My path to the Enneagram and Gurdjieff has a sidebar of synchronicity. In 1966, I entered Shadowbrook, the Jesuit novitiate in Lenox, Massachusetts. The huge, half-empty Spartan novitiate was built on the grounds of a vast Berkshire “summer cottage” that the Carnegies, among other robber barons, had owned before becoming a Jesuit seminary and then burning to the ground in a tragic fire. Lenox was still a weekend retreat for wealthy New Yorkers. We were right across the street from Tanglewood. The old New England town center was very much like Hanover, New Hampshire, where I’d spent the best part of the last four years.
Thursdays were our day off, and I quickly found a small bookstore that had everything except all the assistant professors’ first book. I managed to hide a few dollars so that if some title caught my attention, I could sneak it back to the novitiate like illegal contraband. “In Search of the Miraculous” had just been published in paperback in 1965, and the clerk decided that a young seminarian in pressed white shirt and black pants should expand his parochial reading list. Ouspensky’s title fit right next to the 16th-century spiritual manual, “The Practice of Perfection,” in my novitiate cubicle without a hint of suspicion.
I supplemented my lectio divina. I learned that Mr. Gurdjieff taught that humankind’s default state was sleepwalking through life, unaware of who they were or what they were doing. Ouspensky said G promised that waking up was possible, but it required paying an awake person to wake you up and then continuing to pay real money to that awake person to keep you awake because going back to sleep was inevitable. Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I did understand the concept of having a person monitor your being asleep or awake in a rudimentary way. In the novitiate, our sleeping, waking, praying, and reading were carefully monitored. Life was punctuated by a bell that sounded like a fire alarm.
I read about the Law of Three and the Law of Octaves, also known as the Law of Seven. Then Ouspensky laid the Law of Three on top of the Law of Seven on the nine-pointed Enneagram figure that he claimed unlocked the deepest secret of the Universe. But, alas, Ouspensky didn’t provide the key.
I returned to Saint Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, but only five years later, I would find myself sitting on the floor of a ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley, California, learning about a psychological version of this Enneagram from Claudio Naranjo. I recognized the nine-pointed figure, and now I had something to attach it to.
Naranjo was obsessed with tracing an esoteric link between Ichazo’s Enneagon and the references to an Enneagram in Gurdjieff's teachings. I brought all my Jesuit training to reexamine everything Gurdjieff wrote, as well as a good deal of what his students had written. Nothing. From his fictitious “Meetings with Remarkable Men” to the very strange ”Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson,” there was no mention of a “psychological” Enneagram. Among the other writings by people who had known and worked with G directly, nothing, except perhaps John G. Bennett, but even with Bennett, there was no clear connection to what Ichazo had unearthed.
Taking the next step in the cultist’s playbook, people suggested that the Enneagram was a secret oral teaching, akin to a Tibetan Terma* that had ripened and whose time had finally arrived, like the dusty esoteric volume that fell off a shelf into Ichazo’s lap. In that case, perhaps one of the people who had worked directly with Gurdjieff could help.
I had a connection to Lord John Pentland, the President of the Gurdjieff Foundation. Lord Pentland had worked directly with Gurdjieff and had been changed to carry on the work. My friend, the Jesuit Tom Charbeneau, arranged for me to meet Pentland at the Foundation's headquarters in Saint Francis Wood. He spent a full hour with me. There was something about the man that was inspiring. He seemed genuinely interested in me, what I was about, and saw to the root of my questions. He did not condemn Ischazo or Naranjo’s teaching, but he was adamant that there was no trace of their use or interpretation of the Enneagram in Gurdjieff’s work.
Another friend, Daniel Terrango, had worked for several years in Mr. W.A. Nyland's group, another of Gurdjieff’s trusted disciples. He told me that they had never used anything like Icahzo’s Enneagon or Narranjo’s Enneagram. None of the recognized Fourth Way teachers in the Bay Area were even interested in Ichazo/Naranjo’s work.
Naranjo always talked about Gurdjieff as if Naranjo stood in that teaching lineage. He did not. All the blabber about the Trickster was anecdotal. The alleged Gurdjieff teachers that Naranjo introduced to SAT, with the exception of Pamela Travers, were bullies and frauds, and none of them showed much interest in the Enneagram either. Three names come up, E.J.Gold. Alex Horn and Henry Korman. I met them all, even if briefly, though I was Korman’s student for several years.
Lesson: Just saying that you were a teacher in the line of Mr. G might be a clue that your teaching methods will be overreaching and abusive. Oh, by the way, Oscar Ichazo, who was the origin of the modern iteration of this teaching, thought that the obsession with Gurdjieff was ludicrous.
*Terma: In Tibetan Buddhism and Bon traditions, a terma, meaning "hidden treasure," refers to esoteric teachings or objects concealed by adepts like Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal, to be rediscovered at a later, more appropriate time by tertöns (treasure revealers).
https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-jesuit-transmission-of-enneagram.html
