It was common in early sannyas, and maybe still is, to accept the Reichian “wisdom” that if one did not let one’s anger out, then it built up and spilt over uncontrollably. Osho often reiterated this, though he also spoke at different times more cautiously about western therapies.
One might ask whether those to whom it is a mantra have ever given it deeper thought. Some touched on this in the string before last, and the possible harm derived from the cartharsis stages of Dynamic Meditation, if not handled carefully. Below here is something sent to SN which at least examines the matter in a little depth. (SN)
”If You Let Your Anger Out, You’ll Feel Better!” Is this a Myth?
You always hear people talk about how “cathartic” an experience was and how much better they feel, or you’ll hear them say things like, “If you keep your anger bottled up, one day you’ll just snap!”
In fact the “about to go crazy because he can’t express anger” character is a mainstay in television and movies (see that Simpsons episode where Ned Flanders finally loses it.
Things like squeezing stress dolls, screaming into a pillow, hitting a punching bag are all practices that we’ve seen offered as healthy alternatives to waking up in the fish counter at Farm Fresh and drowning the clerk in the lobster tank.
A lot of actual therapies have been constructed around this idea, and they all basically encourage you to curb your anger by feeding a knuckle sandwich to a punching bag, to prevent you from doing the same to your boss. It makes sense, right?
Why it is Bullshit:
Research says it doesn’t work. Expressing your anger, even against inanimate objects, doesn’t make you less angry at all. In fact, it actually makes you want to get pissed off.
See, we humans have these things called “habits.” When we do something, and it makes us feel good, we want to do it again… and more often. This is why you don’t see a lot of Buddhist monks throwing bricks through storefront windows on their path to enlightenment. The rush to anger is addictive, and letting yourself lash out as a means to control your anger is arguably like drinking to control your urge to drink.
And that’s bad news, considering there are lots of situations where you don’t have an inanimate object to take it out on. If a person gets entrenched in the habit of beating the living shit out of an inanimate object every time they get upset, heads are going to roll if they find they need to excuse themselves from meetings to visit the toilet, and let out the rage by breaking the seat, whenever enraged by some idiot chiming on.
Willy Reich was a brilliant mind, but a bad-tempered grouch with deep-rooted mental problems maybe stemming from the tragedy of his mother, who committed suicide when he was a teen in order to escape his abusive, violent father who was shagging the maid and whom the teenage Willy was also shagging on the quiet (imagine the guilt and anger on that one!).
Yes, it does sound a bit like an episode of ‘Shameless’, without the laughs, and it seems he dealt with this by being an overbearing, hard-drinking misogynist with a messiah complex.
So, his theories didn’t work for him.
I would say that expressive-cathartic stuff makes you familiar with your emotions, which is useful self-knowledge, but it doesn’t “vomit them out”…
I must say, I did meet a guy once, a self-styled care-in-the-community Tantric magician who insisted that he had had the ultimate catharsis when he vomited his ego down a city-centre public toilet and hadn`t heard a pip out of it since…
So you never know…
Good luck with that one….
Excuse me, my memory of details failed me there.
Willy`s mum was shagging the live-in tutor. Willy used to watch them, he thought about forcing his mum to shag him in return for keeping quiet, but then decided to tell Dad, who beat her viciously until she committed suicide.
In his diary Willy wrote that when young he used to jerk off while whipping horses and used to wank over his mum well into his twenties.
It seems he was most likely a victim of sexual abuse.
Definitely a touch of Frank Gallagher there….
Frank, you seem unnecessarily upset about a simple case of incesto-phillipus-misogenia-onanatio-pschyologicum-paternostrum-gigantum-left-hook.
It’s just a simple, inspiring story of how many people entertained themselves at night before blogging was born. At least they were doing something memorable with their lives.
Marty,
I did once have a friend who had an orgone box. I meditated in it a couple of times and actually felt quite ill. I also bought a pyramid kit in the 80s and placed a razor blade and some fruit and veg under it and it all went rotten in a day and then I cut myself shaving.
I think it was probably all a result of my own negativity and the fact I always did dynamic wrong and instead of vomiting the whole lot out in one go, I got some ego stuck in my throat.
When I arrived in Poona 1, I had the shits bad and a long-term sannyasin I met assured me it was “Bhagwans energy”. I told him about the dodgy thali I had down by the station, but he told me to beware of the mind and its tricky explanations.
And you are right, I really should do something more memorable with my life rather than blogging, so today I decided to move my bio-energy a little, so am off out to give Willy a hand down at the local stables….
Frank, must you always refer to yourself as Willy when talking of your past?
No wonder we can only guess what dreadful conditions lead you to adopt a German accent and a messianic belief in conducting pure energy from repeatedly blogging, via the airwaves.
Do you have recurring nightmares of all your posts going up in flames after a police raid?
Keep Jung and Anna Freud, Willy, er, Frank.
Signed,
Arthur Lowen,
Walmington-on-Sea,
Third Reichian Home Guard Platoon Defence Force.
The titles of last five articles on the title page of SannyasNews give the impression ‘spirituality developed by the giants of last century has lost touch with the reality. It is not rooted with here and now but with memory of some small fraction of the society.’
These articles tell it is not winter yet but last phase of autumn. Few dry leaves are still discussing, ‘The days of spring and what kind of spray was used.’
Osho’s cathartic meditation techniques worked for me at the time. Four years of daily dynamic etc. I mean in the sense that my anger issues lost their hold on me. By letting it out without harming another human being I became more intimate with anger etc. I grew up in downtown Glasgow in the fifties, surrounded by a violent social culture. Chased by gangs wielding knives and cut-throat razors. Good clean fun at the time, it did leave its mark on me, including a scar over my spine from where some thug threw a knife at me.
I can recall doing an Aum Marathon with Veresh back in the seventies and how afterwards I took perverse pleasure in telling people to fuck off for a couple of months. Fortunately, I grew out of it. Today I am slow to rise to anger and if it happens it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, sometimes for days. I am a big, strong man, whch brings a certain responsibility, and have lived with the Scottish stigma of violent reaction all my life. Over the years I have learned to control it. Any situation that presents me with an opportunity to vent violence and anger I walk away from, because violence always leads to more violence. The buck stops with me.
Anger is no longer an issue for me. It is always there, but I now feel I have a choice in whether to feed it or not. By saying it’s always there means just that, but its presence is a mere shadow in my life today in comparison to the formidable force it once represented: the great outcome of not feeding it.
In a way, I see Osho’s cathartic meditation techniques as still having great value in terms of helping people to learn how to work with their negative emotions – after all, we all have them. It may be the case that, like many other forms of meditaion, they will have their time and place and one day become obsolete.
Looking at the world at large, I would say that the world does not run on love or money but negative emotions. This is a very destructive phenomenon, which for some reason or another must be needed in the greater scheme of life. We all have to live with that. Beginners who find a problem with this will do well to employ Osho’s cathartic techniques. Those more advanced will have discovered more intelligent ways of working with negative emotions and live more peaceful lives as a consequence. As for the rest, they will coninue to bottle it up, with the occasional explosion when the pressure becomes too much. Such is life.
Lokesh, you have typed really wonderful piece.
Honest, mature, wise.
Cool, baba.
Dear friends,
In catherisis, one basic thing has to be remembered.
When you express your anger or sex or any emotion – beware that you connect with an incident or person to get that emotion and once you get that – you have to carefully disconnect the person or incident and go into the emotion, into the pure emotion with awareness. Express the emotion, the pure emotion. This is very important. If you keep on clinging with the incident or person or circumstance, then it may help just as a temporary cleaning but you accumulate it fast again, even you may become more efficient in it, more attached to it, it may become your mind’s one more way of functioning. Beware.
Thanks to Osho,
Siddharth
Sid, I do not entirely agree with what you say. Some people are simply angry, without people or circumstance to blame. Anger exists, independent in itself. It is a form of energy, hot, like a flame, it needs something to burn on. If not it smoulders.
Lao-tsu said:
“He who speaks does not know and he who knows does not speak,
but I`ll tell you this: it is only when a mosquito lands on one’s testicles that the futility of violence becomes fully apparent.”
So when did this mosquitoes, nadgers event take place then, Frank?
Not much is known about Lao-Tsu.
It`s probably apocryphallic.
Here we go again….Sanny-Pathe-News
Frank (Willy), your home movies are all over the net…
Watch out for Willy Reich’s daughter…a few minutes in she sounds cute when reminiscing…
http://freeflagstaffmedia.us/player.php?page=Century_of_Self_Episode_3.flv
and more by Adam Curtis , Frank’s favourite film maker…
here :
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/
Frank,
You mean when the Universe decided to incarnate us it was no use and too late to scream about it?
Typical bloody universe, wasn’t happy with planets and gas…it had to invent people – how selfish of it.
Still, if you are here, better watch something that passes the time on telly, I agree.
Martyn says, “Typical bloody universe, wasn’t happy with planets and gas…it had to invent people – how selfish of it.”
Precisely. Our planet needs us to help create a biological membrane on its surface in order to form an interplanetary telephone link. Totally selfish! These planets do nothing but gossip all day and slag off lesser memebers of the galaxy, like the moon, just because they have not progressed to interplanetary communication. Shameless!
One of the memorable recent times the planet vented its tsunami-size pissed-offness was at Fuk-u-shima.
Luckily, the authorities had already planned to teach the planet a lesson in the event of, by building a nuclear power station by the sea, on a fault line.
And Now for some Zen poetry…
Sitting by sea-side,
The water glistens with light
At night
Because of the glowing plutonium.
Hooray.
Let’s get outtahere.
“Sir, I also want to do four years of daily Osho meditations, just like you did.”, enquired one young seeker.
“Well, for that you need to buy some CDs”, answered meditator in a serious tone.
Shantam Bhai,
You have certainly been infected by your interactions with the cynical dogs and depraved baboons on SannyasNews!
Not only have you shamefully gone to the West and failed to generate 70-80K Euros a year, now you have further disgraced mighty Bharat, land of your forefathers, by hurling yourself at the feet of a Scottish skinhead/razorboy cum advaitist, Rabwan C. Nesbit!
It is a shameful day for Jullundur!
And before you criticise and mock a genuine seeker like Dhyan Siddharth, you should conduct one simple piece of self enquiry:
When is the last time you removed your flaccid buttocks from your heavily stained sofa, put your dal-caked chuddies in the wash and actually attempted to wobble your way through an Osho active meditation?
It seems that the only heavy breathing that you have done for some years involves XXXXFreeview!
Yahoo!
Hari Om!
Hello, Doctor on the Dip, where have I criticised and mocked a genuine seeker like Dhyan Siddharth?
You are holding wrong pulse, man!
I remember a story about the gutsy Sannyas woman. Before doctor puts her in sleep for breast amputation, she made it clear in a clear tone, “Cancer is in this breast and not the other one. So be careful.”
Wonder if this Swami Anand Yogi has gone through Swami Shantam’s biometric authentication & x-ray machine!
Let me tell you this, Rabwan C Nesbit is wano Scotland’s greatest mistakes…oops, I mean mystics.
Well, well, you must be so over this one particular emotion, anger. One of the most NOT wanted emotions. Can you remember that anger is only a single emotion? And it’s just energy.
But just see if all the other emotions go in the same garbage bin with that one. Can you separate energy from energy? How about just observing? And if there is not so much to observe, so does it get boring, flat?
Catharsis is for me a rainbow: anger, sorrow, ecstasy, overflowing joy, laughter, saving the world or a boyfriend, orgasm, swamp, melancholy, gratitude, praising. Overflowing. Overdoing also. Anger seems to be like fire. Energy. Like any energy, ‘not good, not bad, I have heard.
Today, I had an interesting experience talking with a telephone company’s customer service. I will not go into detail or who is right or wrong (even though I am right, of course), but however, I was totally upset and my voice was rising with this person on the phone. I noticed she neither did this nor got upset, but somehow amused instead the more I got upset.
I was thinking they lie and sell such shit these days and they must be used to us, furious people (because of their bad products and bad service), BUT SHE also knew it AND she seemed to be trained AND as well paid to receive it. So, I felt like laughing at the same time as just being more and more pissed off.
Should I do some mindfulness stories in sleeping in my favourite childhood place to overcome this? Or breathe in their lies and breathe out my ‘love’ for them? (As Tilopa).
Please give me good advice.
Perhaps the only possible way to renounce/dissolve anger is by realising that allowing it to take one over (‘robotically’, as it were) and thus getting ‘lost’ in it, ie unconscious, is actually a form of suffering?
Easier said than done, maybe – but also, there’s nothing necessarily ‘wrong’ with putting something or someone straight with a degree of ‘forcefulness’, wherein one is in control rather than being controlled by hidden inner ‘demons’.
As is invariably the case with emotions, isn’t it all a matter of awareness, of consciousness?
I began to get angry, dramatically less,
when I stopped beating myself up for getting angry.
Chetas,
No advice, by email, phone or blogs is good advice…er, if you include this advice too.
Anyone who isn’t there is not actually, completely there!
‘The internet modifies thought as a commodity, it is a commodifier.’
How about via a letter?
Only if it’s in iambic verse, as in:
Dear Sir,
I am currently reading about how to be or not to be, for that is what I am, aren’t I?
Or to put it another iambic way by the bard himself…
“But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain;
But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.”
(Love’s Labours Lost, Act 4, Scene 3)
When someone looks at my girlfriend with lust in the eyes, I get angry, very angry.
But I don´t get angry when someone indulges in corruption in my country or in my religious organisation; there, I am watcher on the hill.
Thus spoke Swami Fucksutra!
Repression and expression are two sides of the same coin.
Catharsis without awareness is just getting into an endless cycle of catharsis.
It catharsis worked, then the Heavy Metal Rock fans would be the most enlightened people on Earth. Instead, they simply connect to a collective level of vibration based on anger which is really low.
Dynamic Meditation is so much more than catharsis. It has 10 minutes of catharsis, but this is just a small part of the meditation.
Osho emphasized about dynamic:
“This is a meditation in which you have to be continuously alert, conscious, aware, whatsoever you do. Remain a witness. Don’t get lost. While you are breathing you can forget. You can become one with the breathing so much that you can forget the witness. But then you miss the point.
“This witnessing has to be carried in all the three steps. And when everything stops, and in the fourth step you have become completely inactive, frozen, then this alertness will come to its peak.”
But people forget this part.
In Dynamic Meditation, the chaotic breathing, catharsis, jumping and shouting “hoo” — is the Dynamic part — and witnessing all this, remaining a witness is the Meditation part.
Catharsis alone does not work without awareness, it just creates a vicious circle.
Of course, for people who are repressed, it is better to express than to repress.
But there is a middle point — neither repressing, nor expressing – witnessing the emotions.
Witnessing the emotions, the emotions quiet down.
Bothered? Annoyed? Furious? Incandescent? Purpurescent? Or just plain autistic?
This article might help…or it might make you wince, snarl, choke, splutter and yell before throwing the laptop at the wall…
Take twice a day before breathing…
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/anger1.htm
Thank you, SD, so true about being overwhelmed about something. The forehead does not work. I think Osho’s intention (a hard master) was that even if I am fully in emotion, anger or love etc, I still need to be conscious – not fair at all. It so hard to be in feelings or so hard to be conscious, but to be in feelings AND conscious. Almost impossible. For me.
Arps, it sounds like you understood something deep about Buddha’s “accepting awareness” in very complex situations. With Osho it seems to be an end result, not something you try. That’s why catharsis is there. But you know that so well.
Martyn, you said it, a hand-written letter, carefully carried out by a postman to the receiver is such a rare happening these days, it only happens rarely.
I was once almost thrown out from Humaniversity (long time ago) for being reactive. They explained to me in many different ways, actually in a very loving and calm way, to get the issue through to me. It looks like being a lifelong learning for me, and, of course, for all of us. You can always come sideways, which is more difficult to deal with. So, that was years ago, but unlike Lokesh, I actually got awareness from Hum. more than expression. But, perhaps that was what you needed to do and feel what it does for you.
The original story (about the telephone company) is a bit interesting, I think, because it got so much attention. I had already accepted the ”defeat” before. It was not what they (telephone company) wanted to do in the beginning, but now today they just send me a message I can return my phone etc. and close the deal. Happy ending for me.
I have moved to the countryside. Every day I light the fire and it keeps me wondering what’s the best way, what’s the best way to make it warm the house. Also, should I learn to cut my own trees or wait for some man to do it and just buy the wood now?
Chetas… life is one long taxi ride…
and one-2-one in Stockholm…..
..
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/taxi-company-offers-passengers-free-incar-therapy-sessions–e1802Sip8e