Kul Bhushan writes on the beast inside of man.
Most of the time, it lies dormant deep inside your being. When you are disturbed, provoked, annoyed, offended or insulted, it rises up. Even without these external punctures, it wakes up when your ego is hurt.
Once awakened, it soon becomes a monster out of control. As it awakens, it growls, shouts, screams and swings into a deadly attack mode that can destroy and damage your relationships, friendships and even your mental health.
What is it? The beast inside you. Naaaah! There is no beast inside me, you protest. You are so calm and cool all the time. Really? Whether you are aware or not, there is a beast inside you and indeed all of us. This beast is formed with all the deep rooted rejections, prickly comments, nasty barbs, suppressed anger and untold frustrations that we all carry deep within us. At the slightest needling, it rushes out and attacks uncontrollably.
The beast in man was first highlighted by the famous French novelist, Emile Zola in his classic novel, La Bête Humaine in 1890. The human beast here is a railway engineer who has to tame his engine that runs amok. Zola constantly reminds us that underneath the veneer of education and an accepted moral code of civilized society, the savage beast will always remain. Characteristically, the writer doesn’t shy away from baser human impulses, confronting us with a truth, not always palatable. It is a brutal study of individuals derailed by primal forces beyond their control which, at the close, leaves us questioning our belief in ourselves as civilised human beings.
British author, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote another classic on the same lines called The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in 1886. In this novel, we have one person with two identities: a respectable Dr. Jekyll and his beastly, Mr. Hyde. Here is a case of a split-personality: both the good and the bad, come out. Dr. Jekyll faces horrible consequences when he lets his dark side run wild with a potion that changes him into the animalistic Mr. Hyde.
Both these classic novels, popular to this day, explored the crude, wild, raw nature of man for the first time in literature and both were made into movies. In the last century and even more so in this century the ugly nature of man has become a crucially important subject for mental health.
Osho has made a path-breaking contribution in taming this hidden beast. All of Osho’s active meditations are aimed at catharsis or release of pent up and deep rooted emotions, anger, trauma and disturbances. This happens in the initial stages of these techniques and only after this release you sit or lie down silently to experience the peace beyond your ever ticking mind.
“Scratch the surface a little and the beast emerges from within – and it comes out so violently that one wonders if the person was ever a human being at all,” says Osho.
Now it is up to us to face our inner beast and then decide if we want to tame it and evaporate it with Osho’s meditations. Or else, at any time, it will start growling.
Quote by Osho from And Now and Here, Ch 2, Q 3
First published in Osho World Newsletter
Comments are closed.