Soeharto (1921 – 2008)

By VICTORIA LEPAGE—

The recent death of ex-President Soeharto of Indonesia at the age of 86 has reminded me that I was present in Jakarta in 1967 during the bloodbath in which the Communist Party was decimated and General Soeharto rose to political power, along with the minority modernist Muslim party that supported him.

At that time Indonesia was only nominally Muslim: under the charismatic President Soekarno it was animistic, feudal, steeped in an other-worldly mysticism, and was infested with starving beggars, superstition and black magic practices. General Soeharto, of humble village origin, had risen high in the military apparatus and married into a family of the minor nobility in Solo. His marriage gave his political aspirations legitimacy in the eyes of Indonesians, who believed in the ancient tradition that links royal status to the right to rule.

The General was well known to have a close affiliation with a Javanese magico-mystical school believed to give him great occult powers, yet from the time of his ascension to the presidency he appeared, unlike ex-President Soekarno, to deny the affiliation, at least publicly. The new pro-Western president donned the Islamist black pitje and publicly espoused and supported the political arm of orthodox Islam, which in the main was vehemently opposed to any and all occult practices. It proved to be the best thing that could have happened to the country.

Whatever President Soeharto’s questionable legacy in other areas, in this respect he dragged Indonesia from the dreaming Middle Ages into the modern world. Today, Indonesia is officially a member of the great Muslim international fraternity, and Islam’s austere religious mores have increasingly infiltrated the national culture, modifying its more primitive animistic traits and greatly strengthening its influence in Asia-Pacific politics.

Nevertheless, Pak Soeharto retained to the end of his life his private allegiance to Javanese mysticism. Doctors who attended him in the last weeks of his illness, during which he rallied more than once from heart, lungs and kidney failure, said they were amazed and baffled by his recuperative powers. It was commonly believed, however, that the power of spirits and the implantation of many lucky charms inside his body was the factor keeping him alive. Indeed, those who were close to Soeharto in his home town of Solo, the heartland of the Javanese culture, have attributed his resistance to death to his devotion to the powerful occult forces that resided in him throughout his life.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, all six presidents of Indonesia “paid respects to the spirit world, visiting sites said to hold mystical powers, consulting with seers and collecting tokens of magic like the Indonesian dagger called a kris.”¹ Among these leaders, Soeharto was outstanding as a devotee of the occult. He studied as a boy with a spiritual teacher and performed ritual acts throughout his presidency, continuing to do so even after a popular uprising deposed him in May 1998.

According to his aides, over the years he made frequent visits to sacred places, including mountains, caves, tombs and ruins, and took ritual baths in oceans and rivers sacred to Nyai Loro Kidul, the mighty Queen of the South Seas. He also collected hundreds of sacred objects in order to absorb their magical power.

The Javanese Science

Despite the ascendancy of modernist Islam throughout the nation, Soeharto’s private loyalty to Java’s spiritual past is mirrored in Javanese society in general, though its allegiance now tends to run underground in the face of Islamic disapproval, especially that of the strict Wahhabi sect, which over the years has become extremely influential. To the outsider today all Indonesians are strict Muslims, but under the pitje or the headscarf there is likely to be concealed a mystic of quite a different stripe. The people of the island of Java in particular are very proud of their indigenous pre-Islamic spiritual tradition, which they refer to as the Javanese Science, and while few may actually practice it now in its pure occult form, most have a proprietorial understanding of at least some of its sacred principles. They are evasive about discussing this hidden dimension of their society, especially with Western foreigners, but one would be mistaken in not taking the Science very seriously indeed as the essence of the Javanese culture even to the present day.

The Javanese Science is a syncretic blend of Hindu-Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist and ancient animist strands, and evolved in the royal courts of Solo and nearby Jogjakarta in Central Java as a system of self-transformation confined solely to the aristocracy. But since the Revolution that ejected the Dutch rulers from the country after the Second World War, the Science emerged into the popular culture in the form of hundreds of kebatinan (or inner-being) sects, each one of which celebrates some aspect of the royal mother tradition. These esoteric sects have drawn a very large minority of the Indonesian population into their sphere, forming an immensely creative and diverse subculture at the leading edge of national life, very much as happened in Japan after the Second World War.

The Kebatinan movement has in many respects evolved into an inherently new form of mysticism. Syncretism raised to a religious principle is its dominant keynote, a drive towards pluralistic unity that echoes a prominent feature of the New Age spirituality appearing elsewhere in the world. But the Javanese approach to the universe and the human situation generally, though at its best of a high metaphysical order, is in many respects quite different from that of the West. It doesn’t involve religious theories and dogmas so much as a science of inner energies perceived directly with a highly sensitised intuition – one might say, clairvoyantly – and manipulated directly by the will.

This shamanistic approach can lend a disconcerting ambiguity to those moral categories that the Western mind likes to regard as eternally fixed: Justice, Compassion, Truth, Altruism, Duty and so on. To the Javanese, mystic things in the moral sphere are not good or bad according to what we in the West would regard as an ethical judgment, but according to whether the personal energies concerned balance out in a manner beneficial to the whole. Do they bring harmony to the individual, do they stabilise him or her? For the Science all is dynamic, all is in ever-transformative and purposive flux: good is what works in the present moment to the spiritual benefit of the whole; bad is what fails to do so. This stance contributes a relativistic and unpredictable note to the Javanese outlook that Western diplomats and others have famously found difficult to deal with, yet its creative power is undeniable.

Javanese adepts with access to this underlying realm of subtle forces are reputed to have diagnostic powers and techniques of psychic healing of extraordinary efficacy, and are believed to understand the dynamics of spiritual physiology better than any other race on earth. The Javanese Science has much in common with other shamanistic Eastern paths such as have been found in Tibet and Japan, where syncretism has similarly been raised almost to a spiritual principle. These too have dealt in patterns of shifting subtle energies rather than fixed doctrinal systems. But there is something different and mysterious about the Javanese Science, a depth, a quality of purity that most researchers are agreed sets it apart from any other form of mysticism. What makes it unique?

The Invisible People

In a visit to Indonesia some years later, I was able to put this question to Pak Joyo, at one time the Director of a Christian Theological College in Central Java and the pastor of one of the largest charismatic Lutheran churches in the Reformed Dutch Church of Indonesia. Pak Joyo was a fourth-generation Christian whose great-grandfather was converted to Christianity at the point of his Sultan’s kris (the Sultan himself having been similarly converted by Dutch missionaries), and Pak Joyo followed in his family’s footsteps in deciding to train for the ministry. But halfway through his theological training, he decided to quit the church and give all his allegiance to a contemporary mystical sect called Hardopusoro which interested him a great deal more.

However, he told me that in a vision Christ asked him to remain in the church, where he could be more useful than anywhere else; and after an internal struggle he obeyed. Pak Joyo went on to become a multilingual international emissary for Christian ecumenicalism – but, with the blessing of his bishop, privately continued in Hardopusoro, in which he became a high initiate. Such dual religious allegiances are entirely natural to the Indonesian temperament.

Pak Joyo’s answer to my question surprised me. The source of his country’s spirituality, he said, was not familiar to other races. It was unique because it stemmed from the Invisible People, the Badui, who grew no bigger than a ten-year-old child and who lived in an inaccessible part of the mountainous jungle in South Bantam, about a hundred miles west of Jakarta. The Badui were “closer to the soul” than other people, said Pak Joyo, and were the X factor in the background of the Javanese Science. Invisibly they had instructed the Javanese people for nearly three thousand years, helping to guide them from their original primitive state to their present civilisation.

The Badui were not Indonesian and had no part in the country’s laws or economy, but lived apart in forest territory forbidden to outsiders and had great spiritual knowledge and strange magical powers. Although rarely seen by outsiders, they were held in awe in the marketplaces throughout Indonesia. When Indonesian spiritual and political leaders needed advice, said Pak Joyo, even the most illustrious of them went into the jungle alone to consult the Badui seers, for the understanding of the Invisible People on spiritual matters was a universal one that embodied a primordial tradition beyond factions or institutions.

President Soeharto would undoubtedly have been one of those top leaders who was not too proud to seek enlightenment, possibly of a political as well as a spiritual kind, from these strange priestly people of the jungle. Leaving behind his aides, bodyguard and driver, he would have had to ascend alone the jungle forest track that led to the Badui colony, there to consult with its leading prophets.

Inexplicably, although remote from the teeming civilisation surrounding them, the Badui knew everything that happened in it long before the news was heard on television. They had prophesied the Second World War and that the Dutch would leave the country soon after peace was declared. They knew the destiny of peoples worldwide. The Badui, it was said, planted sacred trees – living trees, as they called them – representing their tribal leaders in a hallowed grove called the Artjas Domas, which was visited once a year by the highest-ranking Badui priests. By studying the growth on the trees clairvoyantly, they were able to read the fortunes and destiny not only of people, but of nations and the world. From this yearly examination everything of value to their leading families was recorded in a script known only to them. The Badui were said to have telepathic powers and a magical way of keeping others away from their settlements, especially from the Artjas Domas.

I have recently learned that the Badui people have now inexplicably disbanded and their old territory has been settled by Indonesian farmers. But when I revisited Java in 1980, their colony was still a great focus of mystery and unanswered questions. Why were these strange forest-dwellers so influential? What kind of special wisdom did they possess? Where had they come from? And why did they live apart, alien, feared, invisible – and yet, according to Pak Joyo, all-seeing? Sir Stamford Raffles referred to them in his eighteenth-century History of Java, yet since then no traveller from the West had succeeded any better than the Indonesians themselves in setting foot on the Badui’s inner territory or penetrating their secrets.

Eventually I learned more about this remarkable people from Dr. Paul Stange, an American lecturer in Asian Studies who grew up in Indonesia and who obtained a doctorate from the Michigan University in the US for his study of Sumarah, an akebatinan sect that has become influential in Indonesia since the Revolution.² In his thesis, Dr. Stange was able to relate the Badui indirectly to the growth of kebatinan sects such as Subud and Sumarah as constituting a cutting edge phenomenon in the evolution of mystical consciousness.

Custodians of the Soul World

It seems that the Badui are of the dark-skinned Tamil race that is believed to have spread from Africa long ago into southern India, and from thence into Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, where they lived unmolested for thousands of years. But about eight thousand years ago the Malays, at that time a mainly Caucasian race from the north, crossed the Sunda Strait and displaced the Badui culture in the Sunda Islands, with the consequence that most of the indigenous race withdrew into the mountainous interior of Java, far from the spreading communities of the newcomers, while a remainder migrated further east.

Some time in the first millennium BCE the remnant of the aboriginal Tamil people in Java was joined by a large group of Indian initiates – probably, some authorities think, refugees from the defunct Indus valley culture in which holy trees also played an important part – and the two groups, each with its heritage of ancient racial wisdom, together formed the Badui priesthood.

Forty Indian Hindu-Buddhist families, constituting a sacred nucleus, inhabited a central group of three villages served by an outer ring of vassal Badui communities: together the two clans built a spiritual power-centre in Java which, isolated though it was for nearly three thousand years and finally greatly diminished in numbers, preserved unchanged its sacerdotal structure and identity and its pivotal place in Javanese religious life. Those in the inner esoteric circle wore white sarongs and turbans, were called the White Ones, had strict rules of conduct and were forbidden by their laws to have any communication whatever with the outside world, while those in the outer villages wore blue sarongs and turbans and were called the Blue Ones. There was no intermarriage between the two clans.

Although the use of money or of weapons was forbidden to all in the colony, the ascetic laws of the Blue Ones were less severe than those of the others, and enabled them occasionally to visit an Indonesian village to obtain by barter the very few items the farming colony needed (mainly smoked fish and salt), and to serve where necessary as liaison officers and spokespersons for the White Ones.

Despite their harshly primitive way of life, it would be a mistake to suppose these jungle people were not, in their own way, highly civilised. Nina Epton, a British journalist who is the only known Westerner to have met the Blue Ones and a few of their holy White Ones (although many Dutch researchers tried before her), speaks in her book The Palace and the Jungle of their aloof dignity, their air of having “a destiny apart from other mortals,” and above all, of what she calls “the Tibetan look.” This was a wide-eyed all-seeing look common to many of the Badui, which she describes as staring beyond this world into the spiritual realm. It was a look she associates especially with pictures of seers like Guru Padma Sambhava, the great Indian initiate who brought Buddhism to Tibet.³

Ms. Epton has described the Badui physiognomy as varied and clearly of an older ethnicity than that of the Indonesians. But the elderly leader of the White Ones, reputed to have been a saint and a sage and obviously of a superior caste to the others, was plainly more ethnically advanced. She noted in particular that he had a worn, patient and ascetic face which reminded her of that of a well-mannered European intellectual. In other clothes he would have passed unnoticed in an English crowd, for he had a very light complexion, a narrow face and the gentle bearing of a civilised person. Altogether, Epton says, the Badui were not what one expects from the jungle.

This assertion is borne out by the personal history of a young runaway, the son of a pu’un or chief of the White Ones, who in the seventeenth century escaped the colony to become a stable boy in the then Sultan’s palace. Soon he became the Sultan’s counsellor and then his son-in-law, and today his descendants are the Jajadiningrat family, one of the most aristocratic and politically influential families surrounding the Indonesian presidency. Throughout the intervening three hundred years, the Badui continued to “read” the sacred tree of the stable boy’s line, to visit his Jajadiningrat descendants once a year with predictions and advice for the coming year, and where necessary protect the members of the family from danger.

In fact, the sole reason for Nina Epton’s unprecedented interview with the leader of the White Ones was that, through the Sultan, she obtained an introduction to the Jajadiningrat family, who asked the White Ones as a special favour to grant her an interview. In no other way would the meeting have been possible.

The Badui priests continued to follow the destiny of the Jajadiningrats, says Epton, because for the Invisible People once a holy lineage is laid down it is laid down forever, it belongs to the timeless realm of the soul world. The Badui in fact denied the reality of time. Their sages believed that the rules of life were laid down once and for all at the Beginning of things by an ancestral divinity called Batarratunggal, who will one day return to govern the Badui and the world. In the meantime, it was their sacred obligation to maintain everything exactly as it was at the beginning, without change, without innovation. Nothing concerning their customs or belief system must be disturbed from their state of primordial perfection: hence the necessity of isolation.

To the modern Javanese mystic this Badui belief is merely the folk expression of a deeper spiritual reality. He sees the concept of a Beginning-time or Dreamtime to which so many early races look back with longing, believing it to be a cosmic paradise that must be ritually preserved for the future, as simply a metaphor for the inner soul plane, which is both cosmic and interior at one and the same time. That inner place, eternally omnipresent within each human being, is really the cornucopia from which all spiritual paths and religions flow forth in their season. As a race we have long ago lost contact with such a high level of soul-consciousness, and so it is called by other names: the Garden of Eden, the Dreamtime, Paradise, the Kingdom of Heaven. But according to the Javanese view, it is in truth a soul-world present in each one of us, a celestial headwaters from which the river of the spirit flows continually into our bodily spacetime. This higher/inner world must be kept purified, as it once was and will be again in the future, and it was the task of the Badui to help do this, since we as a race cannot.

No one knows for certain why the Badui people have now dispersed. But it is evident that deep changes reflected in its politics have overtaken Indonesia within the last few decades. The erratic occult climate that pervaded the early years of independence has yielded not only to a stricter Islamist discipline but also to the growing apparatus of democratic government, a maturing judicial system and economic reform, all of which has brought stability and prosperity to the people. The nation has come of age. According to Dr. Stange, who received a wealth of Javanese lore from the Sumarah cognoscenti, there is a school of thought that believes the Badui have now fulfilled their mission in the South Pacific, and that is why they have at last dispersed into the Indonesian population.

The reign of animism in this region under the sovereignty of Nyai Loro Kidul had long been prophesied to end during the twentieth century, giving way to a new and higher religious and cultural dispensation for the Pacific races – one perhaps best represented by the modern Kebatinan movement in Java. It is thought that the Badui understood well that this prophesy has now been fulfilled. They understood that their reign is no longer needed – or indeed tolerable under the new conditions. Having played a custodial role by preserving in secret the pure and unsullied soul-conditions necessary for such a surge of higher consciousness, they have now been able to die out as a separate society.

Whether or not there is any truth in this theory, it is undoubtedly the case that around the Pacific Rim a new religious spirit is rising. Akin to kebatinan and to the Javanese Science in general, it is based on principles of high shamanism known to the Badui many thousands of years ago, but forgotten by modern humanity. Recognising that enormous healing powers are locked in the ancient soul-ways, seekers visiting Indonesia today find common ground with the synthesising mysticism of the new kebatinan sects and are forming part of a spiritual network that stretches from Findhorn in Scotland to the esoteric centres of California. This development in the Pacific zone has in it the potential for creating a new religious paradigm of global significance. But how much of it is indebted to the heroic patience of the Invisible People of the Javanese jungle, as mystics like Pak Joyo believe, we shall probably never know.

Footnotes:

1. ‘As Suharto Clings to Life, Mystics See Spirits’ Power’, Seth Mydans, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008.
2. Paul D. Stange, The Sumarah Movement in Javanese Mysticism, UMI Dissertation Information Service, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980.
3. Nina Epton, The Palace and the Jungle, Oldbourne Press, London, n.d., 55.

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VICTORIA LEPAGE has published numerous articles on the new spiritual paradigm emerging in cultures worldwide and is the author of Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, published in ten foreign languages. Her latest book is Mysteries of the Bridechamber: The Initiation of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon. She lives in New South Wales, Australia, and can be contacted through her website at www.victoria-lepage.org.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 5.

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—

I remember John Perkins. He was a real jerk. A gold-plated, super-slick lying little butthole shill for corporate gangsters; a snake-oil salesman with a movie-star grin, shiny loafers, a crooked calculator and a tooled leather briefcase full of high-blown bullshit.
– Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com)

Despite Greg Palast’s spleenish dismissal from an earlier time, John Perkins has emerged as a spiritual, intellectual and political authority. He is an important leader of contemporary neo-shamanism, one of today’s most effective critics of American corporate culture, and a story teller capable of overshadowing the legendary Ian Fleming, who created James Bond, when it comes a tales of imperial adventure and conquest.

He is working to offer a vision, or a ‘dream change’ as he calls it, designed to rescue America, and the world it dominates, from the destruction of rampant corporate energy. He works to achieve these ends by recounting in a disarmingly honest and sensitive way the personal adventures and dilemmas he has experienced in diverse and exotic parts of the world.

Perkins first gained a reputation in the 1990s for a series of books on shamanic cultures amongst remote tribes and peoples. Around a decade later and prompted by the events of 9/11, he published Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in 2005. This describes life as part of an elite group trained to “utilise international financial organisations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.”

After twenty-seven publishers turned it down, the book came out of nowhere to be an international best seller, and is about to be made into a Hollywood movie. It went to number four on Amazon during its first week and was quickly on all best-seller lists. This was achieved without receiving any mainstream media attention.

Most importantly, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has provided credibility, authority and celebrity in opening up new areas of thought. These range across corporate power, American empire, shaman spirituality and environmental consciousness.

Perkins has become a rallying figure for critics of the American ‘corporatocracy’. The harm it inflicts with casual neglect on the environment and local tradition is identified wherever there is the potential to seize cheap resources or some other commercial windfall. A second book has now been published in this genre. The Secret History of the American Empire again recounts wild, troubling conspiracies to grab resources from vulnerable third world leaders through the peddling of unserviceable loans. This is what makes it tempting, even if it is an injustice, to say that its author is becoming America’s Ian Fleming, with conscience.

Intriguingly, the American hit man is a much more sophisticated and reflective operator than the British secret agent. He never dirties his own hands with an actual act of execution or termination. That is left to the jackal, a scavenger that cleans up after others and a figure much closer to the persona of James Bond. Yet both Fleming and Perkins leave the feeling that they have witnessed a time of transition, as the challenges of empire begin to outweigh its rewards. Each captures his readers through the exposure of perversely heroic excesses.

John Perkins both writes and plays the story of the economic hit man, as he reveals an institutionalised imperial strategy of which few had previously been aware. This exposure may well make a contribution to constraining the role of laissez faire corporate plundering in maintaining empire. It may also help construct a vision for an American future more in tune with the values of its founding fathers and its constitution.

It is a comment on the paradoxical character of the contemporary world that the legacy from time as an economic hit man is now committed to opposing and constraining such activity. Rarely have the costs and destruction that go with exercising power over vast areas of the world and the enormous demands of imperial authority on energy, talent and resources been rendered more transparent.

Perkins sketches a highly complex world, both at the personal and imperial level. His own heroic personality reflects a messy, if robust, form of schizophrenia. Simultaneously, he confesses to ghastly deeds as an economic hit man, articulates a rare sensitivity to diverse indigenous forms of spirituality, uses his experience of malevolent deeds to awaken readers to the destructive power of corporations and comments on the complex feelings and questionings that accompany his actions and reflections.

A simple, powerful and authoritative style makes it easy to follow these stories of endless exotic adventure. It is also easy to follow the author’s feelings as he learns and grows through personal involvement in a world of calculated intrigue and exploitation that no one had ever explained to him.

The experience of many bright, inexperienced young men is captured with rare honesty. These innocents are recruited to maintain and extend the reach of empire by means that it would be politically unacceptable to explain in an academic text or a university course. Such stories are a powerful means of mocking much of the economic doctrine taught at Western universities and wielded like a weapon by the minions of the IMF and World Bank as self-serving theoretical nonsense.

Greg Palast, in a piece titled John Perkins: Jerk, Conman, Shill posted on his website www.gregpalast.com, captures the profound ambiguity in the author’s character in the following colourful language:

To steal millions, you need a top team of armed robbers. But to steal billions, you need PhD’s with colour charts and economic projections made of fairy dust and eye of newt. Perkins had it all – including a magical thing called a computer-generated spreadsheet (this was well before Excel)…..

But, as in every moral tale, Perkins, the modern Dr. Faust, found redemption in confession…..

And in his writings today, Perkins’ heart goes out to the Third World targets of this new empire ruled by shock troops and spread sheets. His empathy extends to those in the occupied territory known as the USA. Because, says Perkins, when the wretchedly ripped-off of the Earth rise in rebellion, the lash of the backlash is felt by the children of the lobstermen of New Hampshire, shivering under Humvees in Falluja, and never the EHM’s clients’ fortunate sons, frolicking in their Ferraris.

While Perkins is best known today for his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, he is best understood in the context of his earlier writing. This explores the wisdom and understanding of shamans in contrasting parts of the world. These revelations can be even more startling than his hit man stories. They raise serious questions about most readers’ perceptions of reality and can leave an elated sense of new possibilities and enhanced insight into the nature of life. It is even possible to read in an exchange with an Amazonian shaman an early contribution to the idea of carbon trading.

Stories of the profound practical wisdom mobilised by forms of shamanic spirituality make this unfamiliar world surprisingly accessible. The struggle for survival in a world threatened with destruction by economic hit men adds further credibility.

Stories of spiritual discovery amongst native shamans are built around a deep but shifting sensitivity. Initial days as a wide-eyed Peace Corps volunteer are followed by subsequent hit man travels surrounded by privilege, sycophantic attendants and murky conspiracies, and then by a role as guide and leader of small groups of spiritual explorers venturing into the Amazon and other threatened environments. A capacity to recognise the mundane daily imperatives of human life in many contrasting environments is a basic strength of these stories. Readers are introduced in a most convincing manner to the surprisingly practical uses to which native spiritual powers are put. These range from the power to track down and destroy a rogue tiger in the jungle to the capacity to navigate vast distances at sea without charts or other recorded knowledge.

Pychonavigation: Techniques for Travel Beyond Time in 1990 displayed a writer and activist deeply concerned with the preservation of native traditions, the understanding of shamanic spirituality and the protection of the environment. It also highlighted the manner in which the contemporary world offers unprecedented opportunities to those with wealth, interest, understanding and accidental opportunity. Such individuals are able to explore and identify with diverse forms of spirituality amongst peoples from many different traditions of belief and behaviour.

The world of shamans may be under threat, but there is also a sense in which the advanced and scientific West needs to turn increasingly to these influences. Christian and scientific dogmas have destroyed essential human qualities in the rush of spread sheets and bottom line calculations.

These discoveries have been followed up and explored further in other books, such as Shapeshifting: Techniques for Global and Personal Transformation. This 1997 book gives readers an almost tactile sense of experience in uncovering new wonders. This powerfully encourages an opening of the mind and spirit to new possibilities. Not only is the reader’s preparedness to explore the seemingly unbelievable tested, but penetrating reflections on the contemporary world challenge many familiar certainties.

The assertion of a sympathetic mentor, a Norwegian engineer and corporate power-broker, that capitalism is here to stay provides the basis for reflections on the future. It is essential to understand as deeply as possible the nature of the corporation, which need not necessarily be predatory and destructive. This gives context and balance to devastating comments about corporate fostering of consumerism and emasculation of education. These products of the European Enlightenment, and the way they have diminished the spiritual qualities and understanding of people in the developed world, are rarely exposed so aptly.

Concern with corporate realities leads to discussion with a Mayan shaman about the need to distinguish dreams from fantasy. While dreams can nourish fulfilment in life and a deep sense of spiritual reality, fantasies only encourage illusion and can be very harmful. This distinction has great practical usefulness because we all vacillate between dreams and fantasies. Yet we rarely pause to recognise the need to distinguish between them, nourish our dreams and discipline our fantasies.

Explorations with the Mayan shaman suggest that critical to realising the potential of dreams is an understanding at the most fundamental level that energy is everything, that spirit is energy and that the sighting of spirits is synonymous with the sighting of energy. From this it follows that the aura that surrounds organic life and that some healers can use to restore well-being is an emanation of spirit and energy. In bold reflections such as these, Perkins offers himself with a genuine sense of humility – attributing his insights to ‘primitive’ shamans – as a serious and profound commentator on the ills of Western progress and development.

Books such as Pychonavigation and Shapeshifting in the 1990s reveal the depth of Perkins experience, reflection and spirituality. While they won him a substantial readership and group of followers, it was the political and corporate expose of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man that catapulted him into the ranks of bestsellers and made him a celebrity leader with a potential to transform many of the spiritual ailments that trouble the contemporary American imperial character.

John Perkins was born in New Hampshire in 1945. He attended Tilton Boys High School, and later Middlebury College and Boston University, before joining the Peace Corps and working in Ecuador in the Amazon. He claims he was vetted by the National Security Agency before being recruited by the Boston strategic consulting firm, Chas T Main, where he rose to the position of chief economist. Not surprisingly, his claims have been disputed by the US State Department.

Then followed some years of internal struggle over the role of persuading third world governments to accept large, unserviceable loans for infrastructure projects contracted to major US corporations. This anguish deepened as understanding grew about subsequent joint US government and international aid agency action, designed to control these governments and dispose of their oil and other resources to serve US interests. Being a witness to such activities all over the world – in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East – led to a decision to quit. Little doubt is left, however, that those who desired silence about earlier work assisted in the success of a subsequent independent energy company.

After the sale of the energy company in the late 1980s Perkins became involved with non-profit work around the world. In addition to his writing, he became active in shifting consciousness and promoting sustainable lifestyles for the individual and global community.

It is possible to question the veracity of accounts of American skulduggery. But there is much evidence to support them and they are rarely subjected to serious critical cross-examination. To the contrary, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man has been followed by books like A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption, a collection of chapters by a variety of writers, edited by Steven Hiatt, which explores the range of such activity.

Even more important, perhaps, unrelated writers such as the German-American William Engdahl have shown in books like A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order that Anglo-American power-brokers have long made devastating use of discreet partnerships between corporate and governmental interests. When the record of the English East India Company is put together with the work of contemporary writers, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Anglo-American empire has largely been the product of the corporation.

These organisations have been effective fronts for imperial expansion. They have been characterised by a remarkable capacity to mobilise adventurous, risk-taking individuals, by skilful, discreet control and manipulation of financial and commodity resources and by the ability to shroud their activities in high-sounding rhetoric about progress and universal values.

The impact of Perkins in exposing this reality has been enhanced by several factors. First, he tells a great story from the perspective of personal involvement and personal anguish. Second, his earlier writings on indigenous spirituality in scattered parts of the world provided him with an established reputation amongst informed and reflective readers in the decade before the appearance of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Third, there is apparent coherence linking his stories of spiritual adventure and discovery and his stories of political adventure and discovery. Finally, 9/11 has created a world, with its enhanced electronic communications and troubled questioning of what has gone wrong, that is disposed to explore the issues raised by corporate excess and economic hit men.

In one sense, the linkage of spiritual and financial adventure and discovery has created a 21st century everyman or icon. Educated and reflective members of economically advanced communities will find it increasingly difficult to avoid the type of issues and questions that are central to these themes.

The fact that Perkins does not claim great erudition but simply recounts a story and a succession of dilemmas enhances the accessibility of the work. The sense of surprised discovery of hidden realities is one that is shared by increasing numbers in a world where even advanced levels of education tend to be narrow and excessively functional. It is easy for even the best intentioned and most responsible of workers to become jerk, con-man, and shill as they toil to fit in, accommodate peer group pressure, win the favour of superiors and build the reputation and wealth needed to support a family.

The modern corporation (or government) demands a certain ignorance and naïvetè of its employees if they are to serve its purpose of maximising profit (or voter support). Only a few are privileged to have the opportunity to see through illusions, opt out and warn others. It is a role where success is improbable.

The title chosen for Perkins’ second book on American financial strategies, The Secret History of the American Empire, invites the reader to revisit and reconsider events like the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and ponder on it as the product of a team of economic hit men. It also raises daunting questions about the longer-term viability of major global institutions like the World Bank and IMF.

There is one story of carrying a book by Joseph Stiglitz during travels to Tibet and of reflections about closely related concerns. Globalization and Its Discontents explains spreading discontent and criticism about the international financial institutions. It does this from the perspective of one who served on President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, was Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank and was the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics. Yet, it is important to understand why it is John Perkins and not Joseph Stiglitz who will have the greater impact on the popular American consciousness.

However much the authority of the American State Department may dispute them, Perkins’ stories take the reader directly into the action and personalities of events that have shaped the latter half of the 20th century. They involve the reader in the excitement, the fulfilments and the angst of such action and make the most implausible of conspiracies seem commonplace and mundane, even as they unfold in exotic and alien environments. Ultimately, they intensify many dilemmas by focusing on discoveries of the shamanic spirituality and wisdom of peoples whose cultural survival in the contemporary world seems condemned – limited to decades.

Unfortunately, there is little about Japan and China, two large nations that have preserved ancient forms of spirituality while building robust and vibrant modern economies. A chapter on geishas in Secret History hints at great subtlety in Japanese traditions. It recounts a platonic, hungering and fleeting relationship with two geishas who are revealed to be mixed blood daughters of Taiwanese mothers abandoned by American fathers and rescued and raised by a shrewd but kindly Japanese businessman. These, in a single forthright conversation, educate a still naïve American in the way their charms are used to advance Japanese corporate interests. One suspects these are rarely matched by American finesse. Sadly, apart from this early chapter in the latest book nothing more is said about Japan.

Another chapter, The Quiet Giant, reflects in passing, and not unsympathetically, on China in the context of a visit to Tibet. There are no insights of particular interest, however, and China is not addressed again.

Both Japan and China have sheltered and preserved shamanic traditions, generally in the form of Shintoism and Daoism, but also in Zen and Chan Buddhism and other forms. Despite the fact that both Japan and China have been remarkably successful in exporting products of this shamanism in the form of martial arts, physical therapy and spiritual disciplines, it is not popular to recognise such successes in the West.

While this issue is not explored directly by Perkins, exploration of less imposing shamanic traditions invites the thoughtful reader to reflect further on the costs inherent in the West’s ‘intellectual apartheid’. Deployed as a means of advancing the West’s civilising mission and imperial ambitions, ‘intellectual apartheid’ blinded most observers to the power of Japanese and Chinese shamanic spirituality. East Asian nations have shown that educated, disciplined and organised communities can defend themselves against Anglo-American economic hit men, whether it is through the use of geishas or other aspects of traditional practice.

Ultimately, one may question whether Perkins offers serious readers any realistic way forward. He cannot be faulted for his criticism of economic hit men and their plundering corporations and one cannot but applaud his revelations about endangered shamanic cultures. But does he address these issues strategically?

The 21st century world of rapid global communications is ruthless in exposing the vulnerability of communities that are not organised to advance their own interests. Perkins’ Anglo-American world is one that has used the corporation to great effect as an empire-building tool but is one that has neither the disciplined subtlety of the Japanese geisha nor the strategic wisdom inherent in Chinese tradition. These are the areas where Asian shamans have displayed their power but they are not areas where Perkins is well equipped to comment.

It would be misguided to criticise Perkins on these grounds. He is modest in his claims to expertise. Yet his writing covers such a broad spectrum and is so authoritative in speaking of hope derived from tribal shaman traditions that it becomes necessary to probe broader issues. It is a reflection of his value that he gives grounds to address weighty matters and encourages recognition of the growing frailties in aggressive contemporary corporate culture.

Unquestionably, John Perkins is a figure with convincing and disarming talent, with spiritual and moral depth and with political and economic discernment. Men with these qualities who are prepared to speak clearly are rare in America.

Should the continuation of economic hit man stories lead to a series of adventure films that recall James Bond, this is only likely to increase Perkins’ influence and importance. It will be hard for such films not to be educational in terms of the way the world works and sobering in terms of exposing the strategies that have constructed Anglo-American Empire. They may also begin to open the popular imagination to long neglected spiritual realities that challenge false certainties. Perhaps no greater service could be rendered in these days of imperial strain and insecurity.

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REG LITTLE was an Australian diplomat for over 25 years in Japan, Laos, Bangladesh, the United Nations, Ireland, Hong Kong, China, Switzerland, and the Caribbean, obtaining advanced language qualifications in Japanese and Chinese. Deputy or Head of Mission in five overseas posts, he served in Canberra as Director of North Asia, International Economic Organisations, Policy Planning and the Australia-China Council. He has participated in Conferences in Asia since 1987, has been a Founding Director of the Beijing based International Confucian Association since 1994 and has co-authored two books, The Confucian Renaissance (1989) in English, Japanese and Chinese, and The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny (1997). His latest book is A Confucian-Daoist Millennium? Reg Little’s website is www.confucian-daoist-millennium.net and he can be contacted via email at reglittle@yahoo.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 104 (Sept-Oct 2007).

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