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13 of 14 found the following review helpful:
"My Stairway to Subud" by Anthony Bright-Paul May 17, 2006
By Emmanuel Elliott
Anthony Bright-Paul has rendered real service in updating and reissuing his book, "My Stairway to Subud," first published in 1965. "Stairway" brings vividly to life the author's personal journey through the Vedanta and the Gurdjieff "Work," a path that in 1957 finally led him to embrace Subud, a spiritual movement then newly arrived in the West. Anthony Bright-Paul, still only in his twenties at the time, had already studied the Gurdjieff system for some half dozen years under the direction of J.G. Bennett, and was unaware that earlier that year his mentor had secretly received a direct contact with the latihan kejiwaan (training of the soul) from Hussein Rofe, himself a pupil of the Indonesian Master, Pak Subuh, soon to be widely known around the world simply as "Bapak."
Rofe had been initiated by Bapak a few years earlier in Indonesia and, along with Baron Ronimund von Bissing and a few other direct pupils of Ouspensky, was instrumental in inviting Pak Subuh to London. However, destiny decreed that it was to be John Bennett who would play the major role in hosting and assisting the Indonesian during this dramatic period. Anthony Bright-Paul, therefore, was well placed to provide a detailed historical record of the heady days which heralded the speedy expansion of Subud to more than 70 countries.
Typical of the honesty which Anthony brings to his book is his acknowledgement of the scepticism and resistance with which he first responded to the proposed transition from the Gurdjieff Work to the apparent simplicity and ease of the surrender to the Will of God, advocated by Muhammad Subuh. All his doubts were in due course swept away by his experience of "the great force which rained down in and around me," which left him "feeling elated yet detached and deliriously happy."
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It was clear that Muhammad Subuh was marked for spiritual greatness from his earliest childhood, and when as a young adult he looked for inner guidance to the local gurus of his day they invariably turned him away. That which he sought, they all told him, was already within him and would be revealed to him by God when the time was right.
In 1925, aged 24, Pak Subuh - the name, by the way, means "dawn" and is not to be confused with the word "Subud," a contraction of three Sanskrit words (Susila, Budhi and Dharma) meaning right living from within according to the Will of God - was out walking one night when a brilliant ball of light descended through space and entered his body. The light initiated a strong vibration within his body and precipitated an intense period of purification and spiritual unfolding. Eight years later, he was given to understand that it was his mission to transmit this same contact to all who asked for it.
It was this direct connection with a higher power that Tony Bright-Paul, together with some 400 other Gurdjieff students, received in 1957, soon to be followed by several thousand other seekers across the globe.
In addition to telling the story of his own exposure to the Subud process, Anthony Bright-Paul also includes a valuable selection of the recollections and experiences of others who were drawn to this still little known path of surrender and awareness.
Bapak, who died in 1987, had always discouraged advertising and proselytizing, with the result that Subud has always maintained a low profile, tending to propagate itself quietly by word-of-mouth. It is perhaps not strange, therefore, that such a dynamic, experiential technique should still be confined to relatively few people scattered throughout the world.
There are no teachers or gurus in Subud. Everyone who asks to be `opened' is in effect introduced to their own inner teacher, be they Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu, or indeed atheist or agnostic. In fact, Bapak explained that the spiritual exercise of Subud is a contact with the Great Life Force, the Holy Spirit, made freely available to all at a time when many people no longer believed in the teachings of the Prophets or at least had trouble following them. The ensuing process, he explained, is one of purification and spiritual growth, one that can be expected to extend both to our forebears and to our descendants. Improvements in health, although not the objective, are also by no means unknown, an early headline-grabbing example being the miraculous cure of film star Eva Bartok.
In the past, Bapak explained, Almighty God had reached out to mankind through a series of Messengers, each of whom brought a teaching, a religion, suitable to the conditions of the age. With Subud, he went on, it is as if God has got up off His throne, come down to earth and made Himself personally available to humanity at a time of great need in the face of escalating domination by the material, a time when men and women demand proof not words. All that we can bring to the experience, Bapak constantly emphasized, is an attitude of sincerity, trust and surrender.
Today's world is surely crying out for just such a cleansing, unifying agency, and perhaps Anthony Bright-Paul's excellent book will go some way towards making the phenomenon of Subud more widely known.
Emmanuel Elliott
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
An honestly fascinating memoir and exegesis Jul 10, 2006
By Geoffrey Armes
This book gives an exegesis as it were of 4th way (in particular), Vedanta and Sufi thought as methods of spiritual inquiry that inexorably show a need for the intervention of some kind of 'higher' experience. The philosophy itself indicates the requirement of something like the 'latihan'; that is the training received by Subud members.
Built around his own experiences as a young `seeker' in the nineteen-fifties, Bright-Paul gives us an excellent snapshot of a certain segment of the `beat' generation in search of truth in action.
Intellectually sound, this book isn't a tract aimed at converting the uninitiated to the author's viewpoint, and is all the more pleasurable to read for that. However, the middle becomes bogged down with perhaps too many stories of 'openings' and the experiences of Subud members, and segues to an inexplicable memoir of real estate dealing in California during the early sixties. This is interesting as documentation of an America that seems to have irrevocably changed, but meanders until getting back on track with a discussion of the author's changed relationship with his former spiritual teacher JG Bennett following the opening of both of them to the Subud latihan. In fact this is one way the book can be read: as a letter of reconciliation to an old teacher and friend.
The writing style is solid, while never excessively poetic, which is exactly what's needed with this subject matter, in that one wants to be swayed by the material itself, not the author's eloquence.
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