Meditation
Though as a seeker Claudio was a disciple of a wide array of meditation teachers from different cultures, he has specifically taught Buddhist meditation, which is part of the SAT curriculum throughout its three modules, which include introductions to Vipassana, Zazen and Tibetan Nyingma practices. Yet in his teaching practice Claudio has supplemented traditional meditation with extensions of meditation to the relational situation, exploring interpersonal extensions of Vipassana, Zazen and mind-inquiry (as illustrated by his demonstration at the Toledo Symposium in Man, the transcript of which is now included in The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure.
Claudio has not only been a pioneer in bringing in meditation into psychotherapy, advocating the view of meditation and psychotherapy as a desirable complementarity, but has reflected on the interphase between both domains and formulated a theory of meditation as a multi-faceted domain.
In his early book On the Psychology of Meditation, written in collaboration with Robert Ornstein, which was in print for many years (first under Viking and then Penguin Books) he proposed a distinction between an "Apollonian Way" involving mainly concentration, a "Dionysian" aspect involving surrender, and a "Way of Nothingness". Recently he has shown the congruence between the domain of meditation and the enneagram, showing that meditation involves six ostensive facets and three "hidden roots", in terms of which we may understand the deeper spiritual attainment - when the realization of spiritual truth becomes more important than mental exercises, and meditation becomes non-meditation.
Filmed by Louis Edelsheim - Berkeley: January 2002
07 minutes, 09 seconds