Predetermination and Spontaneity

Pre-determination and Spontaneity.

When I was just 21, virtually on my birthday, I joined a study Group under J.G.Bennett and for the next 7 years every morning I performed a certain exercise. We were in The Work. It was quickly explained to us that we could not remember ourselves with our minds, that we needed to make a connection with our bodies.

For that reason every morning, I (and for that matter all the other members of that Group) would sit in an upright posture, much like one of those Egyptian statues, I would fix my eyes on one spot, and would then proceed to relax and sense my limbs in a certain pre-ordained order. Starting with my right arm I would relax it, would sense it from my shoulder right down into my fingertips. Then I would do the same with my right leg, sensing right down to each individual toe. Then, on to the left leg and the left arm, before sensing the trunk and then relaxing the muscles of the face.

Only then after some twenty minutes, when we were in what we called the ‘collected state’, would we prepare ourselves for the task of the day. Now there were many different tasks that we did over this seven-year period, but just as an example we would perhaps have the task to remember ourselves on the hour for every hour up till 6 o’clock. It was when we were in this collected state that we would visualise the task ahead and make a commitment to it.

I have not given here all the details of this exercise, as it would be wrong so to do, but at least this is enough description that anyone with any imagination can see that this was no easy thing. It was The Work.

I am reminded of one specific task that we sometimes worked at, and that was the task of Decision. In this exercise we had to make a Decision to do one simple action during the day. We had to visualise it in every detail, even if it was something simple like driving a nail into the wall. I remember that in my selling days, I would prepare one simple sentence and it was that that I would visualise in every detail.

What was the point of such an exercise? What was the point of most of the Gurdjieff exercises? The aim was Self-observation. In attempting to do these exercises it was impossible not to observe oneself. It was impossible not to see that most everything during the day just happened!

However it was easy to forget that this was the aim, it was easy to think that the aim was to become Conscious, to perform every action as a Conscious man. In this we were much influenced by Mr Bennett himself, who had a very deliberate and powerful manner of speech, which many of us were wont to imitate, much to the chagrin and amazement of those outside the Work. I think we all imagined that some day we would be able to do everything in a pre-determined way. We had begun to think that having one’s own ‘I’ was the ability to pre-determine our actions.

Such of course proved to be a false hope, but let me say now that I for one certainly believed that it was possible. But the fact of the matter was that however hard we worked, however hard we visualised, however strong was our connection with our bodies, it was impossible to ‘remember ourselves.’

I have already said all that in my book “Stairway to Subud”, so forgive me if I have repeated myself. But I want to emphasise just one thing and that is speed. The mind and the body are just too slow. Emotions are miles too quick. Irritation and anger appear with the speed of light, particularly if you have a short fuse, and most of our fuses are woefully short. Hurt feelings, imagined slights, dread, fears, contempt are all things that occur just like that, without any pre-determination at all.

Just the very fact that we are living with other people, that we are living with our wives and families, guarantees that much that will happen every instant of the day will not be pre-determined, will not be foreseen. We cannot foresee what the postman will bring, what the electronic mail will offer, we cannot foretell what news will occur on the TV or what tragedies or joys a simple phone call may bring about. We are at the mercy of what will happen and our emotions will react like the hair-trigger of a gun.

However I am straying from my theme a little. The whole point that I wish to make is that all these exercises were pre-determined. They were thought out, they were planned in advance. The exercises demanded that one had to summon one’s attention, and not only that but to divide it. If the school bell rang on the hour I would have to divide my attention between the immediate uproar of the pupils and the inner task I was trying to accomplish.

This was even more noticeable in the ‘movements’. Even in the most simple of the Movements, called the Obligatories, one first learned a series of arm movements, then a series of leg movements, with different head movements and so on, all the time being urged to keep one’s state and one’s attention in one’s body. Again what was required was a division of attention. These movement classes might take an hour and a half, and the curious thing was that they might be tiring, but they often produced a great burst of energy and feelings of togetherness. This was even more the case with the more advanced pieces, like the Ho-ja Dervishes, the Arche-Difficile, and my favourite the Tibetan Masks. All these movements were hideously difficult, but performed to remarkable music by Thomas de Hartman. I should also mention that in some dances we whirled like Dervishes, that is to say that we spun, but in a controlled and rather a sedate fashion.

Once again, all these movements were works of attention, requiring forethought and preparation. And they often produced remarkable changes of state.

This we might call ‘Working from without.’

Now when Subud arrived at Coombe Springs in the summer of 1957, believe me the young men and women who lived at Coombe Springs were inordinately proud of this Work, and judged everything else against it - at least, that is to say, any other esoteric movement, that required inner exercises. We considered that the emphasis on being connected to the body reduced the risk of imagination, present in so many meditation or mantra like exercises.

One needs to appreciate this background to understand just how different the Subud latihan was and is. Far from performing movements as instructed, precisely the opposite was required and occurred. We were told only to stand and to receive, with a very minimum of explanation. We just had to surrender and to follow what arose within us.

You can see at once, that we had no instruction what to do or not to do, there was no forethought, there was no division of attention – in fact all forms of concentration merely got in the way.

Now I did not move straight away, and as described in my book “Stairway to Subud”, I was quite shaken. I knew that I was present at something immensely powerful, but I felt it to be completely different to anything in the Work.

I was not alone; I was not alone in feeling that The Work and Subud were irreconcilable. For The Work seemed pre-determined, while the Subud latihan was totally spontaneous.

As already recounted some people experienced the action of the latihan straight away, and it was clear to everybody that a transformation was taking place – perhaps the most observable was the transformation taking place in Bennett himself. The change in him was so visible, that my friend Ahrend Vos who had not seen him for a year immediately requested to be opened.

In the meanwhile for some six weeks I agonised. From being awed and alarmed at the latihan, I had simply become bored. Each exercise or latihan lasted for about half an hour and I shifted from one foot to another, hearing the sounds, the singing, the speaking and the padding of feet and experiencing nothing. Like Ridwan Aitken I tried to be open, and like Ridwan I wondered if there was something fundamentally wrong with me, some flaw, some terrible past sin that prevented me from experiencing.

When finally I had decided to give it all a miss, I went to my final exercise or so I thought. The rest is history, already recounted in my book “ My Stairway to Subud”, as instead of leaving I experienced in a dramatic fashion. Now in the revised version of the book I have added many things. Amongst others, there is not only my own account of what finally happened when the action of the latihan began, or should I say erupted within me, but also the accounts of Ridwan Aitken, Oliver Vos, John Bennett himself, Hussein Rofe, Bob Prestie, Rainier Gebers and many others, in the form of Extracts, taken from their own accounts.

How was it that each one immediately that they experienced the action of the latihan knew that it was the single most important thing that had happened to them in their whole lives?

Now I have made a claim at the beginning of these essays or treatises, call them what you will, I have made a claim that everything in what Gurdjieff taught, everything that John Bennett showed us in The Work, could be found again in Subud, could be reconciled.

And yet it would seem that in this chapter I have done the very opposite. I have illustrated very clearly, at least so I hope, some of the methods that we in The Work used, the morning exercises, the wrestling with attention, the division of attention and the work with Movements. Surely all this work was totally and finally irreconcilable with an action that occurred from within, that manifestly did not make use of the normal channels, the normal instruments, that did not make use of the Functions, in a word did not make use of the nafsu?

We can only begin to reconcile these apparent opposites when we remember the aims of the Gurdjieff Work. Man has no ‘I’ he declared. Man has no Will. The Conscience of man is buried in his subconscious. Gurdjieff also made clear something very extraordinary, that the Sacred Impulses of Faith, Hope and Charity that had been brought to this earth by the Messengers from Above, were no longer working - and that the only hope for mankind was that the sacred impulse of Conscience that was buried in the subconscious, or the Essence, should be brought to the surface and become active in man.

If we think of the curtain, everything that Gurdjieff declared was on the right side of the curtain. The ‘I’, Will and Conscience are all on the right side of the curtain. Even the Higher Emotional and the Higher Thinking Centres belong to the right side. The aims were right, but the methods however admirable, were the work of the functions. It was like trying to capture the citadel of the soul by main force.

No wonder that P.D.Ouspensky, who had devoted his whole life to The Work, cried out in agony that ‘we have not found the Way’.



Anthony Bright-Paul
May 2006