By Mashud Darlington
Since my car crash at the end of November 2020 and my subsequent stay in hospital to recover from my injuries, I’ve been fortunate, as the road to recovery has given me a series of insights into my condition. A kind of unfolding inner journey that may be of interest to readers.
Having grown up in a culture influenced by Christian teachings, some time ago I became interested in the ideas of Dr Bart D Ehrman, a very distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina. Yet working with refugees and witnessing the problems of evil and suffering he encountered in the world, he suffered a loss of faith and turned to agnostic atheism.
However, my own journey being opened into Subud has been different from that of Dr. Ehrman. For I can’t deny the reality of my own experience. I saw the light, quite literally, when a fragment of light broke off from a greater light, fell on my head and burnt its way through my body. One can’t negotiate with something like that along the bargaining lines of, “I’ll do this, if you give me that.” One can only surrender to a force overwhelming in its omniscience and transformative power to a place of evolution and education for the soul. In fact, emphatically not an earthly paradise.
As Muhummad Subuh, the founder of Subud has said,
…at the centre of this life, which is a life of suffering and a life of trials for man, there is also a great peace and bliss if we are able to surrender at that moment.”
The day before my car crash, I’d become aware that only in a state of love for my fellow beings could I receive the grace of kindness and a loving heart; and had prayed that my heart could be changed. I remember nothing of the accident and no further action from the police was required. Awakening in the hospital surgical ward, surrounded by courageous cancer patients, I was touched by their bravery in facing life-changing surgery. My own initial reaction to the crash was one of stoicism ؘ—the gift of my forebears—combined with a state of denial of the seriousness of my injuries.
Within my suffering, I found I could only experience contact with grace by living in the moment and separating myself from all thoughts and feelings from the past, with memories of places and incidents that no longer exist outside my own mind.
Paradoxically, in this new state I came to feel a closeness to my forebears and feel pity for their lives led in the dirt and squalor of nineteenth century industrial Manchester. I feel less as an individual and more as a part of an ancestral continuum going back for centuries.
I have the awareness that my present blessings—my lovely wife and healthy, talented children and grandchildren, and my home in a quiet Hampshire village—are the result of my forebears’ struggles and sincere worship in the churches and non-conformist Chapels they attended. I also feel a re-awakening of a feeling I had as a young Subud member before the bitterness and betrayal of the failure of a large Subud enterprise I had been involved in. I’m just grateful, that to quote Sheikh Abdul Quadir, an eleventh century Sufi mystic that, “the arrows of Fate have scratched me, but not killed me.”
I could so easily have been in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, or blind, or in a coma. Or I could have lost my life in the crash. Instead, I’m hopeful of a complete recovery and am spending lockdown with therapeutic exercises. This has been a very steep learning curve, but one that I have embraced with gratitude for the hard lessons learnt.
Mashud Darlington
