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 George Ivanovich 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 Gurdjieff.

The Stray Dog*

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

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

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

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

I meet “The Work.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gurdjieff’s public portrait is complex and tightly edited by his followers. On top of that, each one of us 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 that we know of in the Americas, and the first person to refer to an Enneagon, was the Bolivian esoteric 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, but they continue to be used 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. 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, and there were never any 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 just an ordinary man ruled by circumstance? Being a man lulled to sleep by life’s circumstances was exactly what “The Work'' sets out to conquer. This sleep keeps us enslaved. What about all the rest of what Gurdjieff claimed? The house of cards began to fall. I gave up surrendering to a set of ideas that produced a modicum of results. They were based almost exclusively on the word of a man who claimed authority by his experience and hard-won understanding of man’s plight. It stood or fell on his authority, real or imagined. I could no longer stake my life on this teaching.

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

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

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

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

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

____________________

Notes:

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

Enneagram Posts:

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

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

Enneagram Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Short Notes on the Enneagram Teaching

Introduction

Easter Sunday 2023

I am not the oldest of Naranjo’s early students still alive, although I was born 4 years before Gurdjieff died in Paris. I am also not the wisest nor as well known as some of my peers who went on to carve out careers teaching and developing the system, but I have been in the conversation since a year after Naranjo returned to Berkeley from Arica. I’ve known most of the major players except Ichazo. I feel an obligation to write this personal record.

In 1973, I was a Jesuit scholastic coming towards the end of the long, rigorous seminary training when I started working with the psychiatrist turned spiritual teacher, Claudio Naranjo. Returning from a transformational experience in Chile, Naranjo’s early work was inspired but by no means perfect. My initial intense study lasted only 4 years, but it set the course for a lifetime of self-examination. The Enneagram and the conversation about the system have been a part of my inner life, and I’ve tried to nurture my personal understanding. I am an Enneagram student, not a teacher.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve written about the Enneagram, but I have allowed the system its own logic based on self-remembering, not whether the system originated in an esoteric Sufi order or in Egypt or with the Desert Fathers or Pythagoras. I heard inflated claims that it was part of “The School,” a quasi-mystical group of human beings gathered, by chance, luck or karma, to do the rigorous work of self-exploration for the benefit of all humankind, but that feels like it’s out of the Gnostic playbook, I would prefer to examine this training to see if it can stand the test of time on its own. The Enneagram may not be a spiritual practice with the long and revered history many enthusiasts claim, but I remain convinced that we can actually use it to connect with the numinous mystery of life.

Some friends argue that if we trace its source and pinpoint its origin, we spoil the recipe. All they’re really saying is that some things are better left alone, impossible to figure out, or perhaps present unanswerable questions. I'm certainly not going to discourage self-investigation. In fact I want to encourage it. The Buddhist practice that I’m familiar with teaches that we can unlock real possibility and opportunity when we deal head-on with what are called “hindrances.” The Enneagram is also part of the strong tradition that inner work dictates unflinching self-observation in tracking our thoughts, feelings, memories, and “mental-reactions.” This trains our attention and allows us to see ourselves more clearly. I am thoroughly persuaded by the last option.

Emotions, the depth of the anguish or complete frustration can escape formulation. Sometimes the pain was beyond words, and a lament ultimately serves no purpose. A cry is just a cry. Sometimes my memory of these experiences ring with the unexpected noise of someone breaking down a door in the hall for no rational reason. Events or people with whom I had no more than a tangential relationship rupture and the debris spreads. We label it senseless. We label it nonsense but something inside still hangs on. The question that I’ve been trying to deal with is why people believe nonsense? Or more importantly why did I believe nonsense?

Echoing one of his teaching models, G.I. Gurdjieff, Naranjo called the missteps, even tragedies that befell some participants “food for the moon” as if they were just collateral damage of important work, an unfortunate, perhaps even necessary side effect of intense self-investigation. I don't hesitate to use another term—exploitation. Each one of us only sees part of the picture. One person’s poison is another’s antidote, but ethics demand that we label poison as poison, or at least with the clear warning “Take at your own risk.”

We each have our own views and I do not represent anyone other than myself. However I opt for being as honest as I can no matter the cost. The alternative is allowing the kind of introspection that we are invited to by careful study of the Enneagram to become as worthless as the astrology column on the back page of the local news rag or perhaps a 600 word article in Psychology Today.

I want my account is honest, even brutally honest if need be, but I am not even sure if that is possible. I have thoroughly researched and verified facts and names, dates and records of the incidents when available. I have not embellished them. However the story does not easily fit the usual chronology or conventions of a narrative. Words stagger between fact and poetry. They feel like an approximation that does not match the experience. The blur does not capture the beauty or the power that was present even if just for a moment. Parts of the story are difficult to tell. For more than 50 years, I’ve cycled through bouts of depression and spurts of creativity, crippling relationships and love, drug dependency and spiritual infatuations, dedication to hard work on worthwhile projects and hating my job, years of relative freedom from money issues followed by just making ends meet. The reader can take this as background material, use it to disqualify me, or applaud me for still being here. It makes no difference. It is just part of a story.

Is there a way of setting these parochial arguments aside and rescuing the system as a powerful adjunct in the difficult undertaking of introspection? I suppose that I first have to answer the question about what was lost, and whether or not there is anything of value worth saving. Naranjo always warned that the wide dissemination of the system would dilute its power.

People in Naranjo’s groups always referred to Naranjo as Claudio. I never heard anyone call him Dr. Naranjo. We called him by his name in our interactions and conversations within the group. His teaching style was not at all formal. Now that he is no longer with us however, I chose to use Naranjo. We are talking about his work and legacy. By the same token, George Ivanovich Gurdjeiff is usually referred to either as G or Mr. Gurdjieff by his students as a mark of respect verging on homage due a Saint. I have decided to use only his family name.

Naranjo was quite exacting with his students about how we could use the information and teaching in our own writing or work with clients. As I said, I am not an Enneagram teacher nor do I work with students. I no longer consider myself bound by verbal promises I made to him either as a member of SAT or during our private conversations when he was alive.

When I quote friends or Naranjo’s other students, I will try to refer to their actual written word. That is not always possible. Especially in describing my long friendship with Bob Ochs, I have no written records, only my faulty memory adjusted by love and admiration.

I’m also looking from afar. Many of these experiences happened a long time ago. With the passage of time comes a softening of the harsh edges. It becomes difficult to separate hard inner work that had to be done and the natural flow of life.

I have been taken to task by several friends from that era for my criticism. A very close personal friend who was also a close associate of Naranjo still wants to take sides in the debate. For her there is a lot at stake in terms of Naranjo’s reputation. She feels that the difficult work of introspection is hindered by exposing the vociferous debates that litter the terrain. I know that I cannot possibly remain neutral, and I will not choke down my criticism.

When I examine some of the thorny parts of the controversy between Ichazo, Naranjo and Palmer, I will reference the 1992 legal ruling by US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for relevant information. I assume that, for the most part, statements under oath will be as close to the truth as we need to be.

Is there any truth to any of this? I don’t even know if we share any common ground. Have we asked similar questions about our lives? Have we been happy? And I mean really happy, not some drunken free-for-all where you trample the concerns of your heart in a sacred dance and a magic fire lifts the gloom of the burdens we share. That’s what emotional religion sells. I want nothing to do with it, but ordinary human experience seems to dictate words that ignite, flame and confuse.

Naranjo’s Enneagram

photo Alessandra Callegari 

Claudio Naranjo Cohen died on July 12th, 2019; Óscar Ichazo died March 26th, 2020, less than a year later; Claudio’s associate Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us though I can find no obituary; the Jesuit father Bob Ochs died on May 4th, 2018. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Hameed Ali; Kathy Speeth who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s knee when she was a young child no longer teaches publicly; Helen Palmer who traces her “narrative tradition” to Naranjo retired in August of 2020. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West. By and large the teaching is now in the hands of a second generation of teachers and scholars.

The Enneagram that we’ve come to know in the West begins with Ichazo’s first Arica Training in 1971, but people look far, wide and deep into the past for esoteric origins. The figure appears in the works of Gurdjieff and his students; it may also appear in the texts of an esoteric Sufi Order though I have not seen it; some claim it’s also found in Pythagoras, or carefully drawn figures in an almanac compiled by an obscure 16th century Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher; someone even said Ichazo discovered it when a book dropped from a shelf in an occult library in Bolivia and a page fell open. This kind of history is just homemade mythology based on stories from hearsay or anecdotal evidence. 

Mr. James Moore, an authorized Gurdjieff teacher, says “Analogically Ichazo’s enneagram is to Gurdjieff’s what the New Guinea cargo-cults are to aviation.” Most teachers of the modern Enneagram try to trace its origin back to a Sufi school, or more precisely, to an extension or fulfillment of an oral or hidden teaching they want to find in the esotericism of The Fourth Way. These claims lack any evidence. There is no urtext anyone can point to. The actual text that the modern Enneagram work comes from are the notes that Oscar Ichazo used with the first group of Esalen pioneers who in 1971 went with Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly to Arica, Chile. This small port and beach town is surrounded by the forbidding Atacama Desert. It was once part of Peru and closer to Ichazo’s native Bolivia than Santiago. When Chile defeated Bolivia and Peru in La Guerra del salitre, the Saltpeter War in the late 1800’s, both countries lost this coastline. Later Chile and Peru set Arica as the northernmost town in Chile, but Bolivia, the odd man out, remains landlocked to this day. Another odd artifact in Arica is a cathedral of metal and wood, an import of uncertain authenticity, allegedly designed by Gustave Eiffel, shipped from France in 1875 and assembled in 1876 at lighting speed.

I will argue that anything we can know with certainty about the Enneagram has happened within the last six decades, and it is all we need to know. It can also be documented if we sift out the parochialism. We don’t need to know about the origin of the system to experience its power. In fact it might be a distraction and a misdirection. However this speculation has some bearing on the current landscape of Enneagram teaching. A friend forwarded an email promotion for a course by an Enneagram teacher who promises to unlock its radical teaching by returning to the “original intent.” I'm skeptical. Are these third generation experts going back to Naranjo’s characterization of the nine types, or Ichazo’s prototyping which is notably different, or the myth of an esoteric Sufi circle, or the inconclusive evidence that it lay hidden in Gurdjieff’s teaching, or William Patterson’s tracing the system back to ancient Egypt. I challenge any of these teachers to reveal the original intent in a rigorous way. If they were just trying to distinguish themselves from Enneagram parlor games, I might be more generous, but “a radical approach of the true spirit” or “original intent” are just a sales pitch.

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

Every gnostic group wants to keep their secrets secret. They need to hide something or hint at secret knowledge that will cost money. The esoteric argument always relies on the thesis that the careful inner work of introspection is too difficult for a mass audience. While I appreciate the caution about doing inner work, as far as the Enneagram is concerned, the cat’s out of the bag. If the Enneagram ever was an esoteric teaching, it has crossed over into popular culture, at worst mimicking astrology or at best being an adjunct to the techniques of psychotherapy.

The audience for the modern Enneagram teachings might have reached a saturation point so get the copy editors to create some interest. After Naranjo and Ichazo took separate paths, after the wave of Enneagram studies and practice manuals and other writing, more than 150 books since 1990, and the proliferation of study groups, seminars and trainings, the rivalry between the various schools became a battleground. I have no pony in that race. I do not earn my living or claim booty fighting on one side or the other which is not to say that I have not spent, lost and earned in my struggles.

As I undertake to write a personal account, I find it difficult to sort out the details of my personal story, but given the language and the inner discipline required, it’s also the story of passing a teaching from one culture to another, from the East to the West, from an alleged mystical Sufi source to a group of Christian practitioners, from spiritual practice to psychological investigation, from an oral tradition to one that employs books and written lists of personal traits and characteristics. Such a complex transmission opens itself at best to honest differences and interpretations. At its worst, it breeds parochial infighting, condemnation and closed-mindedness. Thank God burning heretics at the stake has fallen out of favor. 

The lack of clarity adds fuel to the Enneagram controversy and arms its detractors. I will try to be non-judgmental, and only speak about people and events about which I have first hand knowledge. My comments do not pretend to be definitive statements about any specific approach or understanding of the system. I’ll leave discussion about typing or proto-analysis to those who specialize in Enneagram studies. However some comment and analysis may be necessary to map out the early history of the Enneagram. If we trust ourselves and follow our best instincts, there is something very useful about argument and debate. They point to useful paths for an individual.

*“The Enneagram Monthly,” October 2021 edition.

Who I was

It was 1972. I was a 28 year old Jesuit scholastic, bright, enthusiastic, inquisitive and, to most observers, engaged in my life. I had been in the Order for almost 7 years, completing my initial spiritual trail or novitiate, the philosophical requirement, a period of study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and my first year of theological training. I loved the Jesuits and had done well in the rigorous course of study. I was certainly accepted and encouraged by fellow Jesuits and superiors. 

I also had a reputation of being a rebel. In the early days after Vatican 2, there was a lot of experimentation. It’s remarkable that I was never “called in.” The Jesuits have a special oath of obedience—to the Pope, or the Father General, and by extension, your immediate superior. When he says do it, it’s done. Te vult was a note that appeared in your box. It translates as “He wants [to see you].” It usually meant that you were in trouble. You’d been found out, or someone had turned you in for an infraction of one of the religious vows. Despite always testing the edges, I escaped censure.

I had invested a lot in getting to that point in my life. I had submitted a rigorous and intellectual discipline and built a tough defense system around what I thought was a pretty well reasoned personal sense of purpose. But despite my liberal Ivy League education, despite being a member of the Jesuit elite, I lived in a straight-jacketed Catholic world. Despite being known as a kind of rebel among the younger Jesuits, I was frustrated and unhappy. I also knew that I needed psychological help. 

I didn’t hide my deepest feelings from my religious superiors, including my struggles. All my superiors were generous and understanding, and tried to help in whatever way they could. I had been in therapy for a short time, but the result only put me in a huge dilemma: I knew I was gay but denied it; I wanted to experience intimacy in my life, and I wanted to have a spiritual life, but the prospect of a lifetime of celibacy seemed more and more like a chain rather than a path to fulfillment. 

___________

It was an uncomfortable night, so muggy that people couldn’t sleep. It had been very hot all day. When the sun went down, it did get cooler, but everyone’s windows stayed wide open. The streets were always noisy anyway, but the level of the day’s frustration lingered. The malaise seemed widespread.. A lady further up 102nd was shouting “Shut the fuck up” out of her window at the top of her lungs. It was past 1 AM. She’d been shouting all week. I didn’t even bother going to bed. I’d actually given up trying to sleep weeks earlier. Humidity, heat and insomnia are not good bedfellows. If you’ve ever lived in New York without air conditioning, you will remember nights like this. 

I was finishing my first year of theological school. I was living in a large, sprawling apartment in New York’s Upper West Side with a group of seven other Jesuit seminarians and Father Avery Dulles. We walked up to 116th Street where Woodstock College, perhaps the most prestigious institution of the American Jesuit order, had just relocated from rural Pennsylvania and become part of an ecumenical consortium. The Second Vatican Council had finished their work in 1965. Several liberal Jesuits from Woodstock, notably John Courtney Murray and Gustave Weigle, had been instrumental in writing the documents that would open up the Catholic Church. Those were heady days. It felt good to be part of creating a modern Catholic Church. We were taking stuffy Thomistic theology out of its ivory tower where it defended doctrinal pronouncements coming out of Rome. We were a Jesuit institution with a 500 year old academic and spiritual legacy but in the vision of Pope John the 23rd, we would breathe new life in the Church. 

I was up late into the night painting a wall mural in the kitchen. A visiting scholastic from Chicago, Bob Partika, couldn’t sleep either. He wandered into the kitchen for a snack, and we began a rambling conversation that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Partika talked about a young priest named Bob Ochs who had  been teaching a nine pointed diagram that described personality types. He described some exercises aimed at intense self-scrutiny allowing for some kind self-understanding based on what he called fixations. My new friend had experienced a real sense of liberation, and I could sense it. Finally, almost to give the story the real feel of human life, he told a story about the last session of the group where everyone, men and women, lay and religious, took off their clothes. He assured me that it was not at all sexual, that the nuns carefully folded their habits and laid them down on their chairs almost reverentially. I was stunned.

My scholastic friend told me that Ochs would be offering this Enneagram course at the Jesuit Theological School in Berkeley California where he was part of a group led by a Chilean psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo. In September, Naranjo’s group would also work with a man who had discovered an innovative process to resolve the conflicts of early childhood experience.

The very next morning I called my superior in Boston and asked for permission to transfer to the Jesuit School in Berkeley. After a few questions, he agreed—actually he was enthusiastic—and asked me to call the Jesuit School in Berkeley to see if I could be admitted. Berkeley said that they would take me as a special student. They had no room for me in the Jesuit community but they found a small off campus room at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Things fell into place so quickly and smoothly that I felt the Universe, or the Holy Spirit, was guiding me.  

Within 10 days I was sharing a ride across the country with a complete stranger from Brooklyn. When I got to Berkeley I called Ochs to introduce myself, and then in a completely flat tone—I have no idea why I remember that—he asked, “Why don’t you join the group?” It had never occurred to me, but I’d just driven across the country in a headlong, desperate search to discover something about myself so I called the number he gave me. Rosalyn Shaffer answered the phone and told me—again her tone was flat—to be at an address on Hearst Avenue at 7 PM sharp on Tuesday night. That started four years of work with Naranjo. 

I was not unique among young seminarians of my generation in feeling that conventional religious practice had failed me. I had come to Berkeley to work with a Jesuit priest, a man who I hoped might introduce me to a psychological understanding of myself that would help thread the needle. Would a fellow Jesuit lead me down a dead end?  In retrospect I was desperately looking for a way out.  Doctrinal formulations are not about jumping from a hundred foot pole, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith without a safety net. I was in the midst of the personal crisis but barely aware of it.  This was a real “Hail Mary,” 

By the beginning of that next summer, my life would be radically changed.

Seekers After Truth, the first groups

The San Andreas Fault runs through the heart of San Francisco at a depth of more than 15 km. Across the Bay, the Hayward Fault lies only a few hundred meters from the ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley where Claudio Naranjo held the first meetings of his group, The Seekers After Truth. About 100 km south at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay seismologists have pinpointed a “deep junction” where the North American Plate collides with the Pacific Plate. Dedicated geomancers claim that they can chart a shift in consciousness by tracking the slow, relentless, unpredictable movement of tectonic plates as if this flood of psychological and spiritual insights were a revelation from an other-worldly source. I contend that there were other forces at work, not perhaps so deeply hidden beneath the surface as the fault lines, but certainly not observable with eyes that casually scan the horizon. 

If I can set aside my internal argument and position myself in a reasonably balanced way, I see the convergence of many factors in the awakening of this New Age in California. Who we were had as much to do with this psychological revolution as the actual encounter with eastern spirituality, imported myths, learning seated meditation of Zen or tai chi, est and Scientology, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt, Ouspensky’s Gurdjeiff and Óscar Ichazo’s Arica. For me it even included the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. 

Stories of discovery and the invention of ideas shape both our culture and our lives. Told and retold, details elaborated and distorted, they become myths. Some of these tales are obviously self-serving while others ring of real experience. In either case, filled with many assumptions, obvious and hidden, they are rich in information. 

One current version of the beginnings of the Western transmission of the Enneagram runs something like this: in the early 1970’s, Claudio Naranjo, fresh from his short and incomplete training with Oscar Ichazo in Arica Chile, begins a tentative conversation with a select group of therapists and teachers in a Berkeley living room. He distributes crudely mimeographed nine pointed figures to experienced self-observers and professional therapists to flesh out the sketchy outline of personality characteristics that Ichazo had developed for each point. These highly trained psychologists and teachers set about the task of connecting Naranjo's and Ichazo’s fragmentary notes with peer reviewed psychological research and reliable diagnostic instruments.

There are only two facts in this myth. Naranjo did return to Berkeley after working with Ichazo in Chile, and there were rather rudimentary descriptions of the nine fixations on mimeographed paper that people used as outlines for their own notes. But after that this particular creation story departs from any description of the real work of Naranjo’s groups and, I might venture, becomes an invitation for the therapist’s students to pay money and join an Enneagram group with psychological theories and clinical diagnosis. 

Here is what we can say with certainty: the Bolivian teacher Óscar Ichazo was the first person that we know who taught the psychological-spiritual system of the nine pointed figure. He called it the Enneagon. His talks about what he called “protoanalysis” at the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada (Santiago) in 1969 were where Naranjo first made contact with Ichazo and the system. Later in 1970 Naranjo and John Lilly with approximately 35 other people recruited from Esalen went to Arica Chile for Ichazo’s first training. When Naranjo returned to Berkeley, he began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations. 

Naranjo’s SAT began in the Fall of 1971 with about 25 people. SAT stood for the Seekers After Truth, a name Naranjo borrowed from G.I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men. By the end of the second year, the number of people in SAT ranged between 50 to 60. We came from all walks of life; there were several psychologists, a Jesuit priest, a Franciscan Friar, one seminarian, one former nun, a devotee of Swami Rudrananda, a rabbi’s wife, a woman who’d been associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation; several professors and Phd’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, a talented product designer and a film distributor, but there were also carpenters, house painters and a French hippie. We were a cross section of highly educated, college town Berkeleyites, predominately white, middle class, a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim, a few queer people, and a few Asians. The membership included Hameed Ali who became a well-known second generation Enneagram teacher, the transpersonal scholar Charlie Tart as well as my friend Father Bob Ochs who became pivotal in the spreading of the Enneagram beyond Naranjo’s groups.. 

I found myself in a far different group than the Arica pioneers I met from Esalen. We were younger spiritual idealists of the 60’s generation. We had for the most part deserted the faiths of our collective fathers and mothers, but we still held strongly to the idea that spiritual practice could overcome the ills of a society that was becoming increasingly materialistic and egocentric, aggressive and greedy. Our parents' generation had nearly destroyed the world in a war ended by nuclear destruction, dreams of peace became a Cold War and our relatively peaceful world was torn apart by the horror of a post colonial civil war in Vietnam. No one I knew who’d self-selected out to join SAT felt any commitment to fight other human beings.

Most of therapists had reached a dead-end with the enterprise of professional psychotherapy, the hippies were burned out on the drug exploration, but were still seeking after the promises of the sexual revolution. Nearly everyone at least pretended to be liberated in attitudes towards sex and drugs. Sex was casual; the lines of demarcation between abuse and pleasure were blurred. Drug experimentation was almost a requirement. Smoking weed was an everyday necessity for many. Weekend hallucinogenic trips were common. 

I was about to step out of the strict Jesuit religious training that had been honed and ossified by at least 30 generations of Jesuits since Saint Ignatius. That tradition had produced more than its share of scholars and saints. Its discipline was legendary as well as its reputation for being a vanguard, the cutting edge of the institutional Church. I was the second Jesuit to become a member of SAT, not to convert but to test my own experience. 

I begin learning to use the Enneagram.

I will violate my self-imposed rule of calling the early enneagram teachers by their last names. Father Bob Ochs became my friend, even a close friend in the cautious, somewhat tentative emotional way that religious men and women form friendships. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude: With his guidance I discovered a path probably cut off for this young Jesuit. The reforms of Vatican II had relaxed that grip, but they were not the leap required to enter the spiritual path. I was discouraged as I witnessed the spiritual enthusiasm of Council ebb when political pressure mounted and tried to reign in its driving force. 

The first thing I noticed about Bob was the bright glean in his eyes and his animated voice. He was a very engaging teacher who loved to laugh. Bob was not a big man physically. His wiry frame seemed constantly in motion, arms and hands pointing looked like the antennae for his attention that wasn’t quite sure where to land. He was a remarkable and courageous human who never gave up exploring and questioning..

Bob was also a Jesuit through and through with outstanding theological credentials. He had trained at Université Catholique de Louvain, Jesuitenkolleg in Innsbruck, and was awarded a PhD. in Theology from Institut Catholique de Paris in 1969. He was dedicated to the work of spiritual revolution in the spirit of Vatican II, but his emphasis was not strictly theological as you can tell by the titles of the books he wrote early in his career: The Death in Every Now (1969) and God is More Present Than You Think (1970).

Bob had been working with Naranjo in the first SAT group. His intellectual and spiritual gifts were a good match for Naranjo. I was not the first Jesuit that Bob introduced to the Enneagram. Under Naranjo’s direction Bob began teaching the Enneagram to a group of his former students at Loyola University in Chicago. In 1972 he was going to offer his introduction to the Enneagram at the Jesuit School in Berkeley. Although he was working as Naranjo’s agent, Bob brought his own passion to the work. It was no polite intellectual exercise. It was spiritual in the deepest sense of the word.. 

I was sitting on the floor of a large open room in one of the buildings at the Jesuit School when Bob said with a chuckle that the origin of the Enneagram Teaching might have been the esoteric school that trained Jesus. Bob was not certainly not given to blind faith or superstition, but this assertion is as unsupported as the claim that during Jesus’s lost years, the time between when he stood up and amazed the synagogue elders and his baptism by John, he was initiated and trained by an Indian guru. Yet not one person in the room challenged it, myself included. Bob then repeated the Tibetan oracle that "when the iron bird flies,” the Dharma will come to the West. This was only 14 years after His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in disguise as the People’s Liberation Army marched towards the Potala Palace. 

But setting aside the otherworldly language and extravagant claims of New Age spirituality, most of us who were drawn to spiritual practice that demands something more than sitting in a church pew and forking over some cash come from a place of experiencing personal pain—sometimes excruciating and seemingly inexplicable. Certainly that was where I was even if I didn’t fully acknowledge it. I didn’t feel any magic in the New Age hype, and I am still no fan of Nostradamus style pronouncements, but I was seeking a remedy, and if I had to learn a new language, I was willing to try.

Bob’s teaching was also rooted in the spirituality of Saint Ignatius Loyola. As a Jesuit novice I’d been trained in the exercise known as the Particular Examen: three times a day, for 15 minutes, I would just note how many times I’d broken the rule of silence, when I’d had stray thoughts, where I’d neglected to keep “custody of the senses.” After taking inventory, I was instructed to generate compunction, and resolve to avoid specific thoughts or actions—avoiding sin and the occasions of sin were the way towards self-perfection.

Bob talked about the Examen that first night, but his adaptation was more nuanced and seemed more sophisticated than Ignatius'. He asked us to try to experience the feelings in our body as we looked over our day—How did we feel in our bodies when we got up in the morning? Did we smell the stew we cooked? What attitude did we bring to our study, did we notice the way we held the book in our hands, even how we felt when we used the toilet?

In a letter that I sent to Father Paul Lucy, who was my direct Jesuit superior, I wrote, “If this is not what Father Ignatius intended in the Examen, it’s what he should have intended.” We have to train ourselves to feel directly, not after-the-fact judgment or analysis. To be present at the moment when we feel, see and act is not something that we do naturally, or if we do as children, we soon learn to forget it. The exercise of trying to catch the immediacy of experience is closer to what I would learn later Gurdjieff taught about self-remembering: “it is to know you are angry when you are angry.” Gurdjieff  also described the practice with an admonition: “You do not remember yourselves. You do not feel yourselves, you are not conscious of yourselves. You do not feel: I observe, I feel, I see.’”

During these first few months I also learned to meditate in formal posture, breath-centered forms of concentration. I experienced the difficulty of sitting for long periods, taking the time required for the work of taking personal inventory. In mindfulness practice, at least as we know it from the Theravadan tradition, there was, I thought, the promise of clearing of the senses and mind as you simply experience your body and breath. But “self-remembering” is different from my understanding of mindfulness: just paying attention with no promise of it disappearing.

To ease the Enneagram into a Catholic/Christian context, Bob began with a kind of rift on Nine Deadly Sins—traditionally the list contains only seven: Pride, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Lust and Greed. Stretching the definition of Envy to include Melancholy, and then adding Lying and Fear, we have the nine points of the Enneagram. But here’s where it gets dicey. None of the Enneagram “sins'' actually describe deeds.

Christians do not have a big issue with using pain in spiritual work—in fact they relish it—but it is seen as the result of sin, not blindness or ignorance as it is seen in most Asian traditions. . In 1998, the US Catholic bishops warned about using the Enneagram, They decreed, "sin is indeed unhealthy behavior and can be combated by an improved understanding, but it is at its root a moral problem, so that repentance before God and one’s neighbor must be the fundamental response. Enneagram teaching thus obscures the Christian understanding of sin." Human nature is basically sinful. Acts in violation of the expressed will of the Deity require repentance. To save yourself, follow the rules; this leads to redemption which in turn leads to salvation. This is the catechism that I learned as an Irish Catholic boy.

“Sin is unhealthy behavior”—get the memo out to the Garden before Eve falls under the serpent’s spell and all hell breaks loose. The work of the Enneagram sees liberation as a struggle against ignorance, blindness, and greed, cowardice, laziness and exaggeration which in themselves are not sinful. At the Jesuit School Bob taught that the fixations are a hindrance rather than a reflection of fallen human nature. He said many times that ideas themselves when coupled with a solid inner practice could change a person’s attitude and actions. And his conviction was, I feel, the intersection where the inspiration of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, particularly the identification of what Ignatius called the “chief fault” and connecting it to the Enneagram’s work of identifying one’s fixation.

He opened the investigation with a question: Is the way we distort the world the root of our negative behaviors? Each of the 9 points was the point of entry for an extended meditation on the nature of ego fixation. In the Spiritual Exercises the first meditation is what Ignatius calls I will quote one sentence from what Ignatius calls “The Principle and Foundation:” . . . it follows that we are to use the things of this world only to the extent that they help us to this end (the praise reverence and service of God), and we ought to rid ourselves of the things of this world to the extent that they get in the way of this end.” Before we examined our own Ego-Fixation, we were encouraged to look at the nature of spiritual hindrances central to the Enneagram in detail, weeks long meditations on points 9, 3, and 6. We explored how the major anchors of all nine fixations, sloth, lying and fear, were present in all our actions.

Bob's teaching was very present—methodical, meticulous and exacting. He took us through the types and subtypes in an orderly way, using the material that Naranjo had given the first SAT groups, and, in an exploratory way, tried to “type” each of us. Although we tried to type ourselves as part of the discipline of learning the system, Bob, like Naranjo, did not hesitate to point out a good place to begin the exploration.

He asked questions. He might say, “Ah that sounds like something a Six might say. Why don’t you look and see if fear might be the motivator? Just explore it. Trace it back. Look for other places in your life where fear might be operative.” He was colloquial. As each of us began to understand the system and see similarities in our own behaviors with various points, Bob would ask us to “say a little more.” He was always gentle and good humored, never harsh or demeaning. I remember when he asked a meticulous nun not to comb her hair for a week and report back on how she felt. Although it drove her nuts, she loved the laughs as she shared in an entirely authentic and revealing way.

Bob asked us time and again to focus attention on those places where we know we hurt but are blind to the source of our pain. I experienced a growing recognition of my own pain. That was the place in our psyche to explore our connection to the vast mystery of the universe. Bob was committed to helping ease suffering. He highlighted the practices of meditation, particularly the examen, and meditation on humility, tools Saint Ignatius outlined in his Spiritual Exercises.

Bob’s foundation in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius is what I call “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” I felt very much at home.

I am not Ego Plan, but I learned to act the role,

When Bob began to help me identify my personal fixation, he pointed to Point Seven, Ego Plan, or Gluttony. Gluttony of the mind is clinically defined as the pull toward an array of interesting possibilities. It's just the pull. It never goes away. It is never satisfied. The promise of these possibilities remains abstract because the Plan does not really engage with them. My rebellious streak found this amusing, I could make hedonism a Christian virtue, like a bright colored Pachinko ball bouncing from adventure to opera to gourmet meal to saving the world.

I learned an important lesson: the Enneagram’s typology demonstrates that my responses, my solutions, my way of framing the world which I imagined were quirky and idiosyncratic did not in any way make me unique. On the surface the textbook description of Ego Plan matched how I handled the tricky situations in life, always planning what to do, creating a fantasy action plan, but never fully satisfying the conditions for success, I would always be disappointed with the outcome. I would be concerned with manipulating the present to create a perfect future, the fulfillment of my ideals. But it also predicted that no sooner had that future become present than I would be disappointed and feel a compulsion to work towards a new, perhaps more perfectly tuned version of the ideal. 

The passion of gluttony is the emotional energy that fuels the fixation and its trap of idealism. The Plan says, "Why get mired in boredom or discomfort when pleasurable alternatives are available?" But running after experiences that are never satisfying masks the pain of not being able to touch the emotional core of an experience. Plans are perhaps the most heady of all the fixations because they are so disconnected from their feelings. That trait is key to a correct diagnosis.

Could Ego Plan provide a plausible explanation why I abandoned architecture for the promise of theology and the priesthood. Was it simply the dream of greener pastures? Was my fixation the reason that in the Jesuits I was known as a Gourmet Gourmand? Did Plan get to the root of the inspiration for all my artistic projects that I thought made me interesting and attractive? Did being a Plan predispose me to bi-sexuality? I was warned that Plans had such bad attention that they were prone to having traffic accidents. I didn’t think of myself as a bad driver, but I began to have my doubts. I did crash into a tree driving myself home from school in my last year in Preparatory school.

What also convinced nearly everyone that I was an Ego Plan was the easy way I dismissed troubling situations, brushing them off with a light laugh or some off handed remark. Naranjo one said in the group, “Hear that tone in Ken’s voice, trying to reassure himself that everything is OK.”:Then he said that if I could achieve sobriety for just one minute, I would be enlightened.

Key to understanding gluttony as a passion was its relation to fear, Point Six. Cowardice, is the most jittery of the points on the Enneagram, Nothing is ever enough. There is no security, no peace, no real friends, no confidence. This fed my seriously low self-esteem, and I thought that the care was settled. All data points of the diagnosis fell into place. I was Ego Plan. In my self understanding I would view the world as a Glutton for the next 30 years.

Naranjo was not “The Teacher of the Age.”

The same week that I began my formal seminary courses at the Jesuit School of Theology, I also started attending three to three and a half hour SAT meetings twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday nights. We were told that in the Sufi tradition these were shock points where our work of self-observation could produce real results.  

While the setup had the marks of a cultist framework, I didn’t look on Naranjo as a guru. I was so wary of being branded as a Moonie that I only allowed myself to think of him as an extraordinary professor—certainly not an enlightened being, an avatar or the Teacher of the Age. However I quickly became aware that he’d had a profound insight working with Óscar Ichazo, perhaps even an enlightenment experience that tied together long years of study and psychological investigation. I actually felt honored to be present while he unpacked that inspiration. 

Naranjo’s unpacking of his experience was not an orderly process. Bringing something new into existence is by its nature messy. Naranjo was simultaneously experimenting with the method of delivery while fleshing out his insight into the Enneagram. Some might date the introduction of the modern Enneagram movement when Ichazo organized that first training in Chile. I prefer to date it when Naranjo returned to Berkeley with his experience, and, according to the complaint filed by Ichazo’s attorneys in their lawsuit against Palmer, the only copy of Ichazo’s extensive notes not returned to Ichazo at the completion of the first Arica training. 

In SAT, Naranjo would work with individuals to determine their fixation, and then with a mixture of therapeutic tools and self-observation, we began to see how the information unfolded in our lives. We were fleshing out the personality of the Enneagram. There were no tablets inscribed with a set of rules that we had to follow in order to be healed or fulfilled. The Enneagram is not a religion of revealed truth nor did a guru direct the path to enlightenment.

In addition to Naranjo’s presentations, some rather basic lists of the characteristics for each fixation as well as a few pages from Ichazo’s Proto Analysis were circulated. In addition we all kept our own notes and we compared notes. Detailed notes were highly regarded, and there were several meticulous recorders. I mention these notes because they became the basis of the wider study of the Enneagram to the New Age audience who began to work with Palmer as well as the small group of Jesuits and other religious who studied the Enneagram in Chicago with Ochs. 

We also promised not to speak about the Enneagram outside the group primarily because confidentiality is integral to self-discovery. We promised not to use certain ‘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.

Naranjo was type Five, what Ichazo labeled “Stinge.” Ichazo says that for this fixation “life is fascinating to watch from a safe hidden place, but is much too terrifying to take part in.” It would seem nearly impossible for a Stinge to actually step into the public role of a teacher or group leader, but Naranjo did lead. However I always felt in him a hesitancy to engage with a larger group. He was more at ease in the defined circumstances of working individually or with a smaller subset of his students. Ironically his chosen profession required a level of personal engagement although it was also a professional requirement to remain as unemotional and objective as possible. Ichazo pins the trap of the Stinge as getting caught as the “Observer.” Maybe starting SAT was Naranjo’s act of courage to venture into the heart of the storm.

I thought that it was difficult for Naranjo to take center stage. Over the course of those first weeks and months, I noticed that Naranjo seemed to appear and then quickly disappear. He relied on representatives to deliver what he called “indications.” At first Rezeleah Schaeffer and later Kathy Speeth would meet with the group and deliver a set of instructions for group and personal work. Naranjo might appear for an hour or so. He would work with an individual or observe, but sometimes he would talk about one of the fixations, or reflect on some particular point of meditation practice. He told or retold stories about Gurdjieff, Idries Shah or Mulla Nasreddin Hodja. To my recollection, his comments seemed to be equally divided between talking about the Enneagram and the techniques of meditation, self-reflection, introspection, or as Gurdjieff described it, Self-Remembering. 

A messy process has its own hidden dangers. We were only a few years removed from the hippie Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury. We were ready, willing, even eager for what we imagined to be the shock of Eastern spiritual practice. We were also terribly naive. At times our work together became a circus. There was a dark side. Marred by his paranoia and personal experience of trauma, Naranjo veered into womanizing, drug experimentation, or relying on psychic messages from an unseen world, and his work turned dangerous, destructive, even deadly.

We called Naranjo’s house on Allston Way the harem. It was off limits to most of the group. His former wife, her daughter as well as several other women in the group lived there. Although Naranjo never directed anyone to have sex with another group member—it would have interfered with his position of being an objective observer—he didn’t set any limits or guidelines. As a matter of fact no one said much about sex other than gossip. As a result basic ethics surrounding sexual manipulation or exploitation in a group setting were just not present. 

Naranjo also used drugs. He’s spoken about it openly, even written about his experiences so I am disclosing a dirty secret. The use of LSD, MDMA, hallucinogens, and plant based narcotics was widespread. There was only one exercise where LSD was recommended though not required, but the general ethos was one of open experimentation. I use experimentation loosely. There were no controls as might be expected in a professional setting. There was no debriefing after a tripping. My personal view is that drug use became a real problem and was one of the factors that led to the end of the first SAT groups.

Though troublesome, this dark side does not discount the value of the work that we managed to accomplish—in a way some of the more thorny issues were part of that training. However the side-effects persist. In my view we cannot allow them to stay in the shadows, or sweep them under the rug. If we purge them from our telling the history of this period, we are just not being honest.

By 1976 Naranjo began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram. He retired from teaching SAT and took a position at the University of California Santa Cruz. Others with more personal knowledge can comment or speculate on his motivation. My sense is that the initial work had been exhausting, that the inspired impulse of his Arica experience had petered out and drained him personally. Some speculate that his drug experimentation had taken a toll which from my observation  is a strong possibility. One member of the first group told me that much of his distress stemmed from the end of his intimate relationship with Kathy Speeth. All these are possible scenarios. 

I do know from my conversations with him that he was apprehensive about the possible distortion of the Enneagram after his course materials had been released to a wider audience. It is difficult for me to accept the callous judgmental side of Naranjo that seemed to emerge later when his role as the person who carried the Enneagram into the northern hemisphere was swept away first by the multiplicity of trainings that began to appear as early as 1980 and then in the flood of books, almost 150 by 1990.

After some period, I cannot fix a date to his reemergence as an Enneagram teacher, he turned on people who had been members of the group, especially people whom he felt had divulged his papers to Palmer and the Jesuits who had worked with Ochs. His position was that his descriptions of the fixations were somehow the only correct ones. He said to me on several occasions about Palmer had “watered it down” and some others whose knowledge of the system could be traced to Ochs just mistyped people. 

I joined a fairly large number of SAT people who began working with Henry Korman, a Fourth Way teacher whom Naranjo introduced to the group. Naranjo seemed to want us to have some avenues open to continue the Work, but it was not a clean ending. I would continue with Korman for 3 more years, but there was always some feeling of nostalgia. We had witnessed and participated in a spiritual revolution. I quote Hunter S. Thompson reflecting on the San Francisco of the late 60’s, “…with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”