Liberation of Man
Liberation of Man
A Study of Marx, Freud and Osho
(Muhammad Saeed Akhter)
My recent interest in Osho, I may say, inspired me to brows through the pages of history to dig out the concepts, of the three great men of the 20th century, about Liberation of Man, who came up with some original thoughts to change the already cherished ideas. It proved to be the catalytic ideas and had the capabilities to shake the whole facade of once scared believes. A blasphemous blow to wrong notions that just helped to promote hatred, intolerance and bigotry for others view point and promoted tyrannous man. Reading Swami Brahmeshananda, who discussed in detail The Nature of Man according to Hinduism, was a feast for me. Swami Brahmeshananda is a senior monk of the Ramakrishna Mission, a world-wide religio-spiritual Hindu organization, founded by Sri Ramakrishna, a great man of God, and his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda who preached the philosophy of Vedas (Vedanta) all over the world. Swami Brahmeshananda has been trained as a medical doctor and has served the sick people considering them as God for more than two decades in the hospital of the Ramakrishna Mission in Varanasi, India. At present he is the editor of the Ramakrishna Mission's English monthly journal, Vedanta Kesari. He has written four books on religious and philosophical subjects. According to Swami Vivekananda, the greatest exponent of the philosophy of the Vedas, which is also called Vedanta, man is Divine. By defining the concept of dharma (which is restraint by moral rules) without dharma men are no better than beasts.' According to Shankaracharya in Hinduism Dharma is of two types: pravritti-lakshana and nivritti-lakshana. When one, observing the moral codes of conduct applicable to one's station in life and society performs actions for enjoyment (kama) and acquisition of wealth (artha), one is said to be following pravritti dharma. A time comes, however, when one gets disgusted with sense-enjoyments and acquisition of wealth and aspires for final emancipation (moksha). The one embraces what is called nivritti dharma, characterized by renunciation of all worldly desires and selfish actions, and resorting to spiritual practice to attain liberation. Man rises from animal to human level by accepting pravritti dharma i.e. by observing social injunctions. He ascends to godhead and becomes divine by embracing the nivritti dharma. This Hindu concept of liberation, in turn, is based upon another concept of an ever pure, ever free, ever perfect, ever conscious spiritual entity in man called Atman. According to Swami Vivekananda this Atman is the Real Man as against the body-mind complex which is only the apparent man. The Hindus have further elaborated this concept by stating that the real man or Atman is conscious, ever free, blissful and immortal. The apparent man consists of five sheaths which cover the soul or atman. These are (1) the physical body or the physical sheath, (2) the vital sheath or the sheath life forces, (3) the mental sheath (4) the ego sheaths, and (5) the Blissful sheath. According to another concept, the real man or the conscious soul or Atman has three bodies: (1) the gross physical body, (2) the subtle mental body and (3) the causal body which is made up of pure ignorance. At the time of death, the physical body dies, but the subtle mental body and the causal body remain and together with the conscious soul or real man, transmigrate to another physical body to be born again.
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Swami Vivekananda laid the greatest stress, in his message, on the divinity of man because he knew men are divine, and since truth liberates, the only way to be free was to perceive the truth of one's divinity. Secondly, we tend to think and act according to our concept of ourselves. This has profound practical, psychological and social implications. "The concepts of man as a sexual, economic, tool-making or social animal may be useful to individual or society to a certain extent, but they are restrictive. If we consider ourselves sexual animals, as Freud wants us to believe, sexual shall we become. If we believe we are economically driven machines, we shall run after money. If we think we are social animals, we shall become slaves of society. But if we consider ourselves ever free, blissful divinities, we shall enjoy freedom and bliss."(Source www.sriramakrishnamath.org) Swami's interpretation of Freud and Marx needs in-depth study to reach any conclusion. I personally don't agree with his suggestions of the above mentioned personalities. It shows the inchoate study of Swami or somewhat deliberate effort to prove the concept of man in Hinduism matured and convincing.
The nafs is a sea of calm until it roars.
The nafs is a Hell that radiates little heat.
The nafs is an ankle-deep river you drown in.
Better to be ignorant of worldly concerns,
better to be mad and flee from self-interest,
better to drink poison and spill the water of life,
better to revile those who praise you,
and lend both the capital and the interest to
the poor, forgo safety and make a home in danger.
Sacrifice your reputation and become notorious.
I have tried caution and forethought;
from now on I will make myself mad.
Rumi
In Sufi mysticism, the "nafs" is the word for the "ego-self," that awareness of oneself as separate from others and God. Rumi, as presented by Helminski (1998), writes as if there are two kinds of madness which should be distinguished. When Rumi writes that he will, from now on, make himself "mad," he means that his madness will take the form of "the freedom from all self-seeking pursuits" (Helminski, 1998, p. 10). It should be made clear here that madness of Rumi's is not of psychopathology, rather Brent Dean Robbins, of Duquesne University defines it , "here madness is perhaps one form of liberation. Yet this madness seems so different from the madness from which we suffer. Rumi writes that, entering madness, he abandons, "cautiousness and forethought" but, to me, another way to talk about that is "play." It is no surprise to me that madness is seen as a form of "regression" to childhood. Childhood is that period in development prior to the establishment of identity -- of that separate self or "nafs" to which, in time, we come to feel so protective. Rather, the child exists in a syncretic union with the world and others. There is, as yet, no separate self. On the other hand, our inability to distinguish the child from the madman and the madman from the mystic, to me, speaks to the poetic quality of all these experiences which exist in a world beyond convention. On a deeper level, we intuitively realize that these experiences are not identical, yet they share similar qualities. From the perspective of the rational, post-operational ADULTHOOD. Brent Dean Robbins) . Madness as "psychopathology"(MADNESS & LIBERATION-- THE MAGIC OF FAIRY TALES & THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN " can go either way -- it can be an exaggeration of the ego-self at its extreme or it can be a loss of ego. In this sense, "psychopathology" is understood as the "logos" of the "pathos," the "structures of suffering" (Barton, 1998). Tentatively, we can say that the child is a pre-storied, pre-ego existence; the madness of 'regression' is a return to a pre-storied, pre-ego existence in such a way that one suffers; the madness of an 'exaggeration' of the self is the grasping of the ego of the "cultural action system" such that one suffers; and the madness of liberation is a kind of freedom from the grasping of the ego-self or "nafs" which Rumi seeks. The madness of liberation, therefore, is the existence which corresponds to the mystic, shaman, saint, artistic genius, etc. -- all those apparently mad forms of existence which are an urge toward liberation and creation rather than suffering and destruction."
The extracts of response of Osho: "Enjoy the poetry of Rumi-But Don't Stop There" , to US.Coleman Barks, the translator of collection of Rumi's work, brings out a new out-look of Maulana Rumi. Coleman asked Osho , "Rumi said, "I want burning,burning..What is that burning? Shams(Rumi's spiritual guide ) said "I am fire"What do the burning and the fire have to do with my own enlightenment?"
Osho responds: You have asked a very dangerous question because burning has nothing to do with your enlightenment. On the path of enlightenment there is no question of burning .But because you are in love with Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi... I also love the man. But you have to understand that Sufism still depends on a hypothetical God. It is not free from the hypothesis of God. And particularly Sufism has the concept of God as a woman. Love is their method ? love God as totally as possible. Now you are loving an impossible hypothesis, and totality is asked. You will feel the same kind of burning, in a more intensive way, as lovers feel on a smaller scale.
Lovers feel a certain burning in their hearts. A deep longing and desire to meet with the beloved creates that burning. To love God is bound to create a very great fire in you. You will be on fire because you have chosen as your love object something impossible. You will have to weep and cry, and you will have to pray, and you will have to fast, and your mind has to continuously repeat and remember the beloved. The mind has the capacity to imagine anything and also has the capacity to hypnotize itself. After long repetition you can even see God, just the way you imagined. It is a by-product of your mind. It will make you very happy, you will dance with joy. I have been with Sufis and I have loved those people. But they are still one step away from being a Buddha. Even though their poetry is beautiful ? it has to be, because it is coming out of their love ? their experience is a hallucination created by their own mind. In Sufism, mind is stretched to the point that you become almost mad for the beloved. Those days of separation from the beloved create the sensation of burning.
On the path of dhyan, or Zen, there is no burning at all because there is no hypothesis, no God. And it is not a question of love. A man of Zen is very loving, but he has not practiced love; it has come as a by-product of his realization. He has simply realized his own buddhahood. There is no question of another, a God somewhere else in heaven. He has simply reached his own center of life, and being there he explodes into love, into compassion. His love comes after his enlightenment, it is not a method for enlightenment.
But for Sufis, love is the method. Because love is the method, it remains part of the mind. The effort on the path of Zen is to go beyond mind, to attain no-mind, to be utterly empty of all thoughts, love included. Zen is the path of emptiness ? no God, no love, nothing is to be allowed; just a pure nothingness in which you also disappear.
Who is there to feel the burning?
Who is there to feel the fire?
So although I love Sufis... I don't want, Coleman, to hurt your feelings, but I would certainly say that you will have one day to change from Sufis to Zen. Then Osho gives his idea of New Man. That's what I teach: homo novus, a new man, not a humanoid. The humanoid is not a natural phenomenon. The humanoid is created by the society - by the priest, the politician, the pedagogue. The humanoid is created, it is manufactured. Each child comes as a human being - total, whole, alive, without any split. Immediately the society starts suffocating him, stifling him, cutting him into fragments.. The humanoid is a slave.I teach freedom. New man has to destroy all kinds of bondage and he has to come out of all prisons - no more slavery. Man has to become individual. He has to become rebellious. And whenever a man has become rebellious.... Once in a while a few people have escaped from the tyranny of the past, but only once in a while - a Jesus here and there, a Buddha here and there. They are exceptions. And even these people, Buddha and Jesus, could not live totally. They tried, but the whole society was against it.
My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha. The new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and spiritual - physical, utterly physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible, and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. He will be Christ and Epicurus together. The old man's ideal was renunciation, the new man's ideal will be rejoicing. I teach a new religion. This religion will not be Christianity and will not be Judaism and will not be Hinduism. This religion will not have any adjective to it. This religion will be purely a religious quality of being whole."
Our discussion has found its footing stone and we will try to understand two of Osho's assertions, given below
1- The new man will accept his totality and he will live it without any inner division, he will not be split
2- He will not choose: he will be choicelessly himself.
The first statement reminds us of a great man of 20th century Freud. But before assessing this statement with Freud I would like to suggest here that Freud never asserted that a man would ever be able to shun off duality and will be able to live in his totality. He provided us the reasons, which are the sound reasons, of the split personality. He believed that only primitive man could be called healthy. He satisfies all his instinctual demands with need for repression, frustration, or sublimation. But when Freud elaborates his clinical examination of contemporary man, this picture of primitive mental health hardly comes at surface. Freud has the parameters to suggest what constitutes mental health. His evolutionary theory has two main aspects: the evolution of the libido, and the evolution of man's relations to others. To Freud the libido (the energy of sexual derives) undergoes a development. It is at first centered around the oral activity of the child----sucking and biting---and later around the anal activities. (I do not feel essential here to provide you in detail study of his vocabulary, since most of my readers are already aquatinted with it.)
For Freud the healthy person is one who has reached the genital level without regressing, and who lives an adult existence, that is the existence in which he can work and have adequate sexual satisfaction. The other aspect of the healthy person lies in the sphere of his object relations. The newborn baby has not yet any object relations, it is in the state of primary narcissism. In which the only realities are his own bodily and mental experience. Child's first attachment is towards his mother and then the fear of castration switches over his allegiance from mother to father. He also identifies with his father by incorporating his commands and prohibitions. This is his independence from his father and mother and the healthy person to Freud is the person who reaches the genital level and becomes his own master, independent of mother and father, relying on his own reasons and on his own strength. Erich Fromm suggests that Freud's concepts are not clear and lack precision about the mental health. It is actually the concept of a well functioning member of the middle class at the beginning of the 20th century, who is sexually and economically potent.
"A new man, not a humanoid. The humanoid is not a natural phenomenon. The humanoid is created by the society - by the priest, the politician, the pedagogue. The humanoid is created, it is manufactured. Each child comes as a human being - total, whole, alive, without any split." It is an interesting study , the words of Osho reverberates Freud's. Let us see what does Marx says about the healthy man. Though Marx's concept coincides with Freud that is independence. But Marx comes up with a humanistic concept of the independence. Freud's independence is a limited one; the son makes himself independent by incorporating his system of commands and prohibitions. Erich Fromm says, "For Marx independence and freedom are rooted in the act of self-creation. "A being", Marx wrote, "does not regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favour of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live completely by another person's favour when I owe to him not only the continuance of my life but also its creation, when he is its source. My life has necessarily such a cause outside itself it is not my own creation."(ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS.) Or, as Marx puts it, man is independent only ".if he affirms his individuality as a total man in each of his relations to the world, willing, loving--- in short, if he affirms and expresses all organs of his individuality"-if he is not free from but also free to. For Marx, freedom and independence were not merely political and economic freedom in the sense of liberalism, but the positive realization of individuality. Marx further says in ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL MANUSCRIPTS.,[This crude communism] appears in a double form; the domination of material property looms so large that it aims to destroy everything which is incapable of being possessed by every one as private property. It wishes to eliminate talent, etc., by force. Immediate physical possessions seem to it the unique goal of life and existence. The role of worker is not abolished but is extended to all men. (For cross reference; Russell's essay In Praise Of Idleness) The relation of private property remains the relation of community to the world of things. Finally, this tendency to oppose general private property to private property is expressed in animal form; marriage (which is incontestably a form of exclusive private property) is contrasted with the community of women, (Marx refers here to speculations among certain eccentric communist thinkers of his time who thought that if every thing is common property women, should be, too.---Erich Fromm) in which women become communal and common property. One may say that that this idea of the community of women is the open secret of this entirely crude and unreflective communism. Just as women are to pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth (i.e., the objective being of man) is to pass to the relation of universal prostitution with the community. This communism which negates the personality of man in every sphere, is the only logical expression of private property, which is this negation. Universal envy setting itself up as a power is only a camouflaged form of cupidity which re-established itself and satisfies itself in a different way. The thoughts of every individual private property are at least directed against any wealthier private property, in the form of envy and the desire to reduce everything to a common level.(here I would request my readers to concentrate on this passage since I have read Russell saying that the concept of communism is the off shoot of envy with the wealthier neighbour and moreover , Toyenbe and Akeda had almost misinterpreted Marx , when they said that it was an out dated idea because the concept of the Preliterate and the usurper had vanished from the scene after industerlization and with the power of the multinationals, actually all these worthy people were unable to realize, I think, the traits of the social character which is influenced by private property) so that this envy and leveling in fact constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only the culmination of such envy and leveling-down on the basis of preconceived minimum. How little the abolition of private property represents a genuine appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the whole world of culture and civilization, and the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless individual who had not surpassed private property but has not yet even attained to it. The community is only a community of work and of equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, The two sides of the relations are raised to a supposed universality; labour as condition in which every one is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.
Frued's independent man has emancipated himself from the dependence of mother; Marx independent man emancipited himself from the dependence of nature.(Fromm)The free man to Marx is the active,relatedand productive man. Only the free and productive man , united to his fallow men, can give thev right answer to man'' existence., Marx concept of man was a dynamic one. Human passion is , hhe says, "the essential power of man striving energetically for its object."
Marx says , "The eye has become human eye when its object has become human, social object, created by man and destined for him. The senses have therefore become directly theoreticians in practice. They relate themselves to the things for the sake of the things, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man vice versa. Need and enjoyment have thus lost their egoistic character, and nature has lost its mere utilityby the fact that its utilization has become human utilization. (In practice I can only relate myself in a human way to a thing when the thing is related in a human way to man. Let us assume man to be man , and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. you wish to enjoy art you must be artistically cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune."
Fromm says that then the fully developed, and thus a healthy man, is the productive man, the man who is genuinely interested in the world, responding to it; he is the rich man, Marx paints the picture of man under the system of capitalism. "The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people"
Profile of the contributor
Muhammad Saeed Akhter
Lecturer in English,
Department of English,
Govt.College D.G.Khan
E-mail: hindal123@yahoo.com, abdal23@hotmail.com.
M.A.(Eng.) Islamia University Bahawalpur(1986-88)
Research:
(A) Hamlets Dilemma.
(B) Liberation of Man (A Study of Marx, Freud and Osho)
( C ) The Traces of Rumis poetry in the poetry of John Donne.
Creative Writings:
Frequent contributor of the short stories to the monthly AFKAR (Karachi) and to the Funoon (Lahore).
Trying to get my novel A Bristle Man(English Novel) published from the Random House Australia.BY:Muhammad Saeed Akhter
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