The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center may be at work.

If not, let’s kick-start it.

July 1, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going to button this up and call it a day.

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

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 an 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

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

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

I fully subscribe to the notion that “discovering” or naming a particular affliction, at least in spiritual terms, goes far towards finding a cure. 

It follows the model we use in medicine. You say to your spiritual director, “I’m feeling distracted and rudderless; I can’t seem to get anything done, much less concentrate and focus on the blessings that I know have been flowing like a mountain stream.” He or she begins to ask a few questions, maybe just to rule out a medical condition. You check for vitamin D deficiency, sleep deprivation, or having an unresolved argument with your partner. Perhaps then you begin to look for a temporary psychological disturbance: persistent fears, habits of isolation, or pre-judging the apparent motivation of a family member. The list can be endless. You catch little glimpses of insight when you examine each possibility, yet you still remain distracted, feeling out of sorts, or, in severe cases, paralyzed — ”can’t get out of bed feelings” for days. I will wager that most of us have been there. If these symptoms point to mental illness, they require intervention, but for otherwise reasonably functioning humans, it’s just called living a human life.

You tell yourself that there has to be a spiritual malady. Spiritual directors have been trying to alleviate the Dark Night of the Soul since shamans first began prescribing snake oil on the plains of Mesopotamia, or in caves painted with magical bears.

You consult your horoscope on the tabloid’s back page next to the comics. Miss Adelle tells you that for Scorpio, when your moon is in Leo, “results in a fascinating mix of intensity and theatricality. Scorpio's depth and passion are tempered by Leo's desire for recognition and leadership, creating a dynamic personality that can be both magnetic and internally conflicted.” (It said that. I’m not making it up.) It’s a diagnosis. You might find it interesting, helpful, incomprehensible, or just laughable. A homeopathic doctor prescribes mint tea. An Ayurvedic witch doctor rubs turmeric all over your belly and tells you to take a nap.

In our enlightened era, we want a scientific instrument. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) provides insights into our perceptual habits and decision-making apparatus, roughly in line with Jung’s analytical tool basket. People have found it helpful; it provides a quantifiable result, which, at least on the surface, avoids completely subjective self-analysis, but the scientific community considers it “pseudo-science.” 

But we’re not launching the Apollo Project. We do not have to prove Niels Bohr’s Theory of Quantum Mechanics. And there is nothing wrong with capturing the public’s imagination. The mother-daughter team of Myers-Briggs had mixed results in helping women find suitable employment. But they set in motion an organizational dynamic that adjusted working conditions to address women’s needs, and they enlivened a conversation about the subtle but very real ways extraversion, introversion, sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling offer insights into how individuals interact with the world, process information, make decisions, and approach their environment. 

But we still find ourselves in the market for spiritual medicine. Enter the Enneagram, another pseudoscience. It adds two sins to the deadly seven and purports to describe the mystery of the universe by pointing to a mysterious nine-pointed figure. For public name recognition, we don’t have Carl Jung with his impressive pedigree, but a Greek-Armenian mystic whose books are barely comprehensible, a Chilean psychiatrist with a taste for psychedelics, a Bolivian occultist who sends people into the desert on a spiritual quest, a relatively innocent-looking, mild-mannered lady who studied with a Rosicrucian cult, and a very personable Jesuit with a broad smile. In their downtime, they either file lawsuits against each other or hurl New Age truth bombs—certainly an odd group to charge with unlocking the secrets of the Universe. 

Unlocking those secrets is further complicated by determining where you fit in the range of 27 personality types, while at the same time sorting through the differing, even conflicting definitions of these types. In the beginning, there were several methods for determining your type, from a kind of psychic facial recognition to directed introspection. It was a Jesuit, Jerome Wagner, who created the first personality survey or test that allowed a person to pinpoint their type with uncanny accuracy. Jerome is a trained psychologist, but I am afraid that the therapeutic community would still label the system pseudoscientific. When I spoke with Jerome and Patrick O’Leary, they mentioned bringing an evangelical fervor to the Enneagram community. Yes, there is a definite spiritual overtone. Let me break this down: whether or not personality, spiritual intelligence, and the pursuit of happiness are governed by the “Law of Three.” Does examining your state of mind from one of the nine points help me, yours truly, gain in self-awareness, be happier, find peace, or be more productive?  

I was among the first 200 people to be introduced to the system after its initial rollout in Arica, Chile, in 1971-72. I just asked Google how many people have used the system in the last 50 years. An online survey site reports 190,000 respondents to a recent inquiry about the prevalence of various types. While hardly a number that rivals card readers or astrologers, one Enneagram school reports having trained and certified 1,680 teachers. There were nearly 300 books about Enneagram typing when I last compiled an Enneagram bibliography in 2019. At the International Enneagram Conference, now being held in Minneapolis, they expect 700 attendees from 47 countries.

What, if anything, sets the Enneagram apart from the daily horoscope or the turmeric belly rub? Why should I toss an important feature of self-analysis into a sea of completing shouts from various teachers who want me to buy their books, attend their trainings, and pay for private consultations?  The courtroom drama and the staggering costs of their lawyers fueled a purient interest. There was enough bad behavior to counter any evidence that Enneagram study assists the spiritual path. It brought out the worst, but in retrospect, it did what it was designed to do. 

I started my exploration well before the various rivalries reached a crescendo, and I’d experienced moments of clarity using the system for self-analysis. All the drama seemed like a sideshow, and didn’t demand that I pick a winner. I didn’t expect to land on a point that would unlock my personality after a weekend. It took more than a year to settle into a point that would guide my self-analysis for years, but even when my typing process turned out to be flawed, the system still held up.

I didn’t take a personality test. I didn’t attend a weekend workshop. I only read a few pages in one or two books. Rather, with a smiling Jesuit as a confidant, I wrestled with the devil. 

From Emily Dickensen There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons, That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes. Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the Meanings are. None may teach it Any - 'Tis the Seal Despair - An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air - When it comes, the Landscape listens - Shadows - hold their breath - When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death.

 

To read more about my story in Narabjo’s early SAT, click 

“Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley”

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Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

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

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