The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center may be at work.

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July 1, 2025

Before the last Enneagram International Association Conference in July 2025, Jerome Wagner and Patrick O’Leary, both former Jesuits and pioneers in the Modern Enneagram movement, gave a presentation on their experiences before all the books, before Palmer, before Almas, Sandra Maitri, and Naranjo’s new, Spanish SAT groups. Along with a small cohort of Father Bob Ochs’s first enneagram students, they were the only people who had never signed either a non-disclosure agreement or a pledge of confidentiality, which became the focal point of the lawsuits that followed. This is part of my correspondence with them regarding that early history.

I have neither applied nor would I be admitted to the august halls of high-level Enneagram deliberations, but I will take your emails as an opportunity to sound off on the early days of Enneagram enthusiasm. My perspective is quite different. The “8” in my email address comes from neither 7 nor 9 being available among the addresses Google offered me when Gmail was in beta. So I’ve left it as the impetus of a strong eight-wing to cut through the inertia of a nine. 

I find myself in a very reflective period right now. I have been isolated in Asia for the last seven years, beginning during the COVID-19 lockdown in India, which was extremely restrictive. It continues. For the past two and a half years, I have been in Thailand, leading a solitary, almost monastic life. I did not foresee any of this, but things have a way of happening. I have been reflecting and writing. 

My retreat is not self-directed. Since 1988, I have been a formal Zen student. I work on the koans in a structured way—the whole nine yards, including daily meditation and frequent meetings with my teacher. I’ve tried helter-skelter, but I wind up in lalaland pretty quickly. I started zazen as a confirmed atheist, but as I said, things have a way of happening, and my current teacher is in the same lineage as the Jesuit Zen Master Father Emiyo LaSalle. So when pressed for a faith statement, I call myself a Jesuit agnostic.  Why am I saying any of this? I woke up this morning with a relatively rasa tabula, and I'm tired of watching Trump on YouTube destroy most of what I hold dear about being an American.

You will be addressing a self-selected group of Enneagram enthusiasts. And it’s an off-the-record exchange. Perfect. My views are unvarnished, critical, and extremely grateful. Of course, it is not the only perspective. This is completely off the record, but I’m presenting it to you for your use. I never aspired to teach the Enneagram, but I am now fairly adept at developing the kind of concentration that enables self-observation.  You said you were going to invite people to talk about what has remained part of their practice. The Enneagram, Naranjo, Ochs, and SAT have been an enormous part of what, I suppose, is my spiritual narrative for more than 50 years. And because it is so basic, it remains. Like being a Jesuit.

The first thing that I would say to the assembled host is that not one of them would have an Enneagram job or income without Bob Ochs. Not a one. Hameed and Sandra’s teachers are few, and they are the only Enneagram teachers who do not, in one way or another, trace their lineage to Ochs. The other exception is perhaps a person with a vaguely Sufi name, Laleh Bakhtiar. However, I would still bet that even he or she would not have written a single word or worked with a single student if it were not for what Bob did at considerable personal cost. It was enormous. 

My sources are my recollections of conversations with almost all the early major players, except Ichazo, plus my experience of SAT for the whole time Naranjo taught in Berkeley; I did not miss a meeting in five years. I am a Nine, though I posed as a Seven, and I think I would characterize my participation as “dogged.” I was not one of the stars -- sometimes to my chagrin. Other times I consider it a blessing.

I have maintained close contact with several members of the first, second, and third SAT groups over many years, and we continue to unpack our experiences. I cannot say if Hameed would even remember my being in the group. That’s OK. He’s as boring now that he's become an enlightened being as he was in Group 1. But to begin the list, I was very close to Father Joe Scerbo, a gay Franciscan friar who is now gone; MM; Michael Smith; Glen Lewis, who was in Arica with Caludio; Daniel Shurman; AL, very full of herself; and CD, toitally full oif herself; Claudio and Rosalyn; Catherine Thur. We all talked. Charlie Tart is still a pompous asshole. He didn’t remember me when I reintroduced myself at a talk by his teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, founder of Rigpa, who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. Charlie was too busy congratulating himself and kissing ass to pay me much attention. I didn’t miss much. I’ve had email exchanges with Idries Shah’s son, Tahir, who is a truly remarkable guy. He was a classmate of a friend, Cynthia Merchant’s brother. Cynthia was not in SAT but became one of Claudio’s close assistants when his teaching was mainly in Spain and South America. She is seamlessly bilingual. I got in touch with Tahir because I loved his writing and wanted to cross-check information I had heard from Ochs about Doris Lessing and Tahir’s father. I mention all these names so that you know that I ain’t just whistling Dixie.

After I left the Hoffman Institute, on a whim, I asked Claudio to allow me to interview him about a possible article I was calling “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” He spoke with me for several hours a day over a week or so. I prepared a transcribed version of our taped conversations, and he gave me permission to use the material as I saw fit. Alas, I lost the whole damn thing in a computer crash and the tapes disapeared in some attic clear out between boyfriends. So I will rely on my memory and intuitive sense to recreate Claudio’s reflections. They were not very positive. I have some very subjective ideas as to why this is so, and when I get to that material, I will say so. (Spoiler alert: it was the drugs.)

Where to begin? The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram. Claudio was emphatic: there was no Jesuit transmission because “they” (you guys, Helen et al) made too many mistakes. You could not type an Eight if your life depended on it. Helen said something like “In our work, we see far more Eighths coming into the 'Work' than Claudio did. When I quoted her, he might have even used the word “bullshit,” though he rarely used gutter talk. Another thing that I remember well about this series of interviews was that there was no humor, a few nervous chuckles, and no jokes. It was all deadly serious.

Claudio asserted that he had only authorized Bob to convey his “indications” to the Jesuit groups (JSTB and Loyola), and that was it. There was to be no personal spin or interpretation. As an example, he cited the “now infamous” meeting where all of you, priests, nuns, men, and women, were to disrobe as a sign of fearless self-inquiry and surrender. He said that Ochs would not have dared give that direction on his own. AL tells me that it was she who came to the group that night in Chicago and had everyone take off their clothes in the closing ceremony; everyone did. I have just heard the story. It was more extreme than the directions or “Indications” given to any Berkeley group. Claudio told me that the idea came to him on a sudden “whim.” 

Both Claudio and Icnazo’s “holier-than-thou” shtick gets a bit heavy. When I say that Naranjo granted me permission to use the material as I saw fit, that was a significant gesture, and he delivered the statement of release or commission in a very formal tone. He made a big deal in these interviews that his notes and Ichazo’s Arica file had escaped without his permission, and their use was unethical, even immoral, because we had all pledged not to use any material without explicit permission. I think I know the source of the major leak (I’m sure, actually), although it is also the source of a lot of denial and counterargument. I can talk later about the missing 73rd (think the number is correct) that Ichazo did not retrieve when the 10-month Arica training was completed. 

(Helen also states somewhere in the court documents about her use of Osacr’s enneagon that she never saw nor used Ichazo’s confidential and, I presume, copyrighted notes. Oh, that Helen is a slippery one. She’s almost Jesuitical. Of course, she saw it, but you will never get me to say that publicly.)

To get Claudio to share, I let him control the conversation. There was a clear, definite subtext: he was deeply upset (I’ll use a gutter expression, “pissed off”) about the huge number of Enneagram titles available. I didn’t press the question. Market share was the true source of the upset. That he considered many of the interpretations to be misdirected, if not entirely flawed, was secondary. Believe me, he didn’t read many (if any) of your books; rather, he heard reports about the typing and might have cross-checked here and there. The issue was that he’d lost control. Although he always spoke of Oscar in a guarded, slightly disapproving way, it was always couched in the mystery that Ichazo was the link between the Enneagram and Gurdjieff’s teachings. With that link was some (to me) weird, esoteric, almost mystiical connection. Ochs had no authorization to pass on that imprimatur or seal of approval because Naranjo imagined Bob had bungled the job, which was unforgivable.

Let’s pick up the timeline again. These interviews happened after Naranjo had stopped returning Ochs’s phone calls; it might have been when I was still at Hoffman, but before 9/11. The serious and hurtful blaming had begun and was taking its toll. Bob had stopped teaching at the JSTB, or anywhere. He moved out of the small faculty residence that I found on Hillegass Avenue at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Perhaps he had been asked to leave. When we talked, he was evasive. He told me that he’d rented a tiny, dark in-law apartment in a converted garage, in a very Asian neighborhood up the hill in El Cerrito. The Jesuits had given him a leave of absence, or sabbatical, plus a small stipend. I was not clear about his canonical status, but his connection to the Society was tenuous at best. He told me that he told his superiors he was working on a book, and they were (how shall I say this?) eager to see results which would never materialize. I surmised that they really didn’t know what to do with him. 

As I said, Claudio had stopped returning Bob’s phone calls, which upset him terribly, and he was no longer visiting the tantric Master Yogi Chen. His only visitor was Susan Diridoni, a lovely woman from either my group or the one directly after mine. I knew Susan and knew that she and Bob had a romantic connection. Susan has also died. I would never have mentioned their intimate connection while they were alive. I am not even sure if I should now, at least publicly, though Bob would not be the first heterosexual Jesuit to develop a strong, exclusive, romantic relationship that at some point included sex. Theilard apparently had a lover, and I knew the woman who filled that role for Avery Dulles, though I am absolutely sure they never had sex.

I called Bob at regular intervals for perhaps a decade. Sometimes it would take him a week or more to respond. We would meet at a particular restaurant where he could eat, particularly a Peruvian one on Mission in San Francisco. He complained that he had no energy; he found a doctor/dietician who prescribed a matchbook-sized piece of protein to be eaten between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. Or something that crazy, so crazy that it would drive a One off the rails. 

He told me that he was trying to write. At the time, I found hundreds of titles, which had increased to more than 300 the last time I surveyed them in 2019. https://enneagrambibliography.blogspot.com/2019/07/all-things-enneagram.html

He was not jealous, though he did mention that all these (his) teachers were generating good incomes and he was living on less than 2,000 USD a month. It didn’t feel like jealousy. I recognized a burden in the way of One’s, to compare and contrast his output very critically. It paralyzed him. It was a sense that he had been the source of so much good work, but every time he started to write, he would produce a few pages and then mercilessly throw them in the waste basket after a week. He felt obligated to produce something unique, worthy of the guy who kicked the ball into play, and he couldn’t do it.

I asked him what he wanted to say. He would respond vaguely that no one had ever looked at the major authors of the Western canon from an Enneagram perspective. However, somehow typing Tolstoy and launching into an analysis was not working out. I didn’t know how to respond, but my gut feeling is that, as with some of the more extreme Enneagram enthusiasts, he was asking the Enneagram to do something that it is not designed to do.

He was obsessed with two writers, Camille Paglia and Doris Lessing. How he lumped them together, I don’t know. With Paglia, I sensed some vindication that he’d been treated badly, even excluded for unjust reasons, and with Lessing, he was obsessed with finding another path to Gurdjieff. He told me that part of his practice was to write to Idries Shah — that letter writing was a revered Sufi practice. Shah might have sent a sentence or two back. When he died in 96, Bob wrote letters to his son as he was sure that Tahir had inherited his dad’s mantle. When Tahir responded that he was not a Sufi teacher, Bob continued to write his letters. He told me: “That’s what he’s supposed to say.” 

Looking back, I have to consider that Bob, a truly important person in my life, had suffered a psychotic break. He lived in a cave and entertained bizarre obsessions. His superiors were helpless. Bob was a solemnly professed member of a religious order with a track record of involvement in a significant spiritual movement. That credential has no value in the real world of academia and job applications. Thank God they did not cut him off. He would have been helpless. He told me that Susan had a profitable therapy practice and helped him out. (She also probably watched out for his mental state.) I was not in any position to help. I was also on a marginal income. Part of me wondered where all the people he’d helped were. Why didn’t he receive invitations to speak or contribute articles? Of course, by the time we had our Peruvian dessert, I realized that it would have been impossible to work with him. He gave us the Enneagram, and when it chewed up his life, we had to stand by helplessly.

Eventually, my calls became far less frequent, and he stopped responding. My own life was in deep shit. After going to meetings and quitting crystal meth, I did a year of intense traditional psychotherapy at Langley Porter. I had tried to trick myself into believing that the Enneagram, or Zen, could do the work of healing. In some ways, it made things worse, or maybe just brought them more into plain sight, while leaving any corrective actions for another time. I’m a Nine so you know how that went. 

I’m a recovering addict. I’m coming up on 15 years clean and sober. I’ve managed to travel the world; I write and tutor English, primarily to Buddhist teachers who want to work in English — that is where the money is for them. They do not pay me. I’ve worked on translating a Zen sutra into Tibetan that has been missing from their canon since approximately 950 C.E. I call myself the executive translator, getting the right materials to the right people at the right time, raising money and organizing the work. I know the Sutra well, but I do not know Tibetan. I have no temple. If I manage to return to India, I will be one of only three or four Zen teachers (and two of them are Jesuits) in a population of over a billion. Lots of Buddhists, though not many Indians. My teacher and I think that I might try to start a meditation hall near the Jesuit houses of formation in Delhi. There are 4000 Indian Jesuits now, more than in either the US or Europe. My boyfriend went to one of their colleges in Bihar.

So, how did things with the early Enneagram get so fucked up? I have a simple answer that is pretty straightforward, but one that is not talked about for good reason — it was the drugs. I didn’t use any drugs during SAT, not even during “Lines,” when it was recommended. Later I took LSD once with supervision, but I became addicted to crystal meth for amost 6 years. So I have to be careful with my judgmental One wing, but the first of the Steps is admitting that life with drugs had become unmanageable and out of control. 

The drug use in SAT was out of control, though everyone claimed that it was normal, or even a privledged state of mind. Almost everyone used drugs pretty much continually. Every weekend a new drug was passed around. People were always high, coming down, or recovering. There were drugs to summon the angry protectors, drugs to calm them, drugs to invite the Virgin to drop her viel of protection, LSD, MDA, MDMA. It was also illegal. Claudio could have lost his license if he had recommended any of these drugs, as several members later did, notably Speeth.  

Naranjo was perhaps the biggest abuser. He taught when he was high; he avoided teaching when he was high; he eventually had to quit SAT to dry out. He was brilliant, and he was a fucking mess. He was in no state of mind to conduct any solid or useful experiments. SAT was not a pharmaceutical spiritual testing ground. There were no controlled debriefings; there were no sober monitors. And of course, we couldn’t talk about it. Ochs was involved, perhaps not to the degree that most people in SAT were, but he experimented. I know because we shared the same floor at the faculty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Ones are not good drug addicts. Save that for Sevens. He tried to hold down a position at a Jesuit house of study; he failed. I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco, and drove a cab. 

I have more to say.  I'm not sure what to do with this, but thank you for allowing me the opportunity to say it. I have a few things to say about the Gurdjieff cult and how Helen obtained her information. You may have some suggestions. I think that this information about SAT and drug abuse does need to be said, but I am not clear enough to know how to do it effectively. You see, what you guys did was in so many ways some of the most valuable of all the Enneagram work. You saved it from the cult. Bob always told me, “Ideas make a difference. Good ideas can be a source of good action.” The Enneagram is such a source.

Going to button this up and call it a day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjgO2amPSY&list=PLBqkQmExk0GJ_UdSxaSzbR_BDjcw1xGVR

“Don't Give Up!”

Comments on Joshua Rothman's article in the New Yorker: "Should You Just Give Up?"

Sisyphus couldn’t stop pushing his boulder—but you can.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-just-give-up

Far be it from me to enter into a debate with a reputable self-help writer. He writes for the New Yorker, so God help me, but I will call him out. Joshua Rothman seems to indicate in his latest article, “Should You Just Give Up?” that sometimes—actually, as a general rule—we should scale back our dreams to land within the parameters of reasonable or “doable” and thus escape being disappointed or disillusioned. We’d be happier campers.

Who am I to argue with a man with such august credentials? I am an 80-year-old failure who has faced at least an equal share of unhappiness as most living, breathing humans, but since I entered religious life as a Jesuit when I was 23 after an Ivy League education with its promise of a cushy life with lots of cash and prizes, I have never given up on my dreams. They have, of course, changed and morphed, but they are still as strong a motivating factor as they were on August 15th, 1966. What is most important, however, is that at 80, I am still living my dreams. Life is challenging, exciting, and new if I’m not careful, although when I get up from more frequent naps, I find myself remembering people and events decades old with clarity and sometimes even wonder. But the most frequent emotion is a deep feeling of gratitude. 

However, when Rothman dug up some anecdotal evidence from Kennet Roshi, I dug in my heels. He cites another self-help writer, Oliver Burkeman, who advocates “imperfectionism.”  Burkeman invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.” Once her charges saw their situations as “totally irredeemable,” they gave themselves “permission to stop struggling.” Burkeman counsels: “Instead of setting out to become a master meditator—and buying the requisite books, candles, cushion, and app—you should simply try meditating for five minutes today, and see what happens.”

I am at least 25,000 hours beyond the meditation time I might have logged using his five-minute rule. I also know the first person in the US that Kennet authorized to teach. We talk at least twice a week. Just standing in those qualifications, I want to ask Mr. Burkeman who the fuck he thinks he is to be telling people to give up on the dream of becoming Zen Masters so that they can settle into some kind of semi-pleasurable mediocrity? We need more Zen masters. You have examined the state of our world and, noticing that innumerable unhappy people have given up their dreams, your best advice is just to wake up and do a fact-driven pro and con list to settle on some achievable goals. Then you cite all the pop psychologists you’ve delved into in your 20-year writing career and find evidence that people have been pie in the sky and perhaps just getting real and seeing what they can reasonably do is the best way out. Jung told us just to do what’s at hand. 

I’m not giving blanket advice that talking to someone with perspective isn't valuable or that, when pursuing a quixotic project, talking to a lawyer or accountant is a bad idea; far from it. Perhaps Burkeman is drawing the wrong conclusions from his Kennet anecdote. Maybe it was not to give up at all, but rather to see the situation for what it was, head-on, with no illusions, and then change your approach and give up a strategy that is not working. Yes, of course, stop struggling, but that is not advice to give up. It just means to stop struggling and perhaps stop daydreaming. Go deeper into your dream and discover what it tells you. I am also sure Kennet said to wake up, but certainly, she did not counsel anyone to shut down their dreams.

Picking up the priest from Sacred Heart

Book of Serenity, Case 8: Baizhang’s Fox (Gateless Gate, Case 2)

Once, when Baizhang gave a series of talks, a certain old man was always there listening together with the monks. When they left, he would leave too. One day, however, he remained behind. Baizhang asked him, “Who are you, standing here before me?”

The old man replied, “I am not a human being. In the far distant past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I was head priest at this mountain. One day, a monk asked me, ‘Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?’ I replied, ‘Such a person does not fall under the law of cause and effect.’ With this, I was reborn five hundred times as a fox. Please say a turning word for me and release me from the body of a fox.”

He then asked Baizhang, “Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?”

Baizhang said, “Such a person does not evade the law of cause and effect.” Hearing this, the old man was immediately enlightened.

I don’t know exactly why, but after meditating a few mornings ago, my mind was engulfed by the memory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I was driving my Veterans cab. Late, very late one evening, I received a call from the dispatcher to pick up the priest at Sacred Heart Church on Fillmore and Fell Streets. It was a ghetto parish, not a Jesuit Church, though the devotion to the Sacred Heart was inspired by the visions of the seventeenth-century French mystic Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, who had been guided by her Jesuit spiritual director and confessor, Claude de la Colombière. They are now both saints. I was never much drawn to the devotion, as it felt too saccharine, but I did admire Blessed Claude.

It had to be about 1990. The Church was abandoned in 2004. It had been home to San Francisco’s largest African American Catholic congregation. The San Francisco Black Panthers served breakfast there, and it had been one of the centers for the Catholic anti-war movement, which I’d been part of in the late 60’s. My kind of church.

Originally, we were told the Church was being shuttered because of the huge cost of a seismic retrofit and condemned as too dangerous for public worship. But then it was repurposed as a roller-skating rink called “The Church of 8 Wheels.” Apparently, we don’t care if wild, wacky skaters lived or died. The Convent across Fell Street had already been taken over by a very small Tibetan monastery that’s now gone. 

But that night, I had been called to assist at one of the holy sacraments, a mission of mercy, anointing the dying.

The priest was waiting for me on the church steps rather than the next-door rectory. He was wearing his soutane, with a narrow purple stole beneath a cheap parka. He probably greeted me, but I just remember that he said, “Saint Mary’s Hospital.” Nothing more. At first, I took him for distracted, but I realized that he was carrying the Blessed Eucharist. “Recollected” would be a better word.  

The hospital was about 20 blocks away, across the Pan Handle, very close to Saint Ignatius, the Jesuit church. Under 10 minutes at that time of night. I am almost certain that I blessed myself; I may have even said, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I was now part of a holy rite. The immediacy forced all the Jesuitical arguments about the Real Presence into the background. In that moment, the Lord was real, even his Heart of Compassion. 

As we turned up Stanyan Street, past the ER, the priest said, “main entrance.” I knew the pedestrian door closer to Shrader. He was visiting one of his parishioners, perhaps an old friend, not a gang stabbing victim. One of the Jesuits would have been called for an emergency. I knew for certain that I was present for an intimate moment, the passing between our world and the universe of the Unseen. 

He tried to press a five-dollar bill into my hand. I refused. I watched him quickly climb the steps and ring the nightbell. I waited until the door opened and he disappeared. 

I may have paused for a few minutes to reflect, but not long. I had to pay more than $60 in “gate” fees for my cab before I actually put money in my pocket. There were many nights that I barely paid for dinner. I had to stay alert for my next fare. 

The Great Star Theater and the Monkey King

For about a half dozen years, several decades ago, I dated LC, who was born and raised in Canton; he loved Chinese opera, the Cantonese version. We never missed a performance by any troupe touring from Hong Kong. They usually played at the Great Star Theater on Jackson near Portsmouth Square in San Francisco, though I remember one more elaborate production at the new theater in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens.

I started going because I was invited and I was curious, especially after seeing the film “Farewell My Concubine” in Honolulu when I was at Kokuan studying with Robert Aitken. But after my third or fourth opera, I came to appreciate the artistry and stagecraft. The singing took some getting used to. Most times, I was the only caucasian in the crowd, mostly aunties and uncles from Chinatown, plus a few immigrant families with bewildered children.

At the Great Star, we always sat as close to the stage as possible. Loren thought he was getting his money's worth when he could see the faces of the protagonists up close, even their spit. One denouement involved the unraveling of a puzzling intrigue: the eight immortals, aided by Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, escaped a terrible situation. Several players and singers were swinging above the stage on harnesses. It was very dramatic. The stage engineering was pretty basic. One of the stage lights crashed down and almost landed on me. There was only a slight pause while the stage crew swept up broken glass, and the performers picked up where they’d been interrupted. The audience wanted the climax. On the way out, I was told that I was going to experience good fortune, having narrowly escaped serious injury.