Religion
Claudio was born Jewish, was raised as a Christian and took a personal interest in all religions, being appreciative of spiritual truth beyond its various languages and symbolic systems. Though he once taught comparative religion at the California Institute of Asian studies (now turned into the CIIS) he has written about religion mostly in contextual ways, when speaking of different features of spiritual development, life and experience. An exception has been the last section of The Way of Silence and The Talking Cure, where his descriptions of meditative approaches in the different traditions is prefaced with some broad consideration on historical and sociological aspects of the religion in question. Another exception was his recent talk at the 2004 meeting of the "World Parliament of Religions", where he emphasized the patriarchal contamination of religion in the Western world and the need to bring the voice of psychotherapy into the arenas of both spiritual training and ecumenical spiritual discourse. A third, a series of papers on Tibetan Buddhism that appeared in Gesar Magazine - a publication of Dharma Press, and another the talk Spirituality in the Third Millennium, invited by Pater Willigis Jaeger at Benediktushof, in Germany.
Since The One Quest, On the Psychology of Meditation and other books, Claudio has sought to put forth a universal perspective that rises above sectarianism, notwithstanding his appreciation of the preciousness of all forms of spiritual teaching. Also in his life and teaching activity, as in his books, he has been integrative and anti-dogmatic.
The Tantric Shamanism of Claudio Naranjo from the book Esalen by J. Kirpal |