Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

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”

____

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

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

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

I asked AI: Did Helen Palmer attend a series of panels on the Enneagram of Fixations with Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley?

Yes, Helen Palmer, a renowned Enneagram teacher and author, was a student of Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley and part of his circle. Palmer is known for developing the "panel method," also known as the Narrative Tradition, where individuals share their experiences related to their Enneagram type. While the results don't explicitly mention panels specifically focusing on "fixations" with Naranjo, they do highlight the close relationship between Palmer and Naranjo in the development and dissemination of the Enneagram in Berkeley during the 1970s.

AI is “garbage in/garbage out.” This information is factually 100% wrong. Somebody’s lying or just doesn’t know. But it suggests that this story has been repeated frequently enough to poison AI’s search engine. 

Palmer was never a member of Naranjo’s circle. They were civil, I suppose, if they did talk. She was never a student in one of Naranjo’s SAT groups, but she attended several semi-public lectures and presentations. She might have asked him a few questions. Most of Naranjo’s students viewed Palmer as an interloper who pilfered and distorted the Enneagram for her enrichment. Naranjo did not correct our opinion. She knew several of Naranjo’s early students quite well: Kathy Speeth, Father Bob Ochs, and CD. She also knew several other people in SAT; she did her famous and expensive psychic readings on many of us. I paid about $100 in 1973 dollars for about 50 minutes, with no clergy discount. 

In the Fall of 1973, Kathy Speeth organized a series of presentations about the Nine Types at the home of Gay Luce on the Arlington Circle, on the Berkeley-Arlington border. It was Speeth’s idea. She was the producer, but Naranjo agreed that it was time to introduce the system to mental health professionals. Palmer paid the fee and attended all the sessions. 

The format consisted of panels for each of the Fixations. I participated in a Panel for Ego-Plan. There were nine presentations and perhaps a tenth; I can’t recall if there was an introductory session. Ochs asked me to participate. He warned that the presentation would be quite different from the way we usually did in SAT. Almost all of our work in the first SAT years was “ego-grinding”: when the memory of a painful incident came to the surface, you were directed to dig deeper, and the conversation was soon littered with unfulfilled dreams. During these panels, however, after Naranjo described a few key structures of a Fixation’s psychology in clinical language, we were asked to share our experiences. He said, for example, that for Ego-Plan, the idealization of the future was not based on experience, and that tasks were often left undone. However, the compensatory defense was that “life would turn out,” and it would be “all OK.” Naranjo at one point said to me, “See, you can even hear it in Ken’s voice, the confidence that everything will be OK.”

I was in the room where it happened; this sounds like what I’ve heard about the “Narrative Tradition.” Imagine, at 28, I was part of founding a “Tradition!” The word suggests centuries of Sufi practice. I suspect there is minimal confrontation in Palmer’s groups. She aimed to present a gentler and milder version of the Enneagram. The name changes of the Fixations align with this teaching style. More students are attracted by honey.

Naranjo had issues with some of her interpretations of various points, but, more importantly, he also asserted that Palmer stole his material. She attended all the presentations, kept the handouts, and took notes. With an outline in hand, she further detailed each Fixation with other confidential information. Ochs told me that he had also spoken with her, and despite his own agreement not to disclose what he had learned. He said, "She has all the information about the points anyway; let’s at least try to make it more complete, accurate, and useful." 

I know the woman was the registrar very well. I asked her about the confidentiality agreement. She said, “Yes, Palmer violated her confidentiality agreement. I don’t have a copy of it, but I’m sure it said the same thing we were all asked to agree to, which is not to discuss these things outside of the group. I have been furious with her ever since then and have completely lost respect for her. She seems to have been able to justify it to herself, but I know she promised not to do this, and she did.”

Palmer also states publicly and in court documents that she never saw nor used Ichazo’s confidential and, I presume, copyrighted notes. This is almost Jesuitical. Of course, she saw them. The only possibility for her equivocation was that the authorship of the texts might have been unclear, although knowing a few quirky terms that Ichazo would have used should have been a good clue.

But both Naranjo and Icnazo’s “holier-than-thou” shtick gets a bit heavy. He made a big deal in the “Jesuit Transmission” 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. When I say that Naranjo permitted me to use the material as I saw fit, that was a significant gesture. He delivered the statement of release or commission in a very formal, flat tone. He was incensed that Palmer had access to his more detailed notes and those of Oscar. He blamed Ochs.

I will now address the thorny issue of the written materials available to the first SAT groups, including the missing folder that Ichazo did not retrieve upon completion of the 10-month Arica training. 

The Three Levels of Documentation

It is a myth that the Enneagram was an oral teaching and that SAT, the Jesuits in Ochs’s classes, and Helen Palmer’s groups marked the point at which it was written down. That is false. What I am about to write is based on my memories of the early SAT groups, my recollection of the controversy, which was discussed during the court cases, and reports from Ochs’s other Jesuit students who were never asked to sign confidentiality agreements. 

During the Berkeley rollout, there were three Levels of written documentation about the Enneagram.

1. A single page for each Fixation was the first written documentation. 

For each fixation, there was a rough mimeograph on cheap 8.5 by 11-inch paper with the name of the fixation at the top. Plan, Venge, Flat, Go, etc.; some general information; a few pointers for self-examination, maybe the virtue, the trap, even the color; plus some quick psychological notes from Naranjo. They were like cheat sheets for personal use as you began the typing process. A senior student, in my case Ochs, said, “Take a look at Ego-Plan and see if it makes sense to you. Take a look at your dreams and fantasy life.”

This is close to the Enneagram being an oral tradition. We all kept notes; we shared and compared them with each other. Detailed notes with complete sentences were highly regarded, and there were several meticulous recorders. But these pages had two sources.

2. Naranjo’s Complete Binder

Naranjo's more detailed notes for each of the nine fixations, including the subtypes, were written, edited, and printed using a word processing program, but were only available to a few people in Group 1’s inner circle. They were usually kept in Naranjo’s study house in the backyard on Allston Way. It was a rickety shack overhanging the creek that ran down the backside of the property, complete with raccoons!

3. The Arica Enneagon Workbook

In addition to Naranjo’s presentations, people also circulated Ichazo’s proto-analysis from people who’d traveled to Arica.

Ichazo’s notes on the Enneagon were in a thick binder, which had been distributed to everyone in Arica. It was somewhat akin to Q in New Testament studies and very closely guarded. Ichazo states in a deposition that he distributed 73 copies to the group in Arica and then collected 72. I may have the exact numbers wrong, but I’m in the ballpark; Naranjo left Arica after about five months. I am almost certain he kept his. Initially, few students saw it, much less used it.

Another copy or duplicates of some of Ichazo’s Arica pages existed. CD claims that this copy was from another participant in Arica and, therefore, not the material she had promised to keep secret. Palmer claimed in a deposition related to the lawsuit with Ichazo that she had never seen Ichazo’s Arica materials. I do not know what she knew about the papers she saw, or even if CD’s description is entirely accurate. 

SAT was a quirky group. There was a hierarchy with levels. Naranjo and later Kathy Speeth determined where you were in the pecking order. Naranjo’s inner circle, including Ochs, CT, MM, HA, and AD, were eventually granted access to the Ichazo/Arica binder (although I believe it was initially granted under supervision). I’m not quite sure how this worked out. I never asked to see it as I was much more involved in the process of self-observation than “Proto-typing,” and remain so to this day.

We also promised not to speak about the Enneagram outside the group because, we were told, confidentiality was integral to self-discovery. We promised not to use specific ‘teachings’ until we’d received permission from Naranjo. This was mainly intended  for work that we would do with others, although, in some instances, that promise included our private conversations with group members. The initial intent was not to protect materials and income as intellectual property, but it did set the stage for later lawsuits.

It would be another 10 years before Enneagram literature started flooding the market.

 

Now that both Naranjo and Ochs have died, and so much material is already public, I feel no obligation to remain silent.

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

“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

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

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 Internation 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 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 could stretch it and say, “Harvard educated," but even that's inaccurate. It just sounds assuring to your affluent Western audience.

• Naranjo did not coin “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 genuine 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 through a dead psychiatrist to a bespoke tailor with absolutely no professional training. Hoffman and The Hoffman Institute need 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.