What is Subud?
One thing I’ve been wanting to get more of them Subud Voice is really serious in-depth articles by people who are leaders in their fields, people who are really making a difference, people who are making a mark in the world. So far, we have come up with two excellent examples…
AUGUST 2011
Promoting justice…
An unexpected life in Subud Livingston Armytage has been a Subud member since 1971, and is a child of Subud parents, Sofyan and Halimah. He served as National Chair for Subud Australia between 1981/3, and as a regional and local helper. He has lived and worked with his wife Miyako in about 25 countries mainly in Asia, and is presently leading a judicial development program across the Pacific region. His Ph.D entitled: Reforming Justice: a journey to fairness in Asia, is being published by Cambridge University Press in early 2012...
Homeless mother with child in Darjeeling. (Photo by Livingston Armytage)
I originally trained as a lawyer in the early 1970s and practised law for about ten years. I then became increasingly convinced of the importance of promoting justice. So I left my law practice to make training judges and reforming justice systems my vocation. Since then, I have worked to promote justice in many unexpected places like Afghanistan, Cambodia, Palestine and Papua New Guinea. While there are rarely Subud groups in such places, I do my best to bring the latihan to keep in touch with that ‘quiet place’ amid all the challenges that I encounter.
All human beings have rights. These rights may be economic, social, political or cultural. People’s lives are, however, all too often blighted by injustices. In many countries, citizens – usually the poor – are routinely denied their fundamental entitlements by the powerful who exploit inefficiencies and subvert justice through corruption and impunity. I have encountered many examples of injustices as a practitioner reforming the courts. While courts are only one focal point for redressing injustice – and many people in developing societies live in the traditional or customary domain beyond the remit of formal justice systems – they are nonetheless the key mechanism of the state to do so. In Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, the physical safety of colleagues was daily threatened by extremely violent crime which fell beyond the control of the justice system.
In Multan, Pakistan, I met farmers whose grandparents’ dispute remained entangled in the courts for 60 years. In Ramallah, on the West Bank, the court staff were so poorly paid that they openly procured commissions. In Panjshir, Afghanistan, I worked with judges untrained in even the basics of secular law. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, judges knew that confronting the government for stealing land from customary owners had career-terminating consequences. In Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, I worked with courts unfamiliar with the notions of enforcement of contract. In Dhaka, Bangladesh, I worked in court-houses which had no electricity or record-keeping systems.
Clearly, justice cannot be administered under these deplorable circumstances. I have found that injustices continue largely unabated despite increasing quantities of development assistance worth hundreds of millions of dollars to improve what governments like to call ‘the rule of law’. These reform efforts have mainly focused on alleviating poverty. While economic growth, good governance and public safety are worthy goals, global efforts have however seldom directly addressed injustices and more often than not success has been elusive.
The best efforts of development practitioners seem to go awry. As a result, I found myself grappling with the challenges of becoming more effective. The difficulties of this work impelled me to embark on a journey to examine why global endeavours have been so limited in improving the access of ordinary people to justice and how justice systems could be reformed to improve their lives. Three years ago, I embarked on my PhD to solve the riddle of why reform efforts so often produce anaemic results. How can justice reform be improved? Surely, there must be a better way!
Sheltered from the demands of my daily practice, I was able to engage in critical reflection. In order to deepen my understanding of reform endeavours, I returned to the foundations of philosophical thinking and then out to the edges of the latest empirical research. In doing so, I was humbled by the limits of my own knowledge but enthralled by the extent of existing inquiry.
The multi-disciplinary dimensions of development – combining economics, political science, and law and justice – are immensely enriching. I became exhilarated by the elegance and persuasion of great thinkers, from Aristotle to Douglass North and Amartyr Sen. Where I had expected to discover clarity, however, I found myself ensnared in a conundrum of uncertainty, divergent disciplinary inquiries, and debates over truth.
I challenged these utopian ideas with my experience of ‘the real world’ in places like Haiti and Pakistan to ask: But, does it work? This was at once disconcerting and fascinating.
Making sense of these mysteries has characterised my journey of learning. So, this is what I know: any notion of development without justice is incomplete. Justice is fundamental to human wellbeing and is thereby indivisible from development.
Justice has been recognised as core to any civilised notion of the good life since Aristotle: government without justice is tyranny; and society without justice is anathema to its citizens. Any notion of civic wellbeing is unattainable without justice. But, what is justice – and why is it so important? From the outset, reform efforts must define what justice is before they can attempt to promote it.
While philosophers and political scientists may continually debate the nature of justice and the role of judicial reform, even a four-year-old child will immediately recognise unfair treatment from its parents and know when justice has been denied.
For me, justice is the notion of rightness built on law, ethics and values of fairness and equity. Justice protects humanity from Hobbesian notions of anarchy, societal breakdown and the brutishness of life in nature. It embodies an ordered community governed by the rule of law. While there are many renditions of justice, the principles of justice are universal and are reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and constitute the core covenants of the United Nations.
All societies comprise some basic structure of institutions that embody renditions of justice, whether formal or informal. These institutions may be political (governance, social affairs and the allocation of interests), economic (opportunities for livelihood), social (civic order and safety) or humanistic (fundamental individual rights). Additionally, justice may be utilitarian – concerned with maximising social outcomes; egalitarian – concerned with equality of opportunity, individual rights and freedoms; distributive – concerned with allocating interests in wealth, power or privilege; retributive – concerned with punishing wrongdoing; or restorative – concerned with restoring social harmony. Notions of justice are pluralistic and may be variously defined in terms of equality, need, reciprocity or just deserts.
Within this understanding, justice embodies values which societies institutionalise through their laws and courts that administer the laws. Beyond the truism that law may not necessarily be just because political decision-making reflects the interests of the powerful, promoting justice is primarily concerned with enabling rights. These rights are vested across the spectrum of human welfare, that is: political, civil, economic, social and cultural. Hence my work in promoting justice focuses on two levels: first on directly improving the effectiveness of the courts to enable rights allocated in law; and second, more broadly on the political, economic and social dimensions of development. I believe that the goal of development is to promote civic wellbeing. In order to achieve this goal, judicial reform must promote justice.
To bring this into life, justice in development must embody notions of fairness and equity, and enable the exercise of rights and entitlements which are what political scientists describe as the allocation of interests in law. These rights are embodied in law whether at the international, domestic and customary levels. Once this approach is put into effect, it becomes possible for us to focus on and measure the success of reforms in visible improvements in the access to and exercise of these rights by ordinary people.
The critical importance of justice becomes immediately apparent as soon as it is denied. Recognition of the importance of justice is however only now entering the development discourse, as evidenced in the World Development Report 2011 which links justice with employment and security to prevent violent conflict and war. The promotion of justice as fairness and equity requires the inclusion of a human-centred, rights-based approach to improving justice as an end in itself, providing the powerless and poor with the means to exercise their substantive rights. Such an approach will dynamically increase justice across all aspects of human wellbeing. It enables us to focus on improving aspects of the human condition, specific rights of people which are to be enabled, and how improvements can be measured. In my experience, these improvements in human wellbeing can be enjoyed across the spectrum of civil society. These rights may belong to Afghanistani girls to education, to Bangladeshi politicians to be held accountable by fair trial, to Nepali dalit women to physical and sexual security, to Vietnamese businessmen to secure investments, to Palestinian labourers and Pakistani taxi drivers to earn a decent living, and to judges to have the capabilities, systems and procedures to enable these rights.
These improvements to wellbeing must be measurable in terms of the actual exercise of rights to equality, efficiency, integrity, transparency, accountability, access and legitimacy to improve justice. As we all know, it is evident that the real world can be a very messy place, particularly when the interests of rich and powerful people are affected. It is daunting to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction of reform efforts to promote justice. Ultimately we must accept that there are no magic elixirs. Our understanding may always remain limited; and yet we must persevere as best we can as believers, pragmatists, dogmatists, sceptics or seekers in improving the often dystopian conditions of our world.
So, for me, this is our unrelenting challenge: to make a difference by promoting justice; to find order in chaos, reduce complexity to simplicity, and offer practical solutions to the injustices which ordinary people are encountering around the world. I am committed to doing this by using the latihan in my work and research, however modest this contribution may be in redressing these injustices.
I am fortunate to have found this path; it is the most extraordinary work that I could have.
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NOVEMBER 2011
FROM RUSSIA WITH FEELING…healing the body corporate from Solihin Thom
Solihin and Alicia Thom in St Petersburg.Harris Smart writes…A couple of years ago I heard that Solihin and Alicia Thom were now living in Russia and working with a Russian entrepreneur, applying their experience in healing modalities and workshops to the development of his enterprise. I have always been interested to know in more detail what they are up to and at last we can bring you the story.
The work they are doing is even more exciting and important than I had imagined. The man they are working for is not only a big businessman – his companies employ 22,000 people – but also a visionary idealist. Solihin writes that this businessman has “a map or scheme for his own conglomerate, to spearhead a new initiative into the way business is done in Russia.”
As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, Solihin goes on to say that he has been employed by this man to “spearhead his desires to change or foster healing of the Russian psyche/soul.” So this is very important work in the world.
Solihin explains his own role as, “Our job is to foster a new moral, ethical, transparent, and spiritual based culture of business in all the companies; although we have concentrated mainly in the Financial Corporation, and now, with the Insurance company. I am Director of personal and corporate culture. Alicia acts as consultant. “
Following an introduction from me, you will read below of how this opportunity was presented to the Thoms. Then, “dangling off” this document are two .pdfs. One is an article about Solihin and how he came into Subud. The second .pdf is a long article by Solihin providing a background to the work he is now doing. He writes particularly about the work he and Alica have done in investigating the “forces” and how this can be applied to the “healing” of a corporate culture…
An Introduction to Solihin
Solihin Thom is well known as one of the leading cranial osteopaths in Subud. Lately, his focus has shifted from working with individuals to working with the “body corporate”. He and his wife Alicia are now based in Moscow and he works in corporate development in the organization of a Russian entrepreneur.
Thirty years ago, I was in Fulham (London) waiting to see a cranial osteopath, called Solihin Thom. I picked up a magazine to pass the time and found an interesting Elle article. It said that there were four “gurus” in the world today. In India there was Muktananda and Sai Baba. In the USA there was Ram Das (Richard Alpert). In Great Britain, there was Solihin Thom.
No doubt he is intensely embarrassed about this and wishes I had not brought it up.
Nevertheless, I think it is something of interest and significance that all those years ago, Solihin was recognised – not just in Subud, but in the world in general – as someone noteworthy and in the illustrious company of these other internationally known “gurus”.
Last year in Subud Voice, Solihin wrote a series of articles about this life and work. The four articles appeared over four months in Subud Voice beginning in July 2010. They can be access by going to www.subudlibrary.net where past issues of Subud Voice are archived in the Miscellaneous and Compilations section.)
The whole story of how Solihin came into Subud is most interesting. Of particular interest is the story of how, after joining Subud, he was hit by a car and suffered very serious injuries. He was extremely fortunate to escape with his life.
As an aside, I know of a number of Subud members having near-fatal car accidents and not only living to tell the tale, but often saying “it was the best thing that ever happened to me”. We published such an article about Simon Guerrand in our February 2011 issue and soon there will be another about Peter Jenkins.
Solihin, prior to this particular accident, was treated by a cranial osteopath, after he had hurt himself at work. During the session he had had an inner experience where he was told to become one; this proved prescient after his pivotal accident. There is something about cranial osteopathy that seems particularly compatible with Subud. We not only have many cranial osteopaths in Subud, but two that are very outstanding and world-recognized, Solihin and Maxwell Fraval.
If you have experienced the sometimes extremely mysterious process of cranial osteopathy, you will understand the connection. Solihin, however, not only learned cranial osteopathy, he went on to master what seems like just about every other healing modality known. He learnt and has developed upon acupuncture and homoeopathy. He has also combined and developed kinesiology into a new modality called InnerDialogue™, which incorporate as a gesture-based language about two thousand received mudras.
However, a tremendously important part of Solihin’s work has been Subud, It has acquainted him so deeply with what it is to be human, that he and his wife, Alicia, created an extremely viable and systematic template for explaining the emanation process that Subud itself draws its own heritage from–what Bapak called the “forces”.
For decades now, Alicia and Solihin have held workshops to enable people to understand the forces – material, vegetable, animal and human. They then they wrote a book about it called, Being Human – Exploring the forces thatshape us and awaken an inner life. (http://innerdialogue.org/shop/being-human-book)
I have followed Solihin’s development with great interest. I was present at seminars where he demonstrated the healing power of cranial osteopathy and I have had treatments from him. He is always most personable, friendly and glowing with energy – a testament to his own practice. “Physician heal thyself,” has, apparently, been his motto.
Occasionally, you will meet someone who thinks Solihin is “arrogant” but I never found him so. It is true that he usually seems extremely self-confident but I have also found him sometimes touchingly modest and humble, revealing things about himself you would not suspect. Once he talked to me about his Scottish ancestry and how one of the things he has to “work on” in himself is a tendency to feel inferior. There was in his ancestry a self-deprecating, “touch the forelock” attitude that he has had to overcome in himself.
A couple of years ago, I heard that he had embarked on a new phase of his career. He was employed by a successful Russian businessman to develop this gentleman’s organization – which is vast. Solihin and Alicia moved from treating individuals to treating multiple corporate bodies.
I wrote to Solihin and asked him if he would provide me with an article about this work.
This is a very serious and substantial article. Many readers will no doubt find it challenging. It is long, 10,000 words, with many footnotes and esoteric illustrations. This article cannot be condensed. People who are really interested can go to the online November edition of Subud Voice where it is available its entirety.
(This is the sort of thing I want to see much more of in Subud Voice – interesting and informative articles by outstanding professionals in their field. A few issues ago we published such an article by Livingston Armytage about Justice and the law. There will be more.)
Solihin has provided an account of what has taken him to Moscow and what he does there. I think it best that Solihin supply, in his own words, a brief introduction explaining what brought the Thoms to Russian and their current work in that country….
SOLIHIN WRITES…
In ninety six a young Russian doctor appeared at a Gurdjieff center in Pennsylvania where he met Sal(uddin) Brownfield, a Subud artist who lives in Atlanta. Konstantin Trifinov, the Russian, had been instructed to find out about Subud, and had come to this center because the Muscovites had a relationship already with Gurdjieff’s work. The book ‘Witness’ by John Bennett had prompted them to look for Subud in the US, oblivious that there was, in fact, a very small group already in Moscow.
Sal told him about me, because the common factor was doctoring and Sal and I knew each other when I had taught in Atlanta, and had been at latihan with him. Konstantin phoned us in Portland, Oregon where we were living, and as luck had it, I was actually flying out to present a workshop in Connecticut the following week. We met there.
Konstantin avidly watched the class, and went around asking if the students could ‘spare’ him a copy of my manuals. Somehow he conned several people to let go of their workbooks and presented me with a dilemma–a Russia loose with my work, without training, and having half a dozen manuals! What to do? However some inner feeling made me say, ‘yes you can have them, but you must come and train with me.’ What trust!
He did, and we still work together, and he is now one of our principle teachers here in Moscow, and works with us in the conglomerate. He has been instrumental in placing this work into the hands of many therapists in Moscow, and we have quite a thriving group of practitioners here. Apart from that, the Subud group has grown and developed over the years since that initial meeting. Many people have been opened, and as usual, with these initial rapid growth spurts, many too, have left.
However there is a quite wonderful solid core group of members; we do love them, and they apparently us! Unfortunately we often are not at latihan, and we do realize how and what we have sacrificed at not being at the group. Our work is very hard, we are holding the inner dynamic of large groups of people, and working hours that make it difficult if not impossible to go to latihan.
However we do make sure that our own daily latihan is there, as a priority, otherwise we would be drowned by the amount and nature of what we are doing here. We recognize there will be some who read this and may judge our situation; we simply ask for understanding of what we are doing, and what has been given to us to do.
During the ensuing years, Alicia and I would visit Moscow, staying with Konstantin, and presenting both the Being Human workshops which we had developed, and the practitioner work that is now called InnerDialogue. During one of these visits, in late 2006, one of Konstantin’s students, a physician, recommended one of his clients, a businessman, to come to see me.
This man, now my boss, came with nothing particularly wrong with him, but a burning desire to change the face of Russian business. He presented to me, as a therapist, his pathophysiology: a map or scheme that he had for his own conglomerate, to spearhead a new initiative into the way business is done in Russia.
This was at the height of prosperity and success, where everyone was making money hand over fist. I worked with him using the process of InnerDialogue, taking his map as the starting place for dialogue. His session proved useful for him, and every time we came back to Moscow I would go and see and work with him.
Gradually our relationship changed to friendship, and an unexpected–yet strangely known– new dynamic started to occur. He would ask me (every time) whether I would be willing to come and work with his business, setting up a school of our work, and spearhead his desires to change or foster healing of the Russian psyche/soul.
We had a rather gentle courtship with this tempting idea, and then eventually as the offer became more concrete, Alicia and I couldn’t say no. We were initially asked to come and present our work in two stages, so we came and presented to the top management of his conglomerate. It was a difficult sell, but the management I guess, nodded their acceptance in front of the boss– who liked it! This visit was followed by the economic downturn, and the second of our visits coincided with an abrupt ‘face the truth’ as the whole Russian (and global) business world disintegrated including a third of the conglomerate and large slice of our boss’ wealth. The management was a little more receptive!
We came May 2009. Our mandate had morphed from engaging in a project to create a series of health clinics around Moscow, and setting up a school of our work, to a singular initial purpose of bringing the Being Human work into the conglomerate as a new corporate culture. We seemed to have moved full circle from ‘healing’ individuals to healing a conglomerate; although we are not interested in healing anyone. The work creates the opportunity for that to occur in the individual, in groups, and ultimately in the larger reality of the conglomerate as well as all those families that our employees have.
We would be charged to work with about 2,500 top managers in the (then) eighteen companies he owned. The conglomerate has a solid base of about 22,000 people with a further ten thousand associates. Our job is to foster a new moral, ethical, transparent, and spiritual based culture of business in all the companies; although we have concentrated mainly in the Financial Corporation, and now, with the Insurance company. I am Director of personal and corporate culture. Alicia acts as consultant.
The Being Human workshop that we came with, were called initially Being Human: purpose and value. The work has been given an algorithmic new moniker: 5+4=v that signifies the five elements of a human and that of a business, relative to the four human qualities and work functionaries which create ‘management by value’. (See the following article).
The main business is as a large Financial Corporation with all the different banking services; leasing, investment, private, retail, corporate etc., that accompany it. Sitting allied to it, is a large insurance company, and then there are fledgling green or ecologically friendly companies that he is building and developing around this central core.
Half of the profit goes into family philanthropy and these funds serve many of the orphans of Russia, as well as ensuring the populace are educated and served by the religious community–they support the Orthodox Church–as well as a continuous program of spiritual educational books, cultural events and dialogues for the population at large.
We love being here. We have been given a great apartment, near the center, twenty minutes on foot to Red Square. Our boss makes sure we are looked after. This does make a large noisy, dirty but nevertheless rather great city good to live in.
It is full of history, monumental Stalinist buildings, wide streets, endless lines of slow moving cars, a fantastic metro, great art galleries, numerous wonderful costly eateries with Cyrillic menus–few speak English, expensive organic food if you can get it all (our conglomerate has a number of organic shops, cows and farms), cheap medicine for hypochondriacs, ghastly run down tenements, endless traffic police, huge numbers of rather maligned foreign labor who do all the donkey work; ice clearing and chipping, sweeping endlessly the parks and roadways – a very clean city!
We are mainly on our own, may it be said, as few speak English, so every sentence is
accompanied through the lens and filters of translation; so nuances of speech, the precise language we use, is often obliterated– we wonder, often times, what is said. Of course we have friends, notwithstanding Subud members, and many of the conglomerate have become dearly loved; but communication is very sparse and often a smile, a close hug, a kiss or two suffices.
Alicia is beginning to learn Russian, and she has an ear and aptitude for languages, I don’t. The language goes in one ear, and if it doesn’t drop out the other, emerges from my mouth as an uncouth approximation.
I find it so frustrating, and this is where I see my own great failing. Nevertheless we are both adept at being with each other; are our best friends, still lovers, and good companions, and have surrendered to this singular life–but blessed by the job we have been entrusted with, and are open to what is provided. We are very blessed.
Solihin, Moscow, September 2011
Click below on 02 Solihin_Thom_-_His_Journey_small_file to see the original article that Solihin reedited from a series of interviews with Riantee Rand and Iliane Lennard about his life in Subud, and his life’s work. (PDF) (Those who want to read that whole series may access it at www.subudlibrary.net where past issues of Subud Voice are archived in the Miscellaneous and Compilations section The 4-part series by Solihin began in July 2010 and ran for the next three issues of the Voice.)
Click below on Solihin Thom Corporate Culture to read Solihin’s long illustrated article in which he presents his And Alicia’s understanding of how the “forces” operate in a human being and how this is reflected in a corporate culture.
Solihin by Edward Gibbs