SAT, Naranjo, the Enneagram, the beginnings, and “the Work”

 Originally published in "The Enneagram Monthly"

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 – 12 July 2019) is gone. Óscar Ichazo (24 July, 1931 – 26 March, 2020) died less than a year later. The meditation teacher Ajahn Dhiravamsa (5 November, 1934 - 28 July, 2021) passed away more recently. Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us though I can find no obituary. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Kathy Speeth who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child and the Nyingmapa teacher Tarthang Tulku who had an enormous influence on Naranjo. At 86 Tarthang is still teaching though no longer traveling internationally. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West.

My friend Dan Kaplan forwarded an email promotion for a course by some proponents of the Enneagram that promises to unlock its radical teaching by returning to the “original intent.” Please forgive me if I'm skeptical. Are these third generation experts going back to Naranjo’s characterization of the 9 types, or Ichazo’s prototyping which is notably different, or the myth of an esoteric Sufi circle, or the inconclusive evidence that it lay hidden in Gurdjieff’s teaching, or William Patterson’s tracing the system back to ancient Egypt. I try to give the devil his due, but “original intent” is just hype to separate you from your money. I challenge any of these teachers to reveal the original intent in a rigorous way. If they’re just trying to distinguish themselves from Enneagram parlor games, I might be more generous.

Perhaps it is time to look at some of the threads that tie the Enneagram’s popularization in the West to the burgeoning of the psycho-spiritual integration that took California by like a New Awakening in the last part of the last century. I only know the SAT experience so that will be my focus.

Dr. Aubrey Lindgren, who was in Naranjo’s first SAT group, talked about Naranjo’s early teaching in the October 2021 edition of “The Enneagram Monthly.” Lindgren’s account tries to unwrap the Enneagram, particularly the Enneagram of Fixations, for a Western audience steeped in the language of psychotherapy. She asks why so little has been written about those early days? Her answer is “To realize the full impact of the teachings, we have to hold the container in silence. A silence that is both inside our own minds, as in not forming concepts about transformation, and outside, as in not discussing the material presented. It is a disservice to the public to hear about a theory without the full understanding and guidance as to how to effectively apply these ideas to your life.”

A gnostic response wants to keep secrets secret, or is trying to hide something, or hinting at some secret knowledge that will cost money. While I appreciate whatever caution is there about doing inner work, Lindgren's answer hides too much. As far as the Enneagram is concerned, the cat’s out of the bag. If the Enneagram ever was an esoteric teaching, it has crossed over into popular culture, at worst mimicking astrology or at best being an adjunct to the techniques of psychotherapy. The careful inner work of introspection seems too difficult for a mass audience.

I was in Naranjo’s SAT 2 which began in the Fall of 1972. By the end of the second year, the group had expanded to perhaps 60-80 people. The first group that Lindgren describes was distinct and interacted with Naranjo in a different way, often delivering his “indications” to newer students. I talked with my longtime friend Daniel Shurman who was in Group 1; together we combed our memories and remembered many people who were and remain friends. I was particularly close to my fellow Jesuit Bob Ochs and the Franciscan priest Joe Scerbo among others. We also remembered friends who lived communally out on Broadway and another group around Indian Rock in North Berkeley, and the women who lived with Naranjo on Allston Way. The membership included the well-known second generation Enneagram teacher, Hameed Ali, as well as the transpersonal scholar Charlie Tart.

The influence of Oscar Ichazo on the modern Enneagram is well known, even litigated. As I pointed out in my article “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram,” as well as “Muddied Roots, Psychobabble, and Inoculation.” I was aware that Naranjo was unpacking a powerful experience he’d had in Arica, and his presentation and understanding were different from Ichazo. Actually a lot of time was spent sorting out the distinctions. I am not an Enneagram teacher so I am not going to indulge in any of the arguments about theories, typing or tests. Have at it.

I will second what Lindgren says about the inspiration of Naranjo’s personal gifts, his intelligence and his creativity. There was also the influence of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt, echoes of Sufi school or what we were told was the teaching of the Brotherhood, the ego reduction in our personal and group work, some dabbling in Buddhist meditation and, of course, what is called “The Work.” Naranjo felt that the Enneagram as it came through Ichazo was a kind of fleshing out of the esoteric work that Mr. Gurdjieff undertook at the beginning of the last century. He never claimed to be an authorized Fourth Way teacher, but he loved the “trickster” myth around Gurdjieff’s teaching, and was always on the lookout for some connections, real or imagined, with Gurdjieff.

We were a group of bright, mostly young, educated westerners ready, willing, even eager for what we imagined to be the shock of eastern spiritual practice. We were also terribly naive. At times our work together became a circus. There were many dark sides. They do not discount the value of the work that we managed to accomplish--in a way some of the more thorny issues were part of that training. However they persist. In my view we cannot allow them to stay in the shadows, or sweep them under the rug. If we purge them from our telling the history of this period, we are just not being honest.

I will examine one aspect of the early SAT story, its connection with the unofficial Gurdjieff work, and my personal experience of sexual abuse and trauma after undergoing the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy.

The Work

When G.I. Gurdjieff died in Paris in 1949, beside his recondite writings, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and All and Everything, he left a large body of oral teaching that spanned nearly four decades. He had many devoted students, and though he did charge certain senior students to work with other interested people across the globe, he died with no clear transmission of a spiritual lineage. As with many powerful systems, it attracted a lot of interest, some from sane people who were intent on realizing the goals of liberation through self awareness and observation that Gurdjieff advocated. In other cases people seem to have been attracted by his unorthodox teaching methods. Several hung out a shingle with “The Work” predominantly displayed, and felt it gave them license to behave badly.

I don’t doubt that Kathy Speeth sat in Mr. Gurdjieff’s lap. But it is extremely unlikely, as Lindgren recounts, that it happened during the summers that her parents spent in Paris studying with Gurdjieff at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard in the 17th arrondissement. Her parents were prominent New Yorkers who had been students of A.R. Orage, perhaps continuing to work with Jane Heap or Willem Nyland after Orage’s early death. Kathy was born in 1937 and the Second World War began in September of 1939. Her meeting with Mr. Gurdjieff was probably on one of his trips to the United States, and he did make one trip to the United States after the surrender of Germany so the timing sounds likely.

Why am I making such a big deal about the exact time that Kathy sat in Gurdjieff’s lap and where it took place? It is probably one of two verifiable connections with “the Work” in the early SAT. Kathy and Pamela Travers were the only people he introduced to the group who had actually met Mr. Gurdjieff. I want to avoid the sloppy thinking that comes from blurring facts with fanciful stories.

When Naranjo began to teach, there were several legitimate, respected Fourth Way teachers in the Bay Area, Lord John Pentland in San Francisco, Mr. Willem A. Nyland on “The Land” up near Cazadero and Mr. Robert S. de Ropp. I know that Pentland and Nyland stayed away from Naranjo’s Enneagram work although each one knew about it. Instead we were introduced to Alex Horn (by proxy--he never visited the group), EJ Gold aka “The Beast,” and Henry Korman as Fourth Way connections. Carlos Castenada, who never claimed to have any connection with the Work but was a Hollywood example of crazy wisdom, appeared at some point to entertain us. None of these teachers had any interest in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it, but Naranjo was interested in their teaching methods.

Lindgren describes working with Alex Horn during one of his late night early morning marathon sessions on a secluded ranch north of San Francisco as a revelatory experience. It could have simply been the result of sleep deprivation and hypnosis. My only experience with Horn was at his Everyman Theater on 24th Street and Mission in San Francisco where I watched a preposterous production about the assassination of JFK staged by Horn and his then wife, Sharon. Horn prowled the audience before, after and during the intermission. That was enough for me.

Horn claimed that he was in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff, but there is zero evidence of a real connection. I assert that Horn was attracted to the power he could reap from Gurdjieff’s unorthodox teaching methods. Period. Naranjo never encouraged me to work with Horn although several members of the early SAT groups did. I know several people who were not Naranjo’s students but had been in Horn’s group. They report sexual exploitation, coercion and even physical violence. For example, Horn would instigate a dispute between several of the men in the group and then instruct them to have a wrestling match, or even fist fight without gloves. Horn was also a known sexual predator with a voracious appetite for young women. His Bible was not anything that Gurdjieff or Ouspensky wrote but Atlas Shrugged.

E.J. Gold claimed to have been authorized to teach as “The Beast” by an esoteric Sufi School. As far as I can ascertain, he fabricated his connection with Mr. Gurdjieff. He was also the author of a cult book called The American Book of the Dead. When I met him, I could not shake the feeling that he was devoid of compassion. He invited anyone of the SAT group to come to Southern California and do an “intensive training.” By the time my friend Hal Slate arrived at a secluded bunker somewhere up on the Grapevine, the title and authority of “The Beast” had been given to one of Gold’s very young disciples who had learned everything he needed to know by performing for three days straight with a garage rock band made up of people who had no musical training. Ripping a page from the script of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, “The Exterminating Angel,” Gold seized on an unexpected change in the weather to concoct a scenario that it was the end of the world and all his trapped guests had to make some serious ontological choices. Hal escaped, walking out of the canyon on foot during the freak Southern California blizzard. As the saying goes, “Never miss the opportunity provided by a catastrophe.” I would add, “real or imagined, there are always several choices available.”

Of all the Gurdjieff students and teachers who visited our groups, meeting Pamela Travers was remarkable. The real Mary Poppins had actually been Gurdjieff’s student. Because I’d actually read some of her books, despite all the technicolor dancing and singing I knew that Poppins would be very English prim and proper with a mystical bent. And here was a middle aged woman, not at all glamorous, as much the portrait of an English nanny as my imagination allowed, who was also very present. She talked and answered our questions in a completely no nonsense way but with a lilt in her voice; she mentioned that she still met with a group and she named one of Mr. Gurdjieff’s senior students as her teacher.

By 1975 Naranjo began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram. Others with more personal knowledge can comment or speculate on his motivation. My sense is that the initial work had been exhausting and the inspired impulse of his Arica experience had petered out and drained him personally. Some of the second generation Enneagram teachers have speculated that his drug experimentation had taken a toll which from my observation was a strong possibility. One member of the first group told me that much of his distress stemmed from the end of his intimate relationship with Kathy Speeth. All these are possible scenarios. There was also the concern that he felt after that the Enneagram materials had also been released to a wider audience. I do know from my conversations with him that he was apprehensive about the possible distortion of the Enneagram. He also told me that popularizers had watered it down. The SAT experiment would go dark at least temporarily.

He introduced Henry Korman as a person who would possibly inherit his SAT groups. Korman was leading a group in New York but had agreed to come and work with anyone who wished to continue to do what we imagined was Gurdjieff’s Work.

I worked with Korman for almost 3 years, group meetings twice a week and every Sunday. We began with an exercise called “Sensing, Looking and Listening,” then observations and questions from the group under Korman’s heavy-handed direction. Korman also organized elaborate dinners with exacting preparation, like the ones we read about in former Gurdjieff students’ memoirs. Sundays were dedicated to a Work exercise, and once a month we would begin on Saturday and extend it throughout the whole night. This pattern of group meetings, intensive concentration and work coupled with sleep deprivation seemed to be something imitated from the way Gurdjieff is said to have worked with his students. Alex Horn and E.J. Gold also made ample, and often manipulative, use of forcibly breaking up normal cycles.

While there was none of the physical violence that was reported in Horn’s groups, my experience of Korman was that he was a bully. He had no qualms about interfering in the sexual relationships of couples in the group or openly sleeping with students. He tried to arrange for a woman in the group to introduce me to heterosexual experience. Thank god she had the presence of mind to say no. He “strongly” suggested that I join with two other group members and start a construction company which he named “Double Action Builders.” This is the one real regret of getting involved in his group. It set me up to follow a dead end career for way too long.

After I had left Henry’s group, I was living in San Francisco, and trying to piece together some of that frayed experience. A Jesuit whom I knew and worked with was a member of the San Francisco Gurdjieff Group. He arranged for me to meet Lord John Pentland. I arrived at the upper middle class home in Saint Francis Woods at the appointed time for a congenial conversation with Pentland. He asked about my intentions, my experience, and talked about our mutual friend whom he knew well and respected. Pentland suggested that one of his longtime students, the woman who owned Fields Book Store on Polk, would meet and talk with me while we decided if I should join the group. When he asked me if I had any questions, I asked if he knew Korman and about the exercise of “Sensing, Looking and Listening.” Pentland said that yes, he had heard of Korman. Then he asked me to describe the exercise completely and fully which I did. He then asked about some specific details, particularly the attention to breath, or really the absence of any instruction about the breath. He paused, then looked at me directly and said that the exercise had absolutely no relationship to anything Mr. Gurdjieff taught. He would not comment about its possible usefulness.

I’m not going to say that my time with Korman was completely wasted, but I cannot pretend that I was in any way participating in “The Work.” Just a quick footnote--Korman met Mr. William Patrick Patterson, and began to work with him. He stopped teaching, admitted to a “grave” mistake, and wrote a letter of apology to his former students. He did not include me. I had to read a copy of the letter sent to a friend. He was in many ways brilliant, and I hesitate to put him into the category of an arrogant, destructive prick. Sadly he belongs in that bin.


Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

Both Lindgren and Ernest Lowe talk about the psychic Bob Hoffman. They both used Hoffman’s Process working with clients as did I. Naranjo introduced this tailor who had zero psychological training to SAT. Hoffman claimed to have had a midnight vision of Dr. Siegfried Fisher, a well known and respected psychiatrist and also a family friend, who revealed the secret of what Hoffman called Negative Love and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy that allowed us to undo the negative consequences of our childhood programming.

Most of my first year in SAT was spent doing the Fisher-Hoffman Process. Hoffman became infatuated with me, and within 6 months after I finished working with him, Hoffman began stalking me at Berkeley’s gay bar. After a few more months invited me to dinner and raped me. He was a psychotic and a criminal.

Naranjo did not condone or in any way encourage aggression, violence or sexual exploitation between students and teachers or among SAT members, but I do fault him for not doing appropriate due diligence before allowing Hoffman to work with SAT members. Hoffman was a “psychic.” Hoffman allegedly told Naranjo several things about his childhood which he could not have known. The normal training for a mental health professional was superseded or abrogated.

Although I don’t think he would have approved of Hoffman’s sexual conduct, Naranjo did sleep with students. To my knowledge he did not coerce or manipulate anyone, but inevitably it had negative consequences.


The Soup of the Soup

Looking back, I find it odd that none of the teachers that Naranjo introduced to the group were conversant or really even interested in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it. They were generally teachers, monks, therapists devoted to the Path of Liberation, but mixed in were some who lied about being in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff and fraudsters who made preposterous claims but really were just out for power, money or sex. It was the soup we swam in, and, like the air we breathe, no matter how careful we try to be, we cannot be certain that we’re not getting a whiff of poison.

Naranjo loved a Sufi story, attributed to Mulla Nasruddin, called the Soup of the Soup. A generous neighbor gave the Mulla a fat duck which his wife dressed and made into a fine dinner. Everyone was happy. The next day, a guest knocked on the door, “I heard that Mustafa gave you a big duck, do you have any left?” Of course observing the obligation of hospitality, the Mulla invited the guest in for some hearty soup made from the leftovers. The next day, a friend of Mustafa's friend smelled the still rich soup bubbling in the kitchen, knocked on the Mulla’s door, and asked to taste the savory dish. The Mulla invited him in. This goes on for several more days and several more friends of the friends of Mustafa. (In the West we’d call this a shaggy dog story). About the 10th day, after the now familiar knock on the door, the Mulla invited another friend of the friend of the friend of Mustafa's friend in for the remainder of the soup, but when the guest sat and tasted nothing more than hot water, he asked, “Where’s the duck?” The Mulla answered, “I’m sorry but all I have to offer you is the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck that Mustafa gave me.”

That is my impression of the end of our work with SAT. We were just going through the motions of the Work of the Work, but we’d lost the taste of that fine fat duck that we were given for our feast. However we'd also tasted real Duck Soup that Naranjo had served, and, with persistence and a bit of luck, we could buy a fat bird and recreate the recipe ourselves. We can, in the words of Lord John Pentland, create what Mr. Gurdjieff called self-remembering, “. . . a state of attention . . . a state of vibrant attentiveness, of inner alignment and attunement, which, when we are sufficiently still inside, possesses a potency reminding us that the real inner work is a response to a higher and deeper calling.”

Goa, Saint Francis and Me

McLeodganj, Himachal Pradesh, India
April 7, 2014

Part of this article was written for the publication of "Spiritual Journeys" by a group of former Jesuits.

One Sunday this past February, my partner and I went to the English mass at the Basilica of Bom Jesu in Goa. We were initially directed towards that queue, but after some negotiation, we found our way into a back pew in the main church. During mass people venerating Saint Francis Xavier wind through the courtyard of the Jesuit residence and pass his shrine, a small Baroque style altar where what’s left of his body is encased in glass.

I began to feel at home with the familiarity of the Jesuit ceremony, and was able to pay more attention. The priest’s sermon was not easy to follow. He struggled to connect Xavier’s religious enthusiasm to martyrdom, comparing the Saint’s remarkable life with the current situation of Christians in India. But Xavier died a natural death and, though they might feel persecuted, Christians in India are generally very well accepted. In fact in Goa, they pretty much control everything. I gave up on following the Jesuit’s exhortations, and drifted off, studying the congregation, mostly Indians, and certainly, as English speakers, well educated. They were not paying much attention to the sermon either, women looking after crying children, men closing their eyes and nodding, in many ways similar to the Irish American parish of my childhood.

The sermon and the ceremony were also disconnected from what was happening at the side altar where men, women, and children, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, pushed their way forward towards the barely visible body of the saint. We’d seen almost identical scenes at the many temples, mosques, shrines, gurdwaras we’ve visited across India, people seeking healing, relief from suffering, forgiveness for a personal transgression, blessings for a new marriage, a prayer for a child’s good fortune, or perhaps even a superstitious belief that touching his statue would produce a child. To be honest it felt disconnected from the Catholic, Jesuit saint I thought I knew, but it was real.

I turned my attention back to the altar and suddenly felt deep compassion, even kinship with the Indian Jesuit. He was obviously a competent, educated, thoughtful, even a devout, spiritual man who was sincerely trying to connect our messy lives with another dimension. With any luck, I might have turned out like him, but in that same moment, I also realized why I’d left the Society.

After I graduated from Dartmouth in 1966, over the objections of my parents, I entered the Jesuits, and stayed for more than a decade. When time came for me to be ordained, I took a leave of absence and extended it for 2 years before I asked to be relieved of religious vows. During that exclaustration, I realized that I had to confront, and deal with coming out as a gay man, my addictive personality, and, at the time, I thought that the most effective path was psychological work rather than prayer or meditation.

I had of course done the spiritual exercises of Father Ignatius many times. The experience was rich. When I was trying to decide whether to leave or stick it out, I undertook them again as well as trying to recreate some of that experience through a study of the enneagram, and beginning Buddhist meditation practice. Then for more than three decades, I either wore the designation “ex-Jesuit” as a badge of honor, and disavowed any value in my religious training except on the rare occasion when I ran into someone from that era.

Twenty-five years ago a chance meeting with a Zen priest who was starting a hospice for people with AIDS turned my attention back to meditation practice. It also allowed me to carefully trace the roots of suffering through a spiritual practice that is agnostic with regard to any particular religious system of beliefs.

Today my experience in the Society of Jesus grows dim, like a series of events in a very distant land, but what remains is a sense of intimacy that feels indelible and timeless. Most of the struggles of my youth, coming out in an unaccepting culture, finding a spiritual expression that suited me, have faded into the background. I no longer seek the kind of answers that I demanded years ago.

I regard spirituality as reflecting on the questions that life presents squarely, and I value seeing things through to the end, even things that did not turn out well. Most of the ordinary language of spiritual conversation feels inadequate. If I describe my particular path as a series of transitions, I feel I’m being melodramatic. Speaking of a path or a journey sounds like I just bought some nifty running shoes to train for a marathon at my unlikely age.

That morning in Goa, I didn’t feel distant or unconnected, but rather like I’d just grown up and realized that even if my life amounted to only a brief second, in that time I could leave things better than I found them, that I was not alone, and that the universe is vast and awe-inspiring.

__________________

The Experience of the Spiritual Exercises is indelible.

I entered the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, on August 15th 1966 at Shadowbrook in Lenox, Massachusetts. After a few months to acclimate to the schedule of getting up at 5:25 and bed at 9:30, the first year novices were guided through the Spiritual Exercises. For a full month, the whole community was totally focused on the discipline of the Exercises, as strict as the discipline of any Zen hall--total silence, 7 hours of contemplation very day, an unwavering methodical sequence of meditations, invocations and most importantly, in retrospect, the Examen.

The bell that alerted us to prayer, or mass, or spiritual reading, or the daily conferences with the Master of novices, was not a beautiful, clear temple bell. Rather it had the urgency of the alarm that gets firemen out of bed in the middle of the night. We were not to be monks dedicated to a life of prayer within exclusionary monastic walls. We were being trained to pray hard and work hard for the Kingdom of God.

After we took religious vows, every year we dedicated 8 days to the exercises. These were the heady days that followed Vatican II, so the strict retreat format, the fire and brimstone of the 1st week, for example, had fallen into disfavor.

Now more than 50 years later it is hard to believe that the Exercises had such a visceral effect, creating an opening for an experience of the Transcendent in the way that they did. I remember as a teenager reading Joyce’s description of the preacher's sermon on Hell in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. My Novice Master, Fr. T. J. C. O'Callaghan may have lacked the dramatic flair of Joyce’s retreat master, but he followed the same script to create a picture of the fiery world of the unforgivable. That, combined with a retreat environment created by the 80 men who shared the life of the novitiate, the silence, the liturgies, the homilies, the food, and the penances, our lives were geared to the meditations of 4 weeks of the Exercises.

I remained in the Society until 1976. But 5 years before I left, I began to realize that traditional rigidity of religious life was not going to be a happy fit for me. Leaving the Jesuits was a difficult choice. I had been very happy studying theology and exploring religious practice, and I wanted to show the same respect for my choice to abandon the Society as my choice to take religious vows. And so I undertook the Exercises again in a form called the 19th annotation. In place of 30 days of seclusion and intense prayer, I dedicated an hour every day for almost a year and, with a director, followed the order of prayer and meditation that Ignatius set within the four weeks. I was already practicing both zazen and vipassana meditation by then, and though I didn’t consciously try to blend the two practices, that is in fact exactly what I was doing.

I cannot cut myself off from the life-giving roots in the Exercises. For most successful Jesuits, the Exercises have been grafted into their bones. I was not immune—it can even happen in 10 years. I have discovered several links between meditation practice and Ignatian discipline. I have written about two aspects, the Examen and the Discernment of Spirits. If you want to read further, follow the links on the Page “Writings about Father Ignatius.”

Reflections on the Feast of the Assumption

It is perhaps no surprise that I am not a devotee of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in the traditional manner of most Roman Catholics. When I took my simple religious vows, it was common for most men to take Mary as their “middle ‘vow’” name. So I might have said “I, Kenneth Maria Ireland, vow to your divine Majesty, before the most holy Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.” I asked to keep my given name and it was granted. The traditional “vow days” in the Jesuits were feasts of the Virgin Mary, today August 15th, and September 8th, her birthday.

I have zero desire to make a pilgrimage to Fatima or Lourdes. Apparitions are far too spooky for my rational mind set. I’ve always held that the “Dormition” of Mary is far more palatable than her bodily transportation to the Gates of Heaven. I prefer myth when it comes to such matters. The infallible pronouncement of Pius 12 happened when I was 8 years old, and I wondered even then how something this momentous could be hidden, unrecognized for such a long period of time. I said the rosary every day when I was in a Jesuit house of formation. We all did. I liked the repetition of the words of a simple prayer and the contemplation of the mysteries which I took to be more like visualizations of scenes from the stories told in Matthew, Mark and Luke (John is a bit too gnostic). As far as my Marian faith goes, I was a pretty stripped down basic gospel kind of guy. Some of this can be traced back to my Calvinist heritage, my father was a Yankee free thinker, and there's some rebellion against the rigid Irish nuns who taught the Baltimore Catechism by rote.

By Erik Cleves Kristensen - House of the Virgin Mary

When Ashish and I visited Ephesus, after tromping through the amazing Roman ruins, we took a small jitney several kilometers high up into the bluffs overlooking the ancient harbor to what is known as Mother Mary’s House. According to legend, Saint John, the gnostic one, took Mary to the small community that Paul had founded in that Roman colony after the death of Jesus. She was to spend the rest of her days protected from the turmoil of James’s Jerusalem Church. Of course her presence also legitimized the ascent of the Jesus congregations of Greeks and Romans who were not observant of Jewish law and customs, but I will leave that side for polemicists to hash out.

It had been more than 35 years since I left the Jesuits and 30 years of practicing Buddhist meditation when I got on that small rickety bus. I’m just giving some background about the mindset of the guy who headed up Mt. Koressos (Turkish: Bülbüldağı, "Mount Nightingale") to the place that Saint Anne Catherine Emmerich had seen in visions as the last earthly abode of Mary the Virgin.

It fit the parameters of a place that I could envision for the house of Mother Mary. Being there was simply wonderful, peaceful, with a real feeling of the Transcendent. No throngs of the faithful seeking miracles, no massive basilicas commemorating a Saint’s vision, no sellers of Marian trinkets and memorabilia. There were perhaps a dozen religious women, maybe less, quietly tending simple gardens and very austere shrines. We wandered where we wanted, stopped when we felt the urge. No one exhorted us, telling us what to believe or how to pray. There were few votary candle boxes like the ones I remember from the Irish parishes of my youth in front of Saint Mary’s statues. There was only one donation box near the exit.

I felt a real sense of freedom when I boarded that rickety little bus for the scary ride down back to Selçuk. I had been in the presence of the Virgin and my mind was allowed the space to take whatever tack was appropriate for the time and place.

Food for the Moon

 August 6th, 2022

In August of 2019, after I learned that Father Bob Ochs had died, I tried to acknowledge my enormous debt to him. He brought the teaching of the Enneagram to some very hungry Catholic religious whose sputtering religious practices were on life support, me among them. I tried to recount as carefully as I could the story of his post Enneagram years when I wrote about the Jesuit transmission of the Enneagram. I will revisit some of them here. Last night a friend who was peripherally involved in the beginning of SAT and the whole Berkeley, New Age psychic scene, told me that Susan Diordoni, Bob’s longtime companion, died of cancer. I now feel free to tell a less edited, much sadder story.

Gurdjieff used the term “Food for the Moon” to describe some of the process of awakening and becoming a true person as if it were organic digesting and processing esoteric teaching. We, all our living and dying, become food for the moon. The process of shedding our old beliefs and habits of perception is akin to consigning this dead weight of the alleged mysterious powers of the moon: the relentless, predictable ebbing and flooding of the tides control the shifts and flow of our ingrained emotions, thoughts, inclinations, mind-sets. I heard Naranjo use “Food for the Moon” pejoratively several times to refer to a person who begins the work and, for whatever reason, just doesn’t have the stuff it takes to see it through to a successful conclusion, whatever that actually means. (I do think this mystical moonshine talk offers some clues about the exclusionary tendencies of cults).

Bob Ochs was a respected member of SAT 1, the first group that gathered around Naranjo after he returned from Arica and began to teach. Ochs, along with Charlie Tart, had the highest recognized level of academic training of all the group members. He was a professor at a prestigious Jesuit seminary with a degree from one the best Universities in France. I never asked Bob how he came to know Naranjo or what drew him to the group, but when we met at the beginning of the second year of that exploration, Naranjo had already delegated him to teach the Enneagram to groups of Jesuits, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Naranjo himself told me unequivocally that he’d entrusted Ochs to be his emissary, to teach the nine personality fixations and to guide people in discovering their own type and subtype. Only one other person shared this responsibility, Aubrey Lundgren; others had various teaching responsibilities within SAT, notably Reza Leah Schaffer and, eventually Kathy Speeth, though the scope of their responsibility was limited to new SAT students in Berkeley.

A lot happened in that first year that would change the dynamic of teaching the Enneagram in the West. Naranjo trusted Ochs, and Ochs had a knack for teaching. His presentation of the ideas behind the Enneagram was engaging and provocative. He was truly interested in ideas, as you might expect from the exemplary Jesuit that he was. But other forces were at work which would revoke both Naranjo’s and Ichazo’s lock on this esoteric system.

Almost everyone who teaches the Enneagram outside Naranjo’s immediate circle owes some debt to Ochs for their basic understanding, the impetus of their personal investigation, the outline of the 9 types and 27 subtypes, their books, their students and for teachers, their livelihood. I will name a few names but it’s by no means complete. This group has its roots in what I have labeled the Jesuit transmission. Here is a partial list of the Enneagram teachers who are linked to Ochs as the source of their practice; Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Jerome Wagner at Loyola University in Chicago; Joanna Quintrell at the Journey Center in Santa Rosa, California; Sr. Suzanne Zuercher at the Institute for Spiritual Leadership at Loyola University; Father William Meninger of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass Colorado; Don Richard Riso, a former Jesuit, (d.2012) and Russ Hudson of the Enneagram Institute, Stone Ridge, New York; Paul Robb, S.J., the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership; Tad Dunne, S.J.; Maria Beesing; Robert Nogosek, C.S.C.; Patrick O'Leary. Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., a very vocal opponent of the Catholic adoption of the Enneagram, was also Bob’s student in Chicago.

Helen Palmer also owes a debt to Ochs, which she may or may not have acknowledged, though it is a not as direct as the people who were in Ochs's groups. She was not in Claudio’s SAT groups either, but she was practicing as a psychic reader in Berkeley at about the same time that Naranjo’s groups were forming. She did readings with almost every member of the early SAT group, often multiple sessions. It was in a large part through these readings that she became aware of the Enneagram, and got a taste of the system’s power. When I did a reading with her almost 50 years ago, one of her first questions was about my fixation on the Enneagram. I also know that she also had access to some of our private notes about Naranjo’s presentation of the Enneagram as well as extensive notes from Ichazo’s 1968 talks at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. Ochs may have had a hand in delivering some of these materials into her hands.

This is a good jumping off point to describe the start of the Enneagram Wars, which also marked the beginning of Ochs’s estrangement from Naranjo. Even before Palmer’s creation and popularization of the “kinder, gentler,” more saleable Enneagram, the flood of Enneagram books had started. When I researched and compiled my Enneagram Bibliography a few years ago, there were more than 150 books and studies, a huge number for such a recondite discipline. In less than two decades, more than 100 separate practitioners, experts, authorities, claiming some level of insight, leading groups and individuals on an inner exploration. The armies were assembling.

You know that you are on an intellectual battlefield when after a Google search on the origins of the Enneagram, the “Let’s set the record straight” articles appear first. I’m not going to enter that fray. Have at it. Hope y’all have fun. The main battle, the Waterloo, was the lawsuit that Ichazo brought against Palmer. Again I am not going to put on soul armor and take sides, other than to point out that there had to have been some monetary upside to winning or losing to justify the enormous costs of any litigation. My interest here, with regard to Ochs, are the casualties resulting from friendly fire. 

As various leaders and teachers waged battle about the authenticity and effectiveness, the “truth” of their particular take on the teaching, whether it came from Pythagoras, the Sufis or some Egyptian cult, Naranjo knew that he’d lost control. And because a large number of the people who had forged their own versions and adaptations of the teaching that he’d stolen from Ichazo had been Ochs's students, Naranjo stopped taking Ochs's phone calls. Although very clearly in the Naranjo camp, Ochs was ostracized.

This was the point in my own life where I took a very clear break for any investigation and controversy. I had a host of personal reasons for my hiatus, among them caring for people dying from HIV/AIDS, but I also had no personal stake in the negotiated settlement: everybody was to lay down their weapons, just carry on, do what they’ve been doing. No one was going to corner the market for the Enneagram; leave the final judgment to when the Archangel Metatron settles all disputes among the lesser inhabitants of the heavenly realm.

When I finally made contact with Ochs after several years’ hiatus, I was overwhelmed by what had become of my vibrant friend. He had given up his position on the faculty of the Jesuit schools, stopped seeing most of his friends, and was living in small, Spartan, nearly windowless basement apartment in a modest suburb a few miles from the epicenter of the Enneagram Wars. His only regular visitor was Susan Diordoni. He is not the first heterosexual Jesuit to seek deep emotional connection with a woman. I have no knowledge if he maintained his vow of celibacy, but I am happy that he at least had some comfort and companionship.

Both he and I had started to separate from regimented Jesuit life when we shared a floor in the faulty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in 1973. He however, was a priest, 14 years my senior, and had no possible means of outside support. He chose to remain within the institutional frame work. I did not. He received a modest stipend, and tried to justify his seclusion as a work on a book. His superiors, I think with some recognition of his contribution to the Jesuit enterprise, did not press him too hard to produce. 

While the people whom Ochs had trained were writing, advertising, going to conferences, producing and leading trainings that cost thousands of dollars, he was living on a few hundred dollars a month and struggling to write. He felt that he still had something to say. Actually I will rephrase that, he felt that he had an obligation to say something as one of the first proponents of the system. I think he may have also been jealous of the money that his one time students were making on “that gravy train,” but that was never his primary focus, and ultimately he would be unsuccessful. He was a One, and the burden of trying to frame his thoughts against the conflict of the Enneagram wars proved impossible. He could never persuade himself that he’d successfully argued his case. There would be no book, but his efforts came with all a One’s self-recrimination and doubt. Ironically, I think I remember that the analysis was to be based on typing some famous writers but I could be conflating a couple of conversations.

He claimed he had almost no physical energy. He was eating a very strict diet whose contents and restrictions baffled me as much as they obsessed him. We met at a Peruvian restaurant out in the Mission in San Francisco only because he could eat several of the things on their menu and really enjoyed them. 

Here he told me about another obsession. He’d become infatuated with the work of Doris Lessing. “Infatuated'' is not too strong a word. Idries Shah had introduced Lessing to Sufi teachings, and she was also apparently interested in the Gurdjieff school although I have no clear knowledge that she actually worked with any of Gurdjieff’s longtime English students. But she was very conversant with “the Work '' and its alleged connections to ancient Sufi orders. The link here is twofold: Ochs was as obsessed with discovering Enneagram’s esoteric roots as he was frustrated in his attempts to create what he considered an adequate language to describe the teaching.

He also told me about corresponding with Idries Shah, claiming that letter writing was a revered form of spiritual instruction among Sufis. After Shah died in 1996, Ochs tried to initiate a correspondence with Shah’s son, because Ochs was certain Tahir had been designated as his father’s spiritual heir. When Tahir replied that he was a writer, not a Sufi teacher, that his father had not designated him to teach, and actually he was not interested in the job, Ochs said to me, “He’s supposed to say that. It’s his job to put me off.” 

I tried my best not to be put off by Ochs’ increasing reclusiveness, but eventually I gave up waiting for him to return my phone calls. Looking back I do feel some remorse for not persisting. But I also ask myself, after the truce was called in the Enneagram Wars, where were any of his former students? Did you play any role in his life? Did he shut you out? I didn’t have a lot of contact so I don’t know if you visited, called, offered support, but I do know that he was not included in your conferences, invited to speak or write an article. And I’m not suggesting that you should have included him as an obligation, like inviting your cantankerous uncle to Thanksgiving dinner, but actually because he had something to contribute. You missed out, yes you, narrow-minded, parochial, greedy, war-mongering Enneagram enthusiasts. He dedicated his life, every waking minute, to making the possibility of human freedom real. If you don’t do that in all your life, all your relationships, all your work, you’re just food for the moon.

Finally this Midwesterner who’d learned French and earned a degree in Paris, a man who’d introduced Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Naranjo and the Enneagram to Catholic religious, a man who’d struggled to make his own mystical experience available to others, this man returned to Michigan and a Jesuit house dedicated to the French priest who’d promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Perhaps full circle.