from notes taken by Sylvia des Tombe
This is one of the stories related by Mbak Tuti and Sharif Horthy at the Subud USA Gathering in Redwood City, September 5, 2015.
How Sharif Horthy Started to Interpret for Bapak
Sharif first met Bapak at Coombe Springs when he was 18. He had finished high school and had nine months off. He was staying in the boiler room. For the first World Congress in 1959, he did the taping. (Bapak stayed there a whole year right in the beginning.) Sharif would listen and listen to the tapes, and that’s how he started to learn Indonesian. Most of the people there at that time were members of the Gurdjieff group which had a specific “pecking order,” and Sharif was at the very bottom of it.
The first time Sharif saw Bapak was when Bapak arrived at Coombe Springs. Sharif was standing in the crowd which welcomed Bapak, and, when Bapak passed him, Sharif felt as though no one had gone by, nothing. He registered a blank. And yet, later, when Bapak talked, Sharif felt as though the words directly touched his own lips. The impression Bapak gave was always different; Sharif never got “used to” being close to him.
Later that year, Sharif went to Indonesia. At that time, Bapak started encouraging non-Muslims to keep the Ramadan fast. Latihan was at 8:30 pm and when it was finished, Bapak would go out of the hall and sit outside every night during Ramadan until around 2 in the morning. He would chat, and the atmosphere was very informal. The men would talk about the latihan.
Bapak said it was possible to be in a state of latihan all the time. Compare this with religions: in a religion, people follow a tradition. In Java, it is the goal of mystics to become powerful. The latihan, compared with these, is something totally new.
Sharif said that the second main way he learned Indonesian was by listening to Bapak talk in this casual environment. Sharif realized that Bapak often contradicted himself or what he said on one occasion was made irrelevant by what he said on another.