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| Masculine-Feminine (original title: Pods)1989 Aquarelle on paper, Ma Anand Leandra |
Today we see a watered-down version of Tantra taking the world by storm, a Tantra that appears to be no more than about great orgasms and a free sexuality, polyamory instead of monogamy, and yes even BDSM. Whereas authentic Tantra raises the level of sexual energy, ultimately to a transcendental level, much of modern day Tantra seems to be focusing on sex alone, and appears to get stuck on a very physical, sexual drive orientated level. This development is not something I particularly like. I find that far to often Tantra seems to be used as a label to hide the one or other form of sexual addiction and if not that, then at least a stagnation in the physical - a far fetched scenario from my understanding of Osho's teachings.
As I looked for an answer as to why this is happening globally, my research took me away from the eastern origin of Tantra and into the western origin of what may be considered pre-occupation with the sexual.
The times in which Osho appeared on the scene as a spiritual teacher were ideal for the western ear to receive his message and the west did indeed flock to hear him speak and take in his teachings. The question is, what was it that made Osho's teaching so desirable at the time?
Setting the scene for the sexual revolution - Sigmund Freud
On the background of the fact that all world religions had suppressed sexuality, resulting in a rigid patriarchal form of relating to the world and each other, an emerging sexual liberation had begun well before the end of the 19th century in Europe. Sigmund Freud had made his mark on the world by discovering that suppressed sexual desires created emotional, mental and even physical illness. He not only changed the way we understand outselves, his legacy included a possible “cure” (or perhaps I should rather say healing modality) in the form of psychoanalysis - bringing the supressed into the open.
Leading up to his discovery of the libido theory, during the time he worked as a lecturer in neurology at the University of Vienna, he travelled to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, the director of the Salpêtrière Hospital, an asylum known as the "mecca for neurologists" in Europe. Charcot later became known as the founder of modern neurology. Freud spent nearly 5 months there, accompanying the famous director on his rounds through the wards, and apart from becoming acquainted with hypnotism as a treatment method, Freud also encountered another interesting form of treatment that today would be unheard of.
Healing aspects of orgasm
One of the treatments for female patients suffering from Hysteria was to induce orgasm manually. In fact, inducing orgasm of female patients was an ancient cure that went back to the classical Greeks who thought that an orgasm might reposition a wandering womb, which physicians thought was the reason for Hysteria and other ailments. The term Hysteria takes its name from this thinking. At the time Freud started working, Hysteria was the mental illness of the day, thought to be caused by a congested womb and affecting mainly females, and occasionally males.
In the 1998 book, "The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction", the historian Rachel Maines writes about this. "Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s". The physical manipulation of the clitoris was first done by a medical practitioner manually, and from 1878, an electro-mechanical vibrator was used as this was considered "safer". This was all done at the very hospital that Freud was visiting.
After his return to Vienna, he set up his private practice and began developing his theories. While it is not known if Freud himself ever operated as a "gynaecological masseur" coming into contact with this treatment would have influenced him. In fact, in his "Studies on Hysteria", Freud mentions a patient who a had an orgasm when he "pressed or pinched" her legs to test her response to pain!
Free sexuality
The fact that at he time, a number of physicians believed that female orgasm would bring release to the energy bound up in neurosis is historically interesting. Much of the work I and my affiliates do today in our Tantra Sacred Massage practice here in South Africa, deals with frustrating experiences with orgasm - lack of orgasm, or orgasm that comes to quickly for example. And while orgasm is never a goal in Tantra, in our work it often has to be as we guide both men and women into the full power of this energetic release, which has far more meaning and health benifits than one generally imagines. Obviously we take it further than those physicans could have done back then. The fact is, orgasm was not only considered healthy but also a cure.
As early as 1893, Freud entertained ideas about a free sexuality that reminds one of an era that almost burst into life over six decades later. In a letter to his mentor and friend, Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wondered if the cure for neuroses could be "free sexual intercourse between young men and women. Otherwise the alternatives are masturbation, neurasthenia...". Freud speculated that the the absence of such a solution to free sexuality would doom society to "fall victim to incurable neuroses".
Slowly a number of physicians who were also intellectual thinkers gathered around Freud, many of whom began as his students or analysands, and they became the early practitioners of psychoanalysis. Amongst them were Karl Jung, Erich Fromm, Fritz Perls, Alfred Adler, Melanie Klein, Bruno Bettelheim and of course Wilhelm Reich. As these progressive thinkers emerged, and many of them discovered their own diversions to the original teaching, they took Freud’s discovery to new levels of understanding human nature, levels from which the world would never again depart.
With Freud and his peers, the birth of psychotherapy took place. Although many would deny this, Freud is defacto the father not only of psychoanalysis but also of what became known generally as "talk therapy". His students, followers and dissadents alike, developed the basis for most forms of psychotherapy that are in use today including Person Centered Psychotherapy, Gestalt, Jungian Therapy etc.
Freud himself moved away from his original belief that neuroses were caused by "enforced abstinence and coitus interruptus" or by suppressed desires, for example as seen with the Oedipus Complex. By 1920 he had published "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and had set the "death drive" against the "sex drive", claiming that "the drive for gratification, love and life is always overshadowed by a self-destructive urge toward aggression and death".
Although Freud moved away from his original theories, the influence of these had far reaching effects on German speaking society. There was already a more general growing movement towards understanding the negative impact of sexual repression on individuals and on society in general. Thomas Mann's 1924 Bildingsroman ("novel of education"), "The Magic Mountain" (Der Zauberberg), one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature, emphasised the negative effects of sexual repression on individuals and society in general. In the book, the fictional clinician, Dr Krokowski, warns of the dangers of sexual repression: "Suppressed love was not dead, it continued to live on in the dark, secret depths, straining for fulfillment and broke the bands of chastity and reappears through transmuted unrecognizable form...in the form of illness".
Wilhelm Reich
As Freud moved away from his original understanding, a number of Freud's colleagues, amongst them Wilhelm Reich who seems to have led the way, stayed with the original sex drive theory, and promoted amongst other things, a free love society. Reich however was not to find lasting recognition in Europe and he would eventually be ostracised by his peers for his radical thinking and for equating political freedom with sexual freedom and vice versa. For Reich, the one could impossibly not exist without the other.
Psychoanalysis and Reich
William Reich was a difficult person, very loud and forward with his ideas, certainly not discrete, and Freud and his psychoanalyst peers eventually threw him out of the professional bodies of the psychoanalytic movement. They saw his loud communist and anti-Hitler views as an attempt to politicise the psychoanalytical movement. Reich however, saw no difference between political freedom and sexual freedom. He clung to Freud's libido theory so strongly and continued to give orgasm a huge role in healing neuroses, that it became embarrassing to the faithful die-hard followers of Freud.
What Reich stood for went way beyond what Freud had discovered. Reich promoted a free culture of nudity and sexuality, masturbation as well as free peer child and adolescent sexual activity. His own children went to schools that practiced this literally - the children were allowed to follow their drives as they pleased. Many years later Reich's daughter would write about how uncomfortable it was that there was no potty training and that the children walked around nude, some of them leaving little brown packages behind themselves! The fact that such schools existed in Berlin at the time, and later the infamous Summerhill in the United Kingdom, shows just how much this thinking had caught the hearts of large parts of society.
The communist party and Reich
Initially, Reich was welcome into the communist party. He was welcome because of his radical alternative views which attracted the youth. His equating freeing sexuality from conditioning with freeing society from fascism fitted party lines well. He taught that in order for society to be healthy, society needed freedom from repression of all kinds including from a repressed sexuality. After initially being a huge draw card for attracting the youth into the movement, he was later thrown out of the communist party because of the same radical views about sexuality. It appears to have gotten too much for them and in addition, he was attracting a strong following of youth and this threatened the party.
Exile
Finally Reich had to leave Germany, the result of being a Jewish, a communist and such a loud propagator of free sex, made him perfect prey for the Nazis.
But Reich was to subsequently became a kind of "superstar" in the freedom movement (free love, free sex and free drugs) of the 1950s and 1960s. The term "sexual revolution" was in fact coined by Reich.
After much coming and going between Germany (he returned a couple of times incognito to collect belongings or visit his children), Denmark, Sweden and France, in what proved to be an extremely painful period for him, he finally ended up in the USA. Most of his friends rejected him and only a few stood by him as he struggled to find a country that would take him into exile. Both Denmark and Sweden refused. He was in good company in the United States, many of Europe's top Jewish thinkers ended up there.
He already arrived as a very welcome guest. Freud's 1909 visit to the United States at the invitation of Clark University where he held a number of lectures, paved the way for Reich and a few others who believed in Reich's brilliance. On arrival they were met at the docks by peers who could hardly wait to have him on American soil.
Reich's fame for being a misfit traveled before him. In America it seemed, one could be a misfit - at least for a while. There was a growing community of men and women who thought and lived differently to the status quo.
Reich and the United States of America
Thus it was in the United States that Reich finally, not only found recognition for his theories, but in certain circles was almost worshiped as the messenger of sexual freedom and non-conformist politics. Again it was the youth that he appealed to. He was in the right place at the right time - America's youth were ready for his theories about orgasm and free sexuality. The fact that he equated sexual freedom to political freedom and vice versa, put him on the map for all times to come.
He rose to fame as one of the leaders of the hippie free love movement that had already begun to sweep through the country in the 1940s through to the late 1960s and early 1970s, taking also the United Kingdom and Europe by storm and reaching significant world wide following. Reich fitted in perfectly with the Zeitgeist of the time and became a kind of superstar.
Zeitgeist
The Zeitgeist prevalent in the United States and into which Reich arrived, had built up over a number of years owing to a number of important events and developments at the time. Some of which are:
- the pill had been discovered in the fifties which allowed for a sexual freedom unknown before, particularly with regards to women, releasing them from the fear of pregnancy and allowing them to experiment with their sexuality as men had been doing all along;
- rock and roll and Elvis Presley paved the way for a huge surge of breaking away from norms of the day by the youth;
- the Vietnam war grasped the hearts of the USA's youth, who no longer felt patriarchal about their country in view of the damage caused, resulting in a politicising of everything dear to a generation, including their music;
- the hippie movement of the sixties followed with the idea of free love, and sexual exploration as well as the exploration of natural and chemical substances to promote altered mental states which were claimed to further personal development;
- finally, the downfall of that very movement. The Vietnam war was over and the experimental use of LSD (which was initially legally available), Marijuana, Magic Mushrooms etc., led to an excessive use of drugs and drug addiction. The anarchical, communities and communal way of life of the hippies finally had to give way to the fact that individuals needed to finance themselves and the families they had produced. This resulted in more middle of the road lifestyles;
- throughout all this, growing criticism of main stream religious systems led to disillusionment in the western religious beliefs and ethics;
- led by George Harrison, the Beatles had very publicly visited India to the eastern mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (founder of Transcendental Meditation) at his ashram in Rakish, India. This resulted in a surge of interest in the west in interest in eastern mystic teachings, mediation and yoga.
- the hippy movement finally ran out of momentum, Many were disillusioned but found themselves unable to return to main-stream thinking and society. Or if they did, it was because a living had to be made in order to finance the upbringing of children. Left with a void and looking for meaning, there seems to have been a general turning to eastern mystic practices and teachings in an attempt to find answers and look for meaning,
Osho
Just like Reich, Osho was in the right place at the right time. Embracing humanity as the vehicle to the spiritual, his teaching caught the spirit of what a generation of individuals were now seeking. Nothing need be avoided, everything could be included - so also desire and sexuality. Osho was also politically outspoken, criticising socialism, Gandhi, religion and just about everything about anything status quo. He emphasised the importance of meditation and awareness and love but also of celebrating life, love and sexuality, of creativity, courage and humor. He told those who listened not to take things too seriously, and instead to be and feel light and okay with whoever they were and to be joyous.
His idea was that freedom became negated, even suppressed by adherence to an un-free society, by obedience to politics that one did not believe in, by religious indoctrination and the conditioning of upbringing, education and society in general. The path to happiness, to freedom was to free oneself from all that inhibited a full expression of a joy and almost lust for life itself and an appreciation and love of everything physical. Spirituality was attained, and indeed consciousness through almost any human activity. At last, a generation of young adults felt understood.
When one looks at both Osho and Reich, their thinking is astoundingly similar. Each one of them in their own way caught the Zeitgeist of a generation and made their mark on whatever was to come. If Freud paved the way for Reich, so did Reich pave the way for Osho. People were now ready in large numbers for any teaching about freeing up sexuality and particularly when this teaching was also politically critical.
I welcome comments...
Namaste
Ma Anand Leandra.
To be continued next month..."Osho's tantric teachings and Neo-Tantra"
