About Truth Gandhi said: 'What seems truth to one person, may seem a mistake to someone else. If we sincerely commit ourselves to truth, we will see that different truths are like the leaves of a tree which seem different but are yet on the same tree'. ..."
'Sumarah' is a Javanese word referring to the condition of total surrender. Thus the name 'Paguyuban Sumarah', the Indonesian spiritual association our practices have grown from, is itself nearly an adequate description of both the aim and nature of our practice. The aim of meditation, most often called 'sujud' within the Indonesian group, is to surrender every aspect of personal being so the self functions as a vehicle for God's will.
Here my wish is just to briefly introduce those aspects of Sumarah meditation and Javanese philosophy that one encounters at the beginning of the practice. This article is the transcription of my first presentation on Sumarah in Italy in 1995 (at the annual congress of the Psycosintesi Society) later on published with the title "Sè and Meditation in practice Sumarah" in the Italian magazine "Quaderni asiatici” October 1995.
We may have the adage that knowledge is power, but beneath it lies an epistemology implying that knowledge is primarily a matter of intellect, of qualities of thought and quantities of information. Closely linked to this is a sense of person, profoundly conditioned by Enlightenment notions of equality, which results in sharp resistence to suggestion that there may be qualitatively different orders of consciousness.
A Selection of SUMARAH MEDITATION SESSIONS with Pak Wondo in
Solo (Baluwarti and Kratonan) from the years 1982 and 1983, recorded and translated by Tony Green,
edited by Laura Romano and Susanne Klein
"Meditation is not a doing, not an act. It is something which happens ... All what we can do is just to open, open towards the happening." This text are the words from Pak Sri, while he guided a meditation session. The translation was transcribed by Peter Koffel, a participant of the Sumarah medititation session at that time.
Master Thesis by Melanie Munt in Clinical Psychology about participant motivation and effects and their link with personal- and background determinants.
