The Spirit of

Thomas Woods

When I first graduated from college in the early sixties, I found myself strongly attracted to left wing politics. Soon I became deeply involved in a student organization and even went so far as to live in an SDS project house in a slum in Oakland.

I was a avowed atheist at the time.

But I slowly began to realize that politics did not satisfy something deep within me. And, as I thought about what that something was, I suddenly had a startling insight. My involvement in the Left was the result of a deep sense of spirituality. What irony! I was an atheist who was driven by a spiritual longing.

I laughed for a whole day

Not long afterward a friend tried to interest me in a group named Subud. I told him I had no interest in such groups but that I would go with him to one meeting. Outside the meeting place someone came up to me and placed his hand on my back -- and, zap, I experienced something unexplainable, a jolt of energy through my body. I looked around for confirmation and saw a number of other members placing their hands on others backs. I was then convinced that this path was calling me.

It was not until much later that I screwed up the courage to ask about what had happened to me and found out that no one else experienced such a thing, that day or ever -- let alone that it was a common experience.

The group was named Subud, a spiritual "exercise" that originated in Indonesia. Subud did not proselytize, but rather expected people to drift into it. We met, I believe, twice a week for half hour latihans (exercises) in which people moved or spoke or gestured or sang or spun or stayed still as their spirit moved them. Latihan (and Subud for that matter) was the antithesis of intellectual spirituality.

I remained a member of Subud for a long time, afraid, like a good Catholic, to leave the church. What I gained spiritually in all those years I still cannot say. I was later told by a psychic that Subud took people to another universe, alien to this one. I do not know whether that is true. Certainly, Subud seemed to produce a singularly alien type of person.

Fortunately, when I ready to leave Subud, I found a replacement -- the Berkeley Psychic Institute. What attracted me to the Institute (and still does) was the laughter --something that Subud rarely brought out in its members. As a member of Subud I had twice changed my first name; the Psychic Institute helped me reclaim my original name and the person who was that name. And the final gift of the Berkeley Psychic Institute was to free me from the need to belong, to be guided by a guru on my spritual way through life--I developed the courage to stand alone.

The Berkeley Psychic Institute also provided me with an income at a time when I was without one. I first worked as a receptionist and counselor within the Institute, and, then, breaking some ties, gave $50 psychic readings to people on my own. During my final days at the Institute I was a student in an Institute teacher training course during which the Director's wife said we should consider whether we really wanted to work as psychics before we committed ourselves further. It was that suggestion that gave me the courage to go my way alone.

I still see things, at times, from a spiritual (read psychic) standpoint, but feel that my personal mission has more to do with the quiet and semiconscious healing of various and sundry people with whom I am thrown into contact than with any great spiritual revelation.

Recently, however, I did have an insight which changed my Way -- I became aware that spirituality should be an experience of the entire being, of the whole life of the being, and not, narrowly focussed on "chakras" or breathing or energy channels or mantras or whatever. For me to focus so narrowly on one or two aspects of spirituality is to lose growth.

During all these years there was one philosophy that had strong appeal to me -- that of the Tao. The idea that everything is an integral part of a whole; that everything has its time of ascendance and decline; that life is best when one accepts and adjusts to the flow of change--all these concept strike a deep chord within me. And they are all akin to the basis of Islam (submission) as well. At this point in my life it is the philosophy of the Tao that still remains with me.

But it is not Taoism as practiced, but rather the practice of living with the Tao that I hope to follow.