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I have hesitated a long time before I could get myself to accept the invitation of the organisers of this group to speak on this topic. I did so only after some deft arm twisting and considerable sole a searchant.
In the first place, I am not a mystic. Secondly, I am aware of the greatsimilarity between the culture of a people and a woman both unfold their enormous secrets only very very slowly, and only if approach with love.
Also, I am not an expertion Javanese culture. Although I have spent a large part of my conscious life trying to understand the culture of Java, hardly a day goes by in which something happens that forces me to try to relae it to the little I know of Javanese culture.
There is an additional difficulty. The modern usage of the term mysticism has blurt and distorted. A great deal of its original meaning it has now often come to mean anything that has to do with superanturalphenomenum, with voodoo like magic practices, obscurantism, or a vescle surrender to some vague notion of the unity of creation. A number of years ago, a foreign writer who is also a friend of mine, came to Indonesia and asked to be brought into contact with some Javanese mystics, because he wanted to write as series of of articles. I asked him how much time he wanted to spend on this project. He said two weeks. I also asked him how important his own religion was to him. He replied that he was elapse Christian. After some reflection then I said that I could not help him. I told him that under these circumstances, the only thing that he could achieve would be to pick up some source here and then about magical practices in which Jakarta abounds and that would be almost impossible for him to become involved in simple rumored mongering. Of course he want ahead nevertheles. And the resulting pieces confirmed my worst fears.
At the same time, we are supposed all aware of the renewed interests in religion in the last decade or so and what want my call manifestation in the counter cultures of the West of an outbreak of must religiosity, sometimes inside, of more often outside the boundaries of organized religion and the established church. The experiment with drafts in a religions contest, the underground churches, the Jesus freks but also this renewed interests in oriental religious astrology and even in devil worship have by now become familiar manifestation. The many of these phenomena may be transitory they do reflect an insistence on the development of men’s intuitive expressive and the transcendental faculties that have withered so long under the domination of rationalism, science and technology.
It appears to me that such a new interest in oriental religion, but also the puzzlement of foreigners and non-Javanese alike about coffee break stories, about gurus, sooth sayers and magical rites as well as the impact on the decision making process in this country, lie behind the selection of tonight’s stop. Let me therefore begin with a clarification of some of the terms that they will use.
Mysticism concerns the direct relationship of man to God. All religious have a doctrinal, an institutional but also a mystical component. In all religions there have been persons whose lifes have been implied by the yearning for an understanding of the infinite, the desires to grasp absolute truth and to comprehend ultimate reality. Their search has been toward the perceptance of the absolute through the desolution of the difference between the observing subject and the observed leading towards the mystical union with God which is an act for love, an act of personal surrender as well as an act of supreme perception.
Mysticism therefore is not a phenomenon limited orientation to religion, it is a way to develop the soul to the poin where can meet the divine where the heart speaks to the Heart “cor ad cor loquitere.” Or as the Javanese says “golek geni pepikulan warih” (to look for fire by carrying fire — the divine fire in one’s heart).
The history of Christianity is studied with accounts of the achievement of its great mystics, be they Catholics or Protestant. It is impossible to read the accounts of St. Theresa, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, Francois de Sale, Blake and our contemporary the late Thomas Murton without being deeply affected by them. But how strikingly similar are there descriptions of the repture of the soul, the perception of the beatice vision, or the light upon light of the great Islamic mystics like Gazaly and Al Haladj. How similar in character are the paradoxis, or the stammering of all these mystics which seems to be the only way for them to break through the capability of the minds of the reader and to give at least a glimpse of the inevable experiences of self validating truth that they have experienced beyond the power of language and the reach of man’s rationale categories. These accounts stand up a mankind’s most noble expressions of its yearning for the divine. They also show how similar beyond the many difference that do exist among them mysticism is in all religions. One of the impressions that these great mystics of various religions are closer to each other than to many of their fellow believers.
I remember asking Thomas Murton, the Trapits Monk and Mystics, with whom I begin friends, what he intended to do on his trip to Asia that turned out to be his last trip in which he met hi death. I knew he was going to see the Dalai Lama and some Indian mystics. He was also planning to visit some monks in Thailand, after which he wanted to go to Indonesia. Thomas Murton answered my question with twinkling in his eyes: I want to bring message mystics of the world, unite. Mankind has nothing to do but its idel.
Religion and Magic
If at one end of the spectrum religion shades off into mysticism and its other end religion shades off in the magic. If the mystical union is possible only in love towards God, requiring the desolution of the self, magic—do it also deals with the super natural remains concerned with man, man’s knowledge and man’s capacity to manipulate the super natural. It could be seen as an extension of the human will, even where it is applied to help a fellow man or for the common goods. There are magical elements in the ritual and secrements of all religions. The host and secremental vine in Catholicism, for instance, as a symbol of trans-substanciasm, a magic concept.
Magic, then, too is universal both in its low manifestations of pitch craft, spells, amilots, as well as in its higher manifestations of the occult sciences. Europe too has a rich history of occultism. Guerdieff, Rudolf Steiner were quite familiar names in the period after World War I in Europe, and of course Theosophy is still an active creed not only in Europe, but also in Java.
Organised religion has always faught the encroachment of magic that has always threathened religious doctrine. In a way the propheted religions released man from the fears that dominated his life, fears of demonic within himself as well as in the natural super-natural whole in which he had to live his life. Likewise, have the guardians of the propheted religions always try to save guard the purity of religious documents against the relativising impact of mystical revelation on dogma and ritual, as well as against the pantheistic imajury that characterizes. That forum of mysticism which pose it the ultimate identity of God and the Divine in man. It is against this background that I now would like to say a few words about mysticism in Java.
Let me first make the points that mysticism in Indonesia is not limited with Java. In fact, there are documents that be speed mystical preoccupation of great intensity, dating from the thirteenth century. Abdulrachim from Sinkal and Al Harriry are two such mystics. If Islam was the first great religion to come to Sumatra, the situation was different in Java where Islam’s influence began in the fifteenth century and where it encountered a Hindu-Budhistic culture which is well established religious and mystical tradition of its own. Additionally, that Islam which came to Indonesia didn’t come directly from the Arab countries, but from Gujarat in India where it had been influence very strongly by Persian sufism. This may account for the relative ease with which Islam too cold in Java but that also account for the difficulties Islam has always had in Java. When it consisted on scriptual orthodoxy. And so it is possible even to this day to discern three different streamsin Javanese mysticism, with Islamic indiss specifically Javanese elements. Viewed in different way one could discern an indigenous popular mysticism which generally clothes itself in a Moslem guard, a more strictly Islamic stream closer to Islamic orthodoxy with ties to Islamic mysticisim abroad, and thirdly an indigineous stream outside Islam, and often in a polemical relationship to Islam. It should, however, be realized that the distinction between the streams is not by any being sharp. They often overlap and suffuse. And so one finds in Java a proliferation of Tarekat, Islamic mysthical brotherhood, a non-Islamic secret societies built around a mystics teacher, often using Islamic terminology mixed with indigenous Javanese, indict and now even Christian concept. Most of them recognize the various stages of Islamic mysticism, the movement from Sjariat to Ma’rifat.
One of the striking features that differentiate Javanese mysticism from its European, or Chrtistian counterparts, is the closeness of the distance between mysticism and magic in Java. Two reasons may accounf for this difference. As I have said before, in Europe the Church has always to guard against the intrusion of mysticism and magic into religious dogma and the observance of the religious ritual by the population in general. It therefore interposes itself between mysticism and magic. The absence of a similar institution in the religious history of Java there was no institution to play similar role. And Islam came too late to enforce affectively the separation between magic and mysticism. To some extent, Islam in Java especially is the scriptualist empahis it is characteristics of more an Islamic renaissance is still engaged in the effort to glance the religion from both the magical and the mystical accretions. It is a struggle that really began right at the beginning for Islam in Java and continued to this day.
It started with the death of Syech Sitti Jenar, one of the nine walis who according to legend brought Islam to Java. He was put to death on orders of his eight fellow walis, who considered his hitrodox mysticism and his lifting of the veil of secrecy from the mystical experience a dange to Islamic code. Over and over again one finds the mystic literature of Java examples of such hithrodoxy with pose the ultimate identity of divine in man with God. Even today one reaches or hears new mystical groups whose leaders say God is I.
This point up a second figure that differentiate mystification in Java and in Europe. In Europe mysticism has always been pursued in a very structure situation, and monestaries and then only with special permission from the superior. In Java mysticism was not so confined. It would not be unfair to say that what we see in Java the wild proliferation of the mystical pursued. One could almost say it is the difference between a tropical jungle and a French garden.
There is a third feature that may be of interest. Some Christian students from Javanese mysticism have deplored the absence of a sophisticated body of theory, or speculative philosphy regarding the mystical pursuit. One even says that the Javanese have brought down to their own primitive level a great mystical tradition that have come from abroad. It may very well be that this view will be traced the proclivity in Western culture towards coherently ordered thought as against the view that mystical knowledge as little to do with discursive mental process, but has to be lived truth is not a master of knowledge but of being. Hence.