The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center may be at work.

If not, let’s kick-start it.

July 1, 2025

Before the last Enneagram International Association Conference in July 2025, Jerome Wagner and Patrick O’Leary, both former Jesuits and pioneers in the Modern Enneagram movement, gave a presentation on their experiences before all the books, before Palmer, before Almas, Sandra Maitri, and Naranjo’s new, Spanish SAT groups. Along with a small cohort of Father Bob Ochs’s first enneagram students, they were the only people who had never signed either a non-disclosure agreement or a pledge of confidentiality, which became the focal point of the lawsuits that followed. This is part of my correspondence with them regarding that early history.

I have neither applied nor would I be admitted to the august halls of high-level Enneagram deliberations, but I will take your emails as an opportunity to sound off on the early days of Enneagram enthusiasm. My perspective is quite different. The “8” in my email address comes from neither 7 nor 9 being available among the addresses Google offered me when Gmail was in beta. So I’ve left it as the impetus of a strong eight-wing to cut through the inertia of a nine. 

I find myself in a very reflective period right now. I have been isolated in Asia for the last seven years, beginning during the COVID-19 lockdown in India, which was extremely restrictive. It continues. For the past two and a half years, I have been in Thailand, leading a solitary, almost monastic life. I did not foresee any of this, but things have a way of happening. I have been reflecting and writing. 

My retreat is not self-directed. Since 1988, I have been a formal Zen student. I work on the koans in a structured way—the whole nine yards, including daily meditation and frequent meetings with my teacher. I’ve tried helter-skelter, but I wind up in lalaland pretty quickly. I started zazen as a confirmed atheist, but as I said, things have a way of happening, and my current teacher is in the same lineage as the Jesuit Zen Master Father Emiyo LaSalle. So when pressed for a faith statement, I call myself a Jesuit agnostic.  Why am I saying any of this? I woke up this morning with a relatively rasa tabula, and I'm tired of watching Trump on YouTube destroy most of what I hold dear about being an American.

You will be addressing a self-selected group of Enneagram enthusiasts. And it’s an off-the-record exchange. Perfect. My views are unvarnished, critical, and extremely grateful. Of course, it is not the only perspective. This is completely off the record, but I’m presenting it to you for your use. I never aspired to teach the Enneagram, but I am now fairly adept at developing the kind of concentration that enables self-observation.  You said you were going to invite people to talk about what has remained part of their practice. The Enneagram, Naranjo, Ochs, and SAT have been an enormous part of what, I suppose, is my spiritual narrative for more than 50 years. And because it is so basic, it remains. Like being a Jesuit.

The first thing that I would say to the assembled host is that not one of them would have an Enneagram job or income without Bob Ochs. Not a one. Hameed and Sandra’s teachers are few, and they are the only Enneagram teachers who do not, in one way or another, trace their lineage to Ochs. The other exception is perhaps a person with a vaguely Sufi name, Laleh Bakhtiar. However, I would still bet that even he or she would not have written a single word or worked with a single student if it were not for what Bob did at considerable personal cost. It was enormous. 

My sources are my recollections of conversations with almost all the early major players, except Ichazo, plus my experience of SAT for the whole time Naranjo taught in Berkeley; I did not miss a meeting in five years. I am a Nine, though I posed as a Seven, and I think I would characterize my participation as “dogged.” I was not one of the stars -- sometimes to my chagrin. Other times I consider it a blessing.

I have maintained close contact with several members of the first, second, and third SAT groups over many years, and we continue to unpack our experiences. I cannot say if Hameed would even remember my being in the group. That’s OK. He’s as boring now that he's become an enlightened being as he was in Group 1. But to begin the list, I was very close to Father Joe Scerbo, a gay Franciscan friar who is now gone; MM; Michael Smith; Glen Lewis, who was in Arica with Caludio; Daniel Shurman; AL, very full of herself; and CD, toitally full oif herself; Claudio and Rosalyn; Catherine Thur. We all talked. Charlie Tart is still a pompous asshole. He didn’t remember me when I reintroduced myself at a talk by his teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, founder of Rigpa, who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. Charlie was too busy congratulating himself and kissing ass to pay me much attention. I didn’t miss much. I’ve had email exchanges with Idries Shah’s son, Tahir, who is a truly remarkable guy. He was a classmate of a friend, Cynthia Merchant’s brother. Cynthia was not in SAT but became one of Claudio’s close assistants when his teaching was mainly in Spain and South America. She is seamlessly bilingual. I got in touch with Tahir because I loved his writing and wanted to cross-check information I had heard from Ochs about Doris Lessing and Tahir’s father. I mention all these names so that you know that I ain’t just whistling Dixie.

After I left the Hoffman Institute, on a whim, I asked Claudio to allow me to interview him about a possible article I was calling “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” He spoke with me for several hours a day over a week or so. I prepared a transcribed version of our taped conversations, and he gave me permission to use the material as I saw fit. Alas, I lost the whole damn thing in a computer crash and the tapes disapeared in some attic clear out between boyfriends. So I will rely on my memory and intuitive sense to recreate Claudio’s reflections. They were not very positive. I have some very subjective ideas as to why this is so, and when I get to that material, I will say so. (Spoiler alert: it was the drugs.)

Where to begin? The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram. Claudio was emphatic: there was no Jesuit transmission because “they” (you guys, Helen et al) made too many mistakes. You could not type an Eight if your life depended on it. Helen said something like “In our work, we see far more Eighths coming into the 'Work' than Claudio did. When I quoted her, he might have even used the word “bullshit,” though he rarely used gutter talk. Another thing that I remember well about this series of interviews was that there was no humor, a few nervous chuckles, and no jokes. It was all deadly serious.

Claudio asserted that he had only authorized Bob to convey his “indications” to the Jesuit groups (JSTB and Loyola), and that was it. There was to be no personal spin or interpretation. As an example, he cited the “now infamous” meeting where all of you, priests, nuns, men, and women, were to disrobe as a sign of fearless self-inquiry and surrender. He said that Ochs would not have dared give that direction on his own. AL tells me that it was she who came to the group that night in Chicago and had everyone take off their clothes in the closing ceremony; everyone did. I have just heard the story. It was more extreme than the directions or “Indications” given to any Berkeley group. Claudio told me that the idea came to him on a sudden “whim.” 

Both Claudio and Icnazo’s “holier-than-thou” shtick gets a bit heavy. When I say that Naranjo granted me permission to use the material as I saw fit, that was a significant gesture, and he delivered the statement of release or commission in a very formal tone. He made a big deal in these interviews that his notes and Ichazo’s Arica file had escaped without his permission, and their use was unethical, even immoral, because we had all pledged not to use any material without explicit permission. I think I know the source of the major leak (I’m sure, actually), although it is also the source of a lot of denial and counterargument. I can talk later about the missing 73rd (think the number is correct) that Ichazo did not retrieve when the 10-month Arica training was completed. 

(Helen also states somewhere in the court documents about her use of Osacr’s enneagon that she never saw nor used Ichazo’s confidential and, I presume, copyrighted notes. Oh, that Helen is a slippery one. She’s almost Jesuitical. Of course, she saw it, but you will never get me to say that publicly.)

To get Claudio to share, I let him control the conversation. There was a clear, definite subtext: he was deeply upset (I’ll use a gutter expression, “pissed off”) about the huge number of Enneagram titles available. I didn’t press the question. Market share was the true source of the upset. That he considered many of the interpretations to be misdirected, if not entirely flawed, was secondary. Believe me, he didn’t read many (if any) of your books; rather, he heard reports about the typing and might have cross-checked here and there. The issue was that he’d lost control. Although he always spoke of Oscar in a guarded, slightly disapproving way, it was always couched in the mystery that Ichazo was the link between the Enneagram and Gurdjieff’s teachings. With that link was some (to me) weird, esoteric, almost mystiical connection. Ochs had no authorization to pass on that imprimatur or seal of approval because Naranjo imagined Bob had bungled the job, which was unforgivable.

Let’s pick up the timeline again. These interviews happened after Naranjo had stopped returning Ochs’s phone calls; it might have been when I was still at Hoffman, but before 9/11. The serious and hurtful blaming had begun and was taking its toll. Bob had stopped teaching at the JSTB, or anywhere. He moved out of the small faculty residence that I found on Hillegass Avenue at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Perhaps he had been asked to leave. When we talked, he was evasive. He told me that he’d rented a tiny, dark in-law apartment in a converted garage, in a very Asian neighborhood up the hill in El Cerrito. The Jesuits had given him a leave of absence, or sabbatical, plus a small stipend. I was not clear about his canonical status, but his connection to the Society was tenuous at best. He told me that he told his superiors he was working on a book, and they were (how shall I say this?) eager to see results which would never materialize. I surmised that they really didn’t know what to do with him. 

As I said, Claudio had stopped returning Bob’s phone calls, which upset him terribly, and he was no longer visiting the tantric Master Yogi Chen. His only visitor was Susan Diridoni, a lovely woman from either my group or the one directly after mine. I knew Susan and knew that she and Bob had a romantic connection. Susan has also died. I would never have mentioned their intimate connection while they were alive. I am not even sure if I should now, at least publicly, though Bob would not be the first heterosexual Jesuit to develop a strong, exclusive, romantic relationship that at some point included sex. Theilard apparently had a lover, and I knew the woman who filled that role for Avery Dulles, though I am absolutely sure they never had sex.

I called Bob at regular intervals for perhaps a decade. Sometimes it would take him a week or more to respond. We would meet at a particular restaurant where he could eat, particularly a Peruvian one on Mission in San Francisco. He complained that he had no energy; he found a doctor/dietician who prescribed a matchbook-sized piece of protein to be eaten between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. Or something that crazy, so crazy that it would drive a One off the rails. 

He told me that he was trying to write. At the time, I found hundreds of titles, which had increased to more than 300 the last time I surveyed them in 2019. https://enneagrambibliography.blogspot.com/2019/07/all-things-enneagram.html

He was not jealous, though he did mention that all these (his) teachers were generating good incomes and he was living on less than 2,000 USD a month. It didn’t feel like jealousy. I recognized a burden in the way of One’s, to compare and contrast his output very critically. It paralyzed him. It was a sense that he had been the source of so much good work, but every time he started to write, he would produce a few pages and then mercilessly throw them in the waste basket after a week. He felt obligated to produce something unique, worthy of the guy who kicked the ball into play, and he couldn’t do it.

I asked him what he wanted to say. He would respond vaguely that no one had ever looked at the major authors of the Western canon from an Enneagram perspective. However, somehow typing Tolstoy and launching into an analysis was not working out. I didn’t know how to respond, but my gut feeling is that, as with some of the more extreme Enneagram enthusiasts, he was asking the Enneagram to do something that it is not designed to do.

He was obsessed with two writers, Camille Paglia and Doris Lessing. How he lumped them together, I don’t know. With Paglia, I sensed some vindication that he’d been treated badly, even excluded for unjust reasons, and with Lessing, he was obsessed with finding another path to Gurdjieff. He told me that part of his practice was to write to Idries Shah — that letter writing was a revered Sufi practice. Shah might have sent a sentence or two back. When he died in 96, Bob wrote letters to his son as he was sure that Tahir had inherited his dad’s mantle. When Tahir responded that he was not a Sufi teacher, Bob continued to write his letters. He told me: “That’s what he’s supposed to say.” 

Looking back, I have to consider that Bob, a truly important person in my life, had suffered a psychotic break. He lived in a cave and entertained bizarre obsessions. His superiors were helpless. Bob was a solemnly professed member of a religious order with a track record of involvement in a significant spiritual movement. That credential has no value in the real world of academia and job applications. Thank God they did not cut him off. He would have been helpless. He told me that Susan had a profitable therapy practice and helped him out. (She also probably watched out for his mental state.) I was not in any position to help. I was also on a marginal income. Part of me wondered where all the people he’d helped were. Why didn’t he receive invitations to speak or contribute articles? Of course, by the time we had our Peruvian dessert, I realized that it would have been impossible to work with him. He gave us the Enneagram, and when it chewed up his life, we had to stand by helplessly.

Eventually, my calls became far less frequent, and he stopped responding. My own life was in deep shit. After going to meetings and quitting crystal meth, I did a year of intense traditional psychotherapy at Langley Porter. I had tried to trick myself into believing that the Enneagram, or Zen, could do the work of healing. In some ways, it made things worse, or maybe just brought them more into plain sight, while leaving any corrective actions for another time. I’m a Nine so you know how that went. 

I’m a recovering addict. I’m coming up on 15 years clean and sober. I’ve managed to travel the world; I write and tutor English, primarily to Buddhist teachers who want to work in English — that is where the money is for them. They do not pay me. I’ve worked on translating a Zen sutra into Tibetan that has been missing from their canon since approximately 950 C.E. I call myself the executive translator, getting the right materials to the right people at the right time, raising money and organizing the work. I know the Sutra well, but I do not know Tibetan. I have no temple. If I manage to return to India, I will be one of only three or four Zen teachers (and two of them are Jesuits) in a population of over a billion. Lots of Buddhists, though not many Indians. My teacher and I think that I might try to start a meditation hall near the Jesuit houses of formation in Delhi. There are 4000 Indian Jesuits now, more than in either the US or Europe. My boyfriend went to one of their colleges in Bihar.

So, how did things with the early Enneagram get so fucked up? I have a simple answer that is pretty straightforward, but one that is not talked about for good reason — it was the drugs. I didn’t use any drugs during SAT, not even during “Lines,” when it was recommended. Later I took LSD once with supervision, but I became addicted to crystal meth for amost 6 years. So I have to be careful with my judgmental One wing, but the first of the Steps is admitting that life with drugs had become unmanageable and out of control. 

The drug use in SAT was out of control, though everyone claimed that it was normal, or even a privledged state of mind. Almost everyone used drugs pretty much continually. Every weekend a new drug was passed around. People were always high, coming down, or recovering. There were drugs to summon the angry protectors, drugs to calm them, drugs to invite the Virgin to drop her viel of protection, LSD, MDA, MDMA. It was also illegal. Claudio could have lost his license if he had recommended any of these drugs, as several members later did, notably Speeth.  

Naranjo was perhaps the biggest abuser. He taught when he was high; he avoided teaching when he was high; he eventually had to quit SAT to dry out. He was brilliant, and he was a fucking mess. He was in no state of mind to conduct any solid or useful experiments. SAT was not a pharmaceutical spiritual testing ground. There were no controlled debriefings; there were no sober monitors. And of course, we couldn’t talk about it. Ochs was involved, perhaps not to the degree that most people in SAT were, but he experimented. I know because we shared the same floor at the faculty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Ones are not good drug addicts. Save that for Sevens. He tried to hold down a position at a Jesuit house of study; he failed. I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco, and drove a cab. 

I have more to say.  I'm not sure what to do with this, but thank you for allowing me the opportunity to say it. I have a few things to say about the Gurdjieff cult and how Helen obtained her information. You may have some suggestions. I think that this information about SAT and drug abuse does need to be said, but I am not clear enough to know how to do it effectively. You see, what you guys did was in so many ways some of the most valuable of all the Enneagram work. You saved it from the cult. Bob always told me, “Ideas make a difference. Good ideas can be a source of good action.” The Enneagram is such a source.

Going to button this up and call it a day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjgO2amPSY&list=PLBqkQmExk0GJ_UdSxaSzbR_BDjcw1xGVR

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Enneagram Posts:

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

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

Enneagram Bibliography

I fully subscribe to the notion that “discovering” or naming a particular affliction, at least in spiritual terms, goes far towards finding a cure. 

It follows the model we use in medicine. You say to your spiritual director, “I’m feeling distracted and rudderless; I can’t seem to get anything done, much less concentrate and focus on the blessings that I know have been flowing like a mountain stream.” He or she begins to ask a few questions, maybe just to rule out a medical condition. You check for vitamin D deficiency, sleep deprivation, or having an unresolved argument with your partner. Perhaps then you begin to look for a temporary psychological disturbance: persistent fears, habits of isolation, or pre-judging the apparent motivation of a family member. The list can be endless. You catch little glimpses of insight when you examine each possibility, yet you still remain distracted, feeling out of sorts, or, in severe cases, paralyzed — ”can’t get out of bed feelings” for days. I will wager that most of us have been there. If these symptoms point to mental illness, they require intervention, but for otherwise reasonably functioning humans, it’s just called living a human life.

You tell yourself that there has to be a spiritual malady. Spiritual directors have been trying to alleviate the Dark Night of the Soul since shamans first began prescribing snake oil on the plains of Mesopotamia, or in caves painted with magical bears.

You consult your horoscope on the tabloid’s back page next to the comics. Miss Adelle tells you that for Scorpio, when your moon is in Leo, “results in a fascinating mix of intensity and theatricality. Scorpio's depth and passion are tempered by Leo's desire for recognition and leadership, creating a dynamic personality that can be both magnetic and internally conflicted.” (It said that. I’m not making it up.) It’s a diagnosis. You might find it interesting, helpful, incomprehensible, or just laughable. A homeopathic doctor prescribes mint tea. An Ayurvedic witch doctor rubs turmeric all over your belly and tells you to take a nap.

In our enlightened era, we want a scientific instrument. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) provides insights into our perceptual habits and decision-making apparatus, roughly in line with Jung’s analytical tool basket. People have found it helpful; it provides a quantifiable result, which, at least on the surface, avoids completely subjective self-analysis, but the scientific community considers it “pseudo-science.” 

But we’re not launching the Apollo Project. We do not have to prove Niels Bohr’s Theory of Quantum Mechanics. And there is nothing wrong with capturing the public’s imagination. The mother-daughter team of Myers-Briggs had mixed results in helping women find suitable employment. But they set in motion an organizational dynamic that adjusted working conditions to address women’s needs, and they enlivened a conversation about the subtle but very real ways extraversion, introversion, sensing, intuition, thinking, and feeling offer insights into how individuals interact with the world, process information, make decisions, and approach their environment. 

But we still find ourselves in the market for spiritual medicine. Enter the Enneagram, another pseudoscience. It adds two sins to the deadly seven and purports to describe the mystery of the universe by pointing to a mysterious nine-pointed figure. For public name recognition, we don’t have Carl Jung with his impressive pedigree, but a Greek-Armenian mystic whose books are barely comprehensible, a Chilean psychiatrist with a taste for psychedelics, a Bolivian occultist who sends people into the desert on a spiritual quest, a relatively innocent-looking, mild-mannered lady who studied with a Rosicrucian cult, and a very personable Jesuit with a broad smile. In their downtime, they either file lawsuits against each other or hurl New Age truth bombs—certainly an odd group to charge with unlocking the secrets of the Universe. 

Unlocking those secrets is further complicated by determining where you fit in the range of 27 personality types, while at the same time sorting through the differing, even conflicting definitions of these types. In the beginning, there were several methods for determining your type, from a kind of psychic facial recognition to directed introspection. It was a Jesuit, Jerome Wagner, who created the first personality survey or test that allowed a person to pinpoint their type with uncanny accuracy. Jerome is a trained psychologist, but I am afraid that the therapeutic community would still label the system pseudoscientific. When I spoke with Jerome and Patrick O’Leary, they mentioned bringing an evangelical fervor to the Enneagram community. Yes, there is a definite spiritual overtone. Let me break this down: whether or not personality, spiritual intelligence, and the pursuit of happiness are governed by the “Law of Three.” Does examining your state of mind from one of the nine points help me, yours truly, gain in self-awareness, be happier, find peace, or be more productive?  

I was among the first 200 people to be introduced to the system after its initial rollout in Arica, Chile, in 1971-72. I just asked Google how many people have used the system in the last 50 years. An online survey site reports 190,000 respondents to a recent inquiry about the prevalence of various types. While hardly a number that rivals card readers or astrologers, one Enneagram school reports having trained and certified 1,680 teachers. There were nearly 300 books about Enneagram typing when I last compiled an Enneagram bibliography in 2019. At the International Enneagram Conference, now being held in Minneapolis, they expect 700 attendees from 47 countries.

What, if anything, sets the Enneagram apart from the daily horoscope or the turmeric belly rub? Why should I toss an important feature of self-analysis into a sea of completing shouts from various teachers who want me to buy their books, attend their trainings, and pay for private consultations?  The courtroom drama and the staggering costs of their lawyers fueled a purient interest. There was enough bad behavior to counter any evidence that Enneagram study assists the spiritual path. It brought out the worst, but in retrospect, it did what it was designed to do. 

I started my exploration well before the various rivalries reached a crescendo, and I’d experienced moments of clarity using the system for self-analysis. All the drama seemed like a sideshow, and didn’t demand that I pick a winner. I didn’t expect to land on a point that would unlock my personality after a weekend. It took more than a year to settle into a point that would guide my self-analysis for years, but even when my typing process turned out to be flawed, the system still held up.

I didn’t take a personality test. I didn’t attend a weekend workshop. I only read a few pages in one or two books. Rather, with a smiling Jesuit as a confidant, I wrestled with the devil. 

From Emily Dickensen There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons, That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes. Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference Where the Meanings are. None may teach it Any - 'Tis the Seal Despair - An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air - When it comes, the Landscape listens - Shadows - hold their breath - When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death.

 

To read more about my story in Narabjo’s early SAT, click 

“Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley”

____

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

Enneagram Posts:

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

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

Enneagram Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But both Naranjo and Icnazo’s “holier-than-thou” shtick gets a bit heavy. He made a big deal in the “Jesuit Transmission” interviews that his notes and Ichazo’s Arica file had escaped without his permission, and their use was unethical, even immoral, because we had all pledged not to use any material without explicit permission. When I say that Naranjo permitted me to use the material as I saw fit, that was a significant gesture. He delivered the statement of release or commission in a very formal, flat tone. He was incensed that Palmer had access to his more detailed notes and those of Oscar. He blamed Ochs.

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

The Three Levels of Documentation

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

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

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

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

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

2. Naranjo’s Complete Binder

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

3. The Arica Enneagon Workbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Enneagram Posts:

Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

Connecting G.I. Gurdjieff with Naranjo’s Enneagram

Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley

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

Enneagram Bibliography

Very few Enneagram teachers today would have a job or income without Father Bob Ochs, S.J.. Few would have a single student if it were not for Ochs. The only exception might be Hameed Ali’s Diamond Diamond approach, or any Teachers from the Arica community. Still, I would argue that Ali and Sandra Maitri as well as Ichazo’s disciples, rode the wave of the Enneagram enthusiasm that Ochs created at considerable personal cost. It was enormous.

In about 1990, on a whim, I asked Claudio Naranjo to allow me to interview him about a possible article I tentatively titled “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” He spoke with me for several hours a day over a week. I prepared a transcribed version of our taped conversations, and he gave me permission to use the material as I saw fit. Unfortunately, it was lost in a computer crash, and the actual tapes vanished during an attic clean-out. I have to rely on my memory and intuitive sense to recreate Naranjo’s reflections. 

They were far from positive. Naranjo was emphatic. There was no Jesuit transmission because “they (the Jesuits plus Palmer et al) made too many mistakes.” Palmer said something like “In our work, we see far more Eights coming into the 'Work' than Naranjo did. When I quoted her, he might have even used the word 'bullshit,' though he rarely used gutter talk. I remember well that throughout all the interviews, there was almost no humor, a few nervous chuckles, and no jokes. Naranjo was deadly serious.

Naranjo asserted that he had authorized Ochs to convey his “indications” to the Jesuit groups, the Jesuit School of Theology (JSTB), and Loyola University Chicago. There was to be no personal spin or interpretation. As an example, he cited the “now infamous” meeting where everyone, priests, nuns, men, and women, took off all their clothes as a sign of fearless self-inquiry and surrender. He said that Ochs would not have dared give that direction on his own. AD tells me that it was she who flew to Chicago that night and asked everyone to disrobe.  Everyone did. Naranjo told me that the idea came to him on a sudden “whim.” That was one of the few chuckles that entire week.

Naranjo controlled the conversation. There was a clear, definite subtext: he was deeply upset (I’ll use a gutter expression, “pissed off”) about the significant number of Enneagram titles available. I didn’t press the question. Market share was not the primary source of the upset. That he considered many of the interpretations to be misdirected, if not entirely flawed, was. 

Naranjo didn’t read many (if any) of the books; instead, he heard reports about the typing and might have cross-checked here and there, but my impression was that he’d lost control and regretted it. He always spoke of Ichazo in a guarded, slightly disapproving way, but it was always couched in his belief that Ichazo was the link between the Enneagram and Gurdjieff’s teachings. That link to me felt a bit weird, esoteric, almost mystical, but I recognized it. Ochs had no authorization to pass on that imprimatur or seal of approval because Naranjo imagined Ochs had bungled the job, which was unforgivable.

Let’s pick up the timeline. The interviews took place after the serious and hurtful blaming had begun and was taking its toll. Ochs had stopped teaching at the JSTB, or anywhere. He moved out of the small faculty residence that I found on Hillegass Avenue at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Perhaps he had been asked to leave. He was evasive. He told me that he’d rented a tiny, dark in-law apartment in a converted garage, in a very Asian neighborhood up the hill in El Cerrito. The Jesuits had granted him a leave of absence, a sabbatical, and a small stipend. I was not clear about his canonical status, but his connection to the Jesuits seemed tenuous. He told me that he told his superiors he was working on a book, and they were (how shall I say this?) eager to see results, which would never materialize. I surmised that they didn’t know what to do with him. 

Naranjo had stopped returning Ochs’s phone calls, which upset him so much he couldn’t talk about it. The Tantric Master Yogi Chen had passed away. His only visitor was SD, a lovely woman from either my group or the one directly after mine. I knew SD and knew that she and Ochs had a romantic connection. SD has also died. Ochs would not be the first heterosexual Jesuit to develop a strong, romantic relationship with a woman that at some point included sex. Theilard had a lover, and I knew the woman who filled that role for Avery Dulles, though I am sure Avery and JC never had sex.

I called Ochs at regular intervals for more than a decade. Sometimes it would take him a week or more to respond. We would meet at a particular restaurant where he could eat, particularly a Peruvian one on Mission in San Francisco. He complained that he had no energy; he found a homeopathic doctor, or dietician, who prescribed a matchbook-sized piece of protein to be eaten between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. It seemed crazy, but he was almost fanatical. 

Ochs told me that he was trying to write. At the time, I found hundreds of titles, which had increased to more than 300 the last time I surveyed them in 2019. https://enneagrambibliography.blogspot.com/2019/07/all-things-enneagram.html He mentioned that all these teachers were generating good incomes, and he was living on less than $2,000 a month. It didn’t feel like jealousy. I recognized the burden of the One Fixation’s way of comparing and contrasting his personal output very critically. It paralyzed him. He had been the source of so much good work, but every time he started to write, he would produce a few pages and then mercilessly throw them in the waste basket after a week. He felt obligated to make something unique, worthy of the guy who kicked the ball into play, and he couldn’t do it.

I asked Ochs what he wanted to say. He would respond vaguely that no one had ever looked at the major authors of the Western canon from an Enneagram perspective. However, somehow typing Tolstoy and launching into an analysis was not working out. I didn’t know how to respond. 

Ochs was obsessed with two writers, Camille Paglia and Doris Lessing. How he lumped them together, I don’t know. With Paglia, I sensed some camaradship that they’d been treated badly, even excluded for unjust reasons, and with Lessing, he was obsessed with uncovering another path to Gurdjieff. He told me that part of his practice was to write to Idries Shah — that letter writing was a revered Sufi practice. Shah might have sent a sentence or two back. When he died in 96, Ochs wrote letters to his son as he was sure that Tahir had inherited his dad’s mantle. When Tahir responded that he was not a Sufi teacher, Ochs continued to write his letters. He told me: “That’s what he’s supposed to say.” 

Looking back, I have to consider that Ochs, this truly important person in my life, had suffered a psychotic break. He lived in a cave and entertained bizarre obsessions. His superiors might have been helpless. Ochs was a solemnly professed member of a religious order with a track record of involvement in a significant spiritual movement. That counted for something with the Jesuits; it was a credential that had no value in the world of academia and job applications. Thank God they did not cut him off. He would have been helpless. He told me that SD had a profitable therapy practice and helped him out. (She also probably watched out for his mental state.) I was not in any position to help. I was also on a marginal income. Part of me wondered where all the people were that he’d helped. Why didn’t he receive invitations to speak or contribute articles? Of course, by the time we had our Peruvian dessert, I realized that it would have been impossible to work with him. He gave us the Enneagram, and when it ate his life, we had to stand by helplessly.

Eventually, Ochs stopped responding, and my calls became far less frequent. My own life was a mess. After going to meetings and quitting crystal meth, I did a year of intense traditional psychotherapy at Langley Porter. I had tried to trick myself into believing that the Enneagram, or Zen, could do the work of healing, something that neither is designed to do. In some ways, it made things worse, or maybe just brought my own pain into plain sight, and I could no longer leave corrective actions for another time.

During the COVID-19 lockdown in India, I started to write about Ochs and discovered that he had died on May 4th, 2018, at the Claude de la Colombiere Center in Clarkston, Michigan. He was 88 years old.

I hope that a few of his students were able to put love into action and provided some comfort in his last years. He used to talk light-heartedly about “The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center.” I hope it didn’t run amok.

For a more in-depth recounting of Ochs’s first Enneagram teachings at JSTB, please go to my post also called “the Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram” on my blog, Buddha SJ, https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-jesuit-transmission-of-enneagram.html

To read the next chapter, 

Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley, Just Click