Ladies and gentlemen, tonight Bapak would like to continue his explanations about the spiritual way. Those of you who did not hear his first talk can listen to the recording that was made.

Ladies and gentlemen, as you have witnessed, the latihan or spiritual training of Subud is a training that does not come about because you want it with your heart, thinking and desires. It is a training that comes through God’s grace; and we receive it when the influence of our thinking, heart and desires has been stopped. So it is clear that the Subud latihan is not an ordinary training but a training from the power of God, given to human beings so that they can be in control of their life and not always influenced by the power of their thinking, heart and desires.

Such is God’s grace to human beings. For indeed the influence of the thinking, heart and desires on the human self is really very strong. Apart from having dominated your ancestors for generations, your thinking, heart and desires have been working within you ever since you were small. They control your entire inner feeling; and they are like an imprint, or an image, that is not easy to erase from the inner feeling.

So, you lost the sense of your soul a very long time ago, when you were small. Your heart, thinking and desires are more attuned to and trust what you are able to see, hear and feel with your coarse body rather than with your fine body.

Evidence of this is to be found in newborn children. Although newborn children are not yet able to see, hear or smell the forms and shapes that exist in this world, the expressions on their faces are often happy, radiant, disappointed, and so on. This proves that the feelings of a newborn child are still sharp and closely connected to their soul; they can see and hear the atmosphere that exists in the spiritual world – not with their eyes and ears, but with their sight and hearing.

When the small newborn child begins to be able to see the forms and hear the sounds that exist in the world, the connection with their soul begins to be blocked. Eventually, as they see the forms of the world more and more clearly, and their thinking mind, heart and desires begin to work, the connection with the child’s soul is completely closed. So finally, when the child becomes an adult, he or she has no faith at all in the soul, but an increasingly sturdy and strong faith in the things of the world.

Therefore it is not surprising that when people think about the nature of life after death – the hereafter – or think of heaven, they picture it in terms of what they have seen on earth. For example, they imagine God to be a handsome person, who sits on a fine throne in a spacious house, where everything is beautiful. Also, they imagine heaven to be a place of beautiful vistas. That is the way people think, and how they picture the hereafter, because they are unable to abandon the imprint of all they have experienced in their life on earth.

So, the imagination of the mind and heart cannot be free of what it is accustomed to. For example, it is very likely that a European will picture an angel as a European. An Arab may well picture an angel as an Arab; likewise, an Indonesian might picture an angel as an Indonesian. And an African might picture an angel as an African. That is how people picture something that originates from their thinking mind, their heart and their desires, which always carry the traces of worldly experience.

That is why we do not need to bring our thinking, heart and desires into the latihan. In the latihan, our inner feeling needs to be clean, uncontaminated and uninfluenced by the thinking, heart and desires, and to go back to how it was originally. Our inner feeling needs to be clean so that we can see and hear the spiritual world, free from the influence of traces of what we continually experience in our life on earth.

So it is clear that our thinking, heart and desires do not have to work in the latihan; but they do have to be put to work in the normal way – that is to say, outside the latihan – to earn a living, to obtain food, clothes, and so on. In other words, we need to use our thinking, our desires and our heart for things of this world, but the realm of the soul is entirely God’s work. Only God can do the work in our spiritual life, because the soul was the first component of our being when we came to this earth.

Bapak says that the soul came first – the precursor of the life of our self – because the soul was the content of our self before these visible parts of us came to be. The soul was there first; so even if the soul within us is wrong, there is nothing we can do about it. We, our physical being, can only carry out the influence and work of that wrong soul within us.

Therefore it often happens that highly educated people, who have extensive knowledge, do things that are really disappointing; that is to say, they still behave in a way that is unacceptable to society. This is because, although they are highly educated and their knowledge is very advanced, all that is just a tool for the low force – the wrong soul – that is in charge within their being. Such a person can be temporarily quietened, so they are no longer wild, by getting good advice; but this only works for a while. Later, if the time comes when the person has a need for something, his or her character, which is not good, will work entirely in accordance with the quality of the soul that is in charge within them.

You may ask, ‘Why is it that there are faults in the human soul, if humans are the chosen creatures of God on earth?’ Brothers and sisters, Bapak needs to explain. It was not God that made the faults. They are not there by God’s will, but because of human beings’ own mistakes. If Bapak may illustrate, the fault lies in the relations between man and woman, husband and wife. For many people, their sexual relations come only from the passions, only from their wanting and desire, not from God’s will. The arousal of their sexual organs is not free from the will of their heart and mind; it is driven by the desire of the passions, by a yearning and need to have intercourse. The result is the creation, within the inner feeling, of a kind of lens that can attract or allow in only the current of a low force, as opposed to one that is high.

And this has been going on from the time of your ancestors, all the way down to you. So, it is not something that started with you, something you have done yourselves; your sin or your mistake. It is something that began with those from whom you are descended. It is the continuation of something wrong that has gone on and on until now.

Such is the nature of the faults within us; and they are so deeply rooted within us that they cannot possibly be eradicated, because that would mean going through death. So there is no method that can free us from these faults except the grace of God, for which we wait, hope and pray. Only God can do this work, and clean and make good all the faults that are within us.

In reality, God’s help has been there within the self of every human being since they were created on this earth – since you were born. God’s help always accompanies you and is always close to you. It is closer than when you see something, closer than when you hear something, and closer than when you think of something. Truly, the power of God and God’s grace are close to all of you. However, you cannot possibly receive this when your thinking, heart and desires are working. That is why, for you to be able to receive the closeness of God’s grace in you, it is essential that you put aside your mind, heart and desires, have faith in God’s greatness, and believe that God always loves us and God’s grace is always close to us.

We can feel God’s grace with our hands and feet and all our coarse physical being; we can see and hear and feel it completely if our inner feeling is not always covered up, obstructed and influenced by our thinking, heart and desires, which continually day-dream about situations experienced in the world. That is why it is said in religion, and advised by the prophets – among them Jesus – that the more you seek God the further away God is. It is impossible for human beings to seek and find God. However, if human beings don’t seek, but have faith in God and love God, God will be there. Indeed, God is within you. Therefore, feel your own being; love yourself; do not neglect yourself or trust others more than yourself.

But most people misunderstand Jesus’ advice to humankind. Love of God is really very different from the love of one human being for another. When a human being loves God, it is not the heart that needs to love God but the inner feeling, free from the desires, heart and thinking. However, what people usually understand by love is the love for someone or something that comes from the heart. That is why their love for God is not reciprocated; that is to say, their love for God does not meet with anything from God in return, because it is from their heart, thinking and desires.

Now, in the Subud latihan, it is God’s will that we begin to love God, not with our heart, thinking and desires but with our soul and its inner feeling. So in the latihan you will find that sometimes you cry without having anything to cry about. You cry for no apparent reason – you just find yourself crying. This means that your inner feeling, which loves God, has been opened. Your inner feeling knows what it is to love God, but your heart does not. Similarly, sometimes in the latihan you feel happy without understanding why, because the happiness is not from your heart but from your inner feeling, uninfluenced by your heart. So this happiness is really the happiness of our inner feeling, as it becomes aware of the grace of God that always surrounds us.

Our inner feeling, which starts to feel these things, will become wider and wider until eventually it is all-enveloping. The clean state of our whole inner feeling, no longer influenced by the thinking, heart and desires, will then become apparent.

When we reach this state, God will start making changes within us. That is to say, the lens or nature within us that is wrong, which has been created by our ancestors and ourselves, begins to be cleared by God’s power. Meanwhile, within our being, a lens is prepared that we really need; namely, the human soul, which will enable us to be really aware of our life in this world and our life after death.

So for you, Subud is a boundary; meaning that the faults that are in you do not go any further. And the world, instead of getting worse and worse can then become better and better, so that eventually it will become good and prosperous, a fitting place for the worship of God.

And all of you will become really Subud; that is, Susila Budhi Dharma. Susila means having feelings that are genuinely charitable and humane. And budhi means a power that, although it cannot be seen, just like that, is certainly there within your being, and that you are able to receive and feel. Dharma means that you are really able to surrender to the greatness of God, no longer influenced by your thinking, heart and desires. With these qualities you will truly represent the Subud symbol within you, and you will become human beings who are obedient to God’s commands and who believe in the One God.

As for the round Subud symbol with the seven circles: it symbolises that human beings are created by God, come from God and return to God – to the place of their origin – through seven levels of spirit; that is, seven levels of life under the power of God. So the symbol means that Subud is directed towards God because indeed God wills it. So we come from God and return to God by way of everything that goes to make up our life under God’s power. That explains further about Subud and its symbol.

Certainly, you must feel that the journey there will take a long time. You cannot even be sure whether you can make it in your lifetime on earth, or if you will continue the journey in your life after death. Indeed, Jesus himself said that death is the continuation of life for us. From what Jesus said, it is clear that in our life after death, if we are really in the right state, we will be able to continue our worship and the purification of our spirit, so that gradually we will ascend – going up and up – until we return to the One Almighty God who created us.

In view of all this, Bapak hopes you will not have any doubt or hesitation about what you feel in the latihan. If something has to come out, let it come out. Do not restrain yourself. And, as far as possible, cut down the wish to think; that is, the wish to under-stand what you have received, or the meaning of what you do [in the latihan].

As for any illness you may be suffering from, perhaps some of you are wondering, ‘Could illnesses I suffer from be taken away from me and from my feelings through this worship, through this Subud latihan?’ Bapak would like to explain that the purpose and aim in our worship, in our Subud latihan, is our worship of the One God who created us. As for any illness we might have, because we worship God without being influenced by our thinking mind, heart and desires, it means that our inner feeling is awakened, and of course, this awakening of the inner feeling will remove obstructions in all the various parts of our being. So there is a good probability that illnesses we have been suffering from may be cured and disappear from our inner feeling, and that we may be restored to the state of good health we had before. But you cannot be certain about that, because it is all in God’s hands. We just surrender to God, have faith in God, and await God’s grace. Whatever we have been suffering from can get better and be cured if God grants it.

Actually, the illness that is the most serious, and the one that human beings really cannot do anything to cure, is the sickness of the soul. But God can improve even a sick soul. So, any illness we suffer from in our physical body can certainly get better if we really surrender it to God, and God grants this to us.

Meanwhile, let us not forget to behave in line with the meaning of Susila Budhi Dharma. Even though everything will work by itself, because it is God who does it all, there is nothing wrong with us also starting to do something for ourselves. In other words, we need to behave in a way that is truly humane; meaning, that we should not deviate from what is normally regarded as the right way for human beings to live on this earth, from what the prophets said to humankind. Let us not deviate from that. We must behave well. We must work really honestly, so that what we do helps. Then God will not have to do the same thing two or three times over; it will be done the first time, because we have prepared ourselves so that things can be put right easily.

This is the explanation that Bapak offers you tonight. Please forgive him if there is anything lacking in what he has put forward, and if any of his words have been out of place. He would also like to say goodbye, because tomorrow he will be leaving this city.

That is all. And after Bapak has left may God always bless all of you, so that you can receive easily in the latihan, and so that your outward life with your families may be happy. Further, Bapak would like to say thank you very much to all of you, particularly to those of you who have looked after Bapak and his party during our stay with you. Thank you.