Dear Ms Williams

Thanks for this curious note that leaves me feeling that responding is the best thing I can do since there have been so many such offers over the months. In general your position has left me feeling that you have no idea what such a temptation does to the experience of one who as been the victim of a major atrocity perpetrated by his own family wherein I was literally robbed and disowned by a group of properly speaking indigents who have earned nothing they have and have devoted themselves only to stealing what they were given rather than trying to earn the value involved.

In proper terms my hometown is Solo in Surakarta, Jateng, Indonesia in that I bow to my experience and feeling for the people of my city. They are very dear indeed to me; I am their servant. Nya gusti; nya kawula.

In any case, I am now in Brazil and while we saw the horror of the Tsunami on the news here, I always suffered a bit of recalcitrance in condemning it altogether feeling that any group of Muslim extremists within the Indonesian Archipelago should probably receive the same treatment to clear their minds of the hideous fundamentalist putrescence of Islam. Islam is already a disaster of over-excited villainy without its burbing up like cultural detritis in Java's more responsible and applied practice while hiding behind an unworkable "book" that has promoted tyranny wherever it has gone.

Java has been afflicted by outside forces since the Indic entry around the time of the Christian Era. The Indians brought Sanskrit, Shivaism, Buddhism and the Mahabharata, which was later corrected by adding in Java�s own Semar to keep the story from pure fascism. This was a period of dewarajas throughout most of Java and then later most of the Indonesian Archipelago in the Majapahit.

During the later part of this period, another group introduced itself in Arabs bringing Islam, Arabic, Sufism and the Koran. What had been done through the adaptation of the Mahabharata and Indic tradition to Java�s vision, now started working on the then and now rather overexcited Muslims who seem to feel that their God empowers them to do whatever they please and then call it a �Jihad�. We took Allah and universalized the concept and its application by identifying this rather outstandingly demonic and peculiar being with Tunggal, Ingsun, Tuhan, etc., which were and are reality-level beings or consciousnesses we already knew, that are akin to Greece�s Anagke and Egypt�s Ma�at. It struck the Javanese that Allah looked rather like the fox in a fox hunt with everybody repeating the name five times a day as if this were good for them. How it could have been good for Allah was impossible to imagine. So our Seh Siti Jenar established universality as the definition of Allah in our practice.

Then in about 1600, the smelly, flee-infested, archconservative, hyper-bourgeois Dutch showed up and informed the Javanese that they were now the overlords. Sultan Agung argued with them but their weaponry left us at a distinct disadvantage. Anyway, they brought us the most curious religion yet in the Zwingli based Dutch Reform cabal where the devout are among the Elect and obviously they did not wish to spread this entry into their ethos among us because obviously it gave them considerable advantage in that they could pretend they knew what they were doing and the Javanese hadn�t a clue. In relating to the Dutch, it was always a question of trying to figure out what element of their lamentable indifference to point out first. I had a student whose husband came out of that grotesque Nederlander uber alles period with a family of hideous pride and vanity about their ascendancy or descendency (I couldn�t figure it out from the stories she told me if they were convinced of their importance because they actually thought they had some or if it was simply a mistake they were defensive about considering in their own terms). However, the keys to understanding these returned colonists are the words hubris and auto-immolation. It appeared they had a lot to hide.

In any case, as a result Java continued the study of these outside intruders and intrusions. This is where kebatinan in many senses began, as a mode of study of outside influences. If you compare Java�s practice with that in Bali which was never occupied by Islam, there is a much less articulated orientation that we sometimes envy in our �understandings� in Java. We do not study kebatinan to be kings of the mountain but because we like one another and these new influences tend to get in the way of what is most important, i.e., one another, for a while.

The Dutch ship-of-state took a hit amidships below the waterline in the 20th century as their grotesque religion as secret society bottomed up altogether and their pretended moral authority turned into the frequent spectacle of overbearing Dutchmen yelling about things they didn�t understand in the slightest as if they were masters. We see the Netherlands nowadays as a result of this interaction and the disarray of the Dutch Kingdom would appear to reflect our feelings about them: �Now you don�t talk so loud. Now you don�t seem so proud��
Anyway, you have given me something to think about and now I have given you something to think about.

I remain at your service if this was something other than an exchange of indifference to the feelings of the Other.

David Howe