Strikingly, Subud is an international spiritual movement without leaders. It has no rules and just one spiritual practice. Absent any authority, Subud’s “members” have no single, authoritative conception of god among them. Some members choose to “submit themselves to the will of almighty god” (who one just knows is a man), while others choose to surrender to the goddess, or the trinity, mixed pantheons, the earth, the universe, a value, an idea or the void.
But strikingly, Subud’s members choose to do so together, in mixed communitarian worship. Which sounds strangely utopian. Absent any official doctrine, it is a challenge to describe their worship—which happens behind closed doors. It has a promisingly esoteric name, the “Latihan Kejiwaan,” but that is only a common Indonesian phrase meaning, “spiritual exercise.”
When asked, each Subud member had a profoundly different description of their worship, freely improvising purely personal descriptions from the pure phenomenology of the spiritual experience…