Above: Lorraine with sisters Mary Kimsey and Lusijah Marx

Lorraine Arden Memorial Subud Stories

As shared with her daughter, Elisa Arden

For as long as I can remember, I have always been looking for a way to connect to God. I grew up in a family where religion played a strong role in our upbringing. My grandfather and three uncles on my mother’s side were all Methodist ministers and if women had been allowed to be ministers back then, my mother would have been one too. The ancestors on my father’s side came to America from Sweden partly for religious freedom. Every night at bedtime our mother read to us from a book of Bible stories. The stories told of people who had guidance from God: Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jesus – so I always believed that this kind of relationship with God was possible. As I got older I tried different churches, tried reading Jung and Rolf Joerich, and eventually Gurdjieff/Ospenslaj. They all provided different ways to help me focus on living my life with a special awareness. In Gurdjieff we had a leader whom we met with regularly to talk about our lives. We also had a movement class based in part on ancient temple dances which required intense mental concentration.

I have always been someone rather who always tried to excel at everything, so I was already tightly wound. The Gurdjieff program made me even more tense so that I felt like a clock with the spring wound so tight it was in danger of going “boing” and breaking. I knew that this was not the correct path for me. My husband Harvey, who had joined Gurdjieff with me, had also decided that he hadn’t found what he was looking for in this group, so we decided we needed to leave.

We had both recently read a book called “Concerning Subud” which Harvey had taken out from the library. It told of a man from Indonesia called Bapak who had started a movement called Subud that seemed to offer a way for anyone who asked to experience a connection with God. We were living in New York City at the time and found a phone number for Subud in the directory. I called the number and said that we were both interested in becoming members. They sent application forms in the mail which we filled out and sent back in. Soon after, we got a phone call saying that Bapak was in New York and all the people who had applied could come meet with him to receive this contact with God. They gave us dates for the opening – the initial experience of receiving contact. Typically, applicants spend three months talking to Subud members called Helpers. This is because Subud is a life-changing event, so applicants must be able to make an informed decision that this is something they really want to do. Because of the special circumstance of Bapak being in town, we never had to go through the application period. I felt strongly that this was what I had always been looking for, but I had no idea how dramatically Subud would change my life.

I thought everything in my life was in good order. I had married a man who, from the moment I saw him for the first time across a room, I knew he was the man I should marry. I still remember the room, the door where he walked in, where I was in the room and what I was wearing. We did indeed marry and we had two children, a boy and a girl. Once they were both in school I had a block of time during the day to devote to painting. The apartment we lived in had a high ceiling and was filled with light so it was perfect for large paintings. In the year before I was opened I won an award for a “younger painter of great distinction who has not yet received due recognition” and my art was reviewed in the New York Times.

While I was in graduate school I got pregnant, married and had my first son, Tom, so had to drop out. I moved with my husband to his home town in Chicago. He was an aspiring writer and also a seeker. We lived in Chicago for several years. When Tom was two we had a daughter so I was busy as a parent, but also still finding time to paint and exhibit my art. Harvey worked at a bookstore and later got a job writing for a set of encyclopedias. That company was bought by another company in New York. Since his original plan before he met me had been to go to New York to develop his writing career, and we had made this detour of several years in Chicago, he jumped at the chance of moving to New York. And that is how we ended up as Subud applicants in the city.

Harvey was opened on June 28, 1963 and I was opened on June 29th, my birthday. In my initial experience of the Subud exercise called “latihan,” I felt like my face was not my real face, that it was a mask that I was wearing. This experience was not enough to convince me that this was what I was looking for, but it was enough for me to continue. Because Bapak was in New York for several days, we went to a couple of talks he gave explaining what Subud was. Bapak always sat quietly, waiting until he felt guided in what he would say, so being at one of Bapak’s talks was always a spiritual experience in itself.

We were encouraged to do the latihan exercise for a half hour twice a week, so we continued to go to latihan. Before we were opened they had talked to us about Subud being a process and told us it might take some time before we began to understand what was happening. The first several latihans left me feeling uncertain about Subud. But then I had a latihan where the fingers of my hand were moving very rapidly in a sequence like I was playing some complicated piece on the piano. If I had been trying to move like this, I couldn’t have done it. But my fingers continued to dance in a swift, deliberate sequence without my thinking about it or trying. I knew then that I had tapped into something beyond any previous experience. Soon after that I had another latihan where, even though we were doing latihan with our eyes closed as we usually did, we ended up reaching our hands out and finding each others’ hands. We were so surprised that we all opened our eyes and found that there were ten of us standing hand-in-hand in a circle. It was not something we had planned on or tried to do, but we were guided to do. We felt as though we had been given a sign that we are all in this together.

I began to be quite certain that the latihan offered us a chance to connect to something beyond ourselves. Different people receive guidance in different ways. I have always received a lot with my voice. In latihan I say things, but since the words don’t come from my mind, I have to listen to them to receive the message. It’s as if my inner self is talking to my ordinary, outer self. Sometimes my interpretation of the meaning of the words is wrong. Once I thought I was saying that there was “a problem with my niece.” I have several nieces so I was trying to figure out which one this might be about when my inner voice said that “the problem is with your knees.”Now that I am old, I have had both my knees replaced so I can walk without pain.

At some point in latihan I said that I had spent my whole life up to that point working to develop myself as an artist, but that focus had prevented me from developing as a human being and I had to quit painting for a time so that I could develop other parts of myself. I had never gone more than a couple of weeks without painting so this seemed like a daunting task. I hoped it would just take a couple of months, but it was ten years before I received guidance that I could begin working as an artist again. A short time thereafter I received that I should have two more children, but not for several more years.

Prior to joining Subud I had smoked marijuana and tried some other drugs in my quest to find more meaning in life. But soon after I joined Subud, I had a dream that made me give up drugs completely. I dreamed that I was in a theater watching a movie in which I was walking in a walled garden with beautiful urns and statues surrounded by flowers. When the movie ended, I decided that I would stay and watch it again but this time the movie was different. The garden was really a cemetery, a place of death. It was a warning to me that I needed to give up using drugs. So in the dream I left the garden and got on a boat that would take me across the river to a place where I could have a different life, free of drugs. Soon after this dream I also had a latihan where I was saying that if I gave up drugs I could have experiences much wider and higher than drugs could ever give me. From that moment on I never used drugs again.

When I was born my parents named me Ann Karen Jacobson. Growing up my parents moved a lot because of my father’s work. In some towns I used the name Ann and in others I used Karen. I had been using the name Karen ever since I got married but as a Subud member I eventually thought I should write to Bapak to ask for a name. He gave me the name “Linda.” This was a good name for me because when I joined Subud I was a very intense, driven, tightly wound person, but the name Linda let me relax and let go. The name change also affected me in a physical way. Before joining Subud I had never broken into a sweat. I even felt proud that I never perspired like other people. But as Linda, I sweat just like everyone else. I also found that if I got wound up or tense I would start yawning and I would continue to yawn until I could relax. I also yawned when I was around other tense people.

There were other ways that Subud changed me in a physical manner. I was born with a defect that my doctors called “pigeon breast.” My rib cage protruded out in the center where my ribs joined my breast bone. One night when I went to bed I received guidance that this defect prevented me from being able to really expand my chest and was keeping me from living as I should. I was informed that my breast bone would be pushed in and my ribs would be pushed out to a correct position during my sleep. I further received that my heart and lungs would need some time to adjust to the changed shape of my chest cavity so I should stay home and mostly in bed the next day. At that time I was one of the few people who had keys to the Subud latihan hall and was responsible for arriving early and unlocking the doors. The morning after my chest expansion I received a call from one of the other members with a key who was supposed to unlock the doors that day. She said she wasn’t going to be able to make it and asked if I would go to the Subud hall and unlock the doors for her. I felt that since this was something I was asked to do for Subud that it would be okay for me to go. So I dressed and got on the subway to go downtown. On my way there I felt very weak and kept collapsing. I finally got to my stop and had a few blocks to walk, but I fell down and couldn’t get up. I asked people passing by for help but they all thought I was drunk and went on their way. Finally I gathered enough strength to get up and go to a nearby phone booth and call a Subud friend who lived close by. She came and helped support me as she got me back on the subway and went with me all the way back to my apartment and into bed. It turns out someone else had showed up with a key to the latihan hall anyway. I learned that when God gives you advice, it is important to follow it.

My parents gave me a bunch of letters and pictures sent from Sweden to my grandfather who immigrated to the US a few years after the Civil War ended. The letters were mainly about religion. A Subud friend knew a hairdresser who had come from Sweden and suggested I have her translate them into English for me. Bapak had said that some of the earlier people to join Subud after it spread to many countries following the Gurdjieff meeting in England were actually looking for this gift of a contact with God and that they had ancestors who were very spiritual who had earned them a place in Subud. As I spent time reading these letters, I had dreams about being one of my ancestors sitting on the porch of their house in Sweden. Years later when my husband was working as a writer for National Geographic, I was able to travel with him to visit my relatives in Sweden and Denmark. Descendents of my great great grandfather took us to the site of that house. The house had burned to the ground but one of the doors that had been on the house was still there covering the well where they got their water. My husband took a picture of me holding up this door to be able to see the well.

During the time I was reading the letters, I had a latihan experience where I was saying that although my ancestors were devout Christians, it was not a pure form of Christianity as it was colored by Teutonic beliefs. So I got books out of the library so I could learn more about these Teutonic beliefs.

As a teenager I had lived in a small town in Iowa that had been settled by mostly Swedish immigrants. They did not approve of dancing or listening to music on the radio. We had no junior prom in high school. Instead, we wore formal clothes out to dinner and a movie. But in Subud we are often guided by the latihan to dance and sing so I don’t feel that God has any objection to either. We should “dance and sing and make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” as it says in the Bible.

After I had been part of the New York Subud group for a while, I was asked to serve on the New York board of trustees. One night after our meeting, a man who also served on the board offered to give me a ride home. He told me that he had been a successful business man but had been diagnosed with cancer. He had heard of some people who had miraculous cures after joining Subud, so he had joined hoping for a cure. He told me that he had realized at some point that he was not going to be cured miraculously, but that his experience in Subud had prepared him for dying, and that he no longer was afraid to die.

While we were living in New York, my husband was writing for a set of books called “The World and its Peoples”. When this project finished he was looking for another job. Eventually he found a job writing for a high school newspaper which had headquarters in Washington, DC. So we packed up and moved to Washington where we rented a house and enrolled our kids in the neighborhood school. Harvey and I became part of the Washington Subud group.

In latihan there I would often do a roll call of body parts. I thought this was strange, but later I found out that Bapak had said that all of the parts of our body needed to become alive to our inner self and when he traveled around the world he would have members test questions like, “where are your feet?” etc.

Later I began talking in latihan about Mary and Jesus. I would say that Christ was a door and that it was necessary to pass through that door as part of my spiritual journey. One day, much to my surprise, I received that I was having a latihan to experience how it was to be Christ being crucified. My experience was much shorter because it was condensed into a 30 minute latihan. At some point during that latihan I was crying out for water. After the latihan, a Jewish member whom Bapak had given the name “Mariani” came up to me and said, “Your plea for water was so plaintive that I wanted to help but I didn’t have a cup of vinegar.” I think perhaps she was the only one there who fully realized what my latihan that evening was about. Soon after that I had a latihan where I felt that Jesus came and kissed my forehead. He said it would leave a mark that would not be visible here in this world, but would be visible when I left this world. Later in life I did a painting of “Christ as a Door” and another of the virgin Mary’s ascension.

Several years later, when I was learning bronze casting, I tried to do a sculpture about the time Jesus kissed me, but no matter what I did it looked like a romantic encounter. Eventually I did a relief of a man lying down and an angel that swoops in to kiss the man. I called it, “The Kiss that Wakes the Sleeping Soul.”

One night I was doing latihan in my basement with two women who were friends of mine. We all had a latihan that was like a fast forward film of how the rest of my life would ideally be lived. In that latihan it seemed like God had meant for me to be a sculptor and that I should study bronze casting and stone carving. We received that the time to do that had not yet arrived but that I could prepare myself by reading books about working with my hands, which I never did. We also received that later, some Subud members would start a school in Tucson, Arizona and that I would move there and teach at that school. We were saying names of people who were meant to do this. Then when I was old, I was to do sculptures of the “holy women.” I couldn’t do them until I was old, because I had to become more developed spiritually to be able to do it correctly. At this point in the latihan, all three of us were saying the names of the women who I was to sculpt. First was Mary, mother of Jesus. Then Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter. Then we said Ibu Sumari, Bapak’s wife, followed by her daughter Rochanawati. The last one we said was Ibu Rahayu. We all knew who Ibu Sumari was and who Rochanawati was, but none of us had ever heard of Rahayu. After this latihan was over, we all kept asking, “who is Rahayu?” We now know that Rahayu is Bapak’s daughter, who was very young at that time. But years later, before Bapak died, he said that she would take over when he died, traveling the world and talking to Subud members. I also received various materials that I would use like bronze, hammered metal, stone carving, wood carving – all “living” materials. I was glad that I did not have the experience alone – that two other people shared it with me. One of those people is still alive and is my best friend, the other one died many years ago.

I did eventually study bronze casting and stone carving. I never moved to Arizona or taught at a Subud school because the people who were supposed to create this school never did. Later, a Subud member in the educational field told me that they did research it and that Arizona did seem like the most favorable place to start a school in the US. Subud schools have since been started in England and Columbia, South America.

For years I felt guilty that my life had not followed the path laid out for me in that latihan. I eventually came to understand that the conditions of the world change, and that some things depend on other people, who for various reasons go in different directions. We each follow our path as best we can.

Above: The Kiss that Wakes the Sleeping Soul, bronze, 1975