By Sanderson Morgan
In a remarkable turn of events, the Subud California at Sonoma Group has recently seen a complete revitalization of their membership. There are so many interesting aspects to this story, indeed, it is an authentic slice of Subud history playing out before our eyes and a good story to consider as we look around us to find new members.
This begins about three years ago when Ralph Davila and I visited Sonoma on a routine Regional Helper visit to talk to the men’s helper, Muchtar Salzman. The issue then was that only a couple of men were active with Muchtar. He had faith in the future as we did, but no solutions were evident – we put our hope in good wishes and prayer and in remembering this situation as we did our latihans over the next year or so. As it turned out, many things happened for the good.
Around that same time I chanced to reunite with some dear friends of mine, some I had not seen for decades, at a wedding party in Arcata. This wonderful reunion was with several men with whom I had attended Fourth Way (the ideas of Georges Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky) classes in the mid 1970’s, that were taught by a former student of John Bennett who was at Coombe Springs at the time Bapak arrived there. During these in the mid-1970’s, we learned about the events at Coombe in that era, but from the perspective of one of Bennett’s students that joined him in his separation from Subud.
In the conversation at this wedding gathering, one of the men asked me how my life was going and among many things that were related I mentioned that I had joined Subud in 1999. Since everyone there who heard this from me also had read Bennett’s book “On Subud” and about his encounters with Bapak in “Witness,” this seemed to set into motion a number of individual investigations into contemporary Subud. I also mentioned that since they lived in Sonoma County, they were fortunate in having a center in Sebastopol and a very good men’s helper who would probably be very happy to meet with them.
Over the course the next months it seemed that I drove to the Sonoma center at least a half dozen times for either openings of these six men and an extraordinary set of meetings, attended by Subud Members from all over the Bay Area and Sacramento, that were concerned with reorganizing Sonoma’s group and getting the center on a path to profitability. Suddenly, everything began to change at Sonoma and for individuals as well as the center. It seemed that the Sonoma members began to see themselves anew and decided they had a future.
No one could have imagined such a renaissance taking place: so many new members with abilities and capacities to receive the latihan and willingness to do center work. It seemed that they all had been especially prepared in their own lives to all arrive at Sebastopol in 2013 – 2014!
The new members include Rick Russell, Jerry Lambert, Ronald Jones, Bill Clinton, Ed Ristad, and John Stocksdale (Ed note: there are also two new women members whom we hope to interview in the future). For additional details about some of these individuals, see stories from: Rick Russell, Jerry Lambert and Ronald Jones