and a true love -- some ambition,
eh?) and, as you will see below, you are a very
big challenge to love.
What a roller-coaster
ride it has been for the last four years! Finally
now I am getting the full open being of my love
for you properly grounded and I'll soon be able to
move on to other problems, while my heart remains
more or less quietly with you and the pain of
being so plays itself out in the expression of
Open Law.
At one point, you
scornfully termed me a "crente" when I explained
the power and purpose of your jewelry at the same
time that you were decrying my slowness to solve
your problems. Do you remember? Confronting
profound problems like yours takes time. There are
no miracle cures: only open confrontation and
grounding. As your pamong (Do you remember what a
"guide" is?) I state that the fundamental process
is now complete. The being I share with you
through the traditional practice of "bearing"
(nggendong) is now properly grounded. Evidently
that does not mean that all your problems are over
but rather that on a deep level you will never
really be alone again. I'll always be here with
you, Gloria, watching over you more or less like a
firm but loving mother. I wonder if you can feel
it yet? It will come to you, I trust. We bear
those that are having trouble relating and being
related to: those that are too hostile or hurt to
accept Reality like you due to your experience
with Miguel at that time. I doubt that you
understand what this means but that's what I've
been doing for the past four years: I have been
trying to help and finding it rather more
difficult and you rather more resistant than I had
expected.
As far as I know this
was the longest and toughest bearing and grounding
ever. The ones I saw in Java were simple
overexchanges of feeling and sense that clarified
rather easily. Women in Java frequently bear their
children in trying to fathom their problems by
sharing them and suffering them together with
them. Maybe you do this with Beryl; I know I do it
with Jennifer and Maria although I don't have as
much time for it nowadays as I might like. Bearing
is sort of a hyper-extended and structured
expression of empathy. It is something we do with
people that feel isolated and trapped and confused
in their own experience and have trouble relating
to the rest of us. It helps if you love the person
because it can be quite painful in that you are
basically dealing with established despair that
only goes away grudgingly like any other trauma.
It can be as destabilizing as the profundity of
the problems involved and I suspect I did go a bit
crazy with it towards the end of our love affair.
Sorry about that, but it was just too much pain.
So it goes. . .
I never told you I was
bearing you because I fell in love with you and
felt trapped myself and unwilling to assume the
official pamong position in that I was confused
about being in love with you and married to Maria
at the same time. Love is like that. I also
doubted that the idea of bearing would make much
sense to you. I gradually started to bear you
while you were so depressed and not eating (about
August or September 1991) and before we began our
love affair in that you were obviously in need of
more than just a shoulder to cry on; I have
continued bearing you until now. Bearing involves
rasa or experiential transfer and the gradual
examination and confrontation of the being of the
person who is born, as well as that of the bearer
to some extent. As I wrote in my Diary:
It has taken me until now to ground or
establish the sense and being fully. Soon you'll
be able to stand in your own being on your own
though the horrors of some of your elements may
still frighten you a bit. I have worked on many
problems, but yours was the most difficult I've
ever seen for reasons you probably have some
awareness of -- you are a nightmare to ground. In
Java a full "bearing" might take about four months
because it is much easier to ground there since
there is a tradition of deep consciousness and
people accept Reality much more readily. But
Brazil is another story and an interesting study
in irresponsibility in and of itself. What a
struggle!!!
More or less unawares
but in an active sense, you serve a purpose or two
involving the definition of love that I serve
myself but you are shy about it: even an openly
evil being like yourself must accept
confrontation, Gloria, and allow herself to be
seen openly. "I am using you!" is a clear mark of
an evil being that does not consider the pain it
causes significant or itself accountable, while "I
don't get mad, I get even!" was a clear
announcement to the world of your Iblis (demonic)
orientation. Why do you think I deeply love you
but hate you at times with such a passion? I am in
this same Iblis Being and know love to necessarily
couple with hate and evil when there is a need in
defining purity and/or satisfaction. But the real
issue is pain for us Iblis and I honestly don't
think you can imagine the pain I have absorbed in
loving you and bearing you and grounding you. You
just try!
Anyway, dukun
are those that practice Java's illustrious shaman
tradition, that primarily studies problems of
influence and emotional contagion and mutual
definition, i.e., it is an interpsychic approach
to problems in general in society as opposed to
the intrapsychic emphasis on personal experience
management in Western society and psychology. Most
dukun would probably term you a "sundel
bolong" as well as an Iblis. Sundel
bolong are women who's hate of men exceeds all
limits due to a practical backlog of
misappreciation and abuse and denied satisfaction,
i.e., pain, as per your betrayal by Marvin and
divorce, etc. (e.g., as you often told me, "David,
I've never had a man for a friend." "David, I hate
my father!" "David, I hate Marvin!" "David, I had
a physical alergic reaction to Miguel in
Pittsburgh!"). They use any and all means to
expose the frauds that most men are, to destroy
men and to promote themselves and their beauty and
their obvious superiority. Delilah in The Bible
with her seduction and betrayal and humiliation of
Samson is the prototypical sundel bolong. This
being is the basis of the Western notion of a
femme fatale like yourself and the fear and
fascination that men have of such women has to do
with their smooth and sweet evil challenge and the
ability to charm and lie that arises out of their
pain seeking satisfaction (Do you remember all of
your silver-tongued lies to Maria and others,
Gloria?). You are an awfully powerful being and
remind me of the black widow spider that normally
kills and eats her husband after he has
impregnated her. What an innovation!
But the problem with
sundel bolong is obviously not their hate
of men. Men are almost always
"I'm-the-best-fuck-the-rest" scum and honestly I,
for example, hate them much more than you do and
am thus something of a sundel bolong
myself. I have been brutalized by men in more ways
than you can imagine. Just try! For example, how
do you think I feel about my father? We don't talk
much about love-hate relations nowadays outside of
the disappearing art of psychotherapy, in that we
collectively would appear to have decided to give
up our deeper feelings and replace them with the
various forms of escapist emotions and activities
and substances that we now pursue with such
abandon, but this is a highly competitive bond
with a lot of the latter as well as the former. Do
you like hate? This is a big one! Perhaps even a
bit more than is normal in father-son
relationships, Heaven knows. But, be that as it
may, the societal problem of sundel bolong
is that they can run amuk, i.e., become
irresponsible and serve nothing with the pain they
cause but the hedonistic promotion of their own
being. They become lost in their own cut-off
version of existence and the weaponry (coming out
of Ilmu Gaib, i.e., "unconscious"
capacities reflecting what they have learned from
their unhappy experience) they have at their
disposal to defend their being as a result of the
pain (that is the source of the hate) can make
them kurang adjar, i.e., unable to accept
their own role and confrontation and
responsibilities and unable to ground due to their
almost conscious fear of the evil that they
"unknowingly" use to defend themselves. The beauty
that they serve becomes suspended being and they
float alone in the hate and love and confusion
around them, a mighty Titanic defying the waves
and the ocean and the night, sailing on arrogant
and unscathed for now and boasting a kind of
absolute impunity. Lonely triumph, but such beings
get brought back into Reality and grounded
eventually, though it is sometimes quite a
struggle. So it goes. . .
I suspect it should be
interesting for you to finally find out how I see
you because I have always seen you this way, my
little Shelob. I walked into your spider web head
on, Gloria, because I love you so (believe it or
not). I must admit I didn't expect so much pain. I
was expecting about a quarter of the pain that
came out of it and relatively quick acceptance
because I am not a fraud: I am the suffering and
loving mystic adept I claimed to be. We mystics
are like that because we actively study and serve
Reality and get to know the strange beings that
make it up. A little crazy, maybe, but that's the
way the world is, Gloria, frequently more than a
little crazy. That's why it's a little hard to get
a handle on from time to time. . .
Honestly, the pain of
loving you is becoming like the pain of loving
Java and Bali for me now in that the confusion is
finally getting ironed out and I can open sense
the being fully now. I just have to confront the
pain continuously and openly and live with it
every day, carrying on with the love and shedding
an occasional tear. Gloria, my love for you
reminds me of when I got run over by a truck: it
was a hell of an experience but far from an
unalloyed pleasure. At least the pain is bearable
now.
But in the continuing
interest of clarifying what I have gone through,
Gloria, let me tell you a bit about the writing I
have done, much of it in connection with the love
I have for you. I have completed a treatise of
some two hundred and fifty pages called The
Book of Being because it treats issues of
existence and experience and love and purpose. The
first part of The Book of Being was written
in 1981 and revised in 1992 and is called Open
and Closed Psychology: How Different Can We Be?
(I gave you a copy of this paper) and considers
the issues dividing Open (Balinese and Javanese)
and Closed (Western) psychology, i.e.,
interpsychic and intrapsychic being. It describes
the basic distinctions and conflicts between the
paths of interpsychic being, as expressed in the
dukun and pamong position above that is based on
seeing others as directly influencing your own
experience and actively tries to serve general
harmony as a result, and intrapsychic being, as
expressed in Western psychology that focuses on
personal experience management without considering
larger issues and acts to serve the individual's
ego. The second part was written in 1981 and
revised in 1993 and is called Open Being Versus
Closed Being: The Struggle to Be. This paper
considers the social and cultural implications of
the Open and Closed perspectives on existence and
the mechanisms a society or social group develops
to defend its being depending on the vision of
existence it serves, i.e., the level of reality
acceptance and recognition (grounding) expressed
in the society and the level of emotional escapism
tolerated or promoted in it reflect these
practices. The third part of The Book of Being is
The Diary: A Record of my Experience in
Struggling with the Feelings Associated with my
"Love" for Gloria Isma'ili. As you can see
from the excerpt above, this is a careful record
and analysis of what has happened to me in trying
to love and serve you coming out of the
Kebatinan tradition (Javanese mystic knowledge
and discipline). Strange experience but there you
are. It is interesting.
I am enclosing the
title page of The Book of Being for you to
have a look at in that it clearly explicates my
purpose and the various key beings I associate
with as a person and a principle myself. I
shouldn't imagine any of it too difficult for you
to understand so I'll just let it stand on its
own, except to say that Sutâpâ are
practitioners of the venerated Javanese tradition
of Nature Worship.
Gloria, my fondest
wishes to you and Beryl for the holiday season and
the coming year. Do you have any vacation plans
this year? It always hurts a bit not to know what
you are doing. Anyway, we are going to see my
parents as usual in December: they send the
tickets and we gratefully go. However, Maria and I
are taking Jennifer to Orlando for a week on our
way to New Jersey. Neither Maria nor I have ever
been to Disneyworld. Jennifer went there with my
parents some years ago but she claims not to
remember anything. We'll see what all the
excitement is about.
Love,
THE BOOK OF BEING
OPEN AND CLOSED PSYCHOLOGY:
How Different Can We Be?
and
OPEN BEING VERSUS CLOSED BEING:
The Struggle to Be
and
THE DIARY:
A Record of my Experience in Struggling with
the Feelings Associated with my "Love" for Gloria
Isma'ili
In preface, let me say that the vision contained in this record comes largely out of Sumarah and the Kebatinan tradition in general. It is also much akin to that of the Buddhists in terms of the nature and structure of reality in realms and heavens and dimensions and beings of associated spirits. The most important distinction between this and the Buddhist perspective has to do with a conflict in long-term outlook: through their Boddhisattva notion of universal enlightenment, the Buddhists are rather concerned with avoiding the true expression of Justice and the return of pain to definer -- in practical terms they just wish to continue the same confusion since their purpose is unacceptable to all Open Beings for obvious mechanical reasons and unworkable. We are interested in Justice and seeing Closed Beings pay in full for the pain they have caused all of us since this pain ties up the energy needed to properly express many Open Beings and turns existence here into a zero sum game that nobody is ever going to win. We seek the end of karmic arrearage and all beings' return to openness such that we Open Beings can truly be together.
"How is it that we think?
It's by confronting a problem and letting it work
itself into a resolution. That's how it is done."
"Nja Gusti, Nja Kawula!" ("Where there
is a Lord, there is a Servant!")
DAVID GORDON HOWE
Philosophiae Doctor
Master of Arts
Pamong
Sutâpâ
Dukun
"For those that do not know, a Dukun performs
more or less the same function as a good teacher:
you find people that are interfering with others
and remind them of their responsibilities!"
Finally the main issues are clarified and the
definition of the Open Being I stand and serve has
stabilized. The depth of Gloria's evil is now
plumbed and grounded and she is being formally
divested in her full sense here and hopefully in
her being over there a few kilometers away too.
Satisfacton and proper revenge are arising and her
being is properly crushed to Reality. The time has
come to report home to Java and get checked in
again by Sumarah and the glorious and magnificent
Javanese Being: May the sands of time ever flow,
I'm coming home. . .
Dear Pak Wondo,
Mamaju hajuning bawana;
mamaju hajuning djagad.
I am
writing to report in after some 16 years out here
in the Western world. I am sorry that I no longer
can remember my Indonesian and hope that you are
able to understand English better now. Maybe if
Carol Block is still around she could help you
with this.
I remember that when I
left Java in July 1980, at my farewell dinner Pak
Sri Sampoerna remarked that I would be "as if a
stranger in a strange land" on returning to the
West. Truer words have rarely been spoken and my
experience both in the United States, where I
finished my Ph.D. studies and produced Sumarah:
A Study of the Art of Living in an incredible
and virtually inexplicable rush (I finished up in
about four months), and then in Brazil, have often
reminded me of one of the things Pak Hardo used to
say, "When God says 'go west,' you go west; When
God says 'go south,' you go south." I hope it has
all served some purpose but what a horror
nonetheless. I can remember that when I left Java
you remarked to me that you were "jealous" because
in Java things are so easy and the people are so
dear that it is difficult to obtain experience
concerning the harder face of being. Believe me
I've gotten plenty of experience out here so I
guess you were right though I have often felt like
I was "swinging like a hanged man in the wind". I
remember you and Suhardo used to say that Sumarah
could be adapted to any locale and that pamonging
is very different in different places. One day a
pamong visited from Jakarta. He said he was direct
and kasar and described his pamonging techniques:
If pamonging was like that in Jakarta, imagine
what it is like here in the land of Carnival and
rampant hedonism. I started a group here but found
it impossible to deal with the escapist tendencies
of those that were coming and also found it
virtually impossible to get cooperation in
"grounding" the interference those who came were
getting due to opening up in the practice. Brazil
floats on a cloud of petty distinction (with
everyone glowing happily with mutual hate and
practicing pass-it-along abuse) and the virtual
imposition of emotional being. The tendency is to
defy Reality rather than seeking to resolve
problems or disputes by opening up to God or
Sedjatining Keadilan: incredibly
irresponsible, but there you are. The enclosed
letter will give you a better understanding of
what I mean by "grounding" since this is a term
that comes out of practicing Sumarah here, in that
the local environment unfortunately requires it. I
let the group die out.
During this same period I
was working on a revision of Sumarah: A Study
of the Art of Living for a more general
audience. I produced three versions that covered
the issues involved in more popular language and
tried to adapt them to the local environment
(Sumarah's basic practice was translated into
Portuguese). The last version is Serve the
Harmony which remains on my shelf still
unpublished in that I ran out of energy for
pursuing it some eight years ago now. Ho hum.
Maybe someday I'll be able to get back to it,
re-revise it to update the outlook and look for a
publisher. Who knows?
Earlier on, when I was
working on my dissertation, I started some
traditional Indic or sutapa practices that come
more out of Pak Hardjanto's bag of tricks than
Sumarah but arose strictly out of Ilmu Gaib.
As I wrote in June 1992 in a letter at the
cataclysmic unraveling of my relationship with
Gloria (the object of the enclosed letter):
I obviously don't recommend this for the
fainthearted. No one can ever really take on full
responsibility for the consequences and the
individual must be called to it: not even the
pamong pribadi really has the right to authorize
this one.
You used to say that a
pamong can perform his service and then go back to
"normal" afterwards, but Pak Hardo then added that
when he started practicing he became a full-time
pamong and was always in the openly receptive,
rasa murni state. This is what has happened to
me as well. This heightened sensitivity is not
notably pleasant in a place like Brazil and is a
bit destabiliziing at times but all in all became
inescapable.
In Pak Kino's terms, I
came to Brazil basically in jinem and then
popped out in junun in December 1991 due to
the shock of falling in love -- can you imagine my
surprise when that happened? Essentially as a
result of what I report in the enclosed letter, I
finally moved into what he used to call suhul
and pure association with the Kabir realm of being
(as opposed to the perversely Sahir perspective in
this society) as of October 1995. Sometimes I have
missed the tranquillity of jinem during the
often tumultuous transition to suhul and to the
open, direct and personal management of my own
being this implies, but obviously there is no
going back at this point. Anyway, things are
calming and steadying now.
That's about it, really.
I hope this letter finds you well and that
Paguyuban Sumarah continues to thrive. I often
miss Java and am frequently consoled by my
knowledge that beauty like that of the Javanese
people really exists. I sometimes wonder how much
change Japanese investment has induced but
hopefully Java remains basically the same. My
loving best wishes to everyone, especially Carol
if she is still to be found.
Yours truly,
David Howe
When the Divine Root Being opened in early
January 1996 and Morning and Plaka and One and Two
and all the rest of the selfless loving ones that
are the source and substance of the Divine Being
stirred and awoke from countless ages of
deprivation and desecration, we had finally
reached the point where there were no further
areas that could be exploited for the definition
of substantial calumny and lies and
misrepresentations in general. With everybody that
matters more or less awake and paying attention,
we are now free from the ancient curse of
overcompensation and baseless worry that has
plagued the Open Path and "served" the Closed Path
seemingly forever. We Opens are easily frightened
if you claim we might be losing one another; the
Closeds enjoy our fear and have endlessly
terrified us to make themselves feel powerful and
impune. Now this has stopped since no one can
meaningfully claim that any of us are going to be
lost anymore: we rest truly and justly open
together. We now just stare any idiot claiming a
crisis down together and rest content to be One,
individually and collectively united in Open
Union. We remain open to fear but there just isn't
much to be afraid of anymore, now is there? I
think we can all understand that, can't we little
sweathearts? Our Being rests open and we rest
truly content with one another.