Interfaithing
by reynold ruslan feldman, ph.d
excerpt:
In May 1961, a year after receiving my B.A. in English, I was opened in Subud. That took place in Chicago. At the time I was also attending the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Hindu Fellowship near where I lived. Back at Yale Graduate School that fall and an isolated member, I began studying Indonesian and hanging around with “people who looked like Bapak.” It wasn’t until the fall of 1969 in Honolulu, with Mas Prio Hartono a recent houseguest, that I first tried the Muslim Ramadan Fast. It was challenging, to say the least, with world-class headaches appearing every day by three. But with Muslim students and professors at the East-West Center, where I was working, for companions, it was a dramatic experiment for me—one that I have since repeated 36 times.
My road to active interest in interreligious matters was less direct. As an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa and, for a year, as intercultural activities officer at the adjoining East-West Center, I was tapped by the Lutheran campus pastor to serve on the University’s interfaith council as a faculty member representing “Team Lutheran.” Then, as assistant director of the University’s experimental School of the Humanities, “New College,” I co-taught an interfaith freshman seminar called “Gods and Men.” By this time I had already been reading widely in the world’s great religions and could spout technical terminology and explain some of the main concepts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism as well as Judaism and Christianity. I also liked listening to Hindu and Christian classical music.
http://www.subud-sica.org/index.php?hkat=7&ukat=24
Subud in Chicago.
And Vivekananda was an impersonalist, as was Ramakrishna, also known as “I am God”ists. Not actually traditional Hinduism.