Why fighting obsessive thoughts is useless? And why exactly does meditation help us break out of the vicious circle of anxiety and worry? The answer is in a short cartoon and comments by the famous psychotherapist Claudio Naranjo.
Why do we meditate, why do we pacify our thoughts that overwhelm us like annoying flies, and strive to achieve a state of “no mind”, pure consciousness?
The outstanding Chilean psychotherapist Claudio Naranjo, using, however, different images than the authors of the cartoon, talks about it like this *: into the darkness to catch the glitter of the stars; to stay for a long time where there is nothing on the surface, in the void, until, as Fritz Perls so aptly put it, «the barren void becomes fruitful.»
- Zen serenity: how to keep it?
We live with the fear of the void, trying to fill it with compulsions, our attachment to the ego — because we can’t stand the void. So it takes a lot of exercise or anti-exercise to endure this emptiness in life and meditation until it suddenly changes valence, until the person changes in the direction of being more open to flow, something that we could call being, although emptiness cannot be called in no other words, it is a mystery, not a thought.”
* K. Naranjo «Change education to change the world» (Klass, 2014).
**F. Perls is the founder of Gestalt Therapy, teacher Claudio Naranjo.