Why choose to work with the Enneagram?

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”

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Claudio Naranjo’s first SAT Groups in Berkeley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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