Does a bottle know the quality of the wine it contains?

Musing Around by Lawrence Pevec

After about seven years (age seven to fourteen) of Pentecostal Christian indoctrination mostly with no evident results, I decided it was all a hyped fraud and I stopped participating. However, I still felt strongly motivated to find the reality of God, and my relationship with Him, (Her, It), in some other way. I also had puberty to endure, and a passion for art to pursue. Those things were a serious distraction, but I never lost my interest in finding a personal spiritual path and I got plenty of help along the way. Then at age twenty-one, I found Subud.

I’m not a scholar or intellectual, I am intellectually lazy and I rather follow my feelings about what I need to know and whether there is truth in it. I am curious about the truth of the issues that interest me and there are plenty of compelling resources on the internet in all my areas of interest.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of videos on many subjects in what was formerly called the esoteric or paranormal. Up until the disappointment of the November election I included politics in my list. Now, not so much. In addition to Unidentified Ariel Phenomenon (UAP), Ancient Aliens, Near Death Experiences and the origins of Homo Sapiens, probably due to my early indoctrination, I’m particularly interested in religion, Bible scholarship and Judeo-Christion spirituality. It is evident there is a massive reevaluating of the spiritual traditions and the whole human experience.

The driving force behind my pursuit of truth in religion originated in one significant belief; that individual humans have two fundamental aspects; The form and the content. Of course, this is nothing new. It is observable every day on every level of experience. Humanity has been looking for clarity about it for thousands of years. It is fundamental in all research in the social and physical sciences as well as in religion, and can as with me, be a primary motivator for personal “seeking”.

In Subud we refer to this dualism as the inner and outer or the material and spiritual aspects of life experience. The value of using either phrase for the phenomenon can certainly be debated. The content (inner, spiritual) side became much more compelling when I read in Susila Buddhi Dharma Bapak’s explanation of the evolutionary hierarchy; the seven life forces that make up the content and how they influence the individual. In many talks he mentions:

“In reality, brothers and sisters, Subud is not a religion, but it is the content of religion; it is the content of what people are seeking in this world.”
— Subud Library; Bapak’s Talk, Provisional Translation by A. Sawyer-Cookson Code Number: 79 YYZ 9

Seeking content correlates to seeking and communing with God in early religious traditions. In the Hebrew religion, God spoke only to the prophets and there is only minor distinction between the content; the inner, and the body, the outer. It’s the origin and destiny of the content that is mysterious. Where did it come from and where does it go? The Hebrew word Nefesh is often translated as “soul” or “life,” but also refers to the whole person. The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) does not provide a fully developed doctrine of the afterlife or an individual soul’s destiny, but it does contain hints and evolving ideas that later Jewish thought (in the Talmud, Kabbalah, and other writings) expanded upon.

In the Bhagavad Gītā (2:20), the Hindu distinction between the inner and outer and their characteristics is much more definite: “The soul is neither born nor does it ever die; nor having once existed, does it ever cease to be. It is unborn, eternal, everlasting, and primeval; it is not slain when the body is slain.”

I believe a clearer distinction and expansion of the original dualism; form and content is what people are looking for. Judging from the amount of related material I’ve found in my “feed” it seems obvious that society is anticipating a breakthrough in empirical understanding of content, not merely makeovers or ideas, new religions and philosophies, but something new and experiential. As I listen, read and watch what is happening on the internet, I can’t help but think the latihan may not drift slowly into obscurity and disappear but rather emerge as the next step in the evolution of human consciousness and hopefully who and what we are.

LF Pevec