Introduction
In 1973 I was a Jesuit scholastic coming towards the end of the long rigorous seminary training when I started working with the psychiatrist turned spiritual teacher, Claudio Naranjo. Returning from a transformational experience in Chile, Naranjo’s early work was inspired but by no means perfect. My initial intense study lasted only 4 years, but it set the course for a lifetime of self-examination. The Enneagram and the conversation about the system have been a part of my inner life, and I’ve tried to nurture my personal understanding. I am an Enneagram student, not a teacher.
Over the past twenty years I’ve written about the Enneagram, but I have allowed the system its own logic based on self-remembering, not whether the system originated in an esoteric Sufi order or in Egypt or with the Desert Fathers or Pythagoras. I heard inflated claims that it was part of “The School,” a quasi-mystical group of human beings gathered, by chance, luck or karma, to do the rigorous work of self-exploration for the benefit of all humankind, but that feels like it’s out of the Gnostic playbook, I would prefer to examine this training to see if it can stand the test of time on its own. The Enneagram may not be a spiritual practice with the long and revered history many enthusiasts claim, but I remain convinced that we can actually use it to connect with the numinous mystery of life.
Some friends argue that if we trace its source and pinpoint its origin, we spoil the recipe. All they’re really saying is that some things are better left alone, impossible to figure out, or perhaps present unanswerable questions. I'm certainly not going to discourage self-investigation. In fact I want to encourage it. The Buddhist practice that I’m familiar with teaches that we can unlock real possibility and opportunity when we deal head-on with what are called “hindrances.” The Enneagram is also part of the strong tradition that inner work dictates unflinching self-observation in tracking our thoughts, feelings, memories, and “mental-reactions.” This trains our attention and allows us to see ourselves more clearly. I am thoroughly persuaded by the last option.
Emotions, the depth of the anguish or complete frustration can escape formulation. Sometimes the pain was beyond words, and a lament ultimately serves no purpose. A cry is just a cry. Sometimes my memory of these experiences ring with the unexpected noise of someone breaking down a door in the hall for no rational reason. Events or people with whom I had no more than a tangential relationship rupture and the debris spreads. We label it senseless. We label it nonsense but something inside still hangs on. The question that I’ve been trying to deal with is why people believe nonsense? Or more importantly why did I believe nonsense?
Echoing one of his teaching models, G.I. Gurdjieff, Naranjo called the missteps, even tragedies that befell some participants “food for the moon” as if they were just collateral damage of important work, an unfortunate, perhaps even necessary side effect of intense self-investigation. I don't hesitate to use another term—exploitation. Each one of us only sees part of the picture. One person’s poison is another’s antidote, but ethics demand that we label poison as poison, or at least with the clear warning “Take at your own risk.”
We each have our own views and I do not represent anyone other than myself. However I opt for being as honest as I can no matter the cost. The alternative is allowing the kind of introspection that we are invited to by careful study of the Enneagram to become as worthless as the astrology column on the back page of the local news rag or perhaps a 600 word article in Psychology Today.
I want my account is honest, even brutally honest if need be, but I am not even sure if that is possible. I have thoroughly researched and verified facts and names, dates and records of the incidents when available. I have not embellished them. However the story does not easily fit the usual chronology or conventions of a narrative. Words stagger between fact and poetry. They feel like an approximation that does not match the experience. The blur does not capture the beauty or the power that was present even if just for a moment. Parts of the story are difficult to tell. For more than 50 years, I’ve cycled through bouts of depression and spurts of creativity, crippling relationships and love, drug dependency and spiritual infatuations, dedication to hard work on worthwhile projects and hating my job, years of relative freedom from money issues followed by just making ends meet. The reader can take this as background material, use it to disqualify me, or applaud me for still being here. It makes no difference. It is just part of a story.
Is there a way of setting these parochial arguments aside and rescuing the system as a powerful adjunct in the difficult undertaking of introspection? I suppose that I first have to answer the question about what was lost, and whether or not there is anything of value worth saving. Naranjo always warned that the wide dissemination of the system would dilute its power.
People in Naranjo’s groups always referred to Naranjo as Claudio. I never heard anyone call him Dr. Naranjo. We called him by his name in our interactions and conversations within the group. His teaching style was not at all formal. Now that he is no longer with us however, I chose to use Naranjo. We are talking about his work and legacy. By the same token, George Ivanovich Gurdjeiff is usually referred to either as G or Mr. Gurdjieff by his students as a mark of respect verging on homage due a Saint. I have decided to use only his family name.
Naranjo was quite exacting with his students about how we could use the information and teaching in our own writing or work with clients. As I said, I am not an Enneagram teacher nor do I work with students. I no longer consider myself bound by verbal promises I made to him either as a member of SAT or during our private conversations when he was alive.
When I quote friends or Naranjo’s other students, I will try to refer to their actual written word. That is not always possible. Especially in describing my long friendship with Bob Ochs, I have no written records, only my faulty memory adjusted by love and admiration.
I’m also looking from afar. Many of these experiences happened a long time ago. With the passage of time comes a softening of the harsh edges. It becomes difficult to separate hard inner work that had to be done and the natural flow of life.
I have been taken to task by several friends from that era for my criticism. A very close personal friend who was also a close associate of Naranjo still wants to take sides in the debate. For her there is a lot at stake in terms of Naranjo’s reputation. She feels that the difficult work of introspection is hindered by exposing the vociferous debates that litter the terrain. I know that I cannot possibly remain neutral, and I will not choke down my criticism.
When I examine some of the thorny parts of the controversy between Ichazo, Naranjo and Palmer, I will reference the 1992 legal ruling by US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for relevant information. I assume that, for the most part, statements under oath will be as close to the truth as we need to be.
Is there any truth to any of this? I don’t even know if we share any common ground. Have we asked similar questions about our lives? Have we been happy? And I mean really happy, not some drunken free-for-all where you trample the concerns of your heart in a sacred dance and a magic fire lifts the gloom of the burdens we share. That’s what emotional religion sells. I want nothing to do with it, but ordinary human experience seems to dictate words that ignite, flame and confuse.
Naranjo’s Enneagram
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The Enneagram that we’ve come to know in the West begins with Ichazo’s first Arica Training in 1971, but people look far, wide and deep into the past for esoteric origins. The figure appears in the works of Gurdjieff and his students; it may also appear in the texts of an esoteric Sufi Order though I have not seen it; some claim it’s also found in Pythagoras, or carefully drawn figures in an almanac compiled by an obscure 16th century Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher; someone even said Ichazo discovered it when a book dropped from a shelf in an occult library in Bolivia and a page fell open. This kind of history is just homemade mythology based on stories from hearsay or anecdotal evidence.
Mr. James Moore, an authorized Gurdjieff teacher, says “Analogically Ichazo’s enneagram is to Gurdjieff’s what the New Guinea cargo-cults are to aviation.” Most teachers of the modern Enneagram try to trace its origin back to a Sufi school, or more precisely, to an extension or fulfillment of an oral or hidden teaching they want to find in the esotericism of The Fourth Way. These claims lack any evidence. There is no urtext anyone can point to. The actual text that the modern Enneagram work comes from are the notes that Oscar Ichazo used with the first group of Esalen pioneers who in 1971 went with Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly to Arica, Chile. This small port and beach town is surrounded by the forbidding Atacama Desert. It was once part of Peru and closer to Ichazo’s native Bolivia than Santiago. When Chile defeated Bolivia and Peru in La Guerra del salitre, the Saltpeter War in the late 1800’s, both countries lost this coastline. Later Chile and Peru set Arica as the northernmost town in Chile, but Bolivia, the odd man out, remains landlocked to this day. Another odd artifact in Arica is a cathedral of metal and wood, an import of uncertain authenticity, allegedly designed by Gustave Eiffel, shipped from France in 1875 and assembled in 1876 at lighting speed.
I will argue that anything we can know with certainty about the Enneagram has happened within the last six decades, and it is all we need to know. It can also be documented if we sift out the parochialism. We don’t need to know about the origin of the system to experience its power. In fact it might be a distraction and a misdirection. However this speculation has some bearing on the current landscape of Enneagram teaching. A friend forwarded an email promotion for a course by an Enneagram teacher who promises to unlock its radical teaching by returning to the “original intent.” I'm skeptical. Are these third generation experts going back to Naranjo’s characterization of the nine types, or Ichazo’s prototyping which is notably different, or the myth of an esoteric Sufi circle, or the inconclusive evidence that it lay hidden in Gurdjieff’s teaching, or William Patterson’s tracing the system back to ancient Egypt. I challenge any of these teachers to reveal the original intent in a rigorous way. If they were just trying to distinguish themselves from Enneagram parlor games, I might be more generous, but “a radical approach of the true spirit” or “original intent” are just a sales pitch.
Dr. Aubrey Lindgren, who was in Naranjo’s first SAT group, has tried to unwrap the Enneagram, particularly the Enneagram of Fixations, for a Western audience steeped in the language of psychotherapy.* She asks why so little has been written about those early days? Her answer is “To realize the full impact of the teachings, we have to hold the container in silence. A silence that is both inside our own minds, as in not forming concepts about transformation, and outside, as in not discussing the material presented. It is a disservice to the public to hear about a theory without the full understanding and guidance as to how to effectively apply these ideas to your life.”
Every gnostic group wants to keep their secrets secret. They need to hide something or hint at secret knowledge that will cost money. The esoteric argument always relies on the thesis that the careful inner work of introspection is too difficult for a mass audience. While I appreciate the caution about doing inner work, as far as the Enneagram is concerned, the cat’s out of the bag. If the Enneagram ever was an esoteric teaching, it has crossed over into popular culture, at worst mimicking astrology or at best being an adjunct to the techniques of psychotherapy.
The audience for the modern Enneagram teachings might have reached a saturation point so get the copy editors to create some interest. After Naranjo and Ichazo took separate paths, after the wave of Enneagram studies and practice manuals and other writing, more than 150 books since 1990, and the proliferation of study groups, seminars and trainings, the rivalry between the various schools became a battleground. I have no pony in that race. I do not earn my living or claim booty fighting on one side or the other which is not to say that I have not spent, lost and earned in my struggles.
As I undertake to write a personal account, I find it difficult to sort out the details of my personal story, but given the language and the inner discipline required, it’s also the story of passing a teaching from one culture to another, from the East to the West, from an alleged mystical Sufi source to a group of Christian practitioners, from spiritual practice to psychological investigation, from an oral tradition to one that employs books and written lists of personal traits and characteristics. Such a complex transmission opens itself at best to honest differences and interpretations. At its worst, it breeds parochial infighting, condemnation and closed-mindedness. Thank God burning heretics at the stake has fallen out of favor.
The lack of clarity adds fuel to the Enneagram controversy and arms its detractors. I will try to be non-judgmental, and only speak about people and events about which I have first hand knowledge. My comments do not pretend to be definitive statements about any specific approach or understanding of the system. I’ll leave discussion about typing or proto-analysis to those who specialize in Enneagram studies. However some comment and analysis may be necessary to map out the early history of the Enneagram. If we trust ourselves and follow our best instincts, there is something very useful about argument and debate. They point to useful paths for an individual.
*“The Enneagram Monthly,” October 2021 edition.
Who I was
It was 1972. I was a 28 year old Jesuit scholastic, bright, enthusiastic, inquisitive and, to most observers, engaged in my life. I had been in the Order for almost 7 years, completing my initial spiritual trail or novitiate, the philosophical requirement, a period of study at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and my first year of theological training. I loved the Jesuits and had done well in the rigorous course of study. I was certainly accepted and encouraged by fellow Jesuits and superiors.
I also had a reputation of being a rebel. In the early days after Vatican 2, there was a lot of experimentation. It’s remarkable that I was never “called in.” The Jesuits have a special oath of obedience—to the Pope, or the Father General, and by extension, your immediate superior. When he says do it, it’s done. Te vult was a note that appeared in your box. It translates as “He wants [to see you].” It usually meant that you were in trouble. You’d been found out, or someone had turned you in for an infraction of one of the religious vows. Despite always testing the edges, I escaped censure.
I had invested a lot in getting to that point in my life. I had submitted a rigorous and intellectual discipline and built a tough defense system around what I thought was a pretty well reasoned personal sense of purpose. But despite my liberal Ivy League education, despite being a member of the Jesuit elite, I lived in a straight-jacketed Catholic world. Despite being known as a kind of rebel among the younger Jesuits, I was frustrated and unhappy. I also knew that I needed psychological help.
I didn’t hide my deepest feelings from my religious superiors, including my struggles. All my superiors were generous and understanding, and tried to help in whatever way they could. I had been in therapy for a short time, but the result only put me in a huge dilemma: I knew I was gay but denied it; I wanted to experience intimacy in my life, and I wanted to have a spiritual life, but the prospect of a lifetime of celibacy seemed more and more like a chain rather than a path to fulfillment.
___________
It was an uncomfortable night, so muggy that people couldn’t sleep. It had been very hot all day. When the sun went down, it did get cooler, but everyone’s windows stayed wide open. The streets were always noisy anyway, but the level of the day’s frustration lingered. The malaise seemed widespread.. A lady further up 102nd was shouting “Shut the fuck up” out of her window at the top of her lungs. It was past 1 AM. She’d been shouting all week. I didn’t even bother going to bed. I’d actually given up trying to sleep weeks earlier. Humidity, heat and insomnia are not good bedfellows. If you’ve ever lived in New York without air conditioning, you will remember nights like this.
I was finishing my first year of theological school. I was living in a large, sprawling apartment in New York’s Upper West Side with a group of seven other Jesuit seminarians and Father Avery Dulles. We walked up to 116th Street where Woodstock College, perhaps the most prestigious institution of the American Jesuit order, had just relocated from rural Pennsylvania and become part of an ecumenical consortium. The Second Vatican Council had finished their work in 1965. Several liberal Jesuits from Woodstock, notably John Courtney Murray and Gustave Weigle, had been instrumental in writing the documents that would open up the Catholic Church. Those were heady days. It felt good to be part of creating a modern Catholic Church. We were taking stuffy Thomistic theology out of its ivory tower where it defended doctrinal pronouncements coming out of Rome. We were a Jesuit institution with a 500 year old academic and spiritual legacy but in the vision of Pope John the 23rd, we would breathe new life in the Church.
I was up late into the night painting a wall mural in the kitchen. A visiting scholastic from Chicago, Bob Partika, couldn’t sleep either. He wandered into the kitchen for a snack, and we began a rambling conversation that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Partika talked about a young priest named Bob Ochs who had been teaching a nine pointed diagram that described personality types. He described some exercises aimed at intense self-scrutiny allowing for some kind self-understanding based on what he called fixations. My new friend had experienced a real sense of liberation, and I could sense it. Finally, almost to give the story the real feel of human life, he told a story about the last session of the group where everyone, men and women, lay and religious, took off their clothes. He assured me that it was not at all sexual, that the nuns carefully folded their habits and laid them down on their chairs almost reverentially. I was stunned.
My scholastic friend told me that Ochs would be offering this Enneagram course at the Jesuit Theological School in Berkeley California where he was part of a group led by a Chilean psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo. In September, Naranjo’s group would also work with a man who had discovered an innovative process to resolve the conflicts of early childhood experience.
The very next morning I called my superior in Boston and asked for permission to transfer to the Jesuit School in Berkeley. After a few questions, he agreed—actually he was enthusiastic—and asked me to call the Jesuit School in Berkeley to see if I could be admitted. Berkeley said that they would take me as a special student. They had no room for me in the Jesuit community but they found a small off campus room at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Things fell into place so quickly and smoothly that I felt the Universe, or the Holy Spirit, was guiding me.
Within 10 days I was sharing a ride across the country with a complete stranger from Brooklyn. When I got to Berkeley I called Ochs to introduce myself, and then in a completely flat tone—I have no idea why I remember that—he asked, “Why don’t you join the group?” It had never occurred to me, but I’d just driven across the country in a headlong, desperate search to discover something about myself so I called the number he gave me. Rosalyn Shaffer answered the phone and told me—again her tone was flat—to be at an address on Hearst Avenue at 7 PM sharp on Tuesday night. That started four years of work with Naranjo.
I was not unique among young seminarians of my generation in feeling that conventional religious practice had failed me. I had come to Berkeley to work with a Jesuit priest, a man who I hoped might introduce me to a psychological understanding of myself that would help thread the needle. Would a fellow Jesuit lead me down a dead end? In retrospect I was desperately looking for a way out. Doctrinal formulations are not about jumping from a hundred foot pole, Kierkegaard’s leap of faith without a safety net. I was in the midst of the personal crisis but barely aware of it. This was a real “Hail Mary,”
By the beginning of that next summer, my life would be radically changed.
Seekers After Truth, the first groups
The San Andreas Fault runs through the heart of San Francisco at a depth of more than 15 km. Across the Bay, the Hayward Fault lies only a few hundred meters from the ramshackle fraternity house in Berkeley where Claudio Naranjo held the first meetings of his group, The Seekers After Truth. About 100 km south at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay seismologists have pinpointed a “deep junction” where the North American Plate collides with the Pacific Plate. Dedicated geomancers claim that they can chart a shift in consciousness by tracking the slow, relentless, unpredictable movement of tectonic plates as if this flood of psychological and spiritual insights were a revelation from an other-worldly source. I contend that there were other forces at work, not perhaps so deeply hidden beneath the surface as the fault lines, but certainly not observable with eyes that casually scan the horizon.
If I can set aside my internal argument and position myself in a reasonably balanced way, I see the convergence of many factors in the awakening of this New Age in California. Who we were had as much to do with this psychological revolution as the actual encounter with eastern spirituality, imported myths, learning seated meditation of Zen or tai chi, est and Scientology, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt, Ouspensky’s Gurdjeiff and Óscar Ichazo’s Arica. For me it even included the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.
Stories of discovery and the invention of ideas shape both our culture and our lives. Told and retold, details elaborated and distorted, they become myths. Some of these tales are obviously self-serving while others ring of real experience. In either case, filled with many assumptions, obvious and hidden, they are rich in information.
One current version of the beginnings of the Western transmission of the Enneagram runs something like this: in the early 1970’s, Claudio Naranjo, fresh from his short and incomplete training with Oscar Ichazo in Arica Chile, begins a tentative conversation with a select group of therapists and teachers in a Berkeley living room. He distributes crudely mimeographed nine pointed figures to experienced self-observers and professional therapists to flesh out the sketchy outline of personality characteristics that Ichazo had developed for each point. These highly trained psychologists and teachers set about the task of connecting Naranjo's and Ichazo’s fragmentary notes with peer reviewed psychological research and reliable diagnostic instruments.
There are only two facts in this myth. Naranjo did return to Berkeley after working with Ichazo in Chile, and there were rather rudimentary descriptions of the nine fixations on mimeographed paper that people used as outlines for their own notes. But after that this particular creation story departs from any description of the real work of Naranjo’s groups and, I might venture, becomes an invitation for the therapist’s students to pay money and join an Enneagram group with psychological theories and clinical diagnosis.
Here is what we can say with certainty: the Bolivian teacher Óscar Ichazo was the first person that we know who taught the psychological-spiritual system of the nine pointed figure. He called it the Enneagon. His talks about what he called “protoanalysis” at the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada (Santiago) in 1969 were where Naranjo first made contact with Ichazo and the system. Later in 1970 Naranjo and John Lilly with approximately 35 other people recruited from Esalen went to Arica Chile for Ichazo’s first training. When Naranjo returned to Berkeley, he began his own investigation of what he termed the Enneagram of Fixations.
Naranjo’s SAT began in the Fall of 1971 with about 25 people. SAT stood for the Seekers After Truth, a name Naranjo borrowed from G.I. Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men. By the end of the second year, the number of people in SAT ranged between 50 to 60. We came from all walks of life; there were several psychologists, a Jesuit priest, a Franciscan Friar, one seminarian, one former nun, a devotee of Swami Rudrananda, a rabbi’s wife, a woman who’d been associated with the Gurdjieff Foundation; several professors and Phd’s, two medical doctors, school teachers, at least one lawyer, more than a handful of psychology graduate students, body workers, therapists, a film-maker, a martial artist, a C-level New York fashion executive, Ravi Shankar’s mother-in-law, one professional journalist, a talented product designer and a film distributor, but there were also carpenters, house painters and a French hippie. We were a cross section of highly educated, college town Berkeleyites, predominately white, middle class, a large proportion of Jews, one Muslim, a few queer people, and a few Asians. The membership included Hameed Ali who became a well-known second generation Enneagram teacher, the transpersonal scholar Charlie Tart as well as my friend Father Bob Ochs who became pivotal in the spreading of the Enneagram beyond Naranjo’s groups..
I found myself in a far different group than the Arica pioneers I met from Esalen. We were younger spiritual idealists of the 60’s generation. We had for the most part deserted the faiths of our collective fathers and mothers, but we still held strongly to the idea that spiritual practice could overcome the ills of a society that was becoming increasingly materialistic and egocentric, aggressive and greedy. Our parents' generation had nearly destroyed the world in a war ended by nuclear destruction, dreams of peace became a Cold War and our relatively peaceful world was torn apart by the horror of a post colonial civil war in Vietnam. No one I knew who’d self-selected out to join SAT felt any commitment to fight other human beings.
Most of therapists had reached a dead-end with the enterprise of professional psychotherapy, the hippies were burned out on the drug exploration, but were still seeking after the promises of the sexual revolution. Nearly everyone at least pretended to be liberated in attitudes towards sex and drugs. Sex was casual; the lines of demarcation between abuse and pleasure were blurred. Drug experimentation was almost a requirement. Smoking weed was an everyday necessity for many. Weekend hallucinogenic trips were common.
I was about to step out of the strict Jesuit religious training that had been honed and ossified by at least 30 generations of Jesuits since Saint Ignatius. That tradition had produced more than its share of scholars and saints. Its discipline was legendary as well as its reputation for being a vanguard, the cutting edge of the institutional Church. I was the second Jesuit to become a member of SAT, not to convert but to test my own experience.
I begin learning to use the Enneagram.
I will violate my self-imposed rule of calling the early enneagram teachers by their last names. Father Bob Ochs became my friend, even a close friend in the cautious, somewhat tentative emotional way that religious men and women form friendships. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude: With his guidance I discovered a path probably cut off for this young Jesuit. The reforms of Vatican II had relaxed that grip, but they were not the leap required to enter the spiritual path. I was discouraged as I witnessed the spiritual enthusiasm of Council ebb when political pressure mounted and tried to reign in its driving force.
The first thing I noticed about Bob was the bright glean in his eyes and his animated voice. He was a very engaging teacher who loved to laugh. Bob was not a big man physically. His wiry frame seemed constantly in motion, arms and hands pointing looked like the antennae for his attention that wasn’t quite sure where to land. He was a remarkable and courageous human who never gave up exploring and questioning..
Bob was also a Jesuit through and through with outstanding theological credentials. He had trained at Université Catholique de Louvain, Jesuitenkolleg in Innsbruck, and was awarded a PhD. in Theology from Institut Catholique de Paris in 1969. He was dedicated to the work of spiritual revolution in the spirit of Vatican II, but his emphasis was not strictly theological as you can tell by the titles of the books he wrote early in his career: The Death in Every Now (1969) and God is More Present Than You Think (1970).
Bob had been working with Naranjo in the first SAT group. His intellectual and spiritual gifts were a good match for Naranjo. I was not the first Jesuit that Bob introduced to the Enneagram. Under Naranjo’s direction Bob began teaching the Enneagram to a group of his former students at Loyola University in Chicago. In 1972 he was going to offer his introduction to the Enneagram at the Jesuit School in Berkeley. Although he was working as Naranjo’s agent, Bob brought his own passion to the work. It was no polite intellectual exercise. It was spiritual in the deepest sense of the word..
I was sitting on the floor of a large open room in one of the buildings at the Jesuit School when Bob said with a chuckle that the origin of the Enneagram Teaching might have been the esoteric school that trained Jesus. Bob was not certainly not given to blind faith or superstition, but this assertion is as unsupported as the claim that during Jesus’s lost years, the time between when he stood up and amazed the synagogue elders and his baptism by John, he was initiated and trained by an Indian guru. Yet not one person in the room challenged it, myself included. Bob then repeated the Tibetan oracle that "when the iron bird flies,” the Dharma will come to the West. This was only 14 years after His Holiness the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa in disguise as the People’s Liberation Army marched towards the Potala Palace.
But setting aside the otherworldly language and extravagant claims of New Age spirituality, most of us who were drawn to spiritual practice that demands something more than sitting in a church pew and forking over some cash come from a place of experiencing personal pain—sometimes excruciating and seemingly inexplicable. Certainly that was where I was even if I didn’t fully acknowledge it. I didn’t feel any magic in the New Age hype, and I am still no fan of Nostradamus style pronouncements, but I was seeking a remedy, and if I had to learn a new language, I was willing to try.
Bob’s teaching was also rooted in the spirituality of Saint Ignatius Loyola. As a Jesuit novice I’d been trained in the exercise known as the Particular Examen: three times a day, for 15 minutes, I would just note how many times I’d broken the rule of silence, when I’d had stray thoughts, where I’d neglected to keep “custody of the senses.” After taking inventory, I was instructed to generate compunction, and resolve to avoid specific thoughts or actions—avoiding sin and the occasions of sin were the way towards self-perfection.
Bob talked about the Examen that first night, but his adaptation was more nuanced and seemed more sophisticated than Ignatius'. He asked us to try to experience the feelings in our body as we looked over our day—How did we feel in our bodies when we got up in the morning? Did we smell the stew we cooked? What attitude did we bring to our study, did we notice the way we held the book in our hands, even how we felt when we used the toilet?
In a letter that I sent to Father Paul Lucy, who was my direct Jesuit superior, I wrote, “If this is not what Father Ignatius intended in the Examen, it’s what he should have intended.” We have to train ourselves to feel directly, not after-the-fact judgment or analysis. To be present at the moment when we feel, see and act is not something that we do naturally, or if we do as children, we soon learn to forget it. The exercise of trying to catch the immediacy of experience is closer to what I would learn later Gurdjieff taught about self-remembering: “it is to know you are angry when you are angry.” Gurdjieff also described the practice with an admonition: “You do not remember yourselves. You do not feel yourselves, you are not conscious of yourselves. You do not feel: I observe, I feel, I see.’”
During these first few months I also learned to meditate in formal posture, breath-centered forms of concentration. I experienced the difficulty of sitting for long periods, taking the time required for the work of taking personal inventory. In mindfulness practice, at least as we know it from the Theravadan tradition, there was, I thought, the promise of clearing of the senses and mind as you simply experience your body and breath. But “self-remembering” is different from my understanding of mindfulness: just paying attention with no promise of it disappearing.
To ease the Enneagram into a Catholic/Christian context, Bob began with a kind of rift on Nine Deadly Sins—traditionally the list contains only seven: Pride, Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Lust and Greed. Stretching the definition of Envy to include Melancholy, and then adding Lying and Fear, we have the nine points of the Enneagram. But here’s where it gets dicey. None of the Enneagram “sins'' actually describe deeds.
Christians do not have a big issue with using pain in spiritual work—in fact they relish it—but it is seen as the result of sin, not blindness or ignorance as it is seen in most Asian traditions. . In 1998, the US Catholic bishops warned about using the Enneagram, They decreed, "sin is indeed unhealthy behavior and can be combated by an improved understanding, but it is at its root a moral problem, so that repentance before God and one’s neighbor must be the fundamental response. Enneagram teaching thus obscures the Christian understanding of sin." Human nature is basically sinful. Acts in violation of the expressed will of the Deity require repentance. To save yourself, follow the rules; this leads to redemption which in turn leads to salvation. This is the catechism that I learned as an Irish Catholic boy.
“Sin is unhealthy behavior”—get the memo out to the Garden before Eve falls under the serpent’s spell and all hell breaks loose. The work of the Enneagram sees liberation as a struggle against ignorance, blindness, and greed, cowardice, laziness and exaggeration which in themselves are not sinful. At the Jesuit School Bob taught that the fixations are a hindrance rather than a reflection of fallen human nature. He said many times that ideas themselves when coupled with a solid inner practice could change a person’s attitude and actions. And his conviction was, I feel, the intersection where the inspiration of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, particularly the identification of what Ignatius called the “chief fault” and connecting it to the Enneagram’s work of identifying one’s fixation.
He opened the investigation with a question: Is the way we distort the world the root of our negative behaviors? Each of the 9 points was the point of entry for an extended meditation on the nature of ego fixation. In the Spiritual Exercises the first meditation is what Ignatius calls I will quote one sentence from what Ignatius calls “The Principle and Foundation:” . . . it follows that we are to use the things of this world only to the extent that they help us to this end (the praise reverence and service of God), and we ought to rid ourselves of the things of this world to the extent that they get in the way of this end.” Before we examined our own Ego-Fixation, we were encouraged to look at the nature of spiritual hindrances central to the Enneagram in detail, weeks long meditations on points 9, 3, and 6. We explored how the major anchors of all nine fixations, sloth, lying and fear, were present in all our actions.
Bob's teaching was very present—methodical, meticulous and exacting. He took us through the types and subtypes in an orderly way, using the material that Naranjo had given the first SAT groups, and, in an exploratory way, tried to “type” each of us. Although we tried to type ourselves as part of the discipline of learning the system, Bob, like Naranjo, did not hesitate to point out a good place to begin the exploration.
He asked questions. He might say, “Ah that sounds like something a Six might say. Why don’t you look and see if fear might be the motivator? Just explore it. Trace it back. Look for other places in your life where fear might be operative.” He was colloquial. As each of us began to understand the system and see similarities in our own behaviors with various points, Bob would ask us to “say a little more.” He was always gentle and good humored, never harsh or demeaning. I remember when he asked a meticulous nun not to comb her hair for a week and report back on how she felt. Although it drove her nuts, she loved the laughs as she shared in an entirely authentic and revealing way.
Bob asked us time and again to focus attention on those places where we know we hurt but are blind to the source of our pain. I experienced a growing recognition of my own pain. That was the place in our psyche to explore our connection to the vast mystery of the universe. Bob was committed to helping ease suffering. He highlighted the practices of meditation, particularly the examen, and meditation on humility, tools Saint Ignatius outlined in his Spiritual Exercises.
Bob’s foundation in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius is what I call “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” I felt very much at home.
I am not Ego Plan, but I learned to act the role,
When Bob began to help me identify my personal fixation, he pointed to Point Seven, Ego Plan, or Gluttony. Gluttony of the mind is clinically defined as the pull toward an array of interesting possibilities. It's just the pull. It never goes away. It is never satisfied. The promise of these possibilities remains abstract because the Plan does not really engage with them. My rebellious streak found this amusing, I could make hedonism a Christian virtue, like a bright colored Pachinko ball bouncing from adventure to opera to gourmet meal to saving the world.
I learned an important lesson: the Enneagram’s typology demonstrates that my responses, my solutions, my way of framing the world which I imagined were quirky and idiosyncratic did not in any way make me unique. On the surface the textbook description of Ego Plan matched how I handled the tricky situations in life, always planning what to do, creating a fantasy action plan, but never fully satisfying the conditions for success, I would always be disappointed with the outcome. I would be concerned with manipulating the present to create a perfect future, the fulfillment of my ideals. But it also predicted that no sooner had that future become present than I would be disappointed and feel a compulsion to work towards a new, perhaps more perfectly tuned version of the ideal.
The passion of gluttony is the emotional energy that fuels the fixation and its trap of idealism. The Plan says, "Why get mired in boredom or discomfort when pleasurable alternatives are available?" But running after experiences that are never satisfying masks the pain of not being able to touch the emotional core of an experience. Plans are perhaps the most heady of all the fixations because they are so disconnected from their feelings. That trait is key to a correct diagnosis.
Could Ego Plan provide a plausible explanation why I abandoned architecture for the promise of theology and the priesthood. Was it simply the dream of greener pastures? Was my fixation the reason that in the Jesuits I was known as a Gourmet Gourmand? Did Plan get to the root of the inspiration for all my artistic projects that I thought made me interesting and attractive? Did being a Plan predispose me to bi-sexuality? I was warned that Plans had such bad attention that they were prone to having traffic accidents. I didn’t think of myself as a bad driver, but I began to have my doubts. I did crash into a tree driving myself home from school in my last year in Preparatory school.
What also convinced nearly everyone that I was an Ego Plan was the easy way I dismissed troubling situations, brushing them off with a light laugh or some off handed remark. Naranjo one said in the group, “Hear that tone in Ken’s voice, trying to reassure himself that everything is OK.”:Then he said that if I could achieve sobriety for just one minute, I would be enlightened.
Key to understanding gluttony as a passion was its relation to fear, Point Six. Cowardice, is the most jittery of the points on the Enneagram, Nothing is ever enough. There is no security, no peace, no real friends, no confidence. This fed my seriously low self-esteem, and I thought that the care was settled. All data points of the diagnosis fell into place. I was Ego Plan. In my self understanding I would view the world as a Glutton for the next 30 years.
Naranjo was not “The Teacher of the Age.”
The same week that I began my formal seminary courses at the Jesuit School of Theology, I also started attending three to three and a half hour SAT meetings twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday nights. We were told that in the Sufi tradition these were shock points where our work of self-observation could produce real results.
While the setup had the marks of a cultist framework, I didn’t look on Naranjo as a guru. I was so wary of being branded as a Moonie that I only allowed myself to think of him as an extraordinary professor—certainly not an enlightened being, an avatar or the Teacher of the Age. However I quickly became aware that he’d had a profound insight working with Óscar Ichazo, perhaps even an enlightenment experience that tied together long years of study and psychological investigation. I actually felt honored to be present while he unpacked that inspiration.
Naranjo’s unpacking of his experience was not an orderly process. Bringing something new into existence is by its nature messy. Naranjo was simultaneously experimenting with the method of delivery while fleshing out his insight into the Enneagram. Some might date the introduction of the modern Enneagram movement when Ichazo organized that first training in Chile. I prefer to date it when Naranjo returned to Berkeley with his experience, and, according to the complaint filed by Ichazo’s attorneys in their lawsuit against Palmer, the only copy of Ichazo’s extensive notes not returned to Ichazo at the completion of the first Arica training.
In SAT, Naranjo would work with individuals to determine their fixation, and then with a mixture of therapeutic tools and self-observation, we began to see how the information unfolded in our lives. We were fleshing out the personality of the Enneagram. There were no tablets inscribed with a set of rules that we had to follow in order to be healed or fulfilled. The Enneagram is not a religion of revealed truth nor did a guru direct the path to enlightenment.
In addition to Naranjo’s presentations, some rather basic lists of the characteristics for each fixation as well as a few pages from Ichazo’s Proto Analysis were circulated. In addition we all kept our own notes and we compared notes. Detailed notes were highly regarded, and there were several meticulous recorders. I mention these notes because they became the basis of the wider study of the Enneagram to the New Age audience who began to work with Palmer as well as the small group of Jesuits and other religious who studied the Enneagram in Chicago with Ochs.
We also promised not to speak about the Enneagram outside the group primarily because confidentiality is integral to self-discovery. We promised not to use certain ‘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.
Naranjo was type Five, what Ichazo labeled “Stinge.” Ichazo says that for this fixation “life is fascinating to watch from a safe hidden place, but is much too terrifying to take part in.” It would seem nearly impossible for a Stinge to actually step into the public role of a teacher or group leader, but Naranjo did lead. However I always felt in him a hesitancy to engage with a larger group. He was more at ease in the defined circumstances of working individually or with a smaller subset of his students. Ironically his chosen profession required a level of personal engagement although it was also a professional requirement to remain as unemotional and objective as possible. Ichazo pins the trap of the Stinge as getting caught as the “Observer.” Maybe starting SAT was Naranjo’s act of courage to venture into the heart of the storm.
I thought that it was difficult for Naranjo to take center stage. Over the course of those first weeks and months, I noticed that Naranjo seemed to appear and then quickly disappear. He relied on representatives to deliver what he called “indications.” At first Rezeleah Schaeffer and later Kathy Speeth would meet with the group and deliver a set of instructions for group and personal work. Naranjo might appear for an hour or so. He would work with an individual or observe, but sometimes he would talk about one of the fixations, or reflect on some particular point of meditation practice. He told or retold stories about Gurdjieff, Idries Shah or Mulla Nasreddin Hodja. To my recollection, his comments seemed to be equally divided between talking about the Enneagram and the techniques of meditation, self-reflection, introspection, or as Gurdjieff described it, Self-Remembering.
A messy process has its own hidden dangers. We were only a few years removed from the hippie Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury. We were ready, willing, even eager for what we imagined to be the shock of Eastern spiritual practice. We were also terribly naive. At times our work together became a circus. There was a dark side. Marred by his paranoia and personal experience of trauma, Naranjo veered into womanizing, drug experimentation, or relying on psychic messages from an unseen world, and his work turned dangerous, destructive, even deadly.
We called Naranjo’s house on Allston Way the harem. It was off limits to most of the group. His former wife, her daughter as well as several other women in the group lived there. Although Naranjo never directed anyone to have sex with another group member—it would have interfered with his position of being an objective observer—he didn’t set any limits or guidelines. As a matter of fact no one said much about sex other than gossip. As a result basic ethics surrounding sexual manipulation or exploitation in a group setting were just not present.
Naranjo also used drugs. He’s spoken about it openly, even written about his experiences so I am disclosing a dirty secret. The use of LSD, MDMA, hallucinogens, and plant based narcotics was widespread. There was only one exercise where LSD was recommended though not required, but the general ethos was one of open experimentation. I use experimentation loosely. There were no controls as might be expected in a professional setting. There was no debriefing after a tripping. My personal view is that drug use became a real problem and was one of the factors that led to the end of the first SAT groups.
Though troublesome, this dark side does not discount the value of the work that we managed to accomplish—in a way some of the more thorny issues were part of that training. However the side-effects persist. In my view we cannot allow them to stay in the shadows, or sweep them under the rug. If we purge them from our telling the history of this period, we are just not being honest.
By 1976 Naranjo began to withdraw from teaching the Enneagram. He retired from teaching SAT and took a position at the University of California Santa Cruz. Others with more personal knowledge can comment or speculate on his motivation. My sense is that the initial work had been exhausting, that the inspired impulse of his Arica experience had petered out and drained him personally. Some speculate that his drug experimentation had taken a toll which from my observation is a strong possibility. One member of the first group told me that much of his distress stemmed from the end of his intimate relationship with Kathy Speeth. All these are possible scenarios.
I do know from my conversations with him that he was apprehensive about the possible distortion of the Enneagram after his course materials had been released to a wider audience. It is difficult for me to accept the callous judgmental side of Naranjo that seemed to emerge later when his role as the person who carried the Enneagram into the northern hemisphere was swept away first by the multiplicity of trainings that began to appear as early as 1980 and then in the flood of books, almost 150 by 1990.
After some period, I cannot fix a date to his reemergence as an Enneagram teacher, he turned on people who had been members of the group, especially people whom he felt had divulged his papers to Palmer and the Jesuits who had worked with Ochs. His position was that his descriptions of the fixations were somehow the only correct ones. He said to me on several occasions about Palmer had “watered it down” and some others whose knowledge of the system could be traced to Ochs just mistyped people.
I joined a fairly large number of SAT people who began working with Henry Korman, a Fourth Way teacher whom Naranjo introduced to the group. Naranjo seemed to want us to have some avenues open to continue the Work, but it was not a clean ending. I would continue with Korman for 3 more years, but there was always some feeling of nostalgia. We had witnessed and participated in a spiritual revolution. I quote Hunter S. Thompson reflecting on the San Francisco of the late 60’s, “…with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
