As a young man, I read many books on philosophy, esoteric subjects and on mysticism. Yet, after a number of years I decided to stop all this reading because I had come to realize that it wasn’t getting me anywhere. It wasn’t making me any wiser, better or happier. I had however noticed that some of the movements or disciplines I had studied had something in common – several of them referred, in different wordings, to Secret Knowledge, which was supposed to exist somewhere.
Now this sounded very intriguing, it gave me the feeling that this might well be the ultimate, the all-embracing total knowledge, which would include ALL the answers, i.e. the answers to all and everything that could possibly be asked by anyone. But after a time, I gave up all hope of ever finding this most elusive of all treasures as I did not find even the slightest trace of it and eventually I forgot all about it. That must have been around 1947.
In 1957 I was opened in Subud. During the next ten years I did my latihan, and I read Susila Budi Dharma several times and never ceased to be amazed at invariably discovering new insights that I had apparently totally overlooked during previous readings. Eventually I understood that this was due to my own understanding slowly growing and expanding as an inconspicuous result of the latihan.
In 1967, ten years later again, after Bapak’s visit to The Hague, I found myself duplicating tapes many times over and thus hearing the same talks over and over again, as copies of the recordings of Bapak’s recent talks were in considerable demand. And then, after about a week of non-stop listening to Bapak’s voice, the penny finally dropped – This was the Secret Knowledge I had been dreaming of twenty years ago!! I was stunned. Could it really be so? Imagine, I had been literally sitting on this Secret Knowledge for the past ten years without realizing it!
It soon dawned on me that this gift implied the mandate of seeing to it that nothing got lost and taking on the stewardship over the collection of tape recordings under my care. That collection comprised only a few tapes in 1967 but it eventually grew to the present 1315 recordings of Bapak’s talks.
In the process it also became clear why this kind of knowledge was called secret. When reading Susila Budi Dharma I now understood a number of matters which had eluded me on previous readings – they had then been secrets to me, secret due to my own spiritual limitation.
And what a treasure it turned out to be… Out of this world - literally - even if I did not understand but a small part of what Bapak was saying - what I did understand was wonderful and fascinating and I just could not hear enough of it.
We are extremely lucky that Bapak’s talks have been recorded on tape right from the very beginning in June 1957. This was due to the fact that, long before Bapak’s arrival in the West, John Bennett had already discovered that it was convenient and profitable to record his Gurdieff-talks on tape and subsequently sell transcriptions for 2/6 or so to his eager followers. So when Bapak arrived, everything was in place - tape recorders, tape, microphones, experienced operators and it was a simple matter of routine to record his talks from the very first one onwards.
The Work
When I got involved in the TPU work in 1967-68, we had a collection of tape recordings. We knew that this collection was incomplete but we did not know which ones and how many were missing.
Of course we thought that the International Organisation would have that information but it turned out that nobody had kept a record of talks, let alone of tape recordings. At best we could obtain itineraries of Bapak’s past journeys. However, itineraries were often modified in the course of Bapak’s travels and such changes were mostly not documented.
All we could do at that time was to see to it that hence forward, we would be accurately informed of every new recording. But what recordings had been made during the 57-67 period and the whereabouts of them remained a mystery for a long time to come.
We soon found out that the only reliable sources of information were the newsletters of the groups which had been visited by Bapak and his party and which usually contained a day-by-day account of such visits listing latihans, talks, testing sessions, selamatans etc.
Our work therefore became a matter of getting in touch with the members in all places which Bapak had visited during the past ten years with a view to obtaining full information on talks, their dates and hopefully also obtaining the original recordings or at least, copies of them.
Well, to cut a long story short, in the end we succeeded in obtaining all the information and all the recordings we sought, but obviously this took at least as long as Bapak lived and gave talks. (And today it still continues as long as Ibu Rahayu gives talks.)
It was a long job but it was never boring because there was always Bapak’s next talk to look forward to. Even if he often repeated matters he had already said in another place such repetitions were always different in some respect and a great many talks contained a few inconspicuous but unique little jewels of wisdom not easily found anywhere else. His talks were alternately interesting, instructive, delighting, fascinating and occasionally also, hilarious but never boring. He could have us sitting spellbound and riveted for hours on end with the greatest of ease, at the same time conveying an appearance of love, ease and total relaxation.
Recordings Code numbers
One essential aspect of the work was the need to introduce a system for identifying every single one of the many recordings of Bapak’s and Ibu’s talks and in 1969 we settled for a seven-digit code comprising prefix, index and suffix. The prefix comprises the two last digits of the year, the three-letter index indicates the town and the suffix is a consecutive number ordering the recordings made in the same town and year, e.g. 76 LON 3 and 76 LON 4 are the recordings codes of Bapak’s third and fourth talk in London in 1976.
Please note:
• A number of talks were never recorded and are therefore irretrievably lost.
• The above codes refer to recordings, not to talks.
• In the interest of clarity and uniformity, the spaces between prefix, index and suffix should not be omitted,
• The index gives the place of recording. Rather than reinventing the wheel we adopted the existing IATA code (International Air Traffic Association) for towns, e.g. PAR for Paris, BCN for Barcelona, SFO for San Francisco, LAX for Los Angeles, etc. etc.
At the Tape Preservation Unit, TPU, every recording has been provided with an oral announcement stating its unique code number, place and date of recording, the venue, the name of the person who made the recording and the copyright clause.
The work was never a burden because there was a great deal of encouragement and support. In the first place it was self evident that the recordings of Bapak’s talks had to be preserved for the benefit of all members, present and future. Then there were the members of my own family, Luzita and our sons Kohar, Reinier and particularly Hassan, who were always ready to help and actually took care of a very considerable amount of work.
Furthermore, Bapak’s talks were so enlightening and fascinating that I have no hesitation in stating that there was a great deal of self-interest that kept us going during all these years. We were always looking forward to the next talk. But the most important support came from Bapak himself when he said that the work of the TPU was important and that it deserved support from everybody. (Cf. attached memo from Sharif dated 4 November 1981)
A few Basic Statistics
• There are 1696 Documented Talks. That means that we have documentary evidence that these talks occurred at the place and date given.
• 1425 of them were recorded on tape, 271 were not.
• 110 of the recordings are considered lost or irretrievable.
• That leaves 1315 recordings which we have at the Tape Preservation Unit in Achel, Belgium. The combined duration of this collection is about 2000 hours.
Originally the talks were recorded on magnetic tape which deteriorates in the long run. In addition, certain batches of tape which were of good quality when they were produced, went sticky in the mid-nineties and could then only be played back with great difficulty. By the late seventies it became obvious that optical storage (the Compact Disc) was going to be the most promising storage medium for audio recordings both as regards audio quality and longevity.
At the 1993 Congress at Amanecer in Columbia we received a donation from an Australian Subud enterprise which enabled us to buy CD-recording equipment. Later we also acquired DAT machines (Digital Audio Tape) and by mid-2001 all recordings had been transferred to digital media, meaning that all decay of audio quality had definitely been stopped from then onwards.
More recently, all recordings have been transferred to DVD, an Optical Storage Medium like the CD but with a greatly increased storage capacity. In this format the entire collection of 1315 recordings fits on 135 DVD discs, corresponding to a storage capacity of about 590 Giga Bytes. We also have the same collection in MP3 format (a compressed version with hardly perceptible lower audio quality). The latter collection fits on 21 DVD discs corresponding to just about 90 Giga Bytes.
Bottom line
Digital recordings can be copied without loss of quality. This implies that it is now possible to preserve the sound of Bapak’s talks for literally hundreds of years. It will provide a solid authentication of all texts derived from Bapak’s talks and it will enable many future generations to hear Bapak’s voice.
Present Location of Complete DVD Sets of Bapak and Ibu Rahayu Recorded Talks:
• the TPU in Achel, Belgium,
• SAI in Canberra, Australia, (Subud Archives International)
• SPI in the UK, (Subud Publications International)
• SAI in Phoenix, Arizona, in the US,
• SAI in Tokyo, Japan
• SAI in Cilandak,(Jakarta), Indonesia
Faisal Sillem
Achel, Belgium
29 April 2006
Faisal approximately 50 years ago and today.