Claudio Naranjo’s legacy in the world of personal development and spirituality continues to bring together experts from all over the world interested in the development of consciousness at the individual and community level. This is what will happen these days in the Conciencia en Comunidad Congress, between June 9 and 11, 2023, that you have chosen as your motto “the spirit of service in an uncertain world”.
The event, organized by the Claudio Naranjo Foundation and Ediciones La Llave, is aimed at anyone who is asking questions and looking for answers, and will bring together many influential names from various areas of contemporary thought, philosophy and spirituality. The aim is to invite reflection on the need to create communities as a form of cultural resistance and a way to humanize society, and puts its accent on service to people as a form of fulfillment and personal development.
This was one of the central ideas of the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, a pioneer of transperson psychology and an indisputable reference to Gestalt who died in 2019.
The writer and editor David Barba interviewed him after the publication of his famous book The patriarchal mind. We reproduce the interview here.
Interview with Claudio Naranjo
By David Beard
Claudio Naranjo was a disciple of teachers such as Fritz Perls or Swami Muktananda and became a key figure in the integration between Western psychology and Eastern spiritual traditions. A prolific author, he warned in his books and conferences of the danger of seeking happiness on the path of success and subordination to profit.
In The patriarchal mindClaudio Naranjo analyzes and dismantles the foundations of our patriarchal society. According to the author, the unbalanced exaltation of some masculine traits such as competitiveness, aggressiveness and dominance of intellect on solidarity affectivity are the main factors that They threaten to destroy us.
– How can we leave behind the present darkness?
– With patience. Saint John of the Cross wrote Dark night as a manual for apprentices, so they would know that darkness is only a stage on the road. Fritjof Capra says that, at this crucial time, the first and most important transition may be due to the fall of patriarchy. At the decline, the darkness becomes unbearable and we are left with only the faith that darkness always precedes enlightenment.
– So, is there hope?
– Edgar Morin once told me that a favorable factor for civilization to be saved is, paradoxically, “the great danger” that it faces… The best way to transform the world is a change in education. Only an education based on self-knowledge and love will be able to give birth to more conscious human beings.
– It seems difficult in a world full of cynicism and competitiveness…
– The good news is that we are realizing that the problem is patriarchal civilization. For thousands of years we have praised it, but now it has become dangerously obsolete. So, to put this crisis behind us, we must question the concept of civilization. In addition, the various neuroses that afflict people are nothing more than adaptive responses to the aggressions of the patriarchal society: the evils of the world are the evils of the soul, so that authoritarianism, the herd spirit, exploitation, greed, corruption… are a social amplification of our internal conflicts.
– Do we live in a civilization unaware of its madness?
– What we consider our civilized condition is a barbarity greater than that of those whom we call barbarians.
“We exalt scientific and technological progress, but what if we judged our civilization according to qualities such as benevolence, the ability to coexist peacefully, or openness to the spiritual dimension of life?”
– What can we do to change our civilization?
– In Change the education to change the world I defended that education should be a space for the development of complete and harmonious people instead of being devoted to instruction. Thus, it robs both educators and students of the opportunity to heal, evolve and discover a true life. But we cannot create a new education if the trainers focus on instilling information and do not develop skills to train human beings.
– Your proposal for education consists of exploring a virtue without moralisms. It’s possible?
– Moralism is secretly immoral: it despises to dominate and, moreover, it becomes a disease when we turn it against ourselves. On the other hand, the virtuous condition is one in which the acts are good because one is well. And to be well, we need to integrate the three loves: eros and joy, tenderness and compassion, and the devotion of admiring love. These three loves correspond to our three brains or centers: the cure for the ills of the soul and the world consists of integrating mind, emotion and instinct.
– Its formula has another ingredient: neutralizing factor.
– Education in love has to be accompanied by education in detachment, which is that neutralizing factor. Thus, we will prevent one of the three centers from tyrannizing the others. There is a tyranny of instinct, of false love and false devotion. All forms of love can degrade. And we observe this in the world: attachment to pleasure, feigned kindness, compulsive respect… these are ways of life in which happiness, compassion and a sense of the sacred are scarce.
– Faced with this degradation, how to access true love?
– Undoing our lies. There is a false devotion to ideals: patriotism, for example, is a kind of cultural obligation; and the commodification of sex: if there were sexual freedom, there would be no pornography. In reality, sexual intensity doesn’t get you very far: eros is most satisfying when combined with devotion and we fall in love.
– We don’t usually love ourselves either…
– Selfishness has nothing to do with self-love, rather it is a patch to cover the emptiness of not feeling one’s own existence. We don’t even accept each other. Lao Tzu says that when natural harmony was lost, laws arose. But the laws are distortions of a primary experience of original virtue, of obedience to oneself, an obedience that connects us with divinity.
– What advice would you give to someone starting to look for themselves?
– Look at your heart. This does not mean dwelling on feelings, but going further: getting to the bottom of yourself. Having contact with one’s own depth is having contact with the divine and, for this, it is necessary to have a thirst for search. That thirst is a way of filling up. Thirst is transformed into devotion, and thus the path is made. The seeking spirit is the root of all possible change: without it, we are lost.