I think I know what your friend means about making up rules for living. Even if you can't live by someone else's rules, I think we each have a tendency to create our own - a rigorous system which is both flexible and unbreakable. Without having our own rules for ethics, morality etc., we can end up as messed up as, well, the people that surround us in Subud or any other cult and faith system. Those are people who need rules from others. People like the helpers at my group. Or those who use the existing framework to manipulate others in order to gain success and prestige, like those who create enterprises by treading on the toes of their friends.

I'm still searching for "the truth," whilst having to a point accepted that there is no absolute truth, there is no final answer that will be the 0ºK of my life. I HAVE gained plenty of positive things from all the things you've spoken. Just because I don't always agree with you doesn't mean I have to hold any animosity towards you. I still, in my own way, see you as being injured by the same forces that I have, and I admire the part of you which feels that, despite being clearly wrong, the actions of others are not going to cause you long term pain and harm.

Next week it will be a year since I first told my dewan that I was leaving Subud. That decision really was a sort of hurricane which tore through every aspect of my life. I've rebuilt many parts of it, but there are some parts which are full of debris that I am frightened to touch. In my mind, the feelings and understandings I've come to this year have been harder than the past 22 years of blind denial. After the Quantum theorists, physics books had to be rewritten. The stepping out of a system and seeing it as a lie requires the past to be re-evaluated, experiences to be put in context. Much-held beliefs turn out to be horribly wrong. The scientists who backed the wrong horse get lost in the long list of historical nobodies. The helpers who believed in a broken system of cultural lies face the end of their lives realising that everything they believed in can be explained in very cold and certain terms.

I do know one thing - I don't want my identity to be that of a "cult survivor." I have no interest in that. I don't want my experiences to push me into an unhealthy obsession with systematic and organisational abuse. Perhaps that is all you meant by letting go of negativity? I don't want to be trapped by thinking about my past every day of the rest of my life. But it's made me cautious, it's made me wary, and it's certainly made me see things in others that I never would have noticed before - that the suffocation of absolute, unshakeable belief is usually the downfall of otherwise brilliant men and women.

I'm lucky to have my margin of scientific doubt. I still want what Pak Subuh claimed the Latihan would give us. It's the same thing that everybody wants - universal peace, understanding, deep connection, and love... but I no longer believe it is possible to have all of those things all the time, and to dedicate your life, finances, hopes and family to achieving them is a sure-fire formula for catastrophic failure. I'm glad you've got something wonderful from your time in Subud and your time with God. I hope my journey will take me away from the world of destructive and controlling organisations and into a more liberal place where the people I am surrounded by take a more empathic view of the human spirit.

Take care Bronte,

Jupiter.

Here is a link to, apparently, the only anti-Subud site:

[www.freewebs.com]

Here's a quote and a link to an article about Subud and its connection government mind control experiments in California in the 1970s:

In fact, in one of Alex Constantine's articles on the mass ritual sex abuse case involving McMartin Preschool and their outright CIA connections, he notes that many of the CIA's child oriented MK [Ultra] operations are "administered" by an Indonesian religious cult: one of the leading members of this cult is also a principal officer in a MAJOR computer games software manufacturing/developing business. He doesn't name names, but I believe it must be either Sega Genesis or Nintendo or some corporation rather close to them in terms of market share, from the way he writes it. The name of the relious cult is "Subud".

[www.mail-archive.com]

mxkitty
Why do you think your information is relevant?

All the literature available on death cults like Jonestown showed they were headed into disastrous mind control.
All the literature on Subud that is referenced by members is fully available to anyone who is not a member, even when it is described as being for "members only". Hence, reasonable conclusions about it's intentions and methods can be reached by any reasoning person.
Have you even looked at any of it?
The purpose of Subud does not include mind-control by one person of another.
The meditative tecniques are currently being debated fiercely and openly on the SubudVision web site.
They do not leave room for any conclusion that Subud is a cult with such evil purposes as implied by the article you refer to.
My own forty year plus experience of Subud has shown me that anyone can find out whatever they want to openly about Subud and that, as Jupiter has clearly indicated, ther are some very dogmatic and insensitve people in Subud, who do things that are not the purpose or task of Subud, and hurt others not because of Subud, or it's purposes, but because they are themselves flawed human beings.
Nothing of that article you refer to has any valid link to Subud, merely unsubstantited implications, or rumours.
Subud does not deserve to be compared with such cults as Jonestowm etc, nor your call to it's supposed work in those experiments.
It may well deserve every bit of the criticism Jupiter gave it, and that which I have also added, since I too feel deeply hurt by the behaviour of many members of it's official heirachy from time to time.

It's relevant because this is a thread about Subud and this excerpt mentions Subud.

There is no reference in the excerpt to Jonestown, which is an extreme example of what a cult is as sensationalized by popular media.

Read the excerpt again. It is not popular media. It is an account of how our government has used Subud/a Subud group to its advantage. It is not an account about the purpose of Subud a purported among its members.

Many members of our government are in cults of their own, i.e. Freemasonry, but they do not believe that it is a cult either.

The term "reasoning" is subjective, by the way, as is the term, "reasonable."

Alex Constantine is a conspiracy theorist. Google his name. Subud has many problems, and flaky aspects to it. You won't understand what these are by reading a person who has even more problems, and is even flakier. For more paranoid fantasies by Mr Constantine, see:

[www.alexconstantine.blogspot.com]
[www.konformist.com]
[www.whale.to]
[www.whatreallyhappened.com]
[www.presidiotex.com]

SAMPLE: "In this report, written by the outstanding writer and researcher Alex Constantine, the incredible trail of connections between the Monsanto Corporation and its chemicals and pharmaceuticals division, the GD Searle Company - owners of NutraSweet - and such entities as the Nazis, the government's secret experiments with LSD administered to unsuspecting victims, their connection to the Jonestown Massacre, and a lot of other incredible historical ties - mostly of a very dark nature, are exposed."

In a sense, Mr Constantine is a cult unto himself. He is the guru. People that believe that kind of stuff are the followers. And off they go into their own little world.

Some of Constantine's information is corroborated by many other researchers.

This is not to say that every single point he makes is supported by such corroboration.

If anyone can corroborate his purported connection between any Subud group and MK Ultra, please do post, because I haven't found anything yet.

The label "conspiracy theorist" is just that - a label designed to evoke a dismissive response, kind of like how the word "nigger" is used to devalue an arbitrary delineation of human being.

Chuck Darwin was a conspiracy theorist too, and a "heretic." But it didn't make him "wrong."

SUBUD would be a good candidate as the new religion of the New World Order.

Like Freemasonry, one can be of any religion in order to join.

Bapak Subuh, who invented SUBUD, lead a SUBUD convention in the Hague (the Netherlands) in 1964 which was held in a Masonic Lodge:

[www.youtube.com]

Queen Beatrix of Holland (the Netherlands) happens to be member of the Bilderberg Group, a major proponent of the New World Order.

I still do not think that a comparison even with fremasonry is appropriate.
Sure, both Subud and that organisaton look like they are advising their adherants to pay respects to the One Creator of the Universe ( I am not a Fmason, so can't use correct terms).
But I can still worship God just as I did when taught how to in my childhood, at a Church of Christ. I worship God the same way that any person does who can pray alone to their Creator.
Subud is not in conflict with that, because it provides no different ways of submitting one's self to God. Only a different limit on the response. I do not have to recite set prayers, or perform copied rituals that someone else has shown me, or do things in the world which someone has said I must in order to be a Subud person. All I have to do is submit myself to God in an act of worship or prayer, which all Subud members do when they get together to do latihan, the Subud exercise, which I describe as Worship of God, Purification, and Training. My description might not meet with some people's approval, but as an outsider to the Subud organisation, it is how I describe it. And in so doing I claim that I am yet another Child of God, as are all people, and the better so for those who acknowledge their God, which only some people on this planet do.
Worshipping God does not make one a Subud person, nor create the New World Religion.
But practicing the Subud latihan as it is meant to be certainly makes one worship God, even if the practitioner does not acknowledge all the words and ideas that are used to connect man to the Creator. hence an atheist can feel a connection. The understanding is lacking.
I still remain a refugee from the people in Subud, and their undeveloped humanity.
And many of them retain their rejection of me as a sound human being.
So I don't think I am about to become an ally of Queen Beatrix any day soon!
Mind you, for some it is nice to have powerful friends.
I just don't count the devil among mine! No thanks!
Glory to God in the Highest!
Peace on Earth and GoodWill to All Men!
Amen

I suppose Subud is not in conflict with poor spelling either.