A tribute to Julia Wilson Carroll

Julia Wilson Carroll

June 3, 1923-May 16, 2006. 

11/19/07

On November 11, 2007, Aunt Judy's ashes were placed in the earth next to her sister's, Leona Carroll Ireland, my mother, in Nichols Connecticut. I prepared this to be part of the eulogy that my sister Julie (named after our aunt) delivered at the mass in the parish church with her own additions and edits.

“If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate,” the Apostle Paul.

Paul’s “Hymn to Love” crossed my desk sometime between when the medical students in Tucson had learned all they could from her physical remains and arranging this service to honor her memory and her life.  And I thought to myself: yes, this is Aunt Judy, Judy as she ought to be remembered. 

Here is a very modern translation (by Eugene Peterson) of those verses from one of Paul’s letters to the Christians in Corinth:

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.

Love doesn’t strut,

Doesn’t have a swelled head,

Doesn’t force itself on others,

Isn’t always “me first,”

Doesn’t fly off the handle,

Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,

Doesn’t revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always, 

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back, 

[And] keeps going to the end.

Judy Carroll would certainly be embarrassed to be remembered by quoting this famous praise of the highest love-she was a private woman who would never dream of using fancy words to describe her interior life. But even if you just spent a day with her, it was clear that her interior life, nurturing and relying on her connection with God, was part of her ordinary life, like getting out of bed. 

Almost everyday of her last years in Green Valley, she carved out time to sit quietly in the back of Our Lady of the Valley church. It was part of her routine, like having lunch with Ken and Lee, playing bridge or watching her beloved Yankees on the TV. When we visited her, she might mention, almost in passing, that we were near the church, and that, yes, this is where she parked, a spot that was shaded, protection from the desert sun, and not too far to walk to rear pews, to sit in silence in the presence of the Sacred. 

There were times in Judy’s life when she could not get out of bed, during her bouts with serious illness, tuberculosis, cancer, and crippling osteoporosis. It was then she showed us in terms of real life what Paul praises: she put up with an enormous amount of pain and suffering but she trusted God always, always looked for the best, and never looked back.

She was our mother, Leona’s only sister, her only sibling, and was always part of our family. When we were growing up, we lived together. It almost seemed at times that we had two mothers. Elen said that was her experience, and she took care of Judy with the love and care of a daughter in her last days. 

So it is from this bank of shared memories that I have chosen some stories and anecdotes that we can remember today as we pray for her, remember her with love and finally lay her to rest.

I remember, as a child, when our mother, next to whom she is now buried, would also stop into church for a quick visit. It was during the time Judy was confined to Laurel Heights sanatorium in Shelton for treatment and only a slim hope of complete recovery from tuberculosis. At some point during her confinement, her sister, our mother, was making a novena and a stop at Saint Theresa’s on Main Street in Trumbull was part of her daily routine. One day she came back to the car with tears and a smile. She said, “I am almost sure that Judy is going to be alright. I may be hallucinating, but I saw the statue of the Infant of Prague move his arm in a blessing.” Whether it was a hallucination or not, whether it was a miracle or the miracle drug streptomycin which saved her, it was clearly the work of God in the eyes and hearts of both sisters.

The story in the family was that this forced interruption in the life of a young woman, in those days, reduced the possibility of finding an eligible young man. And it was probably the case. And we as kids knew her rather dashing suitor, Joe Gurbach, who would take her out every Friday night in his sports car for close to 12 years, and we also knew that there was not the marriage proposal that she expected. Judy must have been disappointed, but whatever regret or anger might have existed was entirely gone in her later years. She simply said that some opportunities had been taken from her, but that she still loved her life as it was. Such a bright and down to earth example of what Paul lists among love’s highest qualities: that it doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.

We as kids used to call the seat next to Aunt Judy’s at the dining room table, the “death seat,” because it was there that you got a thorough training in table etiquette. As I think back to the her firm directions, “keep one hand in your lap and not on the table,” “buttocks to the back of the chair,” “look up and answer when you are spoken to you,” I remember that Paul too, before he gets to the word “love” in 1st Corinthians, talks about a lot of Do’s and Don’ts. Certainly there was a well-regulated Christian way of life instilled in Judy Carroll. 

There is a picture of her dressing as a nun when she was a St Augustine’s school in the 30’s; there was also a quiet suspicion among us that she might have wanted to enter a convent at one time, but caring for her mother took priority.

She did care for their mother, Catherine, during her last days. It was simply understood by both sisters that their mother would live out her days at home and that Judy would care for her. Judy and Nanna shared a room in our house on Huntington Turnpike and Prosper Place, and it was in that room that Nanna died, at home. We were all home when Fr. Halloran came to give Nanna the last rites, though the doors were shut to children for those events a half century ago. And in some ways this was just another expression of what she undertook as her life’s work, caring for others as a nurse, or in Paul’s words, “Love cares for others more than self.”

She did private duty as registered nurse for a wealthy man in Greenfield Hills. When we showed hesitancy in folding our napkins properly, she would tell us that Mr. H. Smith Richardson would insist that everyone at lunch fold their paper napkins properly so that they could be reused, and that he had more money than God so we had better listen up and learn. After Mr. Richardson recovered, she had a number of very wealthy clients. But at another point in her long working life, when she was an industrial nurse for the United Illuminating Company, she showed the same love and care for the more ordinary folks then in her care, whether it was a question of placing someone in treatment for substance abuse or having to tell a lineman’s wife that her husband had been killed on the job. (She told me that this was one of the most difficult tasks she ever had to perform). There is a lot in Paul’s other letters about there being no distinction among the followers of Jesus between rich and poor. Yes, Judy Carroll lived out that ideal too.

Today's mass, lovingly officiated by Monsignor Shea and St. Catherine's parish in Nichols, a town she called home and loved very much, is to pray for Judy and to honor her life. It is taking place almost 16 months after she died in hospice care on May 19 of last year. The reason is that Judy was firm in her wish that her body be given to a medical school so that she could, even after her physical life was complete, make a real contribution to educating the next generation doctors and perhaps relieve the suffering of disease and illness. Judy did know suffering in her life and had a deeply kind regard for others she only knew as fellow humans who shared her lot. The generosity of the final gift of her body cannot be overlooked and is a bright example to all of us. Thank you Judy from the bottom of our hearts. Looking at the whole of Judy's life, I would offer an additional line to close Paul's hymn: Love goes beyond life as we know it. You will always be with us Aunt Judy.

And so AJ, although your ashes have already been set alongside those of your sister very near here in the Nichols cemetery, I will close with the hymn that is usually sung when the casket is taken from the church to grave:

May choirs of angels welcome you and lead you to the bosom of Abraham; and where Lazarus is poor no longer, may you find eternal rest.

How to Move Forward Once You’ve Hit Bottom

BY PEMA CHÖDRÖN

OCTOBER 21, 2016

Pema Chödrön tells the story of when, having hit rock bottom, she asked her teacher what to do.

Photo via Image Catalog.

I thought I would tell you this little story about Naropa University’s founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and my very first one-on-one interview with him. This interview occurred during the time when my life was completely falling apart, and I went there because I wanted to talk about the fact that I was feeling like such a failure and so raw.

But when I sat down in front of him, he said, “How is your meditation?”

I said, “Fine.”

And then we just started talking, superficial chatter, until he stood up and said, “It was very nice to meet you,” and started walking me to the door. In other words, the interview was over.

And so at that point, realizing the interview was over, I just blurted out my whole story:

My life is over.

I have hit the bottom.

I don’t know what to do.

Please help me.

And here is the advice Trungpa Rinpoche gave me. He said, “Well, it’s a lot like walking into the ocean, and a big wave comes and knocks you over. And you find yourself lying on the bottom with sand in your nose and in your mouth. And you are lying there, and you have a choice. You can either lie there, or you can stand up and start to keep walking out to sea.”

So, basically, you stand up, because the “lying there” choice equals dying.

Metaphorically lying there is what a lot of us choose to do at that point. But you can choose to stand up and start walking, and after a while another big wave comes and knocks you down.

You find yourself at the bottom of the ocean with sand in your nose and sand in your mouth, and again you have the choice to lie there or to stand up and start walking forward.

“So the waves keep coming,” he said. “And you keep cultivating your courage and bravery and sense of humor to relate to this situation of the waves, and you keep getting up and going forward.”

This was his advice to me.

Trungpa then said, “After awhile, it will begin to seem to you that the waves are getting smaller and smaller. And they won’t knock you over anymore.”

That is good life advice.

It isn’t that the waves stop coming; it’s that because you train in holding the rawness of vulnerability in your heart, the waves just appear to be getting smaller and smaller, and they don’t knock you over anymore.

“Fail better” means you begin to have the ability to hold what I call “the rawness of vulnerability” in your heart.

So what I’m saying is: fail. Then fail again, and then maybe you start to work with some of the things I’m saying. And when it happens again, when things don’t work out, you fail better. In other words, you are able to work with the feeling of failure instead of shoving it under the rug, blaming it on somebody else, coming up with a negative self-image—all of those futile strategies.

“Fail better” means you begin to have the ability to hold what I call “the rawness of vulnerability” in your heart, and see it as your connection with other human beings and as a part of your humanness. Failing better means when these things happen in your life, they become a source of growth, a source of forward, a source of, “out of that place of rawness you can really communicate genuinely with other people.”

Your best qualities come out of that place because it’s unguarded and you’re not shielding yourself. Failing better means that failure becomes a rich and fertile ground instead of just another slap in the face. That’s why, in the Trungpa Rinpoche story that I shared, the waves that are knocking you down begin to appear smaller and have less and less of an ability to knock you over. And actually maybe it is the same wave, maybe it’s even a bigger wave than the one that hit last year, but it appears to you smaller because of your ability to swim with it or ride the wave.

And it isn’t that failure doesn’t still hurt. I mean, you lose people you love. All kinds of things happen that break your heart, but you can hold failure and loss as part of your human experience and that which connects you with other people.

Adapted from Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better: Wise Advice for Leaning into the Unknown by Pema Chodron. Copyright © 2015 by Pema Chodron. To be published by Sounds True in September 2015.

The Enneagram Rhapsody

 https://youtu.be/BQnmM2XzLjk

Of course it helps if you’re devoted to musical genius of Queen as well as the Enneagram.

Rivers Crossing is a church?

The Enneagram Wars

 [I am posting this article by Subhuti from the Osho News. I found it very interesting.] 

HEALING & MEDITATION

OCTOBER 21, 2017

Subhuti writes in detail on how a method for enlightenment ended up in court. “The Enneagram’s deepest value lies within the context of meditation. That is the turning point, at which self-understanding becomes spiritual transformation.”

Leaving Arica for Pune

By the time the bullets started flying, I had left the battlefield. I had bid farewell to Oscar Ichazo, creator of the modern Enneagram system. I had written a bitchy letter to his staff at the Arica School in New York, arrogantly informing them I was no longer interested in being an Arica trainer and was off to India to complete my spiritual education.

This was 1976. A couple of years earlier, I’d been an enthusiastic, gung-ho ‘Arican’. I was convinced Arica was going to save the world. Oscar had warned us of a great darkness that was about to fall on humanity and we, as little Arican light bulbs, would be its shining saviours.

Nice, spiritually romantic idea. But there were a few problems: First, the darkness didn’t fall. Second, humanity wasn’t interested in being saved. Third, the light bulbs didn’t work. So, when an old girlfriend of mine came back from an ashram in Pune, India, wearing orange clothes and glowing with energy, I was ready to be seduced. Just kissing her was an orgasmic experience.

If she hadn’t been leaning out of a train window while I was standing on the platform, and the train hadn’t started moving, I think we’d still be kissing today. Anyway, I received her energy transmission. I got the message, passed from mouth to mouth: something wonderful and slightly scary was going on in Pune. I had to go and check it out.

A few weeks later, when I arrived at the ashram, I sat in front of Osho and he asked me how long I was going to stay. I heard myself reply “For ever.” Ooops! I hadn’t meant to say that, I still don’t know why I did, but it turned out to be true. I’d found the door to shunyata, divine emptiness, as well as sexual liberation, ecstatic celebration and chaotic meditation.

The combination was irresistible.

Fourteen years and many adventures later, I was sitting in the Pune ashram’s cafe, drinking a cup of chai, when someone handed me a book titled Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life, by Helen Palmer.

“My God, I used to teach this stuff!” I exclaimed, thumbing through Palmer’s detailed description of the Enneagram’s nine personality types.

“Why don’t you teach it here?” asked the book’s owner. So I got together with another ex-Arican, who’d conveniently kept all his notes, and we did.

The legal battle between Helen Palmer and Oscar Ichazo

Meanwhile, back in New York, Helen Palmer and Oscar Ichazo were locked in a legal battle that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. It’s ironic that a method for enlightenment should become a cause for combat. But then again, when you look at the world’s religious history, it’s not surprising. So much blood has been shed in the name of spiritual truth.

The Arica Institute, with Ichazo’s blessings, accused Helen Palmer of copying his Enneagram doctrine and infringing his copyright, requesting the American courts to block distribution of thousands of paperback copies of her book. The courts refused, saying that copyright law did not cover most of what Ichazo was teaching. The secrets of the Arica school had escaped into the public arena.

Oscar was upset, Helen Palmer was happy and the Enneagram mushroomed into a New Age phenomenon, generating hundreds of ‘experts’, scores of trainings and dozens more books. In a way, it was Oscar’s fault. He should have published his own book back in the early 1970s, when he had the whole system to himself.

But, alas, the Bolivian-born mystic, whose native language was Spanish, had a complex and difficult way of expressing himself and was never able to write a decent book in his whole life. There was another, more profound reason, why Oscar was distressed. Whether his methods were effective, or not, Ichazo was a genuine mystic. He wanted to help people become enlightened.

He knew that the ego blocked the path to cosmic consciousness and believed that the Enneagram’s description of nine ego-fixation points could dissolve this basic obstacle. In other words, as Ichazo explained to us, if we could see the ego clearly enough, in its raw, naked form, it would collapse, opening an inner space for the manifestation of our Divine Essence.

Poor Oscar! He obviously had no idea how stubborn and adaptable the human ego can be. The ego is the all-time survival expert – I speak from personal experience.

Ego Plan, Type Seven

For example, when I was informed by an Arica trainer in New York that I was Ego Plan, Type Seven, my ego took a massive hit. For a while, I was in a kind of daze, shocked to my core at this revelation of how my ego functioned.

It was a powerful experience. But pretty soon, like other Aricans whom I knew, my ego had recovered from this knock-out blow, climbed back off the floor, and was again in business. After all, I had a new identity. Now I was an Arican, a Plan, feeling spiritually superior to the rest of our sleepy humanity and happily giving Enneagram sessions to everyone around me.

But, as I say, Oscar was a mystic and his intentions were good. He’d wanted to keep the Enneagram system secret, because he knew it worked best as a tool for ego-reduction within the intense atmosphere of a closed school.

Helen Palmer, on the other hand, was no mystic. She’d made sociological studies of the nine personality types, describing their difficulties and making suggestions how to smooth out the rough edges. It was the exact opposite of what Ichazo had intended. He wanted to destroy the ego. Palmer was telling people how to improve it.

But how did Palmer get hold of the Enneagram in the first place?

Come to think of it, how did Ichazo get hold of it?

Let’s back up and take a look.

Where does the Enneagram come from?

The Enneagram, as many people know, is an ancient symbol. It was brought to the attention of modern Europeans by George Gurdjieff, the Armenian mystic, who claimed it represented the laws of the universe. He used the symbol mainly in music and dance. He also asserted that every individual possessed a “chief characteristic”, but at no time did he mention nine personality types or try to relate these types to the Enneagram symbol.

Gurdjieff had visited many Sufi schools as a young man – documented in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men – so it was assumed he’d learned the symbol from them. Now it seems more likely that it was taught to him, as a boy, by his tutors, who were esoterically-inclined monks, belonging to the Greek Orthodox tradition of the Christian faith.

At this point, we find ourselves in historical regression, because the next question is: where did these monks get the symbol? They seemed to have inherited it from a group of early Christian mystics, living in Egypt, called the ‘Desert Fathers’, who may, or may not, have linked the Enneagram symbol to the so-called Seven Deadly Sins, adding two more for good measure, making nine in all: anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust and sloth.

This, however, is not the beginning of the story. The Desert Fathers, being mostly Greeks, may have picked up the symbol from the teachings of Ancient Greeks like Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus. However, even if all this is true, Oscar Ichazo denied that he got the Enneagram symbol from Gurdjieff, so there was no clear line of continuity.

So, where did he get it? For a while, all kinds of exotic rumours buzzed around the Arica School in New York. My favourite one went like this:

Oscar had undertaken a dangerous solo pilgrimage through remote areas of the Hindu Kush Mountains, in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, meeting with secret Sufi schools and receiving their sacred knowledge.

Actually, the truth was more mundane: he got it from his uncle’s library. In a 1996 magazine interview, Ichazo explained that when he was 12-13 years old, he inherited an esoteric library from his uncle Julio, who was a philosopher.

Since he’d been having frightening, out-of-body experiences from the age of six, Ichazo hungrily devoured these books, hoping to find reassuring answers for his paranormal states. He came across the Enneagram symbol while studying an ancient text from the Chaldean civilization, which existed around 600 BC, in what is now known as Iraq, and whose citizens appear to have been fascinated by numbers.

For example, the Chaldean system of numerology is considered to be more accurate, with more mystical depth, than Pythagorean numerology. So it makes sense that an intrinsically mathematical symbol like the Enneagram would be embraced as part of their metaphysics. And where, might one ask, did the Chaldeans get the symbol?

Nobody knows and we cannot ask them, because in 536 BC, Cyrus the Great crushed their little realm, adding it to his ever-expanding Persian Empire.

Oscar Ichazo, Helen Palmer and Claudio Naranjo

Oscar Ichazo, the Theosophical Society and channelled revelations

Meanwhile, returning to the twentieth century, Oscar Ichazo, studying in his library, also found evidence of the symbol in the teachings of certain Sufi schools and in the more recent Theosophical movement. By the age of 18, Ichazo had joined a group of Theosophists in Buenos Aires who discussed all kinds of esoteric issues, including Gurdjieff’s secret sources and the meaning of the Enneagram symbol. Ichazo soaked up all this information like a sponge and by his mid-twenties possessed a vast store of knowledge.

As a culmination, the placing of nine ego types on the Enneagram symbol seems to have come to Ichazo through personal revelation. In other words, he channelled it, attributing his illumination to a couple of disembodied entities: the Archangel Metatron, and a Sufi entity, the Green Qutub.

This sounds bizarre, if we envisage these entities to be blond-haired angels flapping their golden wings amid white puffy clouds. But to Ichazo, these were states of consciousness. Metatron represented a function of higher mind, which gave Ichazo the blueprint of his whole Arica system, while the Green Qutub personified surrender to divine will and receiving baraka, the energy of divine grace.

So far, so good. But, as is often the case with mystics, problems began for Ichazo when he started to teach his knowledge to others. As long as he confined himself to esoteric groups in South America, things went pretty well. But, in 1970, he invited a group of Americans from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, to participate in a three-month training in the town of Arica, Chile. This, by the way, is how Oscar’s school got its name, because it began with the training in this obscure city.

Among those who answered the call was Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean-born psychiatrist who was living and working in the United States.

Enters Claudio Naranjo

Naranjo was bearded, brainy and hungry. He was no ordinary psychiatrist. He’d trained in Gestalt Therapy with Fritz Perls, dabbled in psychedelic drugs and was obsessed with contacting the elusive “Sarmoun Brotherhood” whom Gurdjieff said possessed great secrets of human transformation.

Astonished by the range of Ichazo’s knowledge, Naranjo was convinced the Bolivian knew the whereabouts of this mysterious Sufi school. But, alas, as far as we know, Naranjo never got the brotherhood’s postcode from Oscar.

After the training in Chile, Ichazo flew to New York and set up his new school in the middle of Manhattan. I still remember the address: 24 West 57th. We called it ‘GHQ’, short for ‘general headquarters’, the hub of a growing network of Arica branches that spread through the US and Europe.

Meanwhile, Naranjo had returned to Berkeley, California, where he began to develop psychological profiles of the nine ego fixation points. He also began to give lectures on the subject. Oscar Ichazo was not happy about this. He’d already criticised Naranjo on several occasions for being overly intellectual and was worried that his precious Enneagram would now be distorted. As it turned out, Naranjo’s eagerness to adopt the Enneagram as his own brainchild was nothing compared to the predatory instincts of the people who attended his lectures.

Helen Palmer, Bob Oakes, Almaas and Faisal

Among those present at Naranjo’s discourses were Helen Palmer, a Jesuit priest called Bob Oakes, Hameed Ali (who adopted the pen name A H Almaas) and Faisal Muqaddam. All of them would catch the Enneagram ball thrown to them by Naranjo and run with it, developing their own systems, writing their own books, offering their own trainings.

Later, Naranjo would complain to journalists that his precious ideas had been stolen by these people without giving him credit. How ironic! Naranjo, it seems, was incapable of seeing how he’d done exactly the same thing to Ichazo. Indeed, Naranjo even went so far as to claim that it was he, not Ichazo, who’d developed the psychological dimension of the Enneagram.

This is simply untrue. Back in 1974, when I was participating in a training at the Arica Institute in New York, we were given psychological profiles of all nine types as part of our instruction, coming directly from Ichazo. Certainly, Naranjo developed these profiles further, fleshing out the psychological aspects of each ego fixation, while Helen Palmer provided an even broader view of each type’s behaviour and attitudes. But the source of all this was unquestionably Ichazo himself.

For this reason, it seems to me that Oscar could have won the court case, if he’d been a bit more street savvy. But in some ways he was his own worst enemy. When asked by the court to describe his Enneagram theory, he replied, “It is not a theory. It is a fact.”

“Well, you can’t copyright a fact,” the court replied. Case dismissed.

New books on the market, by Naranjo, Helen Palmer, Don Riso

In reality, of course, it was a theory. But Ichazo was so insistent on asserting the objective reality of his precious system that he ended up shooting himself in the foot.

In 1990, Naranjo published a book about the Enneagram system, titled Ennea Type Structures, consisting of a dense labyrinth of psychological terms, mixed thickly with Christian theology. His book didn’t do well in the marketplace for the simple reason that few people could understand what he was talking about.

It was Helen Palmer, publishing around the same time, who blew the doors to the mainstream wide open and successfully introduced the Enneagram to the general public.

Meanwhile, a Jesuit student called Don Riso had beaten everyone in the race to the book stores. He’d read Bob Oakes’ notes from Naranjo and promptly wrote his own book, titled Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery.

With these two books, penned by Palmer and Riso, the modern Bibles of the popularized Enneagram faith were born. Each step away from Ichazo had diluted the power of the system, making it tamer and more palatable, and when an amusing book, illustrated with cartoons, titled The Enneagram Made Easy was published by two of Palmer’s students, the social sanitization process was complete.

Meditation is beyond psychological, philosophical and spiritual concepts

Only a Disney movie about the nine types would now render it more cosily impotent. Which brings me back to that moment in the cafe, in Pune, in 1990, when someone handed me Helen Palmer’s book and suggested I should start teaching the Enneagram in the ashram. I had no problem with it. After all, I’d learned the system from Ichazo, so I had the original teaching in my hands. More importantly, I now had a much wider spiritual context in which to place it.

Osho was giving us a vision of spirituality that went beyond anything devised by Ichazo: a vision that began in meditation and ended in No Mind. In other words, one can study everything that Ichazo, Naranjo, Almaas, Faisal and Palmer have to offer in the way of psychological, philosophical and spiritual concepts, and still come up short.

Why? Because, as Osho explained many times in his discourses, the ultimate spiritual experience lies beyond anything the mind can conceive. It is beyond the realm of thinking. It is beyond the realm of self. It is an experience of silence, emptiness, infinite space.

Try writing a book about nothingness. Even the inventive creativity of those who have plagiarised Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram system would have a hard time doing that. To me, the Enneagram is a handy tool for self-understanding and that’s why I continue to teach it. It has helped me get to know my personality and is a useful way of watching my mind, as it jumps through its usual hoops.

I can recommend it to anyone. But its deepest value lies within the context of meditation. That is the turning point, at which self-understanding becomes spiritual transformation.

Subhuti gives workshops about the Enneagram all over the world and also gives individual online Enneagram sessions. Contact: anandsubhuti (at) yahoo.com

More articles on the Enneagram, also by this author on Osho News