Pawakan

[A. G. Maisey]

JB, this third level is in my understanding not something for everybody, there needs to be that special quality as well as the deep formal understanding.

The formal understanding can be learnt, but that does not necessarily mean that having become competent at level one & two, a person can automatically progress to level three.

However, although somebody might have that special gift to cross from the seen to the unseen world, without the foundation of the formal understanding nobody can expect to understand the esoteric qualities of a keris that might be expressed by a transmission of feeling.

When I first encountered these ideas I thought of Luciano Pavarotti. His father understood what was needed to make a singer who rose above the ordinary, Pavarotti's father was a singer himself, but he earnt his living as a baker. Luciano had an inborn talent, his initial guidance was from his father, but it took him 20 years of training & experience to develop the voice he was born with into the instrument it became.

In the absence of early guidance and a lifetime of learning Luciano Pavarotti would have been just another good singer.

It is the same with being able to understand a keris through feeling alone:- we need the experience, knowledge & understanding that can be learnt, but then we need that special gift that permits us to move from the world that we see into the world that we feel.

As far as I was able to understand this idea, it was not exclusively the opinion of Empu Suparman, but it was an opinion that seemed to be held by every upper level ahli keris that I encountered in Solo between 1980 and about 2000.