Talk:"God Is Not Great" is not great
Doofus, kudos for this page, this deconstructs Hitchens' sleight of hand even more. Some thoughts.
What came up for me reading it is how central "catharsis" is in Osho's work. Question: could we do that even more justice by mentioning Dynamic meditation as an ongoing individual cathartic therapy / meditation.
Might it be stronger, to change
- ... that all expressions of sex and violence are just fodder ...
into
- ... that all these forms of catharsis are just fodder ...
Then at the end of that cell could be added something like:
- Incidentally catharsis did play an important role in Osho's work from the very early days, when he designed "Dynamic meditation", an active, cathartic meditation that is done completely individually, and that is still arguably his most important active meditation technique. These days, it is used all over the world, also outside the world of sannyasins. See e.g. this website about Dynamic meditation.
All this to stress the essence of the cathartic element. Feel entirely free to do something with it or leave it.
I also like your idea to have a page Groups. It is great that we already have ;-) Category:Osho's_Meditations and it would be nice to also have a page specifically for Dynamic Meditation etc.
Coming to think of Groups, would it not be better to have your whole piece on Therapy Groups moved there? Reading it again now, I wonder if this piece (I mean the piece outside the table) adds anything essential to your critique of Hitchens. It feels a bit overdone, or pearls before swine.
Then about that dharshan: Hitchens, in his book, actually talks about "early-morning dharshan". Those meetings, at 8 am, afaik, were never called darshan, but locally known as 'discourse' or 'morning lecture'. "Darshan" was certainly happening, often daily, and that was at 7 pm. --Sugit (talk) 19:02, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
Much more could be said about catharsis but i didn't feel to here because the context of "expressions of sex and violence" was Hitch's sensationalism, and it was that that i wanted to address. In that connection, i noted catharsis but did not elaborate on it. I certainly could have avoided elaborating so much on therapy groups, but that seemed more to the point here than catharsis.
I agree that eventually that extra bit on groups could go (adapted) into a general page on groups or a particular page on heavy cathartic groups but for now we have nothing else and i can't see anything like it arising anytime soon, and it IS germane here, so i would prefer to leave it until the topic is covered better elsewhere and this page can just link to it.
About your point re "early-morning dharshan", i had overlooked the "early-morning" aspect of it, you're quite right. So wherever Hitchens got these notions, they are ever-more shoddy research. I'll add "early-morning" to the analysis. -- doofus-9 21:53, 31 May 2018 (UTC)
