My Younger Years

If Bali is known as the island of the gods, Java is the island of the Mystics. A mystic is one who has realised his/her oneness with The Source. It is the realisation of the Ultimate Unification of ALL THERE IS – the Absolute Reality – The Law of ONE. The basic tenets of the Ancient Javanese Mystical tradition, known as Kejawen is; “Manunggaling Kawula Lan Gusti” – literally translated: The Oneness (Manunggaling) of humble me (Kawula) and (Lan) Your Highest (Gusti).

I was born in Surabaya, East Java – Indonesia. My parents are both Theosophist and my late father used to be the bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church in Indonesia. Although I went to a Catholic School from Kindergarten to High School, I grew up in a mixed community amongst Taoist, Buddhist, Confucians, Hindus, Christians and Muslims and all those religions are living harmoniously with each other due to the still prevalent ancient Javanese Tradition believing in ONE-ness of ALL THERE IS, including all religions.

Magic, mystics and paranormal phenomena are nothing but part of our normal daily lives. I know there are physical things that we can see and touch, but there are also nonphysical things and beings that we can’t see or touch but which play a significant role in what is happening in the physical world. And I want to know how these phenomena work.

At the age of five, I was already fascinated by the radio. I still remember when I joined the Catholic Preschool (Kindergarten), I was told the story of God by our priest. He said that God would come down to our church when we pray. Then I asked him, what happens when other people also pray in another church? Does God also come down to the other church? The answer is yes, and my five years old logic thought that God must be a kind of radio wave who can come down to many churches everywhere at the same time.[1]

My fascination with the radio was supported and encouraged by my Mum, who sent me to a Radio repair course when I was eight. And at twelve I built my first Amateur Radio Transceiver from scratch.

After High School, I went to Germany to study Electrical Engineering. It was an obvious choice. For my Master’s degree, I took Control System Technology as my major and my Master’s thesis was about Manual Control, where the Controller is a human being. It gave me the opportunity to study the human condition and behaviour by recording and to analyse their brainwaves, heartbeats and muscular activities while doing some controlling task like driving a car using ECG (Electrocardiography), EEG (Electroencephalography) and EMG (Electromyography).

It was part of the NASA research project to investigate what control tasks can better be done manually by the Astronauts while the rest is automated. Part of the result of my thesis showed that people get tired from doing nothing physical and start to lose concentration after about two hours. Hence the recommendation to stop, revive and survive every two hours for long distance driving.

After obtaining my Master’s degree in 1974, I received a scholarship from the German Government (BMZ / Federal Ministry for Cooperation) to attend an intensive post-graduate course on International Industrial Management with the condition that I would come home to Indonesia to help build the country.

Building the country’s infrastructure

I came back to Indonesia from Germany in 1978 and started my career with a Government-owned company, who is a sole agent for a large multinational engineering company based in Switzerland. With my double degree in engineering and management, the Director of the Company took me under his wing and challenged me to troubleshoot every technical problem as well as organisational, managerial and business issues.

One exceptional technical performance I remember was in solving a problem in a new Emergency Diesel Power Plant installed by our parent company for a local pharmaceutical factory. It comprised of three diesel generators that during a blackout were supposed to start one by one automatically. When the load exceeded 50% of the first Generator, the second generator would start and take half of the load. When the load further increases and exceeded 50% of the total capacity of the first two generators, the third would start, and share the load amongst all three generators. The cycle as to which the generator should start first was rotated.

Since the beginning, the automation system for load sharing never worked. The manufacturer sent their engineer to fix the problem, but the problem persisted. They have tried three times by sending three different engineers, and the problem still persisted.

One day my mentor, the Director asked me to have a look if I could do anything to help to solve the problem. The timeframe given to me is from Friday afternoon when the factory stops till Monday early morning before they start.

Friday afternoon I went to the factory with my assistant and worked through the night, and by Saturday afternoon the problem is solved. The real issue is simple. I only have to change six wires (two from each generator) connecting to the load sharing controller. The problem was that the instruction manual for the load sharing electronic device was wrong.

The three manufacturer engineers have checked that everything was installed and wired according to the engineering diagram produced by the designer following instruction manuals for each device. Unfortunately, the manual happened to be inaccurate. Hence, they could not find the problem.

 I did resolve the problem only because I wanted to know from the word go, how the system should work as if I would create or design the whole system myself from scratch, instead of relying on instruction manuals.

That’s the way of thinking I also apply in trying to understand how the Cosmos work. Hence, I never rely on any teachings, religious or otherwise, without really understanding the real teaching. Every scripture or teaching has an inherent misinterpretation. Therefore, I always tried to go to the source as far as possible to minimise, or if possible, eliminate mistranslations, misinterpretation and misunderstanding.

As my next assignment, I was sent to Central Java to help out in the Project to build the 150kV Electricity Network comprised of 15 Substations and Transmission Lines connecting them. To overcome the lack of technical expertise on site, I was sent to Switzerland for factory training and came back to site to take the role of Commissioning Engineer, especially for the Protection System.

With this specialised knowledge, which was still quite rare in Indonesia in the late 1970s, our client, the National Electric Utility Board, requested my mentor to have me teach High Voltage Protection Systems in their National Training Centre in Jakarta. Their operational staff from all over the country would come in groups, each for a couple of weeks training in Jakarta.

My activities as trainer/lecturer in our client’s National Training Centre were indirectly the best marketing effort we could ever do as one of their major EPC[2] contractors. Realising the business potential from this relationship, I was assigned as Business Development Manager by my mentor the Company Director.

Indonesia comprises 18,000 islands. Around 9,000 of them are named, and about 1000 are permanently inhabited. Except for Java and Sumatra, most of those islands are electrified by Diesel Generators equipped with Turbo Chargers that need regular maintenance or repair. They used to send them to Singapore because there was no facility available domestically.

Our parent company manufactures most of those turbochargers, and it is an obvious choice to establish maintenance and repair workshop for those turbochargers as well as for large electric motors and generators. It was my first project as Business Development Manager, and I was appointed as Deputy Director to run the newly established sister Company.

Meanwhile, as part of the training I gave, I also introduced the advantage of the new technology enabling us to control the whole network by remote control from a control centre. As a result, we were awarded a US$ 7 million Contract to build the first Area Control Centre for the Central Java 150kV Network.

To facilitate technology transfer, I was appointed Site Project Manager responsible for the installation and commissioning in cooperation with our parent company that did the design, engineering, procurement and supply of the equipment, as well as technical support during commissioning.

Parallel to the establishment of the 150kV High Voltage Network, small-scale local contractors were building the 22kV Medium Voltage as well as the Low Voltage Network. The next step was to bring electricity to every household in the rural area. The World Bank financed the rural electrification project with a soft loan.

To participate in that rural electrification project, we established a second sister company for the manufacture of Miniature Circuit Breakers (MCB). Any electrical installation uses MCB as a protection device. The rural electrification project uses a particular type of MCBs for protection as well as ‘Tariff Guard’. Our production capacity is two million units per year, and during the rural electrification project of five years, we have electrified about 10 million households.

Besides the MCB factory, we also established a Concrete Pole factory with the capacity of 20,000 poles/year in Central Java as a third sister company. In this company I only sit as a member of the Board of Directors without any executive function.

My routine as Deputy Director of two companies in Jakarta and a Project Manager includes overtime almost every weekday and flying to Semarang in Central Java on Friday noon to have a weekly meeting with my project staff. And if there were some project issues I stayed over the weekend to work on it and flew back to Jakarta Monday morning. With the Management by Exceptions style, I still managed to have a game of Golf with our client roughly once a month on Fridays when everyone else was heading for the Mosque.

I invested so much energy for my career while my wife was also a career woman. We hardly had a family life, and the one who suffered was our son. I was so happy and relieved that our son grew up to be a decent human being. He is also an electrical engineer specialised on Industrial Automation and a Project Manager, but the most important thing is that he is a loving husband and caring father to his two daughters and I am very proud of him.

The turning point

We just had our second son, nine years apart, when our principal company, the Swiss-based multinational merged with another large Sweden-based multinational. As a merged corporation, they now have two agencies in Indonesia, and one must go.

The company I worked for finally lost the battle, probably because we were a state owned company which had other duty of care for our developing nation besides making a profit. We lost the agency including all the licenses for our manufacturing facilities that I’ve built, and I was devastated. And in that state of mind, I blew up our marriage as well. I walked out from our family home with nothing and slept in my office for a couple of weeks until I found a rental property.

A couple of months after that I finally submitted my resignation letter that I wrote on the 17^th of August 1987. I remember the exact date because it was a public holiday, the Indonesian Independent Day. A few years later I learned that that particular date is also the date of Harmonic Convergence.

That was my turning point. Everything I had worked very hard for, that even cost my marriage just disappeared into nothing. I often cried at nights missing my sons. I started to pray a lot and asked God to take me back with him since I know not what I am here to do. I have no motivation to live any longer.

One day I take a walk and end up in a church. I was baptised as a Catholic when I was ten years old. I used to love going to church and being in the church by myself almost every morning before school when I was at the primary. I enjoyed the atmosphere in the empty church. It is so serene and peaceful, but I stopped many years ago when they changed the rituals, and the priest turns facing the congregation. The ‘magic’ was just gone.

That day in that church I wanted to talk to God and to complain why all those things happened to me, and why He keeps me alive. After reading from the Scripture, the priest was telling us a metaphor of a clump of bamboo trees. Some of the bamboos were taken out from the clusters (from its family) to be used and be made into something useful. (furniture or something). It hit home to me as I felt like one of those bamboos taken out from my family. I was so emotional and cried my eyes out. I hope that God will make something useful out of me.

That night during my meditation I had my first spiritual experience, in which I felt like a baby carried with so much love by Mother Mary. It was a wonderful feeling, and since that experience in the church and the meditation afterwards, I became more spiritually minded. I feel the closeness to my brother Jesus, our mother Mary and God our father.

As Catholics, we were never encouraged to read the bible. As kids, we were just told stories, and I never cared whether the bible is right or wrong. Neither have I ever cared about all the rules and dogmas, the important thing for me personally is that I can relate emotionally as a family that I have just lost. I always picture my brother Jesus with his open sacred heart emanating divine love for humanity. And Mother Mary as my heavenly mother.[3]

From thereon, to work for a new career or to accumulate some material things is no longer in my interest. Instead, I wanted to know what life is all about. Why do we live? How the Cosmos works and what is our role in it. I continued to meditate regularly and started to read books. And slowly it became my new obsession, and my childhood curiosity came back to me. I want to know how the Cosmos works.

Looking back on what I have learned in Germany, I think Western Science is far from complete. Having obtained a Master’s degree in Western Science, I still can’t explain how telepathy works. According to Western Science, they do not exist. However, as Nikola Tesla once said:

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena; it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

One day I went home to see my parents in Surabaya, and suddenly realised that I must have chosen to be their son before I was born. They are the perfect couple for me. Both are Theosophists, and my father was the Bishop of The Liberal Catholic Church for Indonesia. I grew up with Theosophical teachings without consciously aware of it until I could not go any further with Western Science in my endeavour to understand the Cosmos, visible and invisible.

There are tons of Theosophical Literature at home that I suddenly found so fascinating. I borrowed and read almost all of them, but my favourite was the Clairvoyance Investigations by C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant starting with “Man Visible and Invisible”, “The Occult Chemistry”, “Man, Whence, How and Whither” and many others.

Besides the Theosophical Literature, I also acquired books about modern Physics; like “The Tao of Physics” by Fritjof Capra, The Dancing Wu Li Master by Gary Zukav, “Einstein’s Universe” by Nigel Calder, “Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity” edited by Gerarld Tauber and many others.

Having lost my job, I moved to Bali and opened a Bar & Restaurant with my new partner in Seminyak. I had no idea/skill in running a restaurant. Hence, we hired a restaurant manager to run it. I spent most of my time reading and reading. One day I borrowed The Secret Doctrine from my family library and started to read and tried to understand it. It is quite heavy reading and needed a lot of effort and contemplation, but I persevered.

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[1] This logic and way of thinking as 5 years old have helped me to understand the existence of things we can’t see, touch or feel as well as understanding the ONE-ness of all there is as in Radio waves as a metaphor.

[2] EPC – “Engineering, Procurement and Construction” (E P C) is a particular form of contracting arrangement used in some industries where the E P C Contractor is made responsible for all the activities from design, procurement, construction, to commissioning and handover of the project to the End-User or Owner.

[3] Much later I noticed the difference between Christian teachings in Indonesia and in Australia. In Indonesia, where Christians are only a minority (10%), the church never strictly imposed the dogmatic teachings as in Australia and in most of the Western Countries. In Indonesia, the teachings are more tolerant.

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