“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.”

Food for the Moon

 August 6th, 2022

In August of 2019, after I learned that Father Bob Ochs had died, I tried to acknowledge my enormous debt to him. He brought the teaching of the Enneagram to some very hungry Catholic religious whose sputtering religious practices were on life support, me among them. I tried to recount as carefully as I could the story of his post Enneagram years when I wrote about the Jesuit transmission of the Enneagram. I will revisit some of them here. Last night a friend who was peripherally involved in the beginning of SAT and the whole Berkeley, New Age psychic scene, told me that Susan Diordoni, Bob’s longtime companion, died of cancer. I now feel free to tell a less edited, much sadder story.

Gurdjieff used the term “Food for the Moon” to describe some of the process of awakening and becoming a true person as if it were organic digesting and processing esoteric teaching. We, all our living and dying, become food for the moon. The process of shedding our old beliefs and habits of perception is akin to consigning this dead weight of the alleged mysterious powers of the moon: the relentless, predictable ebbing and flooding of the tides control the shifts and flow of our ingrained emotions, thoughts, inclinations, mind-sets. I heard Naranjo use “Food for the Moon” pejoratively several times to refer to a person who begins the work and, for whatever reason, just doesn’t have the stuff it takes to see it through to a successful conclusion, whatever that actually means. (I do think this mystical moonshine talk offers some clues about the exclusionary tendencies of cults).

Bob Ochs was a respected member of SAT 1, the first group that gathered around Naranjo after he returned from Arica and began to teach. Ochs, along with Charlie Tart, had the highest recognized level of academic training of all the group members. He was a professor at a prestigious Jesuit seminary with a degree from one the best Universities in France. I never asked Bob how he came to know Naranjo or what drew him to the group, but when we met at the beginning of the second year of that exploration, Naranjo had already delegated him to teach the Enneagram to groups of Jesuits, first at Loyola University in Chicago, and then at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Naranjo himself told me unequivocally that he’d entrusted Ochs to be his emissary, to teach the nine personality fixations and to guide people in discovering their own type and subtype. Only one other person shared this responsibility, Aubrey Lundgren; others had various teaching responsibilities within SAT, notably Reza Leah Schaffer and, eventually Kathy Speeth, though the scope of their responsibility was limited to new SAT students in Berkeley.

A lot happened in that first year that would change the dynamic of teaching the Enneagram in the West. Naranjo trusted Ochs, and Ochs had a knack for teaching. His presentation of the ideas behind the Enneagram was engaging and provocative. He was truly interested in ideas, as you might expect from the exemplary Jesuit that he was. But other forces were at work which would revoke both Naranjo’s and Ichazo’s lock on this esoteric system.

Almost everyone who teaches the Enneagram outside Naranjo’s immediate circle owes some debt to Ochs for their basic understanding, the impetus of their personal investigation, the outline of the 9 types and 27 subtypes, their books, their students and for teachers, their livelihood. I will name a few names but it’s by no means complete. This group has its roots in what I have labeled the Jesuit transmission. Here is a partial list of the Enneagram teachers who are linked to Ochs as the source of their practice; Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Jerome Wagner at Loyola University in Chicago; Joanna Quintrell at the Journey Center in Santa Rosa, California; Sr. Suzanne Zuercher at the Institute for Spiritual Leadership at Loyola University; Father William Meninger of St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass Colorado; Don Richard Riso, a former Jesuit, (d.2012) and Russ Hudson of the Enneagram Institute, Stone Ridge, New York; Paul Robb, S.J., the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership; Tad Dunne, S.J.; Maria Beesing; Robert Nogosek, C.S.C.; Patrick O'Leary. Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J., a very vocal opponent of the Catholic adoption of the Enneagram, was also Bob’s student in Chicago.

Helen Palmer also owes a debt to Ochs, which she may or may not have acknowledged, though it is a not as direct as the people who were in Ochs's groups. She was not in Claudio’s SAT groups either, but she was practicing as a psychic reader in Berkeley at about the same time that Naranjo’s groups were forming. She did readings with almost every member of the early SAT group, often multiple sessions. It was in a large part through these readings that she became aware of the Enneagram, and got a taste of the system’s power. When I did a reading with her almost 50 years ago, one of her first questions was about my fixation on the Enneagram. I also know that she also had access to some of our private notes about Naranjo’s presentation of the Enneagram as well as extensive notes from Ichazo’s 1968 talks at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. Ochs may have had a hand in delivering some of these materials into her hands.

This is a good jumping off point to describe the start of the Enneagram Wars, which also marked the beginning of Ochs’s estrangement from Naranjo. Even before Palmer’s creation and popularization of the “kinder, gentler,” more saleable Enneagram, the flood of Enneagram books had started. When I researched and compiled my Enneagram Bibliography a few years ago, there were more than 150 books and studies, a huge number for such a recondite discipline. In less than two decades, more than 100 separate practitioners, experts, authorities, claiming some level of insight, leading groups and individuals on an inner exploration. The armies were assembling.

You know that you are on an intellectual battlefield when after a Google search on the origins of the Enneagram, the “Let’s set the record straight” articles appear first. I’m not going to enter that fray. Have at it. Hope y’all have fun. The main battle, the Waterloo, was the lawsuit that Ichazo brought against Palmer. Again I am not going to put on soul armor and take sides, other than to point out that there had to have been some monetary upside to winning or losing to justify the enormous costs of any litigation. My interest here, with regard to Ochs, are the casualties resulting from friendly fire. 

As various leaders and teachers waged battle about the authenticity and effectiveness, the “truth” of their particular take on the teaching, whether it came from Pythagoras, the Sufis or some Egyptian cult, Naranjo knew that he’d lost control. And because a large number of the people who had forged their own versions and adaptations of the teaching that he’d stolen from Ichazo had been Ochs's students, Naranjo stopped taking Ochs's phone calls. Although very clearly in the Naranjo camp, Ochs was ostracized.

This was the point in my own life where I took a very clear break for any investigation and controversy. I had a host of personal reasons for my hiatus, among them caring for people dying from HIV/AIDS, but I also had no personal stake in the negotiated settlement: everybody was to lay down their weapons, just carry on, do what they’ve been doing. No one was going to corner the market for the Enneagram; leave the final judgment to when the Archangel Metatron settles all disputes among the lesser inhabitants of the heavenly realm.

When I finally made contact with Ochs after several years’ hiatus, I was overwhelmed by what had become of my vibrant friend. He had given up his position on the faculty of the Jesuit schools, stopped seeing most of his friends, and was living in small, Spartan, nearly windowless basement apartment in a modest suburb a few miles from the epicenter of the Enneagram Wars. His only regular visitor was Susan Diordoni. He is not the first heterosexual Jesuit to seek deep emotional connection with a woman. I have no knowledge if he maintained his vow of celibacy, but I am happy that he at least had some comfort and companionship.

Both he and I had started to separate from regimented Jesuit life when we shared a floor in the faulty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West in 1973. He however, was a priest, 14 years my senior, and had no possible means of outside support. He chose to remain within the institutional frame work. I did not. He received a modest stipend, and tried to justify his seclusion as a work on a book. His superiors, I think with some recognition of his contribution to the Jesuit enterprise, did not press him too hard to produce. 

While the people whom Ochs had trained were writing, advertising, going to conferences, producing and leading trainings that cost thousands of dollars, he was living on a few hundred dollars a month and struggling to write. He felt that he still had something to say. Actually I will rephrase that, he felt that he had an obligation to say something as one of the first proponents of the system. I think he may have also been jealous of the money that his one time students were making on “that gravy train,” but that was never his primary focus, and ultimately he would be unsuccessful. He was a One, and the burden of trying to frame his thoughts against the conflict of the Enneagram wars proved impossible. He could never persuade himself that he’d successfully argued his case. There would be no book, but his efforts came with all a One’s self-recrimination and doubt. Ironically, I think I remember that the analysis was to be based on typing some famous writers but I could be conflating a couple of conversations.

He claimed he had almost no physical energy. He was eating a very strict diet whose contents and restrictions baffled me as much as they obsessed him. We met at a Peruvian restaurant out in the Mission in San Francisco only because he could eat several of the things on their menu and really enjoyed them. 

Here he told me about another obsession. He’d become infatuated with the work of Doris Lessing. “Infatuated'' is not too strong a word. Idries Shah had introduced Lessing to Sufi teachings, and she was also apparently interested in the Gurdjieff school although I have no clear knowledge that she actually worked with any of Gurdjieff’s longtime English students. But she was very conversant with “the Work '' and its alleged connections to ancient Sufi orders. The link here is twofold: Ochs was as obsessed with discovering Enneagram’s esoteric roots as he was frustrated in his attempts to create what he considered an adequate language to describe the teaching.

He also told me about corresponding with Idries Shah, claiming that letter writing was a revered form of spiritual instruction among Sufis. After Shah died in 1996, Ochs tried to initiate a correspondence with Shah’s son, because Ochs was certain Tahir had been designated as his father’s spiritual heir. When Tahir replied that he was a writer, not a Sufi teacher, that his father had not designated him to teach, and actually he was not interested in the job, Ochs said to me, “He’s supposed to say that. It’s his job to put me off.” 

I tried my best not to be put off by Ochs’ increasing reclusiveness, but eventually I gave up waiting for him to return my phone calls. Looking back I do feel some remorse for not persisting. But I also ask myself, after the truce was called in the Enneagram Wars, where were any of his former students? Did you play any role in his life? Did he shut you out? I didn’t have a lot of contact so I don’t know if you visited, called, offered support, but I do know that he was not included in your conferences, invited to speak or write an article. And I’m not suggesting that you should have included him as an obligation, like inviting your cantankerous uncle to Thanksgiving dinner, but actually because he had something to contribute. You missed out, yes you, narrow-minded, parochial, greedy, war-mongering Enneagram enthusiasts. He dedicated his life, every waking minute, to making the possibility of human freedom real. If you don’t do that in all your life, all your relationships, all your work, you’re just food for the moon.

Finally this Midwesterner who’d learned French and earned a degree in Paris, a man who’d introduced Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Naranjo and the Enneagram to Catholic religious, a man who’d struggled to make his own mystical experience available to others, this man returned to Michigan and a Jesuit house dedicated to the French priest who’d promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Perhaps full circle.

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 Tantric Shamanism of Claudio Naranjo

6. From Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, by Jeffrey J. Kripal (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, pages 173- 80).
   Along with Dick Price, Perls considered Claudio Naranjo to be one of the most gifted successors. Naranjo is a Chilean-born psychiatrist who made his first trip to the States in the early 1960s for family medical reasons (his mother needed an eye doctor). While in Boston, he met the psychologist Frank Barron at Harvard. When Naranjo later won a Guggenheim fellowship, Barron invited him to Berkeley, where he was introduced to the anthropologist Michael Harner. Harner was working on the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon basin and their use of the yage vine as a psychotropic ritual substance. Harner in turn introduced Naranjo to a young graduate student at UCLA named Carlos Castaneda, who was working on similar subjects in Mexico, allegedly with a native shaman named Don Juan. Naranjo and Castaneda would become close friends. Castaneda even claimed that Don Juan had “smoked” Naranjo, that is, seen him in a vision.
   One of Naranjo’s first visits to Esalen involved a local television station (KRON), which had decided to film Murphy, Perls, Naranjo, Harner, and Castaneda discussing the subject of shamanism just after a seminar with a female Pomo Indian healer. Naranjo remembers arriving at Esalen and finally encountering of one his idols standing in the front door of the Big House, Fritz Perls. Having read Gestalt Therapy, Naranjo was somehow expecting a young man. Instead he met what he calls “an old sea world.” This old sea wolf, moreover, was not just old. He was old and feisty. Specifically, he objected strenuously to the “occult mud” that he felt Harner and Castaneda were dishing out to a gullible audience. Indeed, when at one point Castaneda asked something like, “How do I know that consensual [socially constructed] reality is real?” Fritz reached over and slapped him, not out of anger, but as if to demonstrate how reality is not that consensual. Reports differ, but most say Castaneda responded with some version of “Fuck you, old man!”
   Old man or not, slap or not, fuck or not, Perls made a profound impression on Naranjo. In one conversation that Naranjo remembers especially well, Perls pointed out to him that he could do all the things the female Pomo Indian healer could do: if she was a shaman, well, then so was he. Observing first-hand Perls’s uncanny psychological powers, Naranjo could only agree with him: “I came away feeling that he really was a genius, a shaman in another culture.” Indeed, he agreed so much with Perls’s personal assessment of his own shamanic powers that he left his original psychoanalytic orientation and became a Gestalt therapist. By 1969, Claudio Naranjo was one of the second-generation gestaltists, along with Dick price, Julian Silverman, Jack Downing, Bob Hall, and Jim Simkin. Esalen was quickly turning into a kind of gestalt mecca.
   Certainly Esalen embraced Naranjo. Perls gave him a “free scholarship” to any of his gestalt sessions, and Price offered him a space on the floor anytime he wanted to come with a sleeping bag to Big Sur. Naranjo had effectively won a permanent invitation to Esalen. He was part of the inner circle. Naranjo remembers well what a tremendous impact the place’s spirit of experimentation and sexual liberation had on him in turn. Born Jewish and having grown up in a sexually repressive Latin American Catholic environment in which “the flesh” was more or less a synonym for “sin,” Naranjo found Esalen’s metaphysical synthesis of sensuality and spirit especially powerful.
   Like Price but in a somewhat different key, what Claudio Naranjo became know for was a creative synthesis of Asian meditation (again, with a pronounced Buddhist accent) and western psychotherapy. Alan Watts, of course, had written and talked about this a great deal, but it was Naranjo who perhaps did more than anyone to act on these remarkable resonances and come up with models and exercises to realize them.1 He left Esalen in the early 1970s to found his own psychospiritual school along these same lines (SAT Institute, located first in Berkeley and now moved to Spain). Perhaps most interesting of all, however, is the fact that Naranjo’s path through Esalen toward his own psychospiritual community displays in some frankly astonishing ways many of the central themes I am tracing here, from the esoteric roots of western psychotherapy, to the felt energetic states of a distinct Tantric transmission. The later Naranjo understands such a transmission not as some ethnocentric Asian privilege, but as an always available gnostic contagion, a universal human potential rooted in the physiology of the human body and its enlightenment.
   Naranjo understands perfectly well that the original impulse for psychotherapy came from the altered states of Mesmer’s magnetism and Freud’s interest in hypnosis.2
   Accordingly, he insists that, “psychotherapy is always more than what it purports to be.”3This is also no doubt why his mature teachings on psychotherapy—as a kind of “assisted liberation from the barriers of ego” through a yielding to the body’s “organismic” spontaneity4—draws deeply, not only on Reich and Perls (the “organismic” part) but also on his own mystical experiences of Hindu Tantra and kundalini yoga, which he intuitively (and correctly) understands to be related to Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Taoism.5 It is hardly an accident, then, that the very first workshop Naranjo led at Esalen carried an explicitly Tantric title: Sadhana for the West. In short, he has received the Esalen gnosis. Naranjo knows.
   How he came to know through what he himself calls his “tantric journey” is a story very much wroth telling here.6 It involves Naranjo’s kundalini awakening, which he likens both to being possessed by a serpent and to an alchemical process that transfigured his flesh and bones, a kind of “‘kundalinization’ of the body from head to feet,” as it puts it.7 Interestingly, such an awakening was transmitted to him not by the touch of a Hindu guru in the Himalayas, but in a gestalt session with Jim Simkin at Esalen. Simkin told Naranjo that he needed to work on his breath, to pay attention to his breathing. This led Naranjo to hyperventilate, then to a new awareness of his ongoing experience, and finally to “a satori lasting some two hours as I drove back to Berkeley from Esalen.” Naranjo felt he had received a kind of “wordless contagion” that allowed him to surrender to the spontaneous movements of his own body. This, he speculates, can happen through a formal initiation with a guru, spontaneously, or in groups conducted by a spiritual teacher who can inspire real surrender.
   He is fairly certain such awakenings are not actual flowings of “subtle energies.” In a fascinating move, Naranjo suggests instead that, “blasphemous as it may sound,” the felt experiences of energy movements so common in so many types of psychospiritual experience (from Reichian therapy to the shakti-pat initiations of gurus) are in fact “an ever-shifting tonus dance that takes place in our muscle system in the situation of ego- dissolution.” One might feel that there is a literal flow, but “the anatomical fact is one of coordinated volleys of nerve impulses that follow pre-established patterns (according to the organization of our nervous and muscle systems).” But the key is not the metaphysical status of the subtle energies. It is the very real spiritual state of which all of
   this is a bodily response, that is, the spiritual state of surrender and ego-dissolution.8 In the end, then, there is no literal Tantric transmission. There is the enlightenment of the universal body through the surrender of the social self.
   Having noted Naranjo’s elaborate analysis of his own kundalini awakening, it would be a serious mistake to lock Naranjo’s teaching into any single historical tradition, including Indian Tantra. Hence Naranjo actively resists any use of Hindu scripture or mention of the yogic chakras to explain what happened to him, and he does not hesitate to turn to Taoist dragon or Mexican eagle and snake symbolism to explain his more mature shamanic experiences of his scapular bones as felt “wings” and his nasal region as a kind of experienced “beak” (and indeed, in his own mind, it is finally a nontraditional shamanism, not Asian Tantra, that best describes his mature spiritual life).9 Twenty-seven years of meditation, psychotherapy, and altered states cannot be pigeon-holed into any “Hindu” frame for Naranjo. How could they be? The “inner serpent” of kundalini yoga is simply a South Asian construction of a universal neurobiology; it is “no other than our more archaic (reptilian) brain-mind.” The serpent power “is ‘us’—i.e., the integrity of our central nervous system when cleansed of karmic interference,” the human body-mind restored to its own native spontaneity.
   Put a bit differently, Naranjo’s “one quest” is a religion of no religion that has come to realize how “instinct” is really a kind of “organismic wisdom” and how libido is more deeply understood as a kind of divine Eros that can progressively mutate both spirit and flesh once it is truly freed from the ego.11 This, of course, is yet another version of what we have learned to call the Freudian Left, an enlightenment of the body that has passed through both a Western psychotherapy (that is always somehow more) and an Asian meditative discipline (that is more often than not Tantric). Such was the Tantric journey of Claudio Naranjo to and through Esalen.
   Oscar Ichazo and Arica
   Naranjo’s last major impact on Esalen was an indirect one. Oscar Ichazo was a charismatic teacher from the Chilean seaport city of Arica (pronounced a-ree-ka).12 He claimed to be initiated into a legendary Sufi lineage called the Sarmouni or the School of the Bees. Naranjo helped Ichazo establish a community in Santiago, mostly by supplying him with many of his earliest disciples, who had earlier gathered around Naranjo himself. Subsequently, Naranjo returned to Esalen and brought back to Santiago many of the place’s central players (around fifteen, according to Naranjo) to apprentice with Ichazo. There was psychologist and human-dolphin interaction research John Lilly, who, among many other remarkable things, gave dolphins LSD and told the almost unbelievable story of a dolphin named Dolly who seduced a man into making love with her in a holding tank.13 There was also encounter-group leader Seve Stroud. All came with Naranjo back to Chile to study with Ichazo, whose influence on Esalen is now legendary. Heider’s journals, for example, record that Steve Stroud sold his house for $5, quit his Esalen job, and “gave away all his stuff” to travel down to South America.14 As for Heider himself, he didn’t go. He felt that those who did go were “copping out” to an external authority. Cop-out or no, “Arica cleared our bench,” as Price put it.15
   It also enriched their catalog. The winter Esalen catalog of 1972 included its own section called Arica Training, a series of workshops with titles like Arica Awareness Training and The Human Biocomputer taught by Esalen regulars who had traveled to Chile to study with the new master.
   This event would go both well and not so well for Naranjo. Ichazo, like so many other guru figures, turned out to be a highly authoritarian teacher. He also had a way of turning the tables on his original generous host. After secretly sending Naranjo out to the desert for a special forty-day retreat designed to rapidly spiritualize Naranjo’s life, Ichazo gave the community the impression that Claudio was a megalomaniac who had disdained the community and was on a kind of Jesus trip. In actual fact, Ichazo had sent him out and Naranjo had experienced the desert retreat as “a kind of rebirth, a true beginning of a spiritual life.” It would be the first of many lessons for Naranjo in the spiritual potentials, ethical dangers, and psychological limitations of charismatic teachers.
   Even Dick Price would come to study with Ichazo, this time in New York, only to learn similar lessons. One day in the early months of 1971, Price came up to Silverman and said, “It’s yours. Take it.” And then he walked away and left for New York City to take part in a three-month-long Arica training session. Price’s Esalen ethic of never coercing a student or seminarian were violated again and again during his own retreat. The final straw was an exercise in which the group members were asked to perform a mudra (a Tantric yogic term for a hand posture symbolizing a particular state of consciousness) that happened to be identical to the Nazi Heil Hitler! salute. There is no such mudra in Hindu or Buddhist yoga. Price, having grown up in postwar America in a Jewish family fearfully pretending not to be, was not impressed with such an exercise. He had enough and left eight days before the retreat was scheduled to end. Other Esalen figures, however, would stay, and still others would take up Arica in various ways over the next four decades, indeed until this very day.
   Ed Maupin, for example, speaks warmly of how his own Arica training from 1972 to 1973 in New York began his “karma cleansing about sexuality.” He believes that Arica’s turn to such a focus was “a fundamentally new departure in alternative spirituality and in the human potential movement” and “had effects far beyond the borders of Arica.” More personally, it helped him come to positive terms with his homosexuality. Such feelings could be adequately processed now. He thus ended an affectionate but somewhat troubled marriage and, in 1974, met his partner, with whom he has lived happily for the last thirty-three years.
   When Price left Esalen for New York, Silverman became, instantly, the new director of Esalen. He quickly learned that he would now have to deal with Will Schutz, the emperor of Esalen, not to mention a whole bunch of hippies who had camped out on the famous grounds and were tripping on God-only-knows-what. Everyone may have been “tuning in,” as Timothy Leary would have put it, but they were also driving poor Julian crazy. Silverman called a community meeting to try to take some control of things. He began by telling people what they were going to do. Richard Tarnas raised his hand and asked in his typically gentle fashion, “But isn’t this a democracy?” Silverman erupted, “This is not a democracy! This is a damn business!”
   Schutz’s response to Silverman’s business meeting was to organize “an experiment in democracy” with the kitchen staff. Essentially, this was an implicit form of mutiny (or, as some have it, a desperate attempt to improve the quality and diversity of the menu). Silverman went along with it anyway, to a point, and then declared the experiment over. In Silverman’s words, the two men then “went at it” but ultimately survived each other. As did Esalen. In the end, though, it was Gestalt psychology, not open encounter, that would come to dominate the Esalen catalogs well into the 1970s and beyond.
   As for Julian, he stayed on for a full and fruitful seven years. Silverman finally stepped down as director in January of 1978,but only after he had penned with Wendy Ovaitt a manual on how to manage Esalen: Notes from an Esalen Director’s Handbook.16 This document, which was typeset and even illustrated but never professionally published, provides a clear window into the kinds of institutional changes Esalen underwent between 1971 and 1978, complete with salaries and budgets (Silverman’s director’s salary was $1,100 per month in December of 1977). In 1971, Silverman points out, the place was staffed by “transient hippies,” “male chauvinism” was the norm of the day, and Perls’s dictum “lost your mind and come to your senses” had been translated into a dysfunctional and rampant “emotionalism.” Not surprisingly, the institute was also a quarter of a million dollars in debt: “In all but legal declaration,” Silverman sighs in his introductory remarks, “we were bankrupt.” By 1978, however, the place was in excellent financial shape and the key managerial terms were not self-responsibility, co-operative processing, and nonhierarchical decision making. Things had changed quite a bit. Schutz was gone and Silverman was leaving too. But Esalen would go on, and it would continue to change.
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   1. Hence his first book, published in Esalen’s Viking Series: Claudio Naranjo and
      Robert Ornstein, Psychology and Meditation (New York: Viking Press, 1971).
   2. Claudio Naranjo, The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure: On Meditation and
      Psychotherapy (Nevada City: Blue Dolphin, 2006), 73.
   3. Ibid., 69.
   4. Ibid., 73.
   5. Ibid., 38. Actually, Naranjo takes this pan-Asian Tantra even further, to ancient
      Greece, by noting that there is some reason to believe that the Greek Dionysus and the Indian Shiva are cultural manifestations of the same underlying Indo-European mythology (ibid., 40). In this context, then, even Naranjo’s Apollonian/Dionysian typology of early Esalen possesses a rather clear Tantric subtext or secret: Dionysian Esalen is Tantric Esalen.
   6. Ibid., 60.
   7. Ibid., 43.
   8. Ibid., 57-58.
   9. Naranjo’s Esalen-related “tantric journey” to a nontraditional shamanism strongly
      echoes that of Terence McKenna, discussed below, in ch. 17.
   10. Ibid., 51.
   11. Claudio Naranjo, The One Quest (New York: Viking Press, 1972), published in Esalen’s Viking Press series. According to Seymour Carter, this was an especially important book for the Esalen community, as it gave the community an early “map” or frame through which to understand itself (52-53).
   12. For further discussion of Arica and its pass through Esalen, see Walter Truett Anderson, The Upstart Spring (2004 edition), 223-29, 241-43, 262.
   13. For Lilly’s personal reflections on life, including his experiences with LSD, sensory deprivation tanks, Arica and Esalen, see John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (New York: Julian Press, 1972).
   14. Heider Journals (private Esalen journals of John Heider), 74.
   15. Anderson, The Upstart Spring, 227.
       
       
   16. My sincere thanks to Steve Harper for sharing a copy of this document with me.
       There are no pages and no publisher listed, only a copyright date: 1978.