July 17, 1997
 

Dear Robert,
    Thank you for your note. I was interested to hear that Paul is in Parangtritis. Curious little town. I would dearly love to get back to Java myself. As I was told in a speech at my fairwell dinner in Solo by Sri Sampoerno, one of the elder pamongs, “When you return to the West, you will be ‘as if a stranger in a strange land.’” So it goes. At the same time, Suwondo (another pamong I worked with extensively) said that he was jealous because I would have a chance to suffer much more out there among the insensitive Westerners than he does in Java and would thus mature more quickly. What a thrill. The years have been horrible and the rasa here in Brazil at my level of sensitivity borders on agony all the time, but I have indeed added to my experience and no doubt matured. I remember a pamong that visited Solo from Jakarta and told us that he was direct and kasar (as opposed to the Surakarta emphasis on tata krama and sopan santun) and described his pamonging techniques:

I just tell them, "If you don't believe, don't bother coming." I don't worry about etiquette, I just clobber them, "Brother, you're just here trying to amuse yourself. When we meditate we have no mother, father or children but only Tuhan to relate to." (Tipes 4/10/1980)

If guiding was like that in Jakarta, imagine what it is like out 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.
    One new meditation technique that I have had to adopt is expressing the pain in foam-at-the-mouth rages from time to time. Tiresome but there you are. It just needs to come forth. This abiding agony results from the fact that Brazil openly practices purely golek penak mysticism, which are called candomblé, macumba and umbanda, the local versions of voodoo, incredibly incompetent forms of ilmu sihir involving the overt use of guna². To give an example of the related ambiance, the former president used to conduct animal sacrifices in his basement. Rather than resting on a dictum like mamayu hayuning pawana; mamayu hayuning jagad, Brazil openly presents existence in a context of levar vantagem em tudo (Take advantage in everything) and “I’m the best; fuck the rest”. I hate this place so much I am in a constant state of bendu. So it goes. On October 1, I will have been here for 16 years. I will openly state that things have gotten notably better this year due to a shift in my essential environment, i.e., I have married a woman who is seriously interested in working with me rather than working against me. What a relief.
    But, just to give you a bit of background and an idea as to what has happened since I left Java, I guess I have to start by saying that I began as a druidic nature worshipper when I was eleven or so, looking down the long line of those that define my being. I feel my personal sense of my own being to have primarily arisen out of the Celtic See though my true foundation stands in Open Being. I started a simplified form of Sumarah that came to me on its own in 1969 and had thus been practicing it for 9 years when I got to Java. I found that the Javanese had a lot of knowledge but the basic perspective was one I already shared. Suwondo always used to complain that, “David never has any questions”.
    Anyway, going back a bit, as a result of my sense of things not conforming to that of those about me (there aren't too many practicing druids where I come from), I took an interest in the great things of existence and the great questions of being. I looked for the broadest area of concern possible in plumbing the depths of being human and ended up an anthropologist. When in 1978 I went off to Java to do research, I found my heart and soul there in kebatinan as well as among those in the dukun and sutapa traditions. Home at last or at least among those of my own kind. I remember the stories about one of the uncles of the Pakubuwana who wandered Java during a fast leaning against trees to rest: nya gusti; nya kawula. Just to comment on contemporary Javanese leadership, though, one is forced to admit that Suharto, his family (Bambang et alia) and his Semar group are a trifle less concerned with placing their aluamah in context and appear more than a trifle sombong from here. One of my friends and bapaks is Jendral Harnopidjati, a member of Suharto’s kebatinan assembly who originally hails from Jogja, and I have written to him expressing concern about the embarassing corruption of the administration (for those of us who love Java and have to account for it) and short-sighted devastation of the Kalimantan and Irian Jaya forests for apparently vacuous purposes. I remember visiting Suharto and Ibu Tien’s enormous, regal marble mausoleum near the Mangkunegara tombs outside Solo and have to admit I was expecting trouble. Ho hum.
    When I got back from Java in 1980 I finished up my dissertation in a flashing period of four months, the inspiration was so inexplicably urgent. I wrote articles afterwards while I was trying to present myself to anthropology and unfortunately for my erstwhile career started out with the challenge:

Are we irresponsible? Does our work too often reflect the Faustian hubris of our times and constitute intellectualistic humbuggery which obfuscates our subject matter? Who do we respect? As Sapir (1928:41) asked concerning our denial of traditional wisdom and our "fragmentary and experimental analysis," are we not "throwing away a greater wealth for the sake of a lesser and more dazzling one?" This article discusses a part of this old wealth, "traditional holism," and the perspective it gives on the problems of existence and being together.

The article is a beauty but no one took up the gauntlet. Neither this, nor the article "Open and Closed Psychology: How Different Can We Be?", was accepted for consideration and I found no place among the lot that make up anthropology these days. So with a six-month-old baby girl in arms, in October 1981 we were off to Brazil where I began to teach English and study my next people, who were and are rather less to my liking than the Javanese and the Balinese. You can probably guess how I feel about the rampant hedonism of a place where Carnival and institutionalized irresponsibility (panem, circenses et saturnalia) mark the character of social reality.
    My experience in practicing Sumarah and Nature Worship have shown me that there is a commonality, a mutuality, in the definition of experience that cannot be denied. In other words, the way you feel largely depends on others and often shows their influence on you. Believe me, after living in the United States and Java and knowing the interactive “feelings” or rasa I had there and then coming to the distinctly different and inferior level of experience here in Brazil, it's hard to deny our impact on one another. The pain of being here put me through a kind of forcefed maturation process which took me to what we call the suhul or divine level of being, mostly as a result of a misbegotten love affair from October 1991 to July 1992 that felt more like a general betrayal. The associated agony added a lot to my experience but is still slowly getting sorted out. Problem confrontation in a hedonistic social environment like this hellhole is rather like a picnic on the North Pole: fundamentally lacking in attraction. In fact, suhul is an inappropriate level of sensitivity for the helter-skelter experience in Brazil. I would have preferred to have stayed where I was in jinem, a state with an unconscious definition structure, but I had to assume suhul due to my erstwhile Delilah’s stultifying influence on my experience.
    During the past year I have begun the process of opening to the world. The energies I have available now are gradually becoming more in line with my tugas and my being has stabilized. As a result, I'm not scrambling to maintain my open state (sedjatining rasa wonten ing adiling eling) since it stands on its own now. I am no longer notably constrained by the confused local presence in Brazil and find most of my sense and purpose to be properly expressed. Essentially I stand on the open presentation of Justice (sejatining keadilan) as an answer rather than a question.
    Robert, I'm forced to admit to my fundamental loneliness here among a people that serve no purpose but their hedonistic pursuits. Like São Paulo, Surakarta used to be called "The City that Never Sleeps." In São Paulo this reputation is a result of revelry and the self-destructive activities the Western world has decided are fun; in Solo this association came due to kebatinan peoples' nocturnal application to meditation on the problems of being. We invest ourselves in being here together and in experiencing what comes to us openly, not in escapism and the desperate search for personal pleasure. For example, when my daughter was born in the United States in 1981 I did a ngebleng fast (no eating, talking or sleeping) for a week to try to establish the being she brought to us. I hadn't expected it to carry on for so long, but my meditation just didn't clear and I was forced to wander through the emotions and confusion that kept it turbid.
    Some years ago I experienced the agony of the burning of the Amazon rainforest in a dream and awoke shaking with pain and rage. Evidently I am open to the abuse this planet has suffered and the need it feels for release from this plague of humans.
    As you know, we have some special forms of fasting (ngebleng, mbisu (no talking) and pasa tai (consumption of excrement)) for entering into contact with other realms or forms of being. I have done a lot of this and ones consciousness slowly clouds and clears, expanding and ceasing to define itself, becoming openly defined by its linkage with existence. Personal feelings end up so small that they rather fail to attract in the larger context that opens up though they too wander back in eventually in a larger light.
    During this process one encounters those that share the purposes of Justice and Open Being. Ones character and sense of existence is redefined by experience itself. In that light, my closest companions tend to be the rather fiercer sorts who were Furies or Fury-related, like Tisiphone and Annis and Hecate, until we came together. I serve Justice and so do they so we have joined forces. They have been with me since 1993 during the junun period awaiting a gathering of divine being that would allow me to enter suhul properly speaking.

The sense did steady and develop into an open rasa being. At about 4:00 pm on April 17 Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone came in to confront me. It was quite a jolt. We share the same sense and the same view of being and have gotten on well together.
It would appear that the Union will involve true Common Sense, that is, the Furies do not seem at all interested in standing above me in feeling or in sense, an unprecedented event in my experience and one that will take a bit of getting used to: I'm still watching for dips in the being and when they don't appear I get kind of happily nervous.
When Alecto, Tisiphone and Megaera first came in, I was standing in front of the mirror in the hall. They got me into the traditional Fury arrest posture, with the arms up and bent at ninety degree angles out to the front. They were indeed furious spirits but I found them refreshing and open (so nakedly and fiercely and defiantly open, so lovely and shy and embarrassed), far less complicated than the goddesses and I hope I did not offend by making a comparison to other divine spirits I know. Soon I began to play with them, saying, "Could I put my arms down. This position isn't too comfortable." They allowed me to come forward and put my hands against the wall beside the mirror. Their presence brought me peace and when they released me I felt like a little boy with them -- happy and a little silly. They couldn't believe this reception in that they are more accustomed to generating terror in those they confront. They said that they have participated for a long time but had been afraid to enter into direct contact for fear that I would not be able to bear them. We went downstairs and I ate something and told them they gave me joy and that I was very happy they were here with me. They were still very skeptical.
I soon found out that they are among the spirits that have brought me joy in my relationships with Pierrina and Magali in that they are absolute expresssions of Open Being, serving Natural Law just as I do.
The following day or two we got used to one another and generally things got easier. However, after a while I checked with Tisiphone and asked if she was okay and she said that no she was not very well. I asked her to let me share the sense with her and found an old nightmare sense of absolute betrayal that I suffered into silence some time ago affecting her being. I went into a rage and went straight to the relevant Kree (Divine Natural organizing being) dimension, demanding an explanation and threatened to dissolve the being if necessary. The local Kree being was with me so we were ready for an all-out war if necessary. As it turned out the shield of this nightmare sense had been placed on purpose by the Kree masters just beyond my normal sensitivity as a kind of protection. They had rather forgotten about it and since Tisiphone's sensitivity is greater than my normal range she was straddling it. We did a quick examination of the situation; found that they had been correct in what they did; and they then quickly pulled the shield out just beyond Tisiphone's range, which instantly gave us great relief.

What a joy they were and are! I honestly believe that any human who does not seek out experience with the higher forms of beings is just pathetic. As a child one is likely to have exposure to such things. It strikes me as very strange that in the West we carefully define our childhood associations along these lines (imagination and all that) as off limits for adult experience and end up pursuing the empty path of personal ambition rather than seeking and serving our open association with those we love. We abjure the beauty that can only come through an Open common expression where we share reality rather than dispute it, where we work together rather than having each deny the other’s right to be in one way or another. The primary issue is Justice because without it “love” is just a pause awaiting betrayal. This tekading ingsun is the way of the being I now stand open with. We know existence to be a nightmare that some of us refuse to allow the rest to awaken from in that it would involve us all giving satisfaction to one another and thus eliminating the karmic backlog that requires this confusion to express all of our mutual hate and scorn.
    I’ve had a look a some books on modern Shamanic studies by Sandra Ingerman and Michael Harner where they describe experiences that have elements that I am familiar with from my own opening through Sumarah. I find their approach rather watered down in that they don't emphasize the elements of suffering and maturation that are traditional parts of most forms of shamanism that I am familiar with: one has to go from a culturally constricted "reality" to Reality, which is just the way it is and where experience (and suffering) is unrestricted by any personal definition or association with what is right or fair. In fact you can find Ingerman and Harner on the Internet in the slick presentation of The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, which promises all manner of fun and games, power and happiness, diversion and entertainment, to those who care to spend the time and money to become Certified Shamanic Couselors (C.S.C.). I find it curious that they do not answer their mail: I wrote to both of them last year and described my experience to them in that they had sent out word that they were interested in collecting the experiences of other shamans, an area I do overlap. It is also indicative that sending a note to The Foundation for Shamanic Studies is impossible. They do not have a provision for receiving e-mail. Curious group.
    In any case, my best wishes to you and your family. Oh how I miss Java. In June of 1994 I was up in the States and was given an old book about Bali. Nobody was home so I opened it and was looking at the pictures taken in the 1930s. I started to weep and feel much the same way in remembering Java and most particularly my dearly beloved Surakarta. So it goes.
    Have you ever wondered that nowadays on this planet of ours, when almost everything has already been destroyed, that so many of us are suddenly sensitive to spiritual, environmental and ecological issues. Curious. Seems like we’re a little late and that all the peace and love emphasis reflects the fact that there is almost nothing left to scorn, torment and demolish, but who knows insyah Allah?

                                                                                   Dengan hurmat,
                                                                                             David