Subud Books

Subud Publications International

In 1925, a young man in Semarang, a port on the north coast of Java, received a remarkable spiritual experience that was to transform his life and that of many people all over the world. That experience is fundamental to understanding how this book came to be written.
His name was Muhammad Subuh. By day he worked as a bookkeeper at the municipality and at night he would study accounting. It was his custom to go for a walk late at night after working at his studies, to clear his head before going to bed. On this particular night he was on his way back from his walk at around 1 a.m. when he was startled by the appearance in the sky above him of a ball of light as bright as the sun, which illuminated everything around him. As he looked up, he saw that the ball of light was falling towards him. He felt a tremendous physical shock as it entered his body through his head. His body shook, and he was sure he was experiencing a heart attack. He stumbled home, went to his room, lay down on his bed and surrendered to God, preparing to die.
What actually happened was completely unexpected. First he saw the inside of his own body, filled with light. This lasted only a few seconds. Then his body started to move of its own accord. He was made to sit on his bed, then stand up and walk to his study. There his body went through the movements of the Muslim prayer. These were the customary movements that would have been familiar to him as a practising Muslim, but they were not accompanied by the words that are normally spoken. Then he was walked back to his bed. All this happened quite independently of his will, as if an invisible force was moving him, but throughout the whole experience he was fully conscious and aware of what was happening.
That was how Subuh described the first occurrence of what was to become a regular event. Every night the involuntary movements returned, and Subuh observed what was happening as if he was a second person in his own body. Since all this happened independently of his own will and his own mind, Subuh felt that it must be happening by God’s will; so he simply surrendered to what was happening, but remained attentive.
These manifestations kept changing – the movements of prayer gave way to different kinds of dance and martial arts. Subuh had some expertise in the latter, and to his surprise he found he was being taught many new movements and techniques that he had never before experienced. Gradually the movements also became deeper and more complete, involving his feelings and understanding. Soon he found that he was being taught about and experiencing all the levels of life in the universe: the material, vegetable, animal, human and levels higher than that. As this process of inner change went on, Subuh increasingly came to be regarded by his acquaintances and friends as a person of remarkable wisdom and insight.
All this culminated one night some years later in an experience in which he was given to understand that what he had received was indeed the action of God’s power, and that it was not just for him but could be transmitted to others. He was not to seek people out, but if they sincerely asked they could receive the same contact with this same power that Subuh had received. This proved to be true. When acquaintances asked him to transmit this contact to them, he found that he could do so. If they were simply close to him in a state of surrender, they would suddenly start to feel the same action that had started within Subuh many years ago. It was clear they were experiencing the same power, but that it adapted itself to the nature and individual needs of each person. This passing on of the contact from one person to another came to be called pembukaan or ‘opening’. Once it became established in the new person, they were in turn able to pass it on to others. For several years after that, this experience spread slowly among Subuh’s circle of friends in Semarang and Yogyakarta, a neighbouring city that became his home after the Second World War. They referred to it simply as ‘the spiritual training’ – latihan kejiwaan in Indonesian – and practised it together on a regular basis.
The practice consisted of Subuh’s friends meeting in a room – men and women separately – where they would surrender themselves to the working of this inner power for thirty minutes to an hour at a time. People would simply follow whatever spontaneous movements and manifestations arose within them. When the practice later spread outside Indonesia, it came to be called simply ‘the latihan’, because it was felt that the English word ‘training’ would confuse people, as it implies learning something through the use of intellect and will.
Besides joining in the latihan with his friends, Subuh also shared with them his insights about its true nature and purpose. He told them that this experience was not something new, but simply the result of restoring the connection between the Divine Power that fills the whole universe and the human soul; a connection that is the birthright of all God’s creatures, but which human beings have lost through generations of life that emphasised the development of the mind rather than awareness of the soul. Subuh told them that maybe the reason these movements had started for him with the familiar movements of prayer was to reassure him that what he was experiencing came from God’s power.
He had later come to understand that there are different stages in the worship of God. There is the familiar worship enshrined in our various religions, which is initiated by the heart and mind, and based on faith in what has been handed down in traditions deriving from the teachings of prophets or messengers of God. There is also worship that arises spontaneously from the human soul being guided by the power of God, as in the latihan. According to Subuh, this second kind of worship leads to the repair and improvement of the character and physical body of the worshipper.
He made it clear that what he passed on was in no way a new religion, since it brought no new teaching, but was rather a reconnection with God’s power that provides the proof of the reality of what the great religions teach. In the same way Subuh would always emphasise the great difference between the latihan and the many spiritual or mystical ways to be found in Java known as kebatinan, which are passed from teacher to pupil and depend on human will, using techniques of meditation and asceticism. Although Subuh would from time to time pass on to those doing the latihan some of what he had learnt in the course of his own spiritual experiences, he always warned them not to treat this as a teaching but more like a road map to help them understand their own individual experiences in the course of the latihan. He was later to say, ‘In all this, Bapak’s function is like that of a school servant, who sets out the books, opens the door, cleans the classroom, and arranges the desks and chairs for you to sit on. When you are all there, sitting down and facing the front, facing the blackboard, the teacher will come and give the lessons; and the teacher is God, not Bapak.’
[Coombe Springs, England, 19 Aug 1959. 59 CSP 9]
A few years after the war, after Indonesia had declared its independence from the Netherlands, there were already a few hundred people doing the latihan in Central Java and they called a congress with the intention of incorporating themselves as a spiritual association. They chose for themselves the name 'Subud’ – not taken from Bapak’s name but from a contraction of three Sanskrit words: susila, budhi and dharma. The meanings ascribed to these words were as follows:
susila – humane behaviour that is in accord with God’s will.
budhi – the inner power within human beings.
dharma – surrender in following God’s will.
In 1951 an Englishman of Syrian descent called Husein Rofé arrived in Yogyakarta, whose coming had been predicted by Subuh some years earlier. He was to be instrumental in spreading the latihan beyond the shores of Java. He spoke many languages and started to earn his living by giving language lessons in town. Driven by an interest in the mystical movements of Islam, he was eventually introduced to Subuh, and soon afterwards received the Subud contact. That evening, on his way home, he realised that what he had come across was not another eastern mystical teaching but something of great importance for the whole of humanity, and that his mission would be to help it to spread around the world. Indeed, after experiencing the latihan for some time in Subuh’s circle in Yogyakarta, Rofé began to travel and started Subud groups in Sumatra and later in Hong Kong and Japan. In 1956 he travelled to Cyprus and London, which led to the first invitation to Muhammad Subuh to travel abroad in 1957.
So began the spread of Subud around the world. It was soon after the arrival of Rofé in Yogyakarta that Subuh wrote the poem Susila Budhi Dharma, his most important and comprehensive statement on the worship of God through the latihan. He explained later that he had received the whole poem – that the words were not planned but guided by the power of God. In other words, the poem itself was received in a state of latihan. He received it in the form of tembang, a Javanese verse form in which texts are sung to melodies of great beauty that correspond to the particular metre being used, traditionally used for conveying spiritual or philosophical truths. The language is kawi, a literary form of high Javanese that is not in everyday use. Subuh therefore felt it necessary to translate the text into Bahasa Indonesia, the national language adopted by the new Indonesian Republic that had come into being in 1945.
In his correspondence with Rofé, who was in Sumatra at the time and was to make the first English translation, Subuh refers to the Indonesian version as a commentary, and explains that it was not received but the result of intellectual effort that often left him exhausted. In later correspondence he explains that the subtlety of the Javanese language – and even more of kawi – with its extreme sensitivity to spiritual levels and relationships, make a literal translation into languages like Indonesian or English impossible. What he wrote, therefore, was more of an explanation of the meaning of the original, and it is this that has been translated into English in the present volume.
Readers of Susila Budhi Dharma should note that when it was written, the enormous changes that have taken place in Indonesia were still in the future. Java was then almost exclusively an agrarian society where most people still lived in villages. This book therefore expresses universal spiritual realities in terms of the world that surrounded the author at the time.

Sharif Horthy
Introduction to the Centenary limited edition 2001

In the holy books it is said that the way that leads to the completeness of life is not a path that can be made up, explored or planned by human beings – only by Almighty God. Human beings are required only to surrender; to surrender with acceptance and a willingness to let go. If one were to investigate, step by step, realm by realm and journey by journey, it would be impossible to calculate how many hundred million years the journey from this world to heaven would take, the journey to the level we refer to as God.
… Susila Budhi Dharma will give you some idea of that journey.
(Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, Vancouver, 20 July, 1981, 81 YVR 4)