The Stray Dog, Wandering with Gurdjieff

Real Wars kill people. Mythological Wars create cults

23rd April 2022, the Feast of Saint George

I'm going to write about Mr. Gurdjieff against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I cannot hide from real human suffering. If I really acknowledge how little I can do to change this situation, I know I'm powerless. Nonetheless, I constantly check online for the latest updates. I count the children evacuated from Mariupol. I wonder how many fighters remain in the labyrinth of bunkers and tunnels built to withstand a nuclear attack.

I know which side I should root for, or more accurately, I know which side I want to win, although I'm not aware of all the factors that govern my impulses. It seems clear that there are good guys and bad guys. I don’t know if Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hiding secret sins, but I can see Vladimir Putin in Russian TV news clips, keeping his distance at the end of a long white table with arcane golden imperial symbols planting its legs on the floor. His generals sit far away. Does anyone give him accurate information about the progress of his narcissistic war? It's a world of lies and manipulation. I have no reason to believe otherwise, though if I were in Russia, I would hear an entirely different story, and I know I would feel differently. What is accurate information, what is propaganda, and how can I tell the difference? Using filtered information is always tricky. I find sympathy impossible.

I am uneasy. My perceptions are almost archetypal, like watching Arjuna and Lord Krishna surveying the battlefield, going on and on about the “big picture.” I should direct my reflection back to the Bhagavad Gita when things are less heated, the actual winners and losers have been sorted out, and the bodies buried. All wars have consequences, but I am not in the horrific underground labyrinth of Mariupol. It is a theoretical conversation. I cannot know how or where we have been injured, even when I try to get personal about the cost.

However, this mythic, fable-like perspective is perfect for examining the story of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

The Stray Dog*

More than 100 years ago, during the Bolshevik Revolution, very close to this same battlefield, Gurdjieff started his wandering that would eventually take him and his followers to France. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to establish his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Tbilisi, then soon after in Essentuki. By 1920, he and his followers left Georgia for Constantinople. He'd become a stray dog, forced into roaming by the progenitors of the army currently bombing, slaughtering, and raping.

This small group of men and women was drawn from the Russian elite. Eventually, they found their way to Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon. This French chateau, the residence of Louis XIV's secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, was abandoned after a previous revolution impoverished its aristocratic owner. Then the first major global conflict created a mammoth fixer-upper where these homeless exiles set up an esoteric school.

They remained an elite group for the next 29 years he taught. Some prominent figures came to study with Gurdjieff, but he authorized very few senior students as teachers and left us scant, for the most part, very difficult, poorly written materials. Yet he has an outsized impact on modern spirituality. Many proponents of the Western Enneagram cite Gurdjieff as the source of their psychological/spiritual tool, though their claims are far from certain.

Gurdjieff was vague about his teachers. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, and in several other places, he makes them the stuff of legend, idealized characters, almost caricatures in a mythic story of discovery and intrigue. They imparted a special, hidden teaching. They are never clearly identified. This is the very nature of esotericism—obscure and only understood by a small number of people with special (and perhaps secret) knowledge. Understanding these teachings requires secrecy and initiation.

I meet “The Work.”

I moved to Berkeley in 1973 and began work in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth, a name he borrowed from Gurdjieff. Our group of 50 to 60 people came from all walks of life. There were psychologists and professors, a Jesuit priest and a Franciscan Friar, two seminarians, one former nun, a devotee of Swami Rudrananda, a rabbi’s wife, and one woman who’d been associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation; several Ph.D.’s, two medical doctors, school teachers, at least one lawyer, more than a handful of psychology graduate students, body workers, therapists, a film-maker, a martial artist, a C-level New York fashion executive, Ravi Shankar’s mother-in-law, one professional journalist and a film distributor; but there were also carpenters, house painters and a French hippie. We were mostly white, straight (only 2 or 3 gay people), a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim, and a few Asians.

We explored the Enneagram of Fixations, and, by extension, told ourselves we were engaging in “The Work.” The figure of G.I. Gurdjieff, always referred to as “Mr. Gurdjieff,” or "Mr. G.," his pronouncements, statements about the nature of the universe, humankind’s ultimate purpose, and his methods for spiritual work were treated as sacrosanct.  Beelzebub's Tales was spoken of in hushed tones, but rarely read. If you read it but didn’t understand his jibberish or the insidious properties of the mysterious organ Kundabuffer, you were advised to re-board the spaceship Karnak and delve more deeply into the mysteries that eluded you. This language purported to have roots in several esoteric Eastern spiritual disciplines. Using it, wrestling with the complexity of the inner states it purported to describe, was part of the process of introspection, which Gurdjieff described as “Self-Remembering.”

Gurdjieff’s teaching has been passed down to us in several distinct categories. The carefully written unreadable book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man; Meetings with Remarkable Men, apparently combines his own autobiographical work with a draft by his student, A.R. Orage, and finally Life is Real Only Then, When “I Am,” are fragments of talks edited by one of his principle students, Jeanne de Salzmann. The writing of students that Gurdjieff authorized, most notably P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, also received his imprimatur.

There are anecdotal memoirs of students, plus extensive transcripts of his talks. The writings of men and women (both genders are represented, but men far outnumber women) who stand in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers who purport to transmit Gurdjieff’s teaching and to claim authority to teach. Finally, there are extensive writings by people who describe their own experiences and interpretations of his teachings. These vary widely from memoir to metaphysical speculation to hagiography.

I use the word “myth” to denote stories told about Gurdjieff’s understanding of the complexity of our human nature, driven by some overriding knowledge of the ultimate purpose of our human predicament. They include the repetition of phrases or instructions to people who sought his direction as they undertook their own inner search. Though Gurdjieff was a real person who had real contacts with humans that were, from their reports, immensely transformative, the myths that I am talking about are, for the most part, second-generation, embellished stories that share more with Aeneas’s journey from Troy than, and (I chose my example carefully) Krishnamurti’s talks at Ojai. Though I love Virgil’s poetry, I prize Jiddu Krishnamurti’s analysis.

I was born five years before Gurdjieff died in Paris, 29 October 1949. I met and had several conversations with one person, Lord John Pentland, who knew Gurdjieff over a long period and had been his student as well as a person he authorized to teach. I also knew several of Pentland’s students, most intimately a fellow Jesuit and gay man, Father Tom Charbeneau. I met the writer, Pamela Travers, who was Gurdjieff’s student, and I had a long association with Kathy Speeth, who sat on Gurdjieff’s knee when she was a toddler. I worked intensively for several years with Henry Korman, who claimed to be in the lineage of Fourth Way teachers, but later confessed to being a fraud. Others, most importantly Claudio Naranjo, used selected phrases and stories about Gurdjieff in their own teaching. Although I have combined this experience with my wide reading, I state at the outset that I am not a student of the Fourth Way, nor do I claim to have conducted a comprehensive study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching.

Gurdjieff’s public portrait is complex and tightly edited by his followers. On top of that, each one does his or her own editing. I have tried to report as accurately as possible what I can surmise from my own reading and research, as well as what I’ve been able to glean from second-hand accounts. For the purposes of argument, I've set my narrative against an idealized version of the man I’ve pieced together. Naranjo did not present himself as an heir to Gurdjieff’s teaching, but he was certainly conversant with it and frequently cited Gurdjieff as a prototypical teacher of the inner work he favored. He labeled him a “trickster,” standing in a venerable line of teachers who use unorthodox, even unethical means to compel a student to learn something they can’t see for themselves. Naranjo talked about “The School,” an interrelated set of teachings and teachers whose work could be traced, using some psychic map, to the same Source.

This unfettered style often veers outside normal ethical norms and opens the possibility for abuse. The end justifies the means. Our newfound sexual freedom encouraged an attitude of laissez-faire, which inevitably led to exploitation. Naranjo was very interested in psychedelics—he encouraged experimentation with drugs, notably LSD and Ayahuasca; he and his leaders allowed interactions that were outside professional guidelines; teachers’ credentials went unchecked or were inflated. In post-hippie, Beatnik California, Naranjo was not alone, encouraging some of these behaviors, engaging in some, and turning a blind eye to others. Many New Age teachers shared this sin. It comes part and parcel with the top-down authority structure that framed the conversation.

Trying to be as transparent as I can be in this conversation, I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my adult life exploring New Age esoteric and occult, a highly suspect endeavor, populated with the likes of Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Charles Webster Leadbeater, or Aleister Crowley. They all purported to be authentic or enlightened teachers with a clear channel to “All that Is.” This is rocky terrain, rife with snake oil salesmen and outright frauds. Some of these people were more convincing than others, basically because they spun better yarns, but the frauds all seem to have this in common—their stock in trade was taking advantage of vulnerable people. In my case, it was a severe personal crisis that I didn’t even recognize. I was looking for a way out. By directing my attention to my plight, seeming to dismantle it and returning life to some level of normalcy, acceptance, and happiness, roped me into its intrigue.

Several friends have discouraged my investigation. One asserts that Naranjo is not as important as he was when we were part of SAT, that his influence is waning. Another warns that negative comments deter people from undertaking the difficult work of introspection. These cautions do not deter me. The influence of Gurdjieff in modern, non-religious practice is far wider than might appear at first glance. It warrants examination. It extends from the presentation of the Enneagram in a Catholic setting to several “Human Potential Trainings/Processes,” notably the processes directly connected to the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, which Naranjo promoted and introduced to SAT. 

Most importantly, “The Work '' struck a chord with me, opening up a world that I had to explore. I got caught in the trap of not being able to see my own plight clearly. When I could open my eyes, I was forced to admit that I’d been the fool. It was a very uncomfortable predicament. The amount of personal capital that I’d already invested obscured the situation. What makes this gnostic enterprise difficult to crack is that it begins to unmask both the entrapment and the self-deception, the very thing that I’d sought to free myself from in the first place. It provided some sense of relief, but a half-right answer is still wrong. Freeing one hand provided relief, but I was still a slave.

The logical fallacy of the Argument from Authority.

Let's examine the logical fallacy that brings down the whole house of cards. Gurdjieff argues that man has the possibility of being awake, but to wake up, he or she must set an alarm, a conscious mechanism he or she inserts into his unconscious routine to remind him that it's a dream. But there’s a catch: once the alarm clock has been set and has worked a few times, the mechanisms of our human mind grow numb to its sound, and it doesn't work. We fall back into sleep. The human perpetual sleeping machine needs a perpetual waking machine, one that stands outside the habitual way of being. Thus, we need an awake man (sometimes a woman, but rarely), a guru who knows, vs. an ordinary asleep man just going through the rituals of survival and coping. To top off the esoteric mechanism, when you realize that you are asleep, you need to find and pay this awake person to wake you up.*

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true. This is also known as an appeal to authority. This fallacy occurs when person Y claims that person X is experienced in the topic at hand. Therefore, whatever person X believes is the truth. Alternatively, this can also occur if person Y claims to be the authority, therefore whatever person Y believes is true. This fallacy is a special case of the generic fallacy where the source is used to justify the acceptance of a conclusion.”

Who stands in the position of X at the top of the enterprise of the Western Enneagram as the person of authority? When describing the origins of the Enneagram, we find oblique references to Gurdjieff. The main candidates for any authorized source swing between the truly secret teaching of Gurdjieff or his followers, to Arica founder Oscar Ichazo and his student Naranjo, with some dubious stops in the Sarmoung or Naqshbandi brotherhood, or (this one is close to my heart) in the work of a 17th-century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher. 

I argue that all these stories are fishy—to use a technical term. Most conversations about spiritual life are crippled by weak arguments. The impulse to expand the world beyond what we can perceive and verify is not the exclusive property of Gurdjieff's metaphysical construct. The awake person knows something that you do not know, something your present condition blinds you from seeing, but something that can alter your present condition by correct analysis. I argue that this argument from authority is consistent across all revealed religions: for example, the dogmatic claim that the Pope, by virtue of his authority alone, can issue statements that are “infallibly true” despite any factual evidence. I will also point to the passion for miracles, physical occurrences that stand outside the normal laws of cause and effect. I use the word “passion'' purposefully because even if we can’t personally witness these extraordinary events, we “believe” them, assuring ourselves in the benevolence of the unseen world, guiding us when we lack clarity, and for the purposes of this argument, providing authority as we grapple with the unknown.

The proponents of what I call the Western Enneagram Teaching as a tool for self-observation point to the appearance of the nine-pointed mandala in Gurdjieff’s teaching, plus a few other references, found mostly in the works of Ouspensky and Bennett. But in Gurdjieff, the Enneagram outlines the steps for the movements, or sacred dancing, combined with a rather complex set of laws of three and octaves—certainly nothing that points to 27 categories of personality fixations, virtues, or holy work.

The first person in the Americas, and the first person to refer to an Enneagon, was the Bolivian esotericist Oscar Ichazo. In 1968, Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. It was there that Naranjo made contact with Ichazo. Later at Ichazo’s first training in Arica, Chile, Naranjo began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations.

Naranjo wove a convoluted tale of Sufi masters disguising their teaching and tricking their disciples, and wove it into his story about receiving the Enneagram from Ichazo. My skeptic tells me he was just trying to establish an authorized teaching lineage by characterizing his difficult relationship with Ichazo as a Sufi trick. To further break with the pesky facts, Naranjo describes his understanding of the Enneagram as the result of automatic writing. Appealing to an otherworldly realm for evidence, one of Ichazo’s disciples says that an esoteric volume fell from a shelf in Ichazo’s study, opened up to the Enneagon diagram, and Ichazo divined its gnostic meaning.

I want to point out that all these conversations themselves are privileged. They rely on the status of the speaker rather than hard evidence to prove the validity of the Enneagram/Enneagon. Both the claims and statements fall entirely within the argument from authority to confirm the system’s validity.

You don’t believe me? Then why are we still having this argument about the correct or authorized source? Q.E.D.

Debunking some myths around “Mr. Gurdjieff” and “The Work.”

Before I begin to debunk any mythological constructs. I will note what first attracted me to "The Work,” what I found useful, where I opened myself to abuse, and finally, how I began to become disenchanted. Throughout, I will be paying close attention to language. Zen posits that what's important to discuss is beyond words, but we have to use words; they may be an approximation, but they are the only tool available to humans. Some esoteric language points to important issues in life, while other language—I will use a less technical, but very precise, word to describe this abuse—is gibberish.

When I was 29 years old, after just a few months working with Naranjo, I had an experience that lifted a huge weight that I’d been carrying for many years. Sitting in that ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley, it struck like lightning. Its debris would take years to sweep up. I uncovered the motivation for my decision to train as a Jesuit, a dream that began in adolescence. Unpacking it, dealing with the consequences, including the abuse that played out, would be a long, slow, and costly process, but it opened a new vista for my life that I could not have imagined. I remain grateful, but in retrospect, the experience was so overwhelming that I was blinded to its limitations.

These were heady days. Naranjo told us that he was setting up a school that would be a smorgasbord of available spiritual disciplines, shorthand for “Esalen Style.” Experimentation was the norm, and, given the circumstances, the path might prove rocky, even dangerous. I knew that I needed psychological help, but I also wanted to avoid professional treatment. As a Jesuit, therapy was not out of bounds, but still carried enormous baggage if I wanted to advance in the Order. The prospect of blending spirituality with the insights of psychology provided cover. For any psychological process to work, however, it requires a level of vulnerability, but in the freewheeling world of SAT, time-tested ethical and professional principles have been suspended. There were casualties, and personally, I ran up against very difficult obstacles. Being raped by an uneducated tailor who claimed to be the psychic channel for a dead psychiatrist certainly fits in that category.

Naranjo, much like Gurdjieff in Meetings with Remarkable Men, told tales of receiving information from other sources. Bob Hoffman told him things about his past that Hoffman could not have possibly known, or that was Naranjo’s claim,* and therefore the whole group would be subjected to the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, despite Hoffman’s obvious lack of professionalism. On the other hand, the discipline of Fritz Perls was far from unprofessional, and when Naranjo sat in that chair, he was the consummate professional. People in SAT relied on Helen Palmer’s costly psychic readings as prognosticators of behavior patterns, things to work on. Some people used their alleged connections to the other side as sources for psychological investigation. There was Anne Armstrong (who gave me unsolicited and disastrous advice about a business deal) and a specious Chilean palm reader to whom Kathy Speeth is indebted for losing her license to practice therapy in California.

I made a list and named names, far from complete, to point out the otherworldly, suspect sources of many of the psychological techniques used to probe the roots of personal psychological makeup. Key to any of this having therapeutic benefits is surrender. Suspension of judgment opens the back door to the unexpected, revelatory, hidden motivations, the dark family secret that has been lurking and putting up barriers. However, investigation shifts from analysis of counterproductive behaviors to tracing their source, as if dream analysis á la Oracle at Delphi had become a substitute for free association, and the mind-altering experience of LSD a quick route to the fruits of meditation practice.

But what if this type of inquiry does not stand the test of time or produce real results? Spiritual charlatans have a huge bag of tricks—they act like drugs—to induce experiences of ecstasy and revelation. I was told over and over to “suspend [my] judgment, enter into another state where things will be revealed.” This is an exact quote; some version of this is repeated ad nauseam to this day. To be honest, sometimes sleight of hand is useful in discovering a personal blind spot, but at some point, if the trick is not revealed for what it is, it becomes part of the illusion.

We know that some mental processes work below the surface. They are unconscious; if they remain hidden, they wield enormous influence, and we remain in their thrall. But a simple dream about having a heart attack is no predictor. Casual or surface exploration serves little purpose other than to induce fear. When a friend told me about having a dream like this, I asked if he’d seen a cardiologist. But I also knew that I suspended my judgment many times when it would have been better to allow my actually well-trained critical faculty to maintain the upper hand.

Hoffman once told me that his dreams had predicted that he would be cured of cancer because he had a higher calling, and I believed him until I took care of him when he was dying of cancer. I’d been doing professional hospice work for nearly a decade, so I was not particularly shocked by his lack of acceptance of his own death. He was in complete denial, expecting another psychic miracle and very angry when it didn’t appear. I have detailed some of the unraveling of his pretense and absurd lies behind his psychic understanding of life in other writings. Perhaps I ought to listen to my mother and not speak ill of the dead. I have to confess that I was far too close to the man to be objective. His sexual abuse was always in the background, but he never made amends—he was far too arrogant to admit any faults. But there was also something more interesting going on, the beginnings of the erosion of the framework underpinning his system and, by extension, the entire work that Naranjo undertook with his groups.

In response to a friend's request to examine particular Gurdjieff sources, I came across some talks in which he made very definitive statements about the differing roles of women and men. These were the urtexts, transcriptions of his talks to students either at Le Prieuré or in his Paris flat. It seemed all very high-tone, even provocative, but it had the confrontational tone of a bully. Part of my mind revolted, and I realized that it was simply outright misogyny, delivered in an extremely arrogant tone, quite similar to what I experienced in the men whom I’d met who claimed their authority by referencing the Armenian seer.

There was no abrupt “Ah ha” moment. In my mind, I'd constructed a protective shield for this figure who was held in utmost reverence by people I respected. He was, we were told, a man who knew himself. I told myself that the misogyny had to be a function of time, place, and circumstance; this charismatic member of an elite group who’d undertaken a heroic exploration of ancient traditions and helped find a key to some of life's mysteries, and provided a key, or what I imagined was a key, to self-understanding.

But what if Gurdjieff himself was an ordinary man ruled by circumstance? Being a man lulled to sleep by life’s circumstances was exactly what “The Work'' sets out to conquer. This sleep keeps us enslaved. What about all the rest of what Gurdjieff claimed? The house of cards began to fall. I gave up surrendering to a set of ideas that produced a modicum of results. They were based almost exclusively on the word of a man who claimed authority by his experience and hard-won understanding of man’s plight. It stood or fell on his authority, real or imagined. I could no longer stake my life on this teaching.

The argument from authority is “[a] formal fallacy in which it is argued that because a perceived authority figure (or figures) believes a proposition (relevant to their authority) to be true, that proposition must therefore be true.” But what this authority figure proposed was blatantly false. What Hoffman claimed about the psychic workings of the mind was absurd. Naranjo's claim about the origin of the Enneagram of fixations was at best a hallucination. Gurdjieff was a bully, a sexist, and a misogynist. Believe them at your own peril. Q.E.D.

I do not, however, want to throw out the whole barrel as if it were filled with rotten fish that stinks to high heaven. I remembered the words of Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, whom Gurdjieff thought was a convivial partner to share a glass of vodka with at The Stray Dog, but “a weak man”. If Self-Remembering can get us here, even for an instant, it was worth all the effort.

“…that you can know consciousness only in yourself. Observe that I say you can know, for you can know it only when you have it.”

And I emphasize this sentence: “And when you have not got it, you can know that you have not got it, not at that very moment, but afterwards.”

After a period of time and reflection. It took a while.

____________________

Notes:

*The Stray Dog. A Saint Petersburg cafe where Gurdjieff held forth, according to G. Lachman. It is the presumed site that elicited the comment from Gurdjieff that Ouspenskyy was a personable guy to drink vodka with, but a weak man.

* When I first heard of wokeism, this is what my mind conjured up, and the term does insist on a degree of blanket “correctness,” including its underlying assumptions.

Ichazo has said that “in order to understand the originality of the perspective of the Arica Integral Teachings, it is important to remember that Buddhism is based on the epistemological and immediate discovery or knowledge of the world as being fundamentally in a state of suffering (Skt. samsara). This is the First Noble Truth. What the Arica Theory proposes is an ontological foundation with the discovery that one step behind suffering, we find the actual root of that suffering, and this step behind discovers, answers, and defines the ontological proposition that there must be a being, an Ego–entity, that supports that suffering.” The Roots of Buddhism and Arica Integralism

Bibliography

Claudio Naranjo
End of Patriarchy: And the Dawning of a Tri-Une Society, Paperback – 1 Jan. 1994
Cf. Chapter on the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

Enneagram Posts:

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

The Enneagram, the Final Reckoning, Banishment to the Darkness of Ignorance

Enneagram Bibliography

“There is nothing of value apart from the truth.” 

Half a century ago, I joined a cult. I talk about it, sometimes very publicly and too much, but I never call it a cult. I struggle to admit that’s what it was. I am too proud and too embarrassed to admit that I was part of a closed group that controls what you think, how you interact with the world, and how you spend your money, all with vague promises of being enlightened, or perhaps just living consciously, provided we were deferential to mentors who even dictated whom you slept with; there were no limits or boundaries to what was fair game. That pretty much checks all the boxes under “cult.”

Me? I’m an intelligent Ivy League-educated man who’d undergone almost ten years of rigorous training as a Jesuit. How could I possibly abandon all my basic critical skills? Perhaps 'abandon' is too mild — I slavishly devoted them to the leader's system of self-investigation, which he learned from a Bolivian occultist who was protected by a Sufi entity known as the Green Qutb and guided by the Archangel Metatron who speaks directly to God. The Source of this school was rumored to be a Sufi sect half a world away, and allegedly the training ground for the esoteric teaching of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Sufis guard their secrets ferociously, thus all the guessing and obscurity.

Metatron’s alleged seal of approval should have been a red flag, pointing to arrogance rather than wisdom. The occultist was Oscar Ichazo, and although I never met him, from reports I’ve heard and read, he was brilliant, odd, and arrogant. He claimed, “Our work is exceptional in that I am trained and entitled to do much work for others.” His main student, at least in that student’s spiritual narrative, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, describes several profound, self-confirming experiences that led him to believe he had been initiated into the Sufi school that was the source of Gurdjieff’s teaching. My direct connection was with a bright, personable, and well-trained Jesuit, Father Bob Ochs, whom Naranjo had authorized to teach the basics of the Enneagram, also known as the Enneagon, the key to Ichazo’s system of “self-remembering.” Ochs mentioned, almost off handedly, that the esoteric school where the Enneagram had been hiding was the same school that trained Jesus before his ministry.

Naranjo, at least as far as I can determine from his public CV, was not an occultist before meeting Ichazo. He was a highly trained and well-regarded medical doctor and psychotherapist who worked primarily in his native Chile. He certainly had more than a passing interest in entactogens and psychedelic drugs, which were not illegal in his native country, or certainly they were far less regulated than in the US. In 1962, he was invited to Harvard for one academic year as a Fulbright scholar. There, he worked in the Center for the Study of Personality under the direction of David McClelland. He then came to Berkeley, California, and became a regular at the Esalen Center in Big Sur. It was at Esalen that he recruited between 54 and 70 people, reports vary, to accompany him in April 1970 to Arica, a beach town bordering the Atacama Desert at the northernmost point of Chile, to study with Ichazo. They became the first students to participate in what would become the Arica Training. When Naranjo returned to Berkeley, he began gathering 50 or so students to study the Enneagram/Enneagon. I was in the second wave of that group.

Naranjo billed his Seekers After Truth (SAT) group as sampling from the smorgasbord of psychological and spiritual offerings fortuitously appearing in California. We had a Tai Chi Master from Taiwan, a Buddhist Yogi from Tibet, a Thai Vipassana meditation teacher, plus the Gestalt work of Fritz Perls, who was one of Naranjo’s mentors. But other teachers had far less conventional—and far more troublesome — backgrounds. He delegated the psychological exploration of early childhood to a bespoke tailor in Oakland, Bob Hoffman, who didn’t finish high school but was guided by his former therapist, a disembodied (deceased in real language) German-Jewish Freudian psychiatrist who fled the rise of Hitler and landed at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital in San Francisco. 

The birth of the “School for this Age” was marked by very mundane coincidences that defied common sense. Naranjo’s narrative included checking into the same cheap Miami hotel as Oscar, and by chance, picking up the phone at the exact moment that the person he was destined to meet dialed him. Sufi lore suggests that these coincidences put you on a new path to unraveling the mystery of the Universe. He missed the appointment because he took a nap and overslept. Given his infatuation with drugs, he might have been either high or coming down, but no matter.

This “School” had three legs: the Enneagram, sex, and drugs. All three were always present to varying degrees depending on Naranjo’s whim. Most of Naranjo’s students spent (in my view) far too many weekends experimenting with drugs. LSD, harmaline, MDA, MDMA, ibogaine, phenylisopropylamine, and Ayahuasca, a South American shamanic brew. Naranjo claimed to have studied its application to psychotherapy. 

It was illegal for a medical professional to advocate any of these mind-altering substances. Because Naranjo did not want to lose his license, he could not recommend any hallucinogens. But to qualify as a real experiment, either experimentally or therapeutically, there needed to be at least one objective, sober observer. No one assumed that role. Naranjo certainly did not. He was the first to swallow the pill. Looking back, it was probably the drugs that led to what he calls his Dark Night of the Soul. 

After talking with Ochs, I decided not to participate in the drug experimentation, and did not, aside from occasional marijuana use. There may have been some group work or conversations after the experiments, but I was never asked to participate. I was far too afraid. Afraid is too mild; I was petrified, witnessing the side effects. At least one student’s death might have been avoided. 

As far as the sex part of cult exploitation, it was just post the Haight Ashbury Summer of Love, and no one wanted to sit on the sidelines for that party. People seemed to assume they had permission to do whatever the hell they wanted, but that does not, in my view, absolve anyone. Indeed, “no” was a word rarely spoken and rarely heeded when it was. We called Naranjo’s house on Allston Way “the harem,” and I will leave it there. I was raped by Hoffman, a man whom Naranjo recommended, even championed. Entities that spoke “from the other side” encouraged Hoffman to flout the norms of professional conduct. He was a maniac who felt above the law. He defined freedom and grabbed as much power and permission from the invisible world as we were willing to hand over. Part of the game was surrender: if you were unwilling, you’d never get whatever it was your heart desired.

We were all guinea pigs in the experiment. I could not avoid harm. None of us could. The level of denial matched the depth of our participation. Naranjo, other teachers, and mentors in SAT had an obligation to protect us against the dangers of “ego reduction.” They failed. If drugs were to be tolerated, even encouraged, there was the obligation of full disclosure. Instead, there was a wall of silence and denial. I had the right not to be sexually exploited. I was. When I joined Naranjo’s SAT, I was a full-time student at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Four years later, I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco, and drove a cab. 

Better to admit you walked through the wrong door than to spend your life in the wrong room. The fact that I opened the door and walked through, however, remains. 

The next series of posts will detail how I came to this realization and what I’ve done about it.

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2025/07/connecting-gi-gurdjieff-with-naranjos.html

It’s a cult damn it. Nothing more.

“Love your kids more than evolution requires.” --David Brooks

Other Posts regarding Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

The Truth about Bob Hoffman

The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. 

It’s a cult, damn it. Nothing more

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman 

Jonestown and Our Deliverance from Cults

Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple 

I was just listening to a podcast by Andrew Gold, interviewing Jon Atack (A Piece of Blue Sky), about Charlie Manson and Scientology. Alack describes a cult in its simplest form as a group that reveres a particular leader or doctrine. Bow down and surrender. Isn’t that the first thing you heard after you’d knocked on the door? 

A general rule is that cult leaders are not necessarily brilliant, or enlightened, or even educated. As a matter of fact, very often they are none of the above, but they know how to weave a spell, to hypnotize, to create a myth, and make promises that sell themselves. The best and the worst were con men (or women) with an uncanny ability to mirror our insecurities and then reflect back a crafted solution that paid them, usually more than its real value.

In the late 1960s, particularly in California, a new group of high-flying self-help gurus emerged, promising a level of personal awareness that would free us — if we worked with them. We were told that we’d been programmed by a familiar network of parents, schools, pastors, priests and rabbis, tribal culture, liberal (or conservative) political prejudices, the sexual taboos that hounded us along with innumerable generations before us. The gurus pointed to obvious evidence, and we jumped at a ready solution. We’d all suffered through the deadening post-war social homogenization. We’d all experienced the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation, driving under our desks since the first grade (I remember these drills today when the threat of armed maniacs in schools is very real and certainly statistically more deadly). The Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love erupted and, I think, clearly demonstrated a deep hunger for relief.

The new age gurus promised that we could be deprogrammed from this hypnotic state. This was an attractive offer. It was universally agreed among my affluent college-educated peers that we were all caught in the thrall of automatic action and reaction. We also felt that our level of discomfort was somehow unfair. It was just hard to name the culprit. We were told that the buck stopped with us, but we had to pinpoint who we were “being” when push came to shove. A friend paid a sizable chunk of money to spend a long, sleepless weekend sitting on the floor of a yoga studio, asking and answering the repeated question “Who are you?” 

We were told that any possible freedom or newly discovered enlightenment would require work. We rolled up our sleeves and opened our wallets, or at least contrived alternative ways to pay for services. There were groups and rivalries. Bob Hoffman badmouthed Werner Erhard. Mainline Gurdjieff groups paid no attention to Claudio Naranjo’s Enneagram. Gurdjieff teachers questioned the credentials of people who set themselves up as doing “The Work.” Oscar Ichazo sued Helen Palmer, and Scientology had a very long list of defectors in the docket, including Werner Erhard’s est. 

The infighting became cannibalistic. Here’s an example--Scientology sued the Cult Awareness Network, which bankrupted them with the massive legal fees required to defend themselves. Scientology, through an agent, then purchased the shell of CAN for the fire-sale price of $25,000 and made it an arm of the Church of Scientology, which became the resource for distraught parents whose children had become Moonies, an Osho Sannyasin--or recruits for Scientology’s Sea Org. And the Scientologists in charge took their jobs very seriously. I was on the phone with them when a concerned family member raised concerns about the “human-development” seminar company I worked for. They knew the precise questions to ask to uncover a cult.

This kind of feeding frenzy spread like wildfire in dry grass. Not only were our leaders fighting amongst themselves, with lawsuits and unbecoming slander and innuendo, but we took on each other with a righteous, determined vengeance to do the hard work of Ego Reduction. If we were not aware of our patterns of programmed behaviors, rackets, bank, negative behaviors, without lapsing into passive-aggressive behavior ourselves, how could we root them out? Like good soldiers in the war against the dark side, we ganged up on each other, all with some expression of gratitude or at least lack of complaint. In retrospect, our behavior was more like gang bangers than seekers after truth or truth warriors. It also served a dual purpose. It deflected attention from the leaders who were more like tribal Neanderthals with automatic weapons than compassionate, enlightened beings acting for the deepest good of all humankind. 

I knew one of these gurus for almost 30 years. It was an on-again,off-again acquaintance. Bob Hoffman was a very difficult man, most likely suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder. I cannot say that he was dumber than a stump. I don’t know his IQ, though I do know that he dropped out of school in about the 6th or 7th grade and never received a GED. For the almost 30 years I knew him, he never finished a book though he did try several times. He opened E.M. Forster’s “Maurice” when he heard that it was his gay novel, but he never finished it. He told me that the storyline was too bleak. He also tried Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man," but lost interest when he realized Isherwood was not Danielle Steel. He asked me to fill him in on the end of the story. He was disappointed. He loved a happy ending. 

Hoffman channeled the Quadrinity Process from his spirit guide, his psychotherapist, Siegfried Fisher. Because it came from “the other side” Hoffman claimed the highest level of validity. He would stand in front of a group and ramble. I never saw him go into anything like a trance. Most times, the sessions were recorded and Hoffman had them transcribed, edited, and cleaned up by a small group of people who had had, admittedly, some rather remarkable personal experiences following this otherworldly methodology. Because Hoffman tried to hide that he had actually been Fisher’s patient, the whole tale became twisted with lies and information that was “somewhat less than factual,” and it became ripe ground for manipulation.

When I read some well-thought-out passage online attributed to Hoffman, I know that it was obviously written by a ghost. Hoffman liked it short, dirty, and crude. His teaching style was in-your-face aggressive. On a scale of professional to barbarian, he was unapologetically barbarian. He “broke you down to build you up,” and you had to be grateful for his gifts of wisdom. You did things his way, or you’d be shut out. Some of the people who succeeded him will boast they never stooped to or countenanced his crude confrontation, that they told him so to his face, brave souls. They stretch the truth. Every one of them would have to admit to strained working relationships. At some point, everyone close to him just blocked his ranting, and as long as he got paid, he learned to live with it. 

But the adjustments, the edits, the lies are necessary. Hoffman is still the guru face of the Process that bears his name. It is a cult. Is there something more? Is there anything that can be saved from this river of teaching? I will also tackle the question of whether the Western adaptation of Buddhism loses something by closely identifying with the Self-Help Industry. Stay tuned.

 

Omnibus Est Stupri Aliquem--”Everybody was fucking somebody.”

This is dangerous territory. I could be vague and write about the people I want to talk about as if they were hypothetical and their stories anecdotal, but the damage was real and needs to be discussed. I use only Initials when I do not have solid evidence and the men or women are still alive. Believe whatever you want. You get to decide if you will remain in a world of denial and protect whatever you feel needs protecting. Guru types acting badly are precisely that. Even if I’ve made an error and the few I allude to are as clean as the morning dew, there is a long line of those who fill the bill and then some.

Yesterday, I uncovered some slight nostalgia for the New Age California of the last half of the last century, the last of the last. After all, we all learned so much, didn’t we? I’ve talked at length about Bob Hoffman’s sexual and emotional abuse and its lingering effects. I woke up trying to tell myself that perhaps it wasn’t that bad. After all, I knew at least two other young men who were the object of his aggressive, entitled, and uninvited sexual advances. Why should I think I’m special? Besides, I had a life-changing personal breakthrough, so perhaps I ought to change my tune and be grateful.

Then, a rush of other sexual misconduct started like a tidal wave: Everybody was fucking somebody.

It was common knowledge that Claudio Naranjo was fucking KS, but also RS and a few other young women in the groups. He loved the Enneagram, sex, and drugs in no particular order. One woman who lived in his harem had a psychotic break and died in a car crash, but that didn’t stop his behavior. He didn’t even introduce a word of caution. According to this wild, wide-eyed version of the “Work,” there was something to be learned from all our interactions.

Several priests were involved, and they were not celibate--at least for some period of time. They were middle-aged men acting like teenagers. One exclaimed that the vow of chastity was like closing off Soldier's Field. The gay priest came after me, but I wasn’t having it. I’d taken a leave of absence and was having sex, but not with men who’d pledged religious vows.

Joe Scerbo and another friend, an older woman I loved very much but who has cut off communication because of my insistence on talking about things she thinks should be secret, organized a weekend of tantric massage. There was only a hair’s breadth between what transpired and a full-on orgy. It had almost nothing to do with meditation and everything to do with getting naked in a large group with lots of scented oil. A cute guy there from Ichazo’s Arica Training confirmed that those groups, too, were sexually permissive. It was, in his view, part and parcel of being sexually liberated and doing esoteric work.

KS tried to establish an independent “Work” group but lost her license to practice psychotherapy in California when she recommended the services of David (pronounced Da’vid), a Chilean seer who read either your palm or your skull. I forget the particulars, but his blowjobs were legendary. One man who followed KS out of California, I will not use any initials because his crime was so heinous, molested his teenage daughter. Yeah, “everybody was fucking somebody,” but then there are sexual crimes that scream to high heaven.

In these circles, Mr. G. was a mythological figure. You said his name in a hushed voice and bowed your head. We were told he was a trickster whose sexuality was part of his repertoire of teaching tools. Of course, there is only anecdotal information, but that was enough to create a kind of blanket permission for anyone taking up the “trickster” methodology to fuck whomever they wanted, and I say that’s what they wanted, not Liberation. Of course, I, too, only have anecdotal evidence, but I’m not fucking students.

Swami Muktananda, the guru’s guru, had multiple sexual relations with young, underage women, even girls (I didn’t say dozens because even he probably lost count). No one disputes that, but the other gurus defended him! Naranjo said Muktananda was not a lecher, but he could not break the public perception of the Brahmacharya, so he had to keep his sex life secret. No, Claudio, he was a lecher. Luckily, he preferred caucasian to Indian women and avoided a raft of other cultural taboos. The only question I have is what kind of legal mechanism his successor’s lawyers set up to avoid legal claims bankrupting Yoga Siddi Dam.

One teacher in the broad Hoffman group was credibly accused of sexual misconduct with an employee’s teenage daughter. A teacher from the UK described it as “getting his jollies.” The very Brit description confirms that his conduct was known, not taken seriously, and the subsequent shuffling of responsibilities was seen as shielding the Institute from liability. Why didn’t someone call it out, have him removed, or shut down the operation? One word: power. Money and greed played a role, but the winner was pre-ordained.

I know that HK was fucking at least one woman in our work group. I stood beside him when he invited her to his bed after the meeting ended. Although it was the woman who approached him for sex, he was still her teacher, and, following even loose interpretations of the ethics of student-teacher sexual relations, this was way out of bounds. I could barely believe my ears. HK went so far as to suggest that so and so in the group sleep with so and so but stop sleeping with so and so. He tried to set me up to sleep with one of several women in the group, but at that point, I decided that I’d had enough.

A high-level Scientology auditor didn't even pause before she stuck her tongue down my throat after attending a Dianetics lecture in Palo Alto. When I told her her advances were unwelcome, she told me that being gay could be handled in a few auditing sessions and offered me a cut-rate. The ride back to San Francisco was icy. I’ve never been good at small talk after rejecting a sexual advance. Looking back, “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” might have been appropriate.

Two of the Zen groups I sat with had teachers who slept with students. I told myself that these were adults making decisions about their own lives. I sat meditation with two of the men (they were all men) whose behavior became controversial. In both cases, I learned an enormous amount. In one case, it became challenging. This teacher practiced a kind of serial monogamy, and I wanted to maintain relationships with his former wives or girlfriends.

The case of Richard Baker is more complex. He was not the teacher. Suzuki Roshi was. Baker Roshi and his wife in the 60s could be best described as swingers. I’m sure that Baker and Suzuki Roshi talked about this aspect of his life, and you can also be sure that I have absolutely no idea about the content of those discussions. It was after Suzuki’s death that the accusations mounted, forcing him to resign, but at that point, it all seems to me to be an internal power struggle for control of Zen Center’s assets and not the conversation “Omnibus est stupri aliquem” I’m talking about.

Did we have a part in it? Of course. At 80 years old, what amazes me is that we were so reckless with our emotional lives, and some of our teachers threw any reasonable guidelines in the gutter. Not every case was rape, but hormones ruled the day. In Zen, the Path of Liberation is sometimes called the Path of Intimacy, and sexuality is key. Its fabric is complex and sacred, but in the last half of the half, most of us, students and teachers, treated it with little care and even less self-awareness.

Our greed caused great damage. We didn’t want to leave the Summer of Love behind and feel left out. You didn’t have to be a hippie to flaunt the sexual mores of our parents' generation and many more preceding theirs. We thought that we had opened the secret gate to the mystery of sex! There were soft angelic voices in the air as one SAT member wandered across Cuernavaca searching for her lost diaphragm so that the Aztec god of love might descend. Oh, the fucking arrogance is astounding. Like those priests magically or mystically released from their vows, we’d regressed to pubescent insanity.

Later, out of the wreckage, carefully worded policy statements about sexual conduct have been crafted by a cadre of experts called into service; there are policies and procedures for dealing with accusations of sexual harassment. Sister Mary Ignatius could not have engineered a safer place to do the difficult work of deep introspection, but it is a bloodless hellhole of denial and repression. We constructed in less than a generation what occupied the Catholic Church for millennia.

At least part of the fault here, and I do consider it a fault, is the model of “enlightenment” or awakening or finding the way--it requires submission, but the who, what, and where are left to “one who knows” to use a phrase popular with the followers of Mr. G. And for most people that still means someone wearing a funny hat spouting nonsense and then inviting you to his bed.

Is there another way? I certainly hope so, but it will take time, care, and respect to emerge. Until then, to paraphrase another biblical maxim, “By their sins, you shall know them.”

Why cults rewrite history: the backstory of the Hoffman Process.

Originally posted January 22, 2020

Other Posts regarding Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

The Truth about Bob Hoffman

The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. 

It’s a cult, damn it. Nothing more

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman 

Jonestown and Our Deliverance from Cults

Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple 

If I were Deep Throat, I’d tell you to follow the money. If you were asking whether to register for the Hoffman Process, I'd say caveat emptor.

The core premise of spiritual work is to be honest with ourselves, our faults, and idiosyncratic distortions of truth. This applies equally to the healer. Psychological treatment helps you uncover parts of yourself that you’ve been hiding from and have cast their shadow over the rest of your life. You assume that your therapist has dealt with most of that material themselves and can provide a reasonably unbiased mirror. That trust is essential.

Cults rewrite history. A fictitious backstory portrays the guru as having access to privileged knowledge. It’s just a marketing plan. The online biographies of Bob Hoffman, the founder of the Fischer-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, the Hoffman Process, or the Quadrinity Process, are awash in lies, inaccuracies, fabrications, or, in the best case, distortions. How could it be possible that any of these people actually met or worked with Hoffman? If they were honest, they could not demonstrate that Hoffman had the clarity to establish the trust required to do deep personal work. 

Hoffman was not a kindly, grandfatherly, “intuitive” who had everybody’s best interest at heart. He was a bully and a psychopath. He ran roughshod over everyone. If forced to testify under oath, almost all of Hoffman’s early associates would have to admit that he was neither gentle nor sympathetic. They might duck the issue, saying his methods were unorthodox, pig-headed, and unprofessional. He was a malignant narcissist.

His apologists will not agree he was the bully and liar I experienced, but I knew Bob Hoffman for over 25 years. I uncovered some of the lies he insisted he had to tell the world in order to promote his “very important” work. Most significantly, he lied about his relationship with Sigfried Fisher. He was Hoffman’s therapist for many years, but Hoffman created the fiction of a family friend with whom he shared convivial dinners. Hoffman also led a very closeted gay life. He was what I'd call a homophobe, but that is probably too much of a leap as I had to deal with his sexual and emotional abuse.

The Process claims it is not psychotherapy, but it does explicitly and purposefully dig into the roots of emotional conditioning. The first version, The Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy, was billed as an alternative to traditional therapy. The current version of the Hoffman Process is a choreographed emotional rollercoaster that promises an experience of unconditional love in a few days. It costs a great deal of money. It’s a hard sell that needs professional endorsement. In my view, it does not pass the conditions of ethical practice. One glance at the waivers you sign shows you’re in dangerous territory.

Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute International published a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON. The claims that he, Volker, or his copywriter use to describe the endorsement of Claudio Naranjo are not accurate. They are presented as if Naranjo had a strong hand in developing the Process, giving it a psychotherapeutic imprimatur. He did not.

Here are the false claims:

• The renowned Enneagram teacher Claudio Naranjo did help Hoffman formulate his “world-famous” process, but not in the ways described. Their relationship was far more complex and conflicted than either admitted. I have described my first-hand experiences in Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud.
• Naranjo’s medical education was at the University of Chile. He was a Guggenheim Fellow at Harvard for a year, a high honor worthy of note, but it does not include matriculation and graduation from the University. You might try to stretch it and say, “Harvard educated," but that's inaccurate. It just sounds assuring to your affluent Western audience.
• Naranjo did not coin the term “Quadrinity” to point to four aspects of human nature, emphasizing the oft-neglected emotional and spiritual sides. The incredibly talented polymath Julius Brandstatter came up with the term. That’s a fact. But of course, if you were looking for a sign of important collaboration, why not falsely claim that Naranjo gets naming rights? Who, after all, is Julius Brandstatter?
• The writer claims that Naranjo helped Hoffman formulate the 8-day Process. Wrong. When Naranjo independently crafted a 3-day version of the Process for his SAT groups, Hoffman realized that a shorter process would be more marketable. Naranjo had no hand in formulating what is now known as the Process. Again, Julius Brandstatter and his lovely, professionally trained wife, Miriam, were Hoffman’s principal consultants. How do I know this? Hoffman told me. Miriam herself recounted the experience in great detail when I visited her at her home during the last years of her life. I stand by my presentation of the history of the Process. When researching my paper, The Ontological Odd Couple, I had detailed conversations with almost everyone who contributed to Hoffman’s Process.

The Hoffman Institute International’s copywriter is batting four for four. I might be less critical of the Process if the current practitioners did their homework, but I beg the question.

Be highly cautious of psychological work "channeled" from a dead psychiatrist to a bespoke tailor with absolutely no professional training. Hoffman and The Hoffman Institute needed Naranjo’s endorsement. To lend credibility to their product, they’ve invented a dubious backstory. Buyer beware. Undertaking this exploration outside the guidelines of professional therapy is risky. It certainly was in my case. 

Cults rewrite history as advertising copy.