Was Muktananda High-Level Chicanery?

Published Sunday, April 28, 2024

Muktananda

What I remember most about the evening was the fancy BMV with the vanity plates GURU 1, driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Muktananda and Werner Erhard were in the back seat. Baba’s translator, Swami Yogananda Jain, sat in front with the driver. The venue was 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, the important presentation of Siddhi Yoga it pretended to be. I would have to dig deep for anything that piqued my curiosity. I had listened to far too many sermons about grace, shanti, or shakti. What I saw was the Westernization of an Indian sadhu, sanitized but still containing a few tastefully presented cultural artifacts that might be interesting to spiritual seekers of New Age California. 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. A few Westerners had become disciples. They’d purchased and begun refurbishing a large hall with a kitchen and some staff quarters in Emeryville. It was 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 the first 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 that afternoon before the public event at the ashram.

There were no more than 20 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 went into the adjoining 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 to skip the whole foot-kissing ritual. I sat before him in a kneeling position, 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, and 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's (Da Free John) group and had come to extend their greetings to Baba. The conversation was suddenly doused with cold water. The drift of the questions I could follow went something like, well, I do hope he’s well, but where is he? He’s swamped, but he sends this box of cheap crummy chocolate balls from the ashram’s kitchen as a token of his respect. 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 seemed deliberately confrontational. Someone on the staff would be asked how the group made it onto the list of guests.

An hour in, I had a sense of heightened awareness, so when Jain invited questions from other guests, I was unprepared to respond to one woman’s question. She said she was epileptic. Was there anything she could do to prevent seizures? Muktananda became oddly professional and said he’d been a doctor before becoming a sadhu. He recommended drinking cow urine, preferably still warm, fresh from the cow. Now that I’ve lived 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 at 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 we had to wrap things up. The time had come for the chanting, talk, and Darshan in the public hall. Afterward, please stay for dinner. I’m sure Hal and I stayed. Chanting the Guru Gita was very long. The poem praises the eternal guru, and his followers identified Muktananda as that guru. Singing praises of the divine guru in the presence of a human guru was a bit over the top for me, 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 present, not just an observer. It was wildly 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 me to put on my analytical hat and ponder it for a month. It just was. When I noticed that the light had changed to green, I had no idea how long I’d been standing there. I looked at my watch and realized that I would 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 walking north, though I remember being extremely careful of crossing traffic.  

Later that afternoon, I realized I had received shaktipat, which yogis describe as the awakening of the dormant divine energy. I also realized why very little is written about these experiences other than that 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 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 much like the Hindu trappings. I should be more precise: 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 70s. I felt that the people around Muktananda were there to feel some kind of spiritual high or bliss, but it was extremely self-centered. I had conversations with several Western sadhus 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. Still, I wanted to experience a longer concentrated meditation period, so I asked Muktananda personally at Darshan if I could attend only on the weekend. He quickly assented. I arrived late 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 VIPs; Naranjo was among them. They were headed up to the main meditation pavilion. I bowed towards them. Muktananda nodded back. I continued to struggle along the densely overgrown path toward my bunk when suddenly I heard a deafening cracking sound. It sounded like a giant with enormous hands snapping his fingers right over my head or 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, and 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 circling the Krisha shrine, but most of the time, he sat on the side in an 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 formal meal breaks. The dancing and singing went on day and night. It didn’t stop. The drive back to San Francisco was about 4 hours on a hazardous highway, so I made sure that I had a few hours of 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 occasionally when he was there, which was 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, 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 reappeared. 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 about Muktananda’s guards. “I know he’s very lonely. So I wanted to share soup with him and keep him company, but they wouldn’t let me in.” 

I will now 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 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 did happen other than it happened. I might have been deluded or hallucinating or carried away by an induced fervor, or perhaps it did occur, as I am going to describe. But I can't avoid telling the story if I demand complete honesty from Muktananda. 

I forget the circumstances of my invitation. I was not a regular member of Naranjo’s inner circle, but either late 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 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. Other than that, I would have to pick and choose from a list of the usual suspects. I would have remembered if there’d been a very close friend with whom I might have shared and even asked questions about what seemed to happen.

One of the first things I clearly remember was a Scientology E Meter casually set up on the breakfast table. Until then, I had only heard rumors of Nanranjo’s experimentation with Auditing. However, seeing the device, which is nothing more than a galvanic skin response lie detector, the rumor was no more. 

There was undoubtedly 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 was that she’d 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 sitting on the floor near the breakfast nook and 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 increased in intensity, the edges becoming brighter 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 also clearly visible. He was walking at a very deliberate pace, though the legs may not have been moving at all. He had the appearance and movement of a real human body, although it did not seem solid. I could still make out the door and the walls through him. It was eerily lifelike.

I do not know if I was the only person who saw this. There was no discussion, no questions, no 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 started at the edge of the circle opposite me. It stood behind each person. I cannot remember if they were gestures, but the person became quiet. The figure moved clockwise 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 returned to our everyday lives. I have hesitated to speak about it openly for almost 50 years. Many possible reactions exist to an apparent, even violent breaking of ordinary perception. One is silence. Nearly all modern writers talking about their drug experiences have expressed frustration. Most writings by the mystics are rarely 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 of devotees simply have these 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 a 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 incredibly life-like, although his body was diaphanous and bright. He was alive, not dead or resurrected, as in the Jesus narrative, but afterward, I could see 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. 

Baba-ji is lecher

The number of followers around Muktananda became overwhelming. Darshan was a circus. I can’t recall one talk I thought was 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.

It was also clear that in a larger group, there were those who were close devotees or considered themselves close and those aspiring or even jealous. There was also an enormous amount of money now available. This is ripe terrain for abuse, distrust, and even warfare. It never 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 sex life.

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

I’ve read many accounts from insiders, malcontents, and disenchanted followers. At some point, Muktananda gave up the celibate life, but he couldn’t just trade satguru for the role of a conventional married man. Krishna Murti’s long involvement with an older married woman might be a good example of a relationship 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 many younger American women with liberated attitudes available, the doors opened. Most reports said the doors opened frequently, and 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 his cultural mission 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 have been defrocked, or even in jail. He does not get a pass for trying to play the role of a Brahmacharya in some huge cultural shift.

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

I’m unsure where I can begin to separate the man from the yogic powers or even if I have to. But I 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..

SAT, Naranjo, the Enneagram, the beginnings, and “the Work”

 Originally published in "The Enneagram Monthly"

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 – 12 July 2019) is gone. Óscar Ichazo (24 July, 1931 – 26 March, 2020) died less than a year later. The meditation teacher Ajahn Dhiravamsa (5 November, 1934 - 28 July, 2021) passed away more recently. Rezeleah Landman Schaeffer has left us though I can find no obituary. The only teachers and leaders still alive from the early history of Naranjo’s SAT are Kathy Speeth who told her story of sitting in Gurdjieff’s lap when she was a young child and the Nyingmapa teacher Tarthang Tulku who had an enormous influence on Naranjo. At 86 Tarthang is still teaching though no longer traveling internationally. These were the men and women who first introduced the Enneagram in the West.

My friend Dan Kaplan forwarded an email promotion for a course by some proponents of the Enneagram that promises to unlock its radical teaching by returning to the “original intent.” Please forgive me if I'm skeptical. Are these third generation experts going back to Naranjo’s characterization of the 9 types, or Ichazo’s prototyping which is notably different, or the myth of an esoteric Sufi circle, or the inconclusive evidence that it lay hidden in Gurdjieff’s teaching, or William Patterson’s tracing the system back to ancient Egypt. I try to give the devil his due, but “original intent” is just hype to separate you from your money. I challenge any of these teachers to reveal the original intent in a rigorous way. If they’re just trying to distinguish themselves from Enneagram parlor games, I might be more generous.

Perhaps it is time to look at some of the threads that tie the Enneagram’s popularization in the West to the burgeoning of the psycho-spiritual integration that took California by like a New Awakening in the last part of the last century. I only know the SAT experience so that will be my focus.

Dr. Aubrey Lindgren, who was in Naranjo’s first SAT group, talked about Naranjo’s early teaching in the October 2021 edition of “The Enneagram Monthly.” Lindgren’s account tries to unwrap the Enneagram, particularly the Enneagram of Fixations, for a Western audience steeped in the language of psychotherapy. She asks why so little has been written about those early days? Her answer is “To realize the full impact of the teachings, we have to hold the container in silence. A silence that is both inside our own minds, as in not forming concepts about transformation, and outside, as in not discussing the material presented. It is a disservice to the public to hear about a theory without the full understanding and guidance as to how to effectively apply these ideas to your life.”

A gnostic response wants to keep secrets secret, or is trying to hide something, or hinting at some secret knowledge that will cost money. While I appreciate whatever caution is there about doing inner work, Lindgren's answer hides too much. As far as the Enneagram is concerned, the cat’s out of the bag. If the Enneagram ever was an esoteric teaching, it has crossed over into popular culture, at worst mimicking astrology or at best being an adjunct to the techniques of psychotherapy. The careful inner work of introspection seems too difficult for a mass audience.

I was in Naranjo’s SAT 2 which began in the Fall of 1972. By the end of the second year, the group had expanded to perhaps 60-80 people. The first group that Lindgren describes was distinct and interacted with Naranjo in a different way, often delivering his “indications” to newer students. I talked with my longtime friend Daniel Shurman who was in Group 1; together we combed our memories and remembered many people who were and remain friends. I was particularly close to my fellow Jesuit Bob Ochs and the Franciscan priest Joe Scerbo among others. We also remembered friends who lived communally out on Broadway and another group around Indian Rock in North Berkeley, and the women who lived with Naranjo on Allston Way. The membership included the well-known second generation Enneagram teacher, Hameed Ali, as well as the transpersonal scholar Charlie Tart.

The influence of Oscar Ichazo on the modern Enneagram is well known, even litigated. As I pointed out in my article “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram,” as well as “Muddied Roots, Psychobabble, and Inoculation.” I was aware that Naranjo was unpacking a powerful experience he’d had in Arica, and his presentation and understanding were different from Ichazo. Actually a lot of time was spent sorting out the distinctions. I am not an Enneagram teacher so I am not going to indulge in any of the arguments about theories, typing or tests. Have at it.

I will second what Lindgren says about the inspiration of Naranjo’s personal gifts, his intelligence and his creativity. There was also the influence of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt, echoes of Sufi school or what we were told was the teaching of the Brotherhood, the ego reduction in our personal and group work, some dabbling in Buddhist meditation and, of course, what is called “The Work.” Naranjo felt that the Enneagram as it came through Ichazo was a kind of fleshing out of the esoteric work that Mr. Gurdjieff undertook at the beginning of the last century. He never claimed to be an authorized Fourth Way teacher, but he loved the “trickster” myth around Gurdjieff’s teaching, and was always on the lookout for some connections, real or imagined, with Gurdjieff.

We were a group of bright, mostly young, educated westerners ready, willing, even eager for what we imagined to be the shock of eastern spiritual practice. We were also terribly naive. At times our work together became a circus. There were many dark sides. They do not discount the value of the work that we managed to accomplish--in a way some of the more thorny issues were part of that training. However they persist. In my view we cannot allow them to stay in the shadows, or sweep them under the rug. If we purge them from our telling the history of this period, we are just not being honest.

I will examine one aspect of the early SAT story, its connection with the unofficial Gurdjieff work, and my personal experience of sexual abuse and trauma after undergoing the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy.

The Work

When G.I. Gurdjieff died in Paris in 1949, beside his recondite writings, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, and All and Everything, he left a large body of oral teaching that spanned nearly four decades. He had many devoted students, and though he did charge certain senior students to work with other interested people across the globe, he died with no clear transmission of a spiritual lineage. As with many powerful systems, it attracted a lot of interest, some from sane people who were intent on realizing the goals of liberation through self awareness and observation that Gurdjieff advocated. In other cases people seem to have been attracted by his unorthodox teaching methods. Several hung out a shingle with “The Work” predominantly displayed, and felt it gave them license to behave badly.

I don’t doubt that Kathy Speeth sat in Mr. Gurdjieff’s lap. But it is extremely unlikely, as Lindgren recounts, that it happened during the summers that her parents spent in Paris studying with Gurdjieff at 6 Rue des Colonels Rénard in the 17th arrondissement. Her parents were prominent New Yorkers who had been students of A.R. Orage, perhaps continuing to work with Jane Heap or Willem Nyland after Orage’s early death. Kathy was born in 1937 and the Second World War began in September of 1939. Her meeting with Mr. Gurdjieff was probably on one of his trips to the United States, and he did make one trip to the United States after the surrender of Germany so the timing sounds likely.

Why am I making such a big deal about the exact time that Kathy sat in Gurdjieff’s lap and where it took place? It is probably one of two verifiable connections with “the Work” in the early SAT. Kathy and Pamela Travers were the only people he introduced to the group who had actually met Mr. Gurdjieff. I want to avoid the sloppy thinking that comes from blurring facts with fanciful stories.

When Naranjo began to teach, there were several legitimate, respected Fourth Way teachers in the Bay Area, Lord John Pentland in San Francisco, Mr. Willem A. Nyland on “The Land” up near Cazadero and Mr. Robert S. de Ropp. I know that Pentland and Nyland stayed away from Naranjo’s Enneagram work although each one knew about it. Instead we were introduced to Alex Horn (by proxy--he never visited the group), EJ Gold aka “The Beast,” and Henry Korman as Fourth Way connections. Carlos Castenada, who never claimed to have any connection with the Work but was a Hollywood example of crazy wisdom, appeared at some point to entertain us. None of these teachers had any interest in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it, but Naranjo was interested in their teaching methods.

Lindgren describes working with Alex Horn during one of his late night early morning marathon sessions on a secluded ranch north of San Francisco as a revelatory experience. It could have simply been the result of sleep deprivation and hypnosis. My only experience with Horn was at his Everyman Theater on 24th Street and Mission in San Francisco where I watched a preposterous production about the assassination of JFK staged by Horn and his then wife, Sharon. Horn prowled the audience before, after and during the intermission. That was enough for me.

Horn claimed that he was in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff, but there is zero evidence of a real connection. I assert that Horn was attracted to the power he could reap from Gurdjieff’s unorthodox teaching methods. Period. Naranjo never encouraged me to work with Horn although several members of the early SAT groups did. I know several people who were not Naranjo’s students but had been in Horn’s group. They report sexual exploitation, coercion and even physical violence. For example, Horn would instigate a dispute between several of the men in the group and then instruct them to have a wrestling match, or even fist fight without gloves. Horn was also a known sexual predator with a voracious appetite for young women. His Bible was not anything that Gurdjieff or Ouspensky wrote but Atlas Shrugged.

E.J. Gold claimed to have been authorized to teach as “The Beast” by an esoteric Sufi School. As far as I can ascertain, he fabricated his connection with Mr. Gurdjieff. He was also the author of a cult book called The American Book of the Dead. When I met him, I could not shake the feeling that he was devoid of compassion. He invited anyone of the SAT group to come to Southern California and do an “intensive training.” By the time my friend Hal Slate arrived at a secluded bunker somewhere up on the Grapevine, the title and authority of “The Beast” had been given to one of Gold’s very young disciples who had learned everything he needed to know by performing for three days straight with a garage rock band made up of people who had no musical training. Ripping a page from the script of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, “The Exterminating Angel,” Gold seized on an unexpected change in the weather to concoct a scenario that it was the end of the world and all his trapped guests had to make some serious ontological choices. Hal escaped, walking out of the canyon on foot during the freak Southern California blizzard. As the saying goes, “Never miss the opportunity provided by a catastrophe.” I would add, “real or imagined, there are always several choices available.”

Of all the Gurdjieff students and teachers who visited our groups, meeting Pamela Travers was remarkable. The real Mary Poppins had actually been Gurdjieff’s student. Because I’d actually read some of her books, despite all the technicolor dancing and singing I knew that Poppins would be very English prim and proper with a mystical bent. And here was a middle aged woman, not at all glamorous, as much the portrait of an English nanny as my imagination allowed, who was also very present. She talked and answered our questions in a completely no nonsense way but with a lilt in her voice; she mentioned that she still met with a group and she named one of Mr. Gurdjieff’s senior students as her teacher.

By 1975 Naranjo began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram. Others with more personal knowledge can comment or speculate on his motivation. My sense is that the initial work had been exhausting and the inspired impulse of his Arica experience had petered out and drained him personally. Some of the second generation Enneagram teachers have speculated that his drug experimentation had taken a toll which from my observation was a strong possibility. One member of the first group told me that much of his distress stemmed from the end of his intimate relationship with Kathy Speeth. All these are possible scenarios. There was also the concern that he felt after that the Enneagram materials had also been released to a wider audience. I do know from my conversations with him that he was apprehensive about the possible distortion of the Enneagram. He also told me that popularizers had watered it down. The SAT experiment would go dark at least temporarily.

He introduced Henry Korman as a person who would possibly inherit his SAT groups. Korman was leading a group in New York but had agreed to come and work with anyone who wished to continue to do what we imagined was Gurdjieff’s Work.

I worked with Korman for almost 3 years, group meetings twice a week and every Sunday. We began with an exercise called “Sensing, Looking and Listening,” then observations and questions from the group under Korman’s heavy-handed direction. Korman also organized elaborate dinners with exacting preparation, like the ones we read about in former Gurdjieff students’ memoirs. Sundays were dedicated to a Work exercise, and once a month we would begin on Saturday and extend it throughout the whole night. This pattern of group meetings, intensive concentration and work coupled with sleep deprivation seemed to be something imitated from the way Gurdjieff is said to have worked with his students. Alex Horn and E.J. Gold also made ample, and often manipulative, use of forcibly breaking up normal cycles.

While there was none of the physical violence that was reported in Horn’s groups, my experience of Korman was that he was a bully. He had no qualms about interfering in the sexual relationships of couples in the group or openly sleeping with students. He tried to arrange for a woman in the group to introduce me to heterosexual experience. Thank god she had the presence of mind to say no. He “strongly” suggested that I join with two other group members and start a construction company which he named “Double Action Builders.” This is the one real regret of getting involved in his group. It set me up to follow a dead end career for way too long.

After I had left Henry’s group, I was living in San Francisco, and trying to piece together some of that frayed experience. A Jesuit whom I knew and worked with was a member of the San Francisco Gurdjieff Group. He arranged for me to meet Lord John Pentland. I arrived at the upper middle class home in Saint Francis Woods at the appointed time for a congenial conversation with Pentland. He asked about my intentions, my experience, and talked about our mutual friend whom he knew well and respected. Pentland suggested that one of his longtime students, the woman who owned Fields Book Store on Polk, would meet and talk with me while we decided if I should join the group. When he asked me if I had any questions, I asked if he knew Korman and about the exercise of “Sensing, Looking and Listening.” Pentland said that yes, he had heard of Korman. Then he asked me to describe the exercise completely and fully which I did. He then asked about some specific details, particularly the attention to breath, or really the absence of any instruction about the breath. He paused, then looked at me directly and said that the exercise had absolutely no relationship to anything Mr. Gurdjieff taught. He would not comment about its possible usefulness.

I’m not going to say that my time with Korman was completely wasted, but I cannot pretend that I was in any way participating in “The Work.” Just a quick footnote--Korman met Mr. William Patrick Patterson, and began to work with him. He stopped teaching, admitted to a “grave” mistake, and wrote a letter of apology to his former students. He did not include me. I had to read a copy of the letter sent to a friend. He was in many ways brilliant, and I hesitate to put him into the category of an arrogant, destructive prick. Sadly he belongs in that bin.


Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy

Both Lindgren and Ernest Lowe talk about the psychic Bob Hoffman. They both used Hoffman’s Process working with clients as did I. Naranjo introduced this tailor who had zero psychological training to SAT. Hoffman claimed to have had a midnight vision of Dr. Siegfried Fisher, a well known and respected psychiatrist and also a family friend, who revealed the secret of what Hoffman called Negative Love and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy that allowed us to undo the negative consequences of our childhood programming.

Most of my first year in SAT was spent doing the Fisher-Hoffman Process. Hoffman became infatuated with me, and within 6 months after I finished working with him, Hoffman began stalking me at Berkeley’s gay bar. After a few more months invited me to dinner and raped me. He was a psychotic and a criminal.

Naranjo did not condone or in any way encourage aggression, violence or sexual exploitation between students and teachers or among SAT members, but I do fault him for not doing appropriate due diligence before allowing Hoffman to work with SAT members. Hoffman was a “psychic.” Hoffman allegedly told Naranjo several things about his childhood which he could not have known. The normal training for a mental health professional was superseded or abrogated.

Although I don’t think he would have approved of Hoffman’s sexual conduct, Naranjo did sleep with students. To my knowledge he did not coerce or manipulate anyone, but inevitably it had negative consequences.


The Soup of the Soup

Looking back, I find it odd that none of the teachers that Naranjo introduced to the group were conversant or really even interested in the Enneagram as Naranjo presented it. They were generally teachers, monks, therapists devoted to the Path of Liberation, but mixed in were some who lied about being in the lineage of Mr. Gurdjieff and fraudsters who made preposterous claims but really were just out for power, money or sex. It was the soup we swam in, and, like the air we breathe, no matter how careful we try to be, we cannot be certain that we’re not getting a whiff of poison.

Naranjo loved a Sufi story, attributed to Mulla Nasruddin, called the Soup of the Soup. A generous neighbor gave the Mulla a fat duck which his wife dressed and made into a fine dinner. Everyone was happy. The next day, a guest knocked on the door, “I heard that Mustafa gave you a big duck, do you have any left?” Of course observing the obligation of hospitality, the Mulla invited the guest in for some hearty soup made from the leftovers. The next day, a friend of Mustafa's friend smelled the still rich soup bubbling in the kitchen, knocked on the Mulla’s door, and asked to taste the savory dish. The Mulla invited him in. This goes on for several more days and several more friends of the friends of Mustafa. (In the West we’d call this a shaggy dog story). About the 10th day, after the now familiar knock on the door, the Mulla invited another friend of the friend of the friend of Mustafa's friend in for the remainder of the soup, but when the guest sat and tasted nothing more than hot water, he asked, “Where’s the duck?” The Mulla answered, “I’m sorry but all I have to offer you is the soup of the soup of the soup of the soup of the duck that Mustafa gave me.”

That is my impression of the end of our work with SAT. We were just going through the motions of the Work of the Work, but we’d lost the taste of that fine fat duck that we were given for our feast. However we'd also tasted real Duck Soup that Naranjo had served, and, with persistence and a bit of luck, we could buy a fat bird and recreate the recipe ourselves. We can, in the words of Lord John Pentland, create what Mr. Gurdjieff called self-remembering, “. . . a state of attention . . . a state of vibrant attentiveness, of inner alignment and attunement, which, when we are sufficiently still inside, possesses a potency reminding us that the real inner work is a response to a higher and deeper calling.”

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