Was Muktananda just high level chicanery?

Honesty is such a lonely word
Everyone is so untrue
Honesty is hardly ever heard
And mostly what I need from you

--Billy Joel

What I remember most about the evening was the fancy BMV with the vanity plates GURU 1. It was even driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Muktananda and Werner Erhard were in the back seat. Baba’s translator, Swami Yogananda Jain sat in the front next to the driver. The venue was most likely the Masonic auditorium atop Nob Hill. It had the impeccably smooth and professional rollout of an est event, but it was not, at least in my opinion, an important presentation of Siddhi Yoga. It wasn't even interesting, but what do I know? I had pretty much listened to every sermon whether about grace, shanti or shakti. I saw the westernization of an Indian sadhu, sanitized but still containing a few tastefully presented cultural artifacts that might lure western spiritual seekers. We might have been dusted with a peacock feather as we left, but I was definitely not impressed.

This was the second of Muktananda’s world tours. Some westerners who had become disciples had purchased and begun refurbishing a large hall with a kitchen and some staff quarters in either Emeryville or West Oakland. It was sometime in either ‘74 or ‘75 because I had taken my exclaustration, and was living on the Oakland Berkeley border with my fellow SAT member Hal Slate. It was also close to the end of those first early SAT groups, but all the group members were still in active communication. One day either Hal or I got a call that someone had arranged a private darshan with Muktananda to be held late one afternoon before his public event at the ashram.

There were only 20 or so people in the room. I recognized Helen Palmer. As soon as Baba Muktananda entered and took his seat, he gestured towards Helen who got up, bowed and then exited into a private meditation room. She later told me that she was there because Muktananda was the best “hit” in town. Following a few remarks by Jain, Muktananda gestured towards me and Jain asked me to come forward. I’d tried to find an appropriate gift. We were told that he liked hats. I had an old white Panama Hat from college that I’d trimmed with an orange ribbon and the end of a peacock feather. I’d wrapped it in plain white paper. I had already decided that I would skip the whole foot kissing ritual so I sat before him in a kneeling position. I said hello and handed him my gift. After Jain or another assistant unwrapped it, he laughed uproariously, took off his hat and put on the Panama. Then he handed me his orange skull cap and said in English, “hat for a hat!” Then Jain translated a few questions about who I was, what I did, something about a Prince that I missed entirely, but others in the group were impressed. I returned to my seat.

Then Muktananda pointed to someone behind me and asked who he was. The young man said he was from Franklin Jones (Da Free John)’s group and had come to extend their greetings to Baba. The conversation was suddenly doused with cold water. The drift of the questions that I could follow went something like, well, I do hope he’s well, but where is he? Oh he’s very busy but he sends as a token of his respect this box of cheap crummy chocolate balls that came from the ashram’s kitchen. I had tried to be respectful within what I felt were my limits. Da Free John’s people didn’t swear or make foul gestures, but they were definitely confrontational. I got the impression that someone on the staff would be asked how the group made it onto the list of invited guests.

An hour in I had a sense of heightened awareness, so when Jain invited questions from other guests, I was not prepared for my response to one woman’s question. She said she was epileptic. Was there anything she could do to prevent seizures? Muktananda became rather oddly professional, and said that he’d been a doctor before becoming a sadhu. His recommendation was to drink cow urine, preferably still warm. Now that I live in India and have some experience of village Ayurveda medicine, I realize that cow piss is a bit like aspirin. It is applied widely with little discrimination. But in that moment I was facing total culture shock. Here I was in a guru’s ashram wearing his orange skull cap, getting carried away with lots of high energy, watching him dress down a fallen-away follower’s disciples, and listening to medical advice about the benefits of cow piss.

At that point Jain said that the time had come to get ready for the chanting, talk and darshan in the public hall, and afterwards, please stay for dinner. I’m sure Hal and I stayed. Chanting the Guru Gita was very long although harmonious. Even though the poem is in praise of the eternal guru, it was obvious that the followers identified Muktananda as that guru. I thought that singing the praises of the guru in the presence of a human guru was a bit over the top, but I was also doing my best to dispel my preconceived ideas and prejudices.

The next day I had a meeting at the Jesuit School. After meditation I walked down Telegraph Avenue towards the campus. There was a bank just past Ashby and I stopped to get 20 bucks from the ATM. I made my way back to the sidewalk, turned left and stopped on the corner of Russell waiting for the light. Before the signal turned green, my entire world was transformed. The experience is extremely difficult, if not impossible to describe. It lit up. I’d been plugged in. First were colors I had never imagined. If I said I was floating in a whirlwind of electric particles, that wouldn’t do it justice. I knew exactly where I was and what I was doing but the world was buzzing. It was somewhat akin to the few drug experiences I had had, but far more vibrant and I was really present, not just an observer. It was extremely expansive, but the center held. I cannot say how long it lasted. It disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived. Part of me was stunned, but it was not the kind of experience that required that I put on my analytical hat and ponder it for a month. It just was. When I noticed that the light had changed to green although I had no idea of how long I’d been standing there, I looked at my watch and realized that I was going to be late for lunch at the Jesuit School if I lingered. The universe returned to what it had been a few minutes, seconds or nanoseconds before, and I continued to walk north though I do remember being extremely careful of crossing traffic.  

Later that afternoon I realized that I had received shaktipat, what yogis describe as the awakening of the dormant divine energy. I also realized why there is really very little written about these experiences other than they happen. It was a wild experience. Maybe I could blame it on the orange skull cap.

I would have been a fool not to follow up on my experience at least to see if it led anywhere. I returned to the Oakland ashram, but did not become a regular by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t really like the Hindu trappings. I should be more clear: I didn’t particularly dislike them either but I wasn't falling in love. The singing started to feel like uninspired Catholic guitar masses of the 70’s. The people around Muktananda, I felt, were there to feel some kind of spiritual high or bliss, but it was extremely self-centered. I had conversations with several of the western sadhu and again, but was not inspired. I could not shake off their guru worship.

The staff announced a retreat, a long period of meditation at a center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was to last a week which I could not manage, but I wanted to experience a longer concentrated meditation period so I asked Muktananda personally at darshan if I could attend only the weekend. He quickly assented. I arrived late on Friday afternoon after the long rush hour drive from San Francisco. I signed in and was directed to the shared cabin I’d been assigned. I set off into the woods. On the path I passed Muktananda with his perpetual entourage of VIP’s. Naranjo was among them. They were headed up to the main meditation pavilion. I bowed towards them and Muktananda nodded back. I continued to struggle along the rather densely overgrown path towards my bunk when suddenly I heard a very loud cracking sound. It sounded like a giant with enormous hands snapping his fingers right over my head or very close to my ear. Then again. I found my cabin, threw down my sleeping bag, and made my way to the meditation hall. I wouldn’t return to bed for 36 hours. 

An elaborate Krishna shrine had been set up in the middle of the room. Men would circumambulate for an hour and then the women would take up the dance. It was not like the ecstatic airport Hari Krishna chanters but that was the song. It was not quiet. There were as I recall live musicians as well as spontaneous twirling and jumping. The chanting was modulated with slow and faster sections. When I did circumambulate, I was extremely restrained, but didn’t feel out of place or forced into a fake religious fervor. We sat in what zen monks would consider a very loose meditation posture, men on one side of the room and women on the other. A guy in front of me was bouncing off the floor with what I was told were some kind of kriyas or loosening of the kundalini energy. Once Muktananda came into the room and led the procession of men in the chanting. Otherwise he sat on the side in his elevated chair. There must have been a few breaks when Muktananda talked or answered questions. I remember the guy in front of me thanking Muktananda for his experience. Food was available during certain periods, but I don’t recall any formal meal breaks. And oh, it didn’t stop, but went on day and night. The drive back to San Francisco was about 4 hours on a very dangerous highway so I made sure that I had a few hours sleep before leaving, but other than that I was in the meditation hall.

Once was enough. Despite these intense meditation experiences, I began to feel more and more disconnected from Muktananda. I continued to visit the Oakland ashram from time to time when he was there which was less and less frequent. He had engagements in New York and southern California. There were now a huge number of people gathering around him. It had a cultish feel. There was also an extraordinary amount of money flowing into the organization. 

One time we were told through the SAT grapevine that Hoffman would visit. Knowing that Hoffman only went to make a public display of himself as Muktananda’s equal, or to find some way to denigrate Muktananda, I was not going to miss it. After Hoffman’s private meeting, and I wasn’t present so I don’t know about the encounter, I was standing at the edge of the dining hall with others when Hoffman appeared. Suddenly he disappeared, and then, after a few minutes he came into the room sheepishly carrying a plate of food or a bowl of soup, complaining loudly that Muktananda’s guards wouldn’t let him into the private quarters. “I know he’s very lonely. So I just wanted to share some soup with him and keep him company, but they wouldn’t let me in.” 

I am now going to try to describe an experience that I have never written about or even talked about other than on one or two occasions and then privately. I think that I’ve been afraid of either being called a madman or a failed sannyasin, neither of which is personally appealing. I can’t say with certainty what actually did happen, other than it happened. I might have been deluded or hallucinating, or carried away by some religious fervor, or perhaps it really did occur as I am going to describe. But I am going to demand a complete level of honesty from Muktananda so I can’t avoid telling the story. 

I forget the circumstances of my invitation. I was not a regular member of Naranjo’s inner circle, but either late one afternoon or early evening, I went to Kathy and Claudio’s house in North Berkeley above the Arlington circle. When I arrived there were only a few people. I actually only specifically remember my friend Danny Ross being there. Cheryl Dembe, who later became Sundari might have also been present as well as Luc Brebion. But other than that I would have to pick and choose out of a list of the usual suspects. If there’d been a very close friend with whom I might have shared and even asked questions about what was going to happen, I would have remembered.

One of the first things that I remember very clearly was a Scientology E Meter casually set up on the breakfast table. I had only heard rumors of Nanranjo’s experimentation with Auditing and to see the device, which is nothing more than a galvanic skin response lie detector, there it was. 

There was certainly the usual friendly chit chat. As it was beginning to get dark, Speeth and several others arrived. They came in through the front door. She was carrying a plain square cardboard box, slightly smaller than a bank box. In it were copies of a thin book, talks by Muktananda* that she and Donovan Bess had edited and published. She said that they were hot off the press and the reason she was late is that she’s been at the airport saying goodbye to Muktananda before he and his entourage flew back to India, and she had wanted to share the new publication with him before he left. She gave us each a copy. We were all now sitting on the floor near the breakfast nook near some casual seating. I still had a clear view of the front door. The group was politely enthusiastic about Speeth and Bess’s work, thumbing through, reading bits and pieces here and there, smiling, laughing.

Then I looked up and noticed a very bright light that seemed to be coming through the front door. It was a long oval shape and fit the door frame. It continued to increase in intensity, the edges becoming more white while the inside seemed reddish or orange. Suddenly the actual shape of Muktananda’s body became clear. It was dressed as we had always seen him in darshan, but the clothing was diaphanous and brightly lit. His distinct facial features were clearly visible. He was walking at a very deliberate pace though the legs may not have been really moving at all. He had the appearance and movement of a real human body although it was not solid. I could still make out the door and the walls through him. It was eerily real.

I do not know if I was the only person who saw this. There was no discussion, no questions, or expressions of shock and awe. The only thing that did happen was that someone in the group began to sing Om Namah Shivaya very softly. The figure began at the edge of the circle opposite me. It stood behind each person. I cannot remember if they were gestures, but the person became very quiet. The figure moved in a clockwise fashion until I could sense it standing behind me. That was the last thing I recall until we began to gather our things together to return home.

I am surprised that after an extraordinary experience, and I presume that others had some experience, we just went back to our normal lives. I have hesitated to speak about it openly for almost 50 years. There are many possible reactions to a clear, even violent breaking of normal perception. One is silence. Almost all modern writers talking about their drug experiences have expressed frustration. Most writings by the mystics are rarely clear or self-explanatory. When you can’t say anything, nothing may be the best option. I have not used any language designed for extraordinary mystical experiences, Muktananda was not projecting an astral body. I am not calling it an apparition. I wonder if close disciples or devotees simply have these kinds of encounters and accept them as the “new normal,” but what I experienced was not ordinary by any stretch of the imagination. 

What I can say honestly is that a revered Indian guru who was on an scheduled international flight from San Francisco to Mumbai appeared in an ordinary Berkeley house in the early evening. He was a real person or appeared extremely life-like although his body was diaphanous and bright. He was alive, not dead or resurrected as in the Jesus narrative, but afterwards I could see the story of Thomas’s meeting Jesus differently. And if the story of Thomas putting his hands in Jesus’s open wounds actually happened, I could also understand that the conversations recorded in the 20th Chapter of John took a few years to emerge. 

Things fall apart

The number of followers around Muktananda became overwhelming. Darshan was a circus. I can’t recall one talk that I thought memorable. No one seemed interested in psychological investigation. I stopped going. Siddha Yoga is a practice of energy transfer and a connection between the guru and his or her student. That wasn’t happening.

What was also clear that in a larger group, there were those who were close devotees, or considered themselves close, those aspiring or even jealous. There was also an enormous amount of money now available. This is ripe terrain for abuse, distrust, even warfare. I don’t think that it ever reached the outrageous heights of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, but cults are cults. The disintegration in trust was the beginning of the leaking of salacious details about Muktananda’s sexual life.

Hoffman had been wrong, or perhaps very right. Muktananda was not lacking in company, and he may have been very lonely. I am not going to delve into his motivations, but soon there were many credible rumors that the guards who had blocked Hoffman from the private apartments invited many younger women, some even underaged, to join Muktananda. He was not a celibate sadhu. 

I have read through many of the accounts from insiders and malcontents and disenchanted followers. Muktananda at some point gave up the celibate life, but he couldn’t just trade satguru for the role of a conventional married man. I think that Krishna Murti’s long involvement with an older married woman might be a good example, one that I can understand and even sympathize with. What I think I can say with some understanding of the cultural divide between traditional Indian culture and westernized ones, especially New Age California: Muktananda could not prey on younger Indian women--the taboos are too strong--but with so many younger American women with liberated attitudes available, the doors opened. From most reports, it was not about nurturing human relationships. It was sex.

People try to defend him. I will only point to one of Muktananda’s most ardent supporters, Claudio Naranjo’s explanation: “I think Muktananda’s case is very complex. My own interpretation of him is that he was playing the role of a saint according to Western ideals, or to cultural ideals in general. I think he was a saint in the real sense, which has nothing to do with that. For instance, it's the popular idea that a saint has no sexual life, and he was playing the role of a Brahmacharya, which I think was part of a cultural mission he was on, to be an educator on a large scale. It was fitting that he did that role, and my own evaluation of him is that he was clean, because he was not a lecher.” 

Claudio, let me be clear--your analysis is wrong, He was a lecher. His behavior was unethical and exploitative. If he were a Catholic priest he would be defrocked, or even in jail. He does not get a pass for trying to play the role of a Brahmacharya in some large cultural shift.

Baba-Ji, you lied to us. You were not who you claimed to be.

I’m not quite sure where I can begin to separate the man from the yogic powers, or even if I have to. But I do know where to place my allegiance and when to withdraw it.

Honesty is such a lonely word

Everyone is so untrue

Honesty is hardly ever heard

And mostly what I need from you

--Billy Joel

*The publication date of “Swami Muktananda,” edited by Kathleen Speeth & Donovan Bess is 1974 so my mental calculation is slightly off.

“Histoire de Jour”

"What's your soup du jour today?" "Cream of tomato, just like every day."

Yuval Harari notes that while it’s difficult to get 20 baboons to coordinate any organized effort that would produce a widespread effect, homo sapiens has been successful in creating narratives that have allowed our species to organize large-scale efforts to subdue and exploit every inch of the universe that we can reach. Propaganda for the superiority of the human race.. If 20 baboons had been able to listen to a convincing narrative and organize themselves, ”The Planet of the Apes'' might be our reality.

In the history of religions, creating and propagating a supernatural narrative spearheaded the seemingly invincible superiority of monotheism. Stories of the resurrection of Jesus follow Moses’s Exodus, which scholarship has shown to be rabbinic creation after the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple. Then about 600 years after Jesus, the Prophet was visited by the Archangel Gabriel and set the course for the world to experience a more militant version of monotheism. In another part of the world, stories about the Enlightenment of the Buddha touch on another side of the human psyche that propelled the practice of meditation to legitimacy. 

There are many narratives in the political sphere from Mao Zedong’s Long March to Lincoln’s studying law by candlelight; they also help solidify support of large numbers of people to secure a common goal.

The Origin of the Enneagram

As one of  Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s first students when he introduced the system organized as a nine-pointed diagram that he’d learned from Oscar Ichazo, I’ve had a long standing interest in what’s become known as the Western transmission of the Enneagram. Though I’ve written about it before, recently I’ve become fascinated by competing narratives about its esoteric roots. There is really very little difference here from the phenomenon that Harari describes. The proponents of particular styles of enneagram work have crafted creation narratives to take their products to the marketplace. At least one side effect of enlightening mankind is to separate you from your money.

This brand of histoire de jour is at best self-serving, pieced together from bits and pieces of hearsay evidence, and in some cases, outright fraud. 

Here is a preposterous statement on the first page of Helen Palmer’s website for her Narrative Tradition.

With a history of centuries, the Enneagram is arguably the oldest human development system on the planet.  During the past decade, the system has undergone a renewal of scholarly attention within the context of current personality typologies. 

In the interest of the scholarly attention that Ms. Palmer lauds, here’s the clear, distinct, identifiable historical beginning of the Narrative tradition of the Enneagram. The history of centuries condensed into something a bit shy of 50 years. I was present, voila!

In the late Spring of 1975,. I found myself in a large living room of a non-descript house on Berkeley’s Arlington. Kathy Speeth had organized a series of nine evening presentations about the Enneagram for the “therapeutic” community. In attendance 15 or so therapists who are interested in the Enneagram but not members of Naranjo’s SAT group. Among them was Helen Palmer, who had been hearing about the Enneagram from Claudio’s students in her own practice of psychic readings.

I remember these conversations quite clearly. They were a departure from the usual work of Naranjo's SAT group. Speeth and Bob Ochs had asked me to be on a ‘panel’ of Seven’s, ego ‘Plan’ as both Ichazo and Naranjo referred to the point “Gluttony.” This was the first time several people of the same fixation spoke in front of a group and answered questions (the identical format of Narrative Tradition). There was at least one evening for each of the 9 major fixations.

Naranjo directed the sessions, laying a foundation with descriptions of the 9 points. In itself this was not unusual, but his comments were definitely tailored for an audience of trained psychologists, and not the more conversational tone aimed at a student’s personal work that he normally used. The authentic tone of self observation may have been present, but I felt that the obligation of explanation (perhaps performance) distorted the feeling of each point.

Other enneagram enthusiasts proffer other histoires and sources. For example:

• Egyptian Gnosis, apparently because in Heliopolis, the center of worship of the Ennead, there were nine deities of ancient Egyptian Mythology about which we know next to nothing. 

• Some proponents of the system trace the variations of the Enneagram symbol to the sacred geometry of Pythagorean mathematicians and mystical mathematics, but Pythagoras left no clear teachings though apparently he once went to Heliopolis with its nine gods, or something.

• Plotinus’s Enneads. There! A use of the Greek word for 9. However we have to credit a dude named Porphyry for the somewhat artificial division of Plotinus’s writings into six groups of nine. Thus I think that connecting the Enneagram with neo-Platonic thought is a stretch too far.

• Adam and the Kabbalistic Trees--leave no stone unturned, and rope in Jewish seekers.

• The Secret Teachings of Jesus (via the Desert Fathers)--sure why not, but far more persuasive is the Jesuit connection. The frontispiece of the Arithmologia by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher(1601–1680), published in 1665, shows a figure not identical but somewhat similar to the Enneagram.

• “Originally created in 1915 by philosopher George Gurdjieff.” This historian sources G. I Gurdjeiff and the Naqshbandi Sufi order a little more than 100 years ago. However there is absolutely zero evidence in the voluminous writings of Gurdjieff that he ever used the Enneagram in the way the Naranjo, Ichazo et al use it. Zero.

• I am particularly fond of the story that a book fell from a shelf in the esoteric library of Ocsar Ichazo’s uncle in Bolivia and opened to a page with the 9 pointed diagram.

• Claudio Naranjo claims his source of the teaching were mystical experiences in the Arican desert. He claims the historic origins of the Enneagram are esoteric gnosticism and occultism from channeled material gained from automatic writing and then verified through observation.

While I am persuaded by Professor Harari’s embrace of history as a means of coordinating mass human efforts. I am equally suspicious of lesser enterprises employing the same methodology. These people are selling snake oil. They are using the “histoire de jour” like a fine French restaurant getting rid of yesterday’s leftovers for a profit.

“Something is missing” is a constant storyline running through all these narratives. We lose our connection with the divine and have to reconnect, and in most cases, are unable to complete the circuit without some assistance that costs money. It is one answer to a felt experience of the human condition, but it is just the most accepted answer. There are others, but their popularizers were not as adept as the ones that captured humankind’s attention.

At best these histoires are "Cream of tomato, just like every day." But probably they’re closer to yesterday’s leftovers..

The Stray Dog, Wandering with Gurdjieff

Real Wars kill people. Mythological Wars create cults

23rd April 2022, the Feast of Saint George


I write about George Ivanovich Gurdjieff against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There can be no hiding from real human suffering, but if I really acknowledge how little I can do to change the situation, I feel completely powerless. Nonetheless I find myself checking online for the latest updates. I count the number of children who have been evacuated from Mariupol, and wonder how many fighters remain in the labyrinth of bunkers and tunnels built to withstand a nuclear attack that have become the last holdout for a beleaguered regiment of the Ukrainian army.

I know which side I should root for, or more accurately, I know which side I want to win although I'm not entirely aware of all the factors that govern my impulses. From afar it seems clear that there are good guys and bad guys. I don’t know how many secret sins Volodymyr Zelenskyy is hiding, but I can see Valdimir Putin in what appear to be carefully edited Russian TV news clips keeping his distance from everyone at the end of a long white table with some arcane imperial symbols in gold holding the legs to the floor. Generals sit at the other end. According to reports, no one dares feed him accurate information about the progress of his narcissistic war. Looking at the picture, I find sympathy impossible. It seems like a world of lies and manipulation, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, although I know that if I were in Russia, I would hear an entirely different story presented over the airwaves, and I might feel differently. In fact I know I would feel differently. What is accurate information, what is propaganda, and how can I really tell the difference? Using information that comes through a filter is always tricky.

I am uneasy. My perceptions feel almost archetypal, like watching Arjuna and Lord Krishna surveying the battlefield and talking on and on about the “big picture” meaning of conflict. But I will direct my reflection back to the conversation of the Bhagavad Gita when things are less heated, the actual winners and losers have been sorted out, the bodies buried. This war will have consequences. All wars do, but right now I cannot feel in my body how or where we have been injured. I myself am not in the horrific underground labyrinth of Mariupol. It is a theoretical conversation except when I get personal about the cost.

I also know that it is from the perspective of myth and fable that I examine 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 the wandering that would eventually take him and his followers to France. Gurdjieff had tried, unsuccessfully, to establish his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man first in Tbilisi then soon after in Essentuki. But by 1920 he and his followers left Georgia for Constantinople and he became a stray dog, forced into roaming by the historical progenitors of the army currently bombing, slaughtering and raping.

This small group of men and women were mostly members of the Russian elite. Eventually they found their way to Le Prieuré in Fontainebleau-Avon, an abandoned French convent which had been the chateau of Louis XIV's secret wife, Madame de Maintenon, until a previous revolution had impoverished its aristocratic owner. Then the first major global conflict created an opportunity for a homeless group of exiles to set up an esoteric school in what was, from all accounts, a mammoth fixer-upper.

Although some very prominent people came to study with Gurdjieff, they remained an elite group over the next 29 years that he taught. He authorized very few senior students and left us scant and, for the most part, very difficult written materials, but along with several people who worked with him, Gurdjieff had an outsized impact on the world of modern spirituality. Many proponents of the Western Enneagram cite Gurdjieff as the source of their psychological/spiritual tool though this is not at all certain.

Gurdjieff always seemed a bit vague about the sources of his teachings. In Meetings with Remarkable Men, and in several other places, he makes his teachers into the stuff of legend, idealized characters, almost characterizations in his story of discovery and intrigue. They imparted a special, hidden teaching which he then promised to pass onto select students. These teachers are never clearly identified, but this is the very nature of esotericism. It is obscure and only understood or intended to be understood by a small number of people with special (and perhaps secret) knowledge. Receiving and understanding the teachings requires initiation into the group.

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 or 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 4 or 5 gay people), a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim and a few Asians.

We were also serious about exploring the Enneagram of Fixations, and by extension, engaging in “The Work.” The figure of G.I. Gurdjieff, always referred to as “Mr. Gurdjieff,” his pronouncements, statements about the nature of the universe, humankind’s ultimate purpose and his methods to undertake spiritual work were treated as sacrosanct. His inscrutable Beelzebub's Tales was spoken of in hushed tones. If you read it but didn’t understand his made-up words 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, or, as Gurdjieff described it, “Self-Remembering.”

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

There are also the 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, purport to transmit Gurdjieff’s teaching as well as claiming authority to speak in their voice. And finally there are extensive writings of people who describe their own experiences and interpretations of his teachings. These vary widely from memoir, metaphysical speculation to hagiography. Each of these kinds of writing have to be treated differently.

I use the word “myth” to denote the 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. It includes 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 of time, 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 as instructions in their own teaching. Though 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 done a complete 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 have placed my narrative against an idealized version of the man I’ve pieced together. Naranjo did not set himself up as an heir to Gurdjieff’s teaching, but he was certainly conversant with it, and frequently pointed to Gurdjieff as a prototypical teacher of the kind of inner work he favored. He labeled him a “trickster” in the venerable line of teachers who use unorthodox means to help a student examine something about him or herself that they can’t see for themselves. Naranjo also talked about “The School.” It referred to the interrelated 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 new found sexual freedom encouraged an attitude of laissez-faire and there was inevitably some degree of exploitation; Naranjo was very interested in psychedelics--he encouraged experimentation with drugs, notably LSD and Ayahuasca; he and his leaders allowed interactions which were outside professional guidelines; teachers’ credentials went unchecked or were inflated. In post hippie, Beatnik California Naranjo was not alone, on the one hand encouraging some of these behaviors, engaging in some and turning a blind eye to others. From my observation, many New Age teachers shared this sin to some degree. It comes part and parcel with the way conversation has been framed as a top down authority structure.

In the interests of being as transparent as one can be in this conversation, I spent an inordinate amount of time in my adult life exploring what I can only describe as the world of the New Age esoteric and occult. I never admitted to myself that it was a highly suspect endeavor, populated with the likes of Mme Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Charles Webster Leadbeater, or Aleister Crowley who 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 at all as important as he was when we were part of SAT, that his influence is waning. Another warns that any negative comments will 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, and 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. The influence extends even into the world of American Zen practice. One teacher whom I admired told me that when she didn’t know where to take a student in meditation instruction, she fell back on the Enneagram.

But most importantly, “The Work '' struck a chord with me, opening up a world that I knew I had to explore. When I found myself caught in the trap of not being able to see my own plight clearly and was forced to admit that I’d been the fool, it was not the most comfortable of personal predicaments. The amount of personal capital that I’d already invested into the enterprise obscured the situation. What makes this spell of gnostic enterprise more difficult to crack is that it did begin to encroach on the entrapment and unmask self-deception, the very thing that I’d sought to free myself from in the first place. Though it provided some sense of relief, 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 me now examine the logical fallacy used to support the “exit plan” that brings down the whole house of cards. Gurdjieff asserts that man does have the possibility of being awake, but in order to wake up, he has to set an alarm clock, and insert a conscious mechanism into his unconscious routine to remind him that he’s dreaming. 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 loses its effectiveness. We fall back asleep. The human perpetual sleeping machine needs a perpetual waking machine, one that stands outside his or her habitual way of being. Thus the set up--we have need of a guru, an awake man (sometimes a woman but rarely), or one who knows vs. 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 person who is awake 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 themselves to be the authority, therefore whatever person Y believes is true. This fallacy is a special case of the genetic fallacy as the source is being 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 this Enneagram, we only find oblique references to Gurdjieff. The main candidates for an authorized source swing between the truly secret teaching of Gurdjieff or his followers, to Arica founder Oscar Ichazo and his student Naranjo with some far more 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.

This conversation about spiritual life is crippled by lame 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 throughout all revealed religion: for example the dogmatic pronouncement that the Pope can, by virtue of his authority alone, utter 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 as far as we know, the first person to refer to an Enneagon, was the Bolivian Oscar Ichazo. In 1968 Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis and the ego-fixations at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. It was here that Naranjo made contact with Ichazo, and later at Ichazo’s first training in Arica Chile, Naranjo began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations.

Naranjo told a convoluted tale echoing Sufi masters disguising their teaching and tricking their disciples, and wove it into his story about receiving the Enneagram from Ichazo. My skeptic says that 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 difficult factual history, at some point Naranjo describes his understanding of the Enneagram as the result of automatic writing. Appealing to this otherworldly realm of 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 these conversations themselves are privileged. They rely on the status of the speaker rather than hard evidence as to the root of the Enneagram/Enneagon to prove the validity of the system. Both the claims and statements fall entirely within the argument from authority. But they still continue to be used for confirmation of the system’s validity and ultimate use.

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 a lot of what is important to discuss is beyond words, but we have to use words; they may be an approximation, but they are only tool available to humans. Some of this esoteric language points to important issues in life while other language--I will use a less technological, but very precise word to describe this abuse--is gobbledegook.

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 life choice to train as a Jesuit, a dream that began when I was just an adolescent. 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 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 still required a level of vulnerability, but in the freewheeling world of SAT, time-tested ethical and professional principles had been suspended. There were casualties, and personally I ran up against very difficult obstacles. Being raped by a 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, but that happened rarely. People in SAT relied on Helen Palmer’s costly psychic readings, as prognosticators of behavior patterns, things to work on. There were people who 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 Riordan Speeth is indebted to for losing her license to practice therapy in California.

I have made a list and named names, far from complete, in order to point out to the other-worldly and suspect sources for many of the psychological techniques that were used to dig down to the roots of personal psychological make-up. Key to any of this having therapeutic benefits is surrender. Suspension of judgment opens the back door to the unexpected and 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 using suspect means, 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 gibberish is an exact quote; some version 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 the trick has to be revealed for what it is. Otherwise it just 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 facility 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 about the dead, and in honesty 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 personal 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 request from a friend to examine particular Gurdjieff sources, I came across some talks, very definitive statements he made 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 began to realize that what I read was simply outright misogyny, delivered in a 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 started to construct 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 undertook a heroic exploration of ancient traditions and helped find a key to some of the mysteries that had presented themselves to me, and provided a key, or what I imagined was a key, to self-understanding.

But that made Gurdjieff himself just an ordinary man ruled by circumstance, and being a man lulled to sleep by life’s circumstances was exactly what “The Work'' sets out to conquer. The sleep state 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. But it all 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. What Naranjo claimed about the origin of the Enneagram of fixations was an hallucination at best. Gurdjieff was a bully, a sexist and 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 me 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.

Oscar 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

The Enneagram: A Developmental Study

There is a lot of information about the Enneagram in the primary Gurdjieff materials. However it is rather esoteric and almost nothing that points to what we know about the system through the work of Ichazo, Naranjo, Ochs, or any of their students. The closest in my estimation are some of the writings of John G. Bennett, however Bennett’s authorization by Gurdjieff is murky.

Most of the close students of Gurdjieff do not support the iteration of the Enneagram teaching as proposed by Ichazo et al. Some like Mr. William Patrick Patterson mince no words.

Mr. James Moore was an authorized Gurdjieff teacher, and his paper, The Enneagram: A Developmental Study contains the most sympathetic view I could find. It is presented with no edits. There is a website dedicated to his work, JAMES MOORE HOME PAGE.

by James Moore

 

First published in 1987 and updated by the author in March 2004. Moore winnows the grain from the chaff in this discriminating examination of Gurdjeff’s problematic and best-known symbol.

 

The sea of faith, whose ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ (1) was evoked metaphorically by the elegiac Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, is sweeping back, but in a hundred strange modalities. And though its waves are ostentatious, its eddies and undertows are obscure; and the charting of its cross-currents – these admixtures among religions old and new – is aided by certain discrete ‘marker-buoys’. This paper examples one, which – moored decades ago in the esoteric deep – has been swept leeward into the frothy shallows of pseudo-Sufism, ARICA, Transpersonal Psychology and liberal Catholicism. Our chosen marker is Gurdjieff’s problematic ‘enneagram’.

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (c.1866-1949) was a writer, explorer, choreographer, psychologist, composer, physician, polyglot, entrepreneur, and spiritual teacher, who utterly eludes simplistic categorisation. But his ascendancy over many distinguished pupils, and his seminal importance in a variety of fields, are now challenged only by the most ill-informed or opinionated critics. 

The Enneagram

Gurdjieff’s integrated cosmological and psychological teaching has been described as ‘bewilderingly simple and sublimely, or absurdly complete’: (2) one small but disproportionately significant component was his enneagram, or nine-sided figure (3)– first presented to a private group of pupils in Moscow and Petrograd in 1916. Stressing the symbol’s importance, he demonstrated it as a dynamic model for synthesising, at macrocosmic and microcosmic level, his ‘Law of Three’ (4) and ‘Law of Seven’. (5) Later at Fontainebleau in 1922 he choreographed and taught the first of those many sacred dances (6) or ‘Movements’, whose beautiful but rigorously choreographed evolutions enact the enneagram. 

The subject is abstruse, certainly contentious, and not our real concern. All we need initially establish is that the enneagram was intrinsic and peculiar to Gurdjieff’s system of ideas, and unpromulgated before him. 

In effect, Gurdjieff did claim priority here, and persuasive in his favour is the enneagram’s perfect calibration with other uniquely Gurdjieffian models – those relating to cosmogony and cosmology, and to man’s assimilation of food, air, and sensory impressions. Nor has investigative scholarship yet produced a serious challenge. Consider Whitall Perry: this stern critic (7) of Gurdjieff is formidably armed with brickbats from oriental mystical literature, neo-Platonism, pseudo-Dionysius, Martinist, Rosicrucian and Masonic sources. Yet even he backed by all the academic resources of the Guénon-Schuon philosophical school (8) fails to adduce a precedent for the enneagram. Consider James Webb: no independent scholar worked more doggedly to unearth the provenance of Gurdjieff’s ideas. Yet all his efforts to tease the enneagram out of cognate materia in the Kabbalah, in the Ars Magna of Ramon Lull (c. 1232-1315), and the Arithmologia of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), seem finally as implausible as they are laboured. Consider J. G. Bennett: no Gurdjieffian became more personally and passionately involved in the search. Yet his convoluted argument that the enneagram ‘ . . . originated with the Sarmãn society about 2500 years ago and was revised when the power of the Arabic numeral system was developed in Samarkand in the fifteenth century’, (9) is projected with no hint of intellectual vigilance, and supported by no scrap of textual or archaeological evidence. 

Conclusion: although some future revelation cannot be ruled out, we may meanwhile decently hypothesise that the enneagram is sui generis and G. I. Gurdjieff, if not its author, is at least its first modern proponent. We have a valid anthropological marker. 

The Authorised Version

For more than thirty years (a longish spell with new religions), the enneagram remained hermetically sealed within its Gurdjieffian ambit. In Paris at the Salle Pleyel Gurdjieff gave it hauntingly beautiful expression in dance. In England profound commentaries were meditated (but not published) by his distinguished pupils, the Russian writer Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878-1947) and the psychoanalyst Dr Maurice Nicoll (1884-1953). 

On 29 October 1949 Gurdjieff died, and the ensuing three years saw a natural dissemination (10) of hitherto recondite material. His original enneagram exposition, supplemented by Ouspensky’s commentary, was embodied in the latter’s brilliant recapitulation of Gurdjieff’s larger teaching; in May 1950 enneagram dances were included in the programme shown publicly by Gurdjieff’s pupils at the Fortune Theatre, Drury Lane, London; and finally in 1952 came the publication of Dr Nicoll’s 14 enneagram dissertations. These four manifestations represent, if anything can, the hieroglyph’s ‘authorised version’, and whatever one’s view of symbolism, sacred dance, or the enneagram in particular – it is hard to deny their integrity and essential dignity. On this sturdy and decent foundation however, a whole cluster of baroque enneagram ‘developments’ would soon be reared by ideological entrepreneurs. 

Heterodox Gurdjieffian Extrapolation

The first innovators were (in the broadest possible sense) Gurdjieffians. Rodney Collin-Smith (1909-1956), a precocious disciple of Ouspensky, emigrated to Mexico City and here in 1952 published The Theory of Celestial Influence (El Desarollo de la Luz). This astonishing work is essentially a Gurdjieffian Systema Universi, bearing comparison both in its audacity and ultimate implausibility with Bergson’s ‘Panpsychism’, Comte’s ‘Panhylism’ Fechner’s ‘Panentheism’, and Hegel’s ‘Cosmosophy’. Significantly for later developments, it gave the first account of the enneagram in Spanish, and contributed (11) to the formation of groups in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. 

The Gurdjieffian spirit, although unaligned with any specific religion, is essentially theistic and traditionalist: and in 1954 in Italy, Collin-Smith was received into the Roman Catholic Church. He now published his brief perfervid Christian Mystery, which tendentiously gives an enneagrammatic and astrological form to the incarnation, passion and resurrection of Christ. Needless to say, Rome took no formal cognisance of Collin-Smith, who died age 47 at Cuzco on 3 May 1956, probably by suicide. (12) Within the Gurdjieffian pantheon he remains at best an equivocal figure: in his speculations – brilliant perhaps – the enneagram begins to lose its aura of objectivity. 

Already, through our modest enneagram exhibit, we approach the more general dilemma of doctrine which challenges contemporary Gurdjieffians (as classically it challenges the custodians of any new teaching, once its protagonist is dead). Where lies the middle way between an indulgently ‘progressive’ exegesis and a moribund conservatism? ‘Every stick,’ as Gurdjieff was fond of saying, ‘has two ends.’ 

It was law-conformable that among Gurdjieff’s broad posterity two divergent schools arose, orthodox and heterodox. In England they might respectively be personified by two eminent (13) men, Kenneth Walker (1882-1966) and John Godolphin Bennett (1897-1974). Contrast them in 1957. This was the year in which Bennett at his Institute (14) in Coombe Springs opened his Djamichunatra, (15) a lofty study hall, oriented towards Gurdjieff’s grave, and having, like the enneagram, nine sides; it was a year which found him well embarked on The Dramatic Universe, his own Brobdingagnian Systema Universi, permeated by enneagrammatic speculation. It was also however the year which saw publication of Walker’s eagerly awaited Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching,(16_ which added to the enneagram canon – precisely nothing. 

Nearly fifty years have come and gone, yet from the orthodox Gurdjieff school (17) scarcely a fresh word on the enneagram has emerged into the public domain. They have cherished the authorised version; they have laboured – some more than others – to deepen their understanding of it; above all they have brought it to vibrant life in dance, and recorded that silence. 

           The heterodox faction – mostly inspired by Bennett – have grown more incontinent as they dwindled in numbers and influence. Largely abjuring Gurdjieff’s cosmological and metaboldance on film (18) which it would be an impertinence to praise. But being justifiably concerned that spiritual glasnost would only replenish the ‘Schachermacher-workshop-booths’ (19) of popular charlatans, they have maintained – in the face of each new provocation – their deep ic synthesis, they have unexpectedly preferred themes of management, industry and science: in 1963 Clarence E. King perceived the enneagram at play in the engineering division of Vauxhall Motors; (20) in 1966 Kenneth Pledge, more persuasively, calibrated it with Newton’s prism deviation experiment and the corresponding spectrometer experiment; (21) in 1974 Bennett himself published his controversial anthology The Enneagram, exampling the symbol in the kitchen; in 1978 Irmis Popoff found it relevant to consumer product testing; and in 1987 Saul Kuchinsky confidently applied it across the whole managerial spectrum. (22) Speculations of this species have proliferated and indeed toppled over into a new century. 

  And their validity? Intuition is not slow to suggest an answer. Yet if the poor heterodox Gurdjieffians are to be accused of reckless and feeble subjectivism (as they sometimes are), council for the defence might plead in mitigation that they strove, however clumsily, to relate to Gurdjieff’s writings, and to respect – in its many implications and constraints – the specific geometric and arithmetic morphology of his symbol. Such a deference and such a discipline hardly commended itself to the self-anointed ‘enneagram experts’ who quickly arose outside Gurdjieffian circles. 

Non-Gurdjieffian Appropriations

All that was meretricious in the nouvelle orientalism of the 1960s, facilitated an impudent collusion by a small cabal of Home County pseudo-Sufis to denigrate Gurdjieff – the better to suggest that the half Scottis, half Afghan ‘Grand Sheikh’ Idries Abutahir Shah (1924- ) had somehow assumed his mantle. (23) They worked through rumour and pseudonymous writing; through half-truth, historical revisionism, and the usurpation of Gurdjieffian ideological talismans. (24) 

The want of a credible ‘proto-enneagram’ even within the incomparable treasure-house of traditional Islamic geometry was happily supplied (as so often in Shah’s ambit) by imagination:

On a wall faced with white Afghan marble, delineated in polished rubies glowed the symbol of the community. This is the mystical ‘No-Koonja’, the ninefold Naqschor ‘Impress’ . . . (25)

The casual generalist may be forgiven for viewing such passages (and they abound) (26) merely as nondescript oriental Kitsch: but the Gurdjieffian and the anthropologist – construing them within a broader complex of coded allusions, almost tantamount to a metalanguage – identifies a specific and tendentious claim. In effect Gurdjieff’s enneagram – ignobly shorn of functional significance – is being appropriated as some sort of pseudo-Sufic trademark. 

The enneagram’s final descent to a level of spiritual vaudeville affords only the bitter-sweet consolation of humour. That the symbol, for example, has been so aggressively marketed throughout South and North America, is due respectively to the Instituto de Gnoselogia (founded Arica, Chile 1968) and the ARICA Institute, Inc. (founded New York 1971). Neither enterprise is remotely Gurdjieffian. Each was instigated by the clever Bolivian ideological opportunist Oscar Ichazo, who is instructed by Metraton the prince of archangels, guided by the Green Qu’tub, and his removed his karmic nodules by massaging his left foot with the handle of a mixing spoon.(27) 

These dubious advertisements aside, it is arguable that Ichazo’s methodology and typology should be independently situated and evaluated within the extravagant complex of American eupsychian therapies (Synanon games, T-groups, Erhard Seminar Training, encounter groups, Transactional Analysis, Myers-Briggs personality inventory etc.) which, as Theodore Roszak points out, (28) owe so much to Gurdjieff yet acknowledge so little. But Ichazo himself forfeits independence by placing the enneagram at the centre of his system – and moreover in a manner which tests, virtually to destruction, one’s neutrality of viewpoint. 

The symbol’s exterior form has been copied without the smallest grasp of its interior dynamic: a conceptual instrument developed to transport objective ideas, is flatly reproduced as a means for coaxing down some personal advantage. Analogically Ichazo’s enneagram is to Gurdjieff’s what the New Guinea cargo-cults are to aviation. Ichazo’s 63 ‘domains, energies, divine principles, fixations, virtues, passions, and psychocatalyzers’ seem stuck around the symbol au choix like so many bird-of-paradise feathers. 

The Bolivian implausibly claims to have discovered the ‘enneogon’ and its arcane meanings independently; (29) his pupil John C. Lilly, an authority on dolphins, (30) chimes in misleadingly, ‘ . . . the enneagram is a device used by the Sufi school and developed by Ichazo.’ (31) By a sort of spiritual Gresham’s Law, it is this pastiche and commercialised version which has gained ascendancy in our contemporary world; which is enriching its proponents; which begins to infiltrate British Universities; (32) which is taught indeed in Roman Catholic retreats. (33) Perhaps it is unsurprising that a facile psychometric typology commends itself to Californian freshmen: but its uncritical acceptance at professorial level, and still worse by the spiritual heirs of St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus – this is sobering indeed. Gurdjieff himself jocularly foresaw a moment when his work would ‘be read in Pope’s palace’, (34) but hardly in the form of travesty. 

CONCLUSION

The symbolic corollaries to religious, political, artistic and literary movements are not historically negligible. Whether the enneagram in particular will sustain its present momentum, and even emerge from the ruck of contemporary symbols, very much remains to be seen: one might already concede it some resilience and adaptive qualities. Then does it matter that most modern exegesis is trivial and preposterous, and as much resembles the original ‘as a nail is like a requiem’? (35) The answer depends on one’s point of view. Clearly it does not matter a jot to those exploiting the symbol; and little if anything to the value-free anthropologist. But predictable indifference in these quarters does not oblige the more engaged commentator to emulate Mathew Arnold and ‘bring the eternal note of sadness in’. (36) For if Gurdjieff’s model lacks fundamental integrity, its corruption cannot concern us: and if, on the contrary, it is one of those rare symbols which encapsulate and transmit a new idea of awakening power, it will survive even its wildest extrapolators and apologists: some spirits at least, first meeting the enneagram in debased pastiche, will instinctively turn for a truer perspective to Gurdjieff’s original teaching. Perhaps on that formidable ground, an infinitely more intelligent, infinitely more responsible, exegesis could now be raised. Certainly it is overdue. 

 

First published in Religion Today: A Journal of Contemporary Religions (London) 

V (3), October 1986-January 1987, pp.1-5.

james.moore@easynet.co.uk

 

 

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Original Formulation

1949. G. I. Gurdjieff. Quoted by P. D. Ouspensky In Search of the Miraculous. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 399p., pp. 286-95. 

Orthodox Gurdjieffian Commentaries

1949. P. D. Ouspensky. Ibid.pp. 376-8. 

1952. Maurice Nicoll. Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky. Three Volumes. Vincent Stewart, 1766p., Vol. 2, pp. 373-438. 

 

Heterodox Gurdjieffian Speculation

1954. Rodney Collin-Smith. The Theory of Celestial Influence. Vincent Stewart, 392p., passim.

1954. Rodney Collin-Smith. The Christian Mystery. Mexico City: Ediciones Sol, 24p.

1956-1966. John Godolphin Bennett. The Dramatic Universe.Four Volumes, Hodder & Stoughton, 1667 p., passim. 

1974. John Godolphin Bennett. The Enneagram. Coombe Springs Press, 1974, 64p.; amplified edition retitled Enneagram Studies. Weiser, 1983, 133p. 

1978. Irmis B. Popoff. The Enneagramma of the Man of Unity. Weiser, 96p. 

 

Non-Gurdjieffian Appropriations

1972. Oscar Ichazo. The Human Process for Enlightenment and Freedom: A Series of Five Lectures. New York: Arica Institute Inc, 120p. 

1975. Charles T. Tart (ed.). Transpersonal Psychologies. New York: Harper & Row, 485p. Contains ‘The Arica Training’ by John C. Lilly and Joseph E. Hart, pp. 330-351. 

1982. Oscar Ichazo. Between Metaphysics and Protoanalysis: A Theory for Analysing the Human Psyche. New York: Arica Institute Inc. 

1984. Marian Beesing O. P., Robert J. Nogosek C. S. C., and Patrick O’Leary S. J. The Enneagram: A Journey of Self-Discovery. New Jersey: Dimension Books Inc. 

1987. Barbara Metz S. N. D. de N. and John Burchill O. P. The Enneagram and Prayer: Discovering Our True Selves Before God. New Jersey: Dimension Books Inc. 

 

NOTES

 

---

1 From ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) the most celebrated poem of Mathew Arnold (1822-1888), English critic and professor of poetry at Oxford University.

2 Richard Rees. ‘Monsieur Gurdjieff’ The Twentieth Century. Vol. 164, No. 981. Nov. 1958, p. 440. 

3To construct Gurdjieff’s enneagram: describe a circle: divide its circumference into nine equal parts: successively number the dividing points clockwise from 1 to 9, so that 9 is uppermost: join points 9, 3, and 6 to form an equilateral triangle with 9 at the apex: join the residual points in the successive order 1, 4, 2, 8, 5, and 7 to form an inverted hexagon (symmetrical about an imaginary diameter struck perpendicular from 9). 

In relation to the digits 3 and 7 – which in Gurdjieff’s model, as in mystical systems generally, are crucially significant – the sequence 142857 has noteworthy properties (lost incidentally when transposed to notations other than denary). It deploys all digits except 3 and its multiples. As a recurring decimal, it results from dividing 1 (The Monad) by 7. Its cyclical progression yields every decimalised proper seventh (thus 2 sevenths = .285714: 3 sevenths = . 428571 and so on). 

4 Named by Gurdjieff ‘Triamazikamno’, the Law of Three is a ubiquitous sacred dialect, built around his formulation ‘The higher blends with the lower in order to actualise the middle and thus becomes either higher for the preceding lower, or lower for the succeeding higher’. (See Beelzebub’s Tales, 1950, p. 751 passim.)

5 Named by Gurdjieff ‘Heptaparaparshinokh’. The Law of Seven defies précis. Centred on the idea of the ubiquitous discontinuity of vibrations, it has correlates with the Western musical scale (and more problematically with quantum theory and the periodic table of the elements, though Gurdjieff did not adduce these). (See Gurdjieff, ibid., p. 755 ff., passim). 

6 Gurdjieff perceived himself not least as a teacher of dancing, and the enneagram as a moving symbol. In many of his dances, individual and ensemble displacements are precisely governed by the enneagram. The word ‘Movements’, which in 1928 replaced the term ‘exercises’ in Gurdjieffian vocabulary, evidently now embraces seven discrete categories: the six preliminary exercises or ‘Obiligatories’; women’s dances; rhythms (harmonic, plastic and occupational); ritual exercises and medical gymnastics; men’s ethnic dances e.g. Dervish and Tibetan; sacred temples dances and tableaux; and the 39 Movements of Gurdjieff’s last series. 

7 Whitall N. Perry Gurdjieff in the Light of Tradition, Perennial Books, 1978 (first serialised as three instalments in Studies in Comparative Religion during the Autumn of 1974 and the Winter and Spring of 1975) constitutes the most considered intellectual attack on Gurdjieff to date. His charges of exclusivism, obscurantism, and anti-traditionalism, have been contested by Michel de Salzmann, K. E. Steffens, and James Moore. 

8 The hostility of René Guénon to Gurdjieff had a personal basis (see James Webb,The Harmonious Circle, Thames & Hudson, 1980, p. 467). For biographical detail see Robin Waterfield, René Guénon, Crucible, 1987, 160p.). The brilliant philosophical school overtly indebted to Frithjof Schuon (‘Isa Nuruddin’) – and to Guénon through the Alawiyya dervishes of Morocco – reinstituted attacks on Gurdjieff in 1972. Ironically Guénon’s and Schuon’s books (and those by associated figures like Titus Burckhart, Ananda Coomeraswamy, Martin Lings, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Marco Pallis, Whitall Perry and so on) receive more sympathetic attention in certain Gurdjieffian circles than anywhere else. 

9 John Godolphin Bennett, Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Turnstone, 1973, 320p., p. 293. 

10 In January 1949 Gurdjieff sanctioned posthumous publication of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (an account of Ouspensky’s discipleship, essentially comprising Gurdjieff’s direct and reported speech). He also urged forward publication of his own magnum opus,Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950, 1238p.); this work, although not explicitly referring to the enneagram, contains (in Chapters XXXIX and XL) the deepest exposition of the laws it encapsulates. 

11 The strength and prevalence of Gurdjieff groups in South and Central America is largely owed to the direct influence of orthodox Gurdjieffians from France, England, and the USA – commencing shortly after Gurdjieff’s death. 

12 An idealised account of Collin-Smith’s death appears in a postscript to his book The Theory of Conscious Harmony, Vincent Stewart, 1958, 212p., pp 187-8. A less inhibited version is offered in The Harmonious Circle, Thames & Hudson, 1980, 608p., pp. 494-6 by the rationalist historian James Webb (who tragically took his own life on 8 May 1980.) 

13 Walker was a man of wide culture and three times Hunterian Professor of Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons. Bennett was a polyglot and mathematician; his speculative paper ‘Unified Field Theory in a Curvature-Free Five-Dimensional Manifold’ (written with R. L. Brown and M. W. Thring) was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in July 1949. As J. B. Priestly wrote, ‘The level of Gurdjieff’s . . . most devoted students was very high. In order to study this movement, nobody will have to do any intellectual slumming.’ 

14 Bennett’s Institutefor the Comparative Study of History, Philosophy and the Sciences Ltdwas incorporated on 22 May 1946. By 1954 Bennett had broken from the Gurdjieffian mainstream to purse an eclectic line: he used his Institute to promote several cults (notably Subud and pseudo-Sufism), which were neither mutually consistent nor compatible with Gurdjieff’s ideas. See Bennett’s autobiography Witness, Turnstone, revd. ed 1975, 385p.

15 For fuller detail see James Moore, ‘Neo-Sufism: The Case of Idries Shah’ Religion TodayVol 3, No. 3, note 30. For photographs of the Djamichunatra,, see various editions of J. G. Bennett’s autobiography, Witnessibid. 

16 Kenneth Walker, A Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching, Jonathan Cape, 1957, 221p. 

17 Albeit 'orthodox Gurdjieffian school' remains a taxonomic signifier which is useful and salutary in many contexts, the growing need for interpretative vigilance is manifest from recent untoward episodes within the Gurdjieffian communion. The delineation of orthodox and heterodox groupings in James Moore's ‘Gurdjieffian Groups in Britain’ [Religion TodayVol. 3 (No. 2)] published in May 1986, has become largely outdated. More perennially relevant may prove his 'Moveable Feasts: The Gurdjieff Work'[Religion Today Vol.9 (No.2) spring 1994] with its principled differentiation of (i) an orthodoxy fixedly arrogated to itself in institutional and nomenclatural terms, as against (ii) an orthodoxy validated, however fragilely, in terms of Gurdjieffian historicity and traditional praxis. Here Moore examples inter alia the problematical 1992 revision of the English-language text of Gurdjieff's magnum opus Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (since withdrawn from circulation), which drew widespread criticism as stylistically vapid, ideologically revisionist, and socially divisive. Paradoxically it sprang from the fountainhead of orthodoxy, namely Mme Jeanne de Salzmann and her Gurdjieff Foundations: yet was far-sightedly opposed by broadly heterodox Gurdjieffian figures like Annie Lou Staveley and even (at the earliest feasibility stage) by J.G. Bennett. 

18 A substantial effort of the traditional Gurdjieff groups over the last 35 years has been to create and preserve for the future, a visual record of Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dance and Movements. At a considerable expense of time, effort, and money, some 10 archival films have been made in Paris by the French, English, and American groups, collaborating together under the supervision of Gurdjieff’s senior pupil Jeanne de Salzmann (1889-1990). None of these films, from the heart of Gurdjieff’s teaching, are as yet in the public domain, but semi-public showings have recently begun (eg. in London on 14 June 1987). Here is a major quandary for Gurdjieffians: on the one hand they feel certain these films would ‘nourish the times’; on the other hand they readily identify forces and agencies which would appropriate, copy, and corrupt the material, for artistic and even for commercial purposes. Thus the only fragment so far released to the general public is the last 10 minutes of Peter Brook’s (1979) adaptation of Gurdjieff’s autobiography Meetings with Remarkable Men. 

19 Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales, op cit.,p. 1188. 

20 Clarence E. King, ‘The Systematics of a Manufacturing Process’, Systematics, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 111. 

21 Kenneth Pledge, ‘Structured Process in Scientific Experiment’, Systematics, Vol. 3, No. 4, p. 304. 

22 Evidently the American business milieu is a unique field for cultivating a debased Gurdjieffianity. Charles Krone, a Carmel organisational consultant personally unconnected with Gurdjieff or his senior pupils, reportedly indoctrinated the 67,000 employees of Pacific Bell Inc. with his ‘Standard Leadership Development’ programme: Krone candidly acknowledges his fundamental reliance on J. G. Bennett’s (debatable) version of Gurdjieff’s ideas. See Kathleen Pender, ‘Pac Bell’s New Way to Think’, San Francisco Chronicle 23 March 1987, p. 1, 6. Ms. Pender implies that similar programmes are in progress or planned at Dupont, Scott Paper, Certain Teed – and in the UK at I.C.I. 

23 See (i) L. P. Elwell-Sutton, ‘Sufism & Pseudo-Sufism’, Encounter, Vol. XLIV, No. 5, May 1975, pp. 9-17 and the series of fifteen lively letters under various headings relating to Gurdjieff and Sufism between August 1975 and March 1976 from among others, Michael Currer-Briggs, James Moore, John Pentland and James Webb; and (ii) James Moore, ‘Neo-Sufism: The Case of Idries Shah’, Religion Today, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 4-8. 

24 Another Gurdjieffian talisman exploited by the Shah-School was the putative ‘Sarmoung Brotherhood’. Shah also followed Gurdjieff in his enthusiasm for Mullah Nassr Eddin, the medieval wise fool of Turkish folklore. 

25 Major Desmond R. Martin (? Pseud.) ‘Below the Hindu Kush’, The Lady Vol. CLXII, No. 4210, 9 Dec. 1965, p. 870. 

26 cf. ‘Rafael Lefort’ (pseud.) The Teachers of Gurdjieff, Gollancz, 1966, 151p., p. 23. And, Taslim (? Pseud.) ‘A Reconnaissance – Why I Travelled’ in The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West: An Anthology of New Writings by and about Idries Shah (ed. L. Lewin) Institute for Research on the Dissemination of Human Knowledge, 1972, 212 p., pp. 158-9. 

27 These unusual claims are made on Ichazo’s behalf by John C. Lilly and Joseph E. Hart in ‘The Arica Training’ in Transpersonal Psychologies(ed. Charles T. Tart) Harper & Row, 1975, 485 p.; 1977, 504 p., p. 329-351, see p. 341 and p. 346. 

28 Theodore Roszak, Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness, New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 271p., p. 139. 

29 See Interviews with Oscar Ichazo, New York: Arica Institute Press, 1982, 190 p., passim. Significantly however major Gurdjieff enneagram disquisitions were available in Spanish throughout South America, before Ichazo published his first book. 

30 Dr Lilly, a former associate in residence at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, is the author of Man and Dolphin (1961) and The Mind of the Dolphin(1967). He spent two and a half months in a ‘living-in situation’ with Margaret Howe and a dolphin called Peter; and ten years working with isolation tanks and LSD. He converted to Ichazo in 1970. 

31 Lilly and Hart, op. cit., p. 333. 

32 Especially in the USA. A recent British case was Shree Pickar’s workshop ‘The Enneagram: Symbol for Personal Transformation’ held on 13-14 October 1984, under the auspices of the University of Surrey. Ms. Pickar formerly led workshops for Claudio Naranjo, the Chilean psychiatrist and authority on drug states. 

33 In the USA ‘Enneagram workshops’, loosely based on Ichazo’s adaptation, have for approximately for eight years been given by Jesuits, Dominicans, and various women’s orders. In the UK these characteristically take place under the auspices of the Roman Catholic National Retreat Movement at Cenacle houses in London, Dublin, Liverpool, Bristol, and Hindhead. 

34 Gurdjieff quoted by John Godolphin Bennett in his autobiography Witness: the Story of a Search, Hodder & Stoughton, 1962, 381p., p. 271. 

35 Mullah Nassr Eddin quoted by Gurdjieff Beelzebub’s Tales, op. cit., p. 13. 

36 Arnold loc. cit.

 

 

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Special Note on relevant 1987-2003 developments.

 

In appending below a provisional recapitulation of some significant developments touching on the typological enneagram, I acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Gurdjieff bibliographer and independent scholar J. Walter Driscoll, for sharing his knowledge of developments in the U.S.A.

 

 

1988 Helen Palmer publishes ‘The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life ‘(Harper).

1990 Oscar Ichazo's lawsuit against Helen Palmer for copyright infringement of his "Enneagon" is dismissed.

1992 Religion Today Vol.7 (No.2) (London). Anthony C. Edwards publishes ‘Competitiveness and Apartheid in the New Age: the Enneagram Schools’, rashly lending academic weight to the misinformation promoted by successive proponents of the personality analysis industry, namely that indeterminate Sufic schools, not Gurdjieff, originated the enneagram.

1992 Religion Today Vol.8 (No.1) (London). James Moore publishes ‘New Lamps for Old: The Enneagram Débâcle’ challenging Anthony C. Edwards representations and emphasising Gurdjieff as the enneagram’s protagonist.

1993-1994 Gnosis # 30 Winter issue, News & Notes: ‘Enneagram Enters Halls of Academe’ announces that Helen Palmer's Center for Enneagram Studies and Stanford University's Business School will host the first International Enneagram Conference. (Addressing Conference, Kathleen Speeth unexpectedly warns of the “potential for harm" inherent in using the typological enneagram, adding that she herself will discontinue teaching it publicly.)

1994 Claudio Naranjo publishes Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View, a scholarly if laboured apologia for Ichazo’s contentious enneagram of personality types. 

1994 Gnosis: a Journal of the Western Inner Traditions (San Francisco) Summer Issue # 32 carries feature ‘Why the Enneagram: an interview with Helen Palmer’

1995 Helen Palmer publishes The Enneagram in Love & Work: Understanding Your Intimate & Business Relationships. (Harper). 

1996 A.G.E. Blake publishes The Intelligent Enneagram [Shambhala], a unique and honourable attempt to calibrate Gurdjieff’s enneagram with numerous scientific, philosophical, and spiritual paradigms. Audacious, cerebral, and heavy going. 

1996 Gnosis (San Francisco) Fall 1996 Issue carries feature ‘The Distorted Enneagram: interview with Claudio Naranjo’ in which he indicates “my main interest in learning from Oscar Ichazo was the conviction that he was the link to the Sarmouni - the school behind Gurdjieff." (The interviewer, O. M. C. Parkin suggests that "Ichazo has retreated to Hawaii and, apart from an interview with L. A. Weekly in 1993, has remained almost silent in public.")   

1997 Gnosis Magazine (San Francisco) #42, Winter, features a revealing correspondence section "Special Forum: The Enneagram in Contention": Helen Palmer defends herself against Claudio Naranjo's accusations of her "misappropriating the enneagram oral tradition":

Nicolas Tereschenko stresses that "Mr. Gurdjieff himself never gave his pupils any indication of this low-levels application of the enneagram”; Claudio Naranjo closes with a terse refusal to rebut criticism.

1998 William Patrick Patterson Taking with the Left Hand(Arete Communications) Part 1: ‘How the Enneagram Came to Market’ offers a racy and adversarial recapitulation of the links among Ichazo, Naranjo, Palmer et al, distancing that entire lineage from Gurdjieff’s original teaching.

 

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Copyright © James Moore 1987, 2004

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