Primal (group)

Primal was a fourteen-day Pune One therapy group led by Divya. The group first started in Aug 1975, one of the first two groups to be offered, and it continued to be offered, as far as we know, until Jun 1981, when Osho left for the States, and possibly a little afterward. The Community to Provoke God brochure gave this as a brief description:

Primal Therapy, originated in the USA by Dr. Arthur Janov, is based on the psychological discovery that each person's behaviour is a result of childhood conditioning. The 14 day group creates a safe environment in which the root causes of the personality originating in early childhood traumas can be re-experienced and resolved. Highly structured, with all normal escapes such as social conversation, cigarettes, rich food, escapist literature and stimulants denied, submerged feelings and anxieties start surfacing and can be released and accepted.

Maneesha wrote about Primal in a Darshan Diary, Hammer on the Rock, in the entry for Dec 29 (1975). Some structural details are different from the brochure's account, likely reflecting an evolution of the group:

The Primal Therapy group, halfway through the fifteen days of their therapy, were at darshan.

The course actually consists of a total of twenty-five days which includes the ten days of the camp. For the last two days of the camp, members of the group maintain silence and remain in isolation (except of course during the meditations). This continues for the remainder of the group.

The entire period is intended to be a meditation, with each thought and activity being observed and brought into the sessions. Individual and group meditations are given as is felt appropriate. Through the process one is helped to remember, or relive, one's past. This reliving is linked with body feelings and sensations. One is taught to unify the body and the mind to form an integrated experience of oneself.

Bhagwan has described it as not so much a therapy as a situation where people can let go into their fears and madnesses, their obsessions and secret hankerings, in a safe and protected environment and where help can be given to see beyond them.

A month later, in Above All, Don't Wobble's groups list, Primal is described as a twenty-one day course. The evolution has begun! Then, in Be Realistic: Plan for a Miracle (Mar 15 1976), she writes:

Bhagwan has said that the Primal group is to create a situation where people can let go of their fears and madness, their obsessions and secret desires, in a safe and protected environment, where help can be offered to see beyond. One can take the jump into the unknown into one's buddha-self, from any point in consciousness.

In Primal, the door is feeling; subjectivity as experienced through the child within and the acknowledgement of this child within the adult.

The actual moment of integration between child and adult, body and mind, personality and being, is called a "primal". Primals are usually, though not always, accompanied by convulsive catharsis.

The course consists of the ten camp days, with the last two days in silence, and then for fifteen days after, there are morning and afternoon sessions, under the supervision of four sannyasins training under a Janov-trained therapist.

Anam, who co-led the Primal group which was present tonight, said that he felt he was absorbing too much energy from other people and was there anything one could do to prevent this?

Osho replies:

Just do one thing. During the day, in the group, look at least ten or fifteen times to see whether your stomach is relaxed or tense. If it is tense, relax it -- just the stomach.

If it is tense you collect any energy that is around, and it is dangerous, because these groups release so much negative energy. They are meant to do that, and people who are releasing it will not be affected, but leaders will be if they are not relaxed. So if you see that the stomach is tense, relax the belly and breathe by it. Make it a habit by and by that you don't breathe by the chest but by the belly.

There are very many false notions about breathing, and almost all over the world, people have started breathing by the chest. Breathing by the belly relaxes your whole being -- your psyche and soma, both -- and society does not allow a relaxed being. He will be spontaneous, and he will move moment to moment. You cannot enforce rules on him. He cannot be regulated, regimented, manipulated. He will be like a child -- and you cannot regiment a child. The moment you succeed in regimenting a child, he is dead.

Further evolution was found in the next excerpt, from Passion for the Impossible (Sep 6 1976):

The Primal therapy group -- a process that takes people back to their childhood to re-experience traumas suffered there which have become the basis for blocks and neuroses in their adulthood -- had recently undergone a change in its format.

Bhagwan asked Anam, one of the leaders, how he felt about the new method in which the three therapists worked with three or four participants each, and then all met and worked as a group.

ANAM: "It took a long time to get going. We had to integrate a lot of things we had learned from Purnananda with what we had been doing. I feel that in the last few days things really started to happen".

"It took a long time for the group to gel, to become a group and to work".

BHAGWAN: "How do you feel the new way worked with the group?"

ANAM: "It varied from person to person. It was mainly focusing on the individual, whereas before we tended to put a lot of pressure on the group all the time. This time the pressure wasn't coming from us so much as letting the pressure build up in the people.

Sometimes that was released out of the group, through people not following the minimum structure. Before we had had a lot of rules and this time we eliminated all that, and threw off the whole structure.

Bhagwan asked Purna, another leader, how she had felt about the new system. She said it was more like psychoanalysis than group therapy, and that if it hadn't done anything else, it had stirred up the leaders! She said she preferred the former method, but felt if they were to return to it, it would be somewhat different now.

BHAGWAN: "So let me talk to the group, then I will see. Let me see how things moved".

Osho's words above are not recorded in the CD-ROM. And in the event, the direction for the next Primal group was not reported in Passion.

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