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Excerpt from Part I
Copyright 1996 William Patrick Patterson
The ancient esoteric teaching of the Fourth Way, reformulated for our time, was first introduced by G. I. Gurdjieff in Russia circa 1915. The teaching, Mr. Gurdjieff said, was "completely self-supporting and independent of other lines and it has been completely unknown up to the present time. . .[and the enneagram] is one of its principal symbols." In later discussions it was illustrated how the enneagram could be used to understand the relationship and transformation of the three foods (air, physical food, and impressions) within the body for the purposes of evolution and connection with higher being-bodies. The enneagram, he said, was "the fundamental hieroglyph of a universal language which has as many different meanings as there are levels of men." As a principal symbol of the teaching, it could not be understood or used appropriately outside the teaching. Said Gurdjieff, "The knowledge of the enneagram has for a very long time been preserved in secret and if it now is, so to speak, made available to all, it is only in an incomplete and theoretical form of which nobody could make any practical use without instruction from a man who knows."
The existence of the enneagram was first made widely known with the publication of P. D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous in 1949. The application of the symbol to "personality fixations" was first introduced by Oscar Ichazo. Through Ichazo, Dr. Claudio Naranjo, a specialist in human typology, learned of what might be called "the personality enneagram" in 1969. Naranjo codified it into a system and, on his own accord, began to teach it to others with the proviso that they keep it a secret. This, of course, was naive. Interest in the enneagram, as applied to human typology or personality fixations, built steadily over the years but finally "came to market" in the late 1980s with the publication of numerous books on the personality enneagram.
"I'VE TAUGHT THE ENNEAGRAM IN ADDICTION AND RECOVERY CENTERS, I'VE TAUGHT IT IN DANCE halls, I've taught it in high schools, and in business settings," said Helen Palmer. And taught it she certainly has, traveling the world giving lectures, workshops and corporate consultations, as well as teaching at her own 'school' in Berkeley. "The psychotherapists want it as a very useful, hot tool to work with normal, high-functioning people," said Mrs. Palmer. "Business consultants love it because it deeply facilitates conflict resolution. It really helps in negotiation and especially in team building." Her indefatigable crusading, unquestionable certainty in regard to the enneagram, and her three books on the subject--her first sold over 200,000 copies--have given her in the minds of many in what is called the enneagram community the title, "the mother of the personality enneagram."
And Mrs. Palmer is just one of the many who are propelling the enneagram movement. Jesuits, frocked and defrocked, therapists, New Agers, human potential and business consultants have all now published enneagram books. Enneagram associations have been formed. There are tapes, videos, study groups, certification courses, retreats and workshops galore, even movie reviews---Thelma and Louise is really a story of point nines and counter-phobic point sixes; Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry is a point eight. Newsletters and monthly newspapers have also sprung up running articles such as "The Ennea-style," which features an analysis of how clothing relates to various personalities of the enneagram. Point ones, for example, "dress to repress," while point twos "dress to effect," and so forth, until nine is reached where the dressing is "dress to dress." Meanwhile, in business, human resources people use the enneagram as a hiring tool and, according to Newsweek, the CIA uses it to train its agents. Some Hollywood and TV scriptwriters are building their plots around it. The First International Enneagram Conference held at prestigious Stanford University several years ago drew some 1,600 attendees. Clearly, this is the time of the enneagram.
This personality enneagram---human typology or personality fixations as applied to the enneagram---is now well-known in the areas of self-help, human resources, therapy, and certain fringe spiritual groups. Its success has brought its detractors, one of whom, the man commonly agreed to be "the father of the personality enneagram," Dr. Claudio Naranjo, said, "...the questionable ethics of the earliest teachers has had cultural consequences, for I see the movement as pervaded by a combination of greed and arrogance and by great disrespect toward the sources of the knowledge to the extent of insinuating that the tradition is a myth." Oscar Ichazo, known to contemporary enneagrammers as the grandfather of the personality enneagram, said, "Concretely speaking the enneagram authors start from the point of a 'belief,' which they make into a 'dogma,' because they accept it irrationally and in full without any analysis or criticism as if it would be a divine truth, unquestionable and final. They appoint an 'old Sufi' theory or whatever as their basis to elaborate scientific propositions. The work of the enneagram authors is plainly unscientific and without rational foundation, because it is based on dogmatic formulations." Ichazo is saying that Palmer, Naranjo and others do not know the source or real basis of the enneagram, the root series of principles upon which it operates, but instead take the enneagram as a given, ascribing its source to Sufis who, with a few come-lately exceptions, take no interest in it as it is not part of their teaching. Ichazo declared: "I know Sufism extensively---I've practiced traditional zhikr, prayer, meditation---and I know realized Sufi sheiks. It is not part of their theoretical framework. They couldn't care less about the Enneagon [Ichazo's name for the enneagram]."
Although born sixteen years after Gurdjieff first made the enneagram known, Oscar Ichazo nevertheless claims himself as the source of the enneagram or, as he would have it, enneagon. That cannot be true, but certainly he is responsible for introducing what might be called the "contemporary" enneagram. What is known of Ichazo is only what he has written or told others about himself and so its veracity is without witness. Sometimes the accounts differ. This is what he says: Born in 1931 in Bolivia, his father was a military officer and so his early years were spent at a military installation. By the age of six he was having periodic cataleptic attacks every few days in which he would become very rigid and frightened. To cure himself, at the age of thirteen, he took the drug ayahuasca (yaje) made, interestingly enough in terms of later events, from a vine which grows around trees in the Amazonian forests. More than once he says he had an out-of-body experience which allowed him "to experience the unity of matter." He went on to study yoga, hypnosis, Theosophy, Hindu philosophy, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and the Kabbalah.
Then in La Paz in 1950, at the age of nineteen, he met a European businessman who gave him copies of Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous and Tertium Organum. The man told Ichazo of a study group in Buenos Aires to which he belonged and invited him to join. (Ichazo first said he spent four years with the group, later two years, then one year. In his early description, it was a Fourth Way group, in a later account it is undefined.) Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, Ichazo was told to rent a large apartment for the group where they could work. He was to serve them while they worked, making coffee and so forth. He didn't live at the apartment, but in a hut on the outskirts of the city. The group passed him through a number of experiments or initiations, one of which was to sit in a lotus position on a post until they returned. Three days passed, he says, before they returned. Ichazo's body was so rigid he had to be lifted off the post. Back in his hut, his personality structure broke down completely, after which he was transformed. When he went to the apartment, he found the men waiting for him. Now, they said, he could join the group.
According to whichever account may be true, either one or four years later he returned to La Paz. There, he either discovered, or created, the system of the enneagramatic psychological fixations. The versions, or amplifications, of what happened differ in part. In the earliest he said he received or discovered the knowledge from the 'Green Qu Tub' or the Archangel Gabriel. More recently, that he created the application but was "in a state of 'divine presence.' Metatron is the prince of archangels and an archetypal figure for the concentration of the relative mind, you know. At this point, I started visualizing the Enneagons in front of me. They didn't just appear. I started visualizing it. It was not that some Archangel Metatron came and said, 'Here it is.' If things were that simple and ridiculous--my God."
Thereafter, in 1951 or 1955, Ichazo began teaching groups. He also made trips to Nepal, Kashmir, the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan. Originally, he said he made contact with the same school from which Gurdjieff came. Ichazo says he was given much knowledge during his journeys, allowed to read the Akashic records, and at the death of one of the five elders of what he will only call "the School," he became the Qu Tub, or center, the one who was to carry the knowledge to the West.
On October 1, 1969, in Santiago, Chile, Oscar Ichazo gave a series of lectures at the Instituto de Psicologia Aplicada on the enneagram as a means of mapping the human psyche and its character fixations. Among the attendees was Dr. Claudio B. Naranjo, an expert on various psychotropic substances and a research associate at the University of Chile who had introduced feeling-and image-enhancing drugs to psychotherapy. Naranjo had studied at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship and was now a Guggenheim Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. While at Berkeley, he had received letters from fellow psychoanalysts and a former patient extolling Ichazo's esoteric knowledge, particularly of Naranjo's specialty, human typology. Although unimpressed with Ichazo himself--"His total impact on me as a person did not impress me in any way"--Naranjo found himself "awed by the completeness of his theoretical picture and techniques."
Naranjo spent two months with Ichazo and a group of twenty-seven Chileans with whom he worked. He then returned to California. Naranjo had extensive connections with Esalen, then the center of the human potential movement, and with Berkeley's psychological community, particularly the Center for Biochemical Dynamics (where he had continued his study of typology and the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD, psylocybin, mescaline and yajé, a shamanic drug growing in the jungles of the Colombian Andes, the same drug taken by Ichazo).
Naranjo spoke informally to a good many of his friends about his experiences with Ichazo, who in the meantime asked Naranjo to see if Americans would be interested in working with him in a ten-month program. That May, in 1970, Naranjo gave a talk at Esalen telling of his experience with Ichazo, saying he "claimed to be somebody who had been schooled or 'accepted' in the same Sufi tradition that was the source of Gurdjieff's training." Ichazo, he said, was explicit about differentiating "'the School' from traditional Sufi orders, including the Naqshbandi." According to Ichazo, while some Sufi orders derived from the School, it was not Sufi. About his personal impression of Ichazo, Naranjo said that although he seemed to have "an authoritarian streak that I don't trust" and that "I don't like him as a person," he found that "his bag of tricks is incredible." Soon, all the talk in spiritual and psychological circles at Esalen and Berkeley was about Ichazo.
Hearing about Ichazo from Naranjo, the scientist John Lilly decided to spend a week with him and flew down to Arica, Chile, a rapidly growing fishing port of 100,000 people, most living in old packing crates, near the Peruvian border. It was a desert and, according to Lilly, "one of the driest places on earth." Ichazo's school, he said, was called the Instituto de Gnosologia and was "billed as a center for the revival of an ancient esoteric school of mysticism." He found a balding man of medium height with prominent, dark brown eyes. Though his physical appearance did not live up to "the visual expectation of a 'holy man,'" Lilly was impressed, like Naranjo, with Ichazo's knowledge. Unlike Naranjo, he found Ichazo a "warm, likable human being who was practical, pragmatic, direct and had boundless energy. He is very positive and never criticizes third parties."
When the ten-month course began on July 1, 1970, fifty-four Americans, Naranjo and Lilly among them, were in attendance. The days were long, fifteen and more hours filled with gymnastics, meditation, talks and experiments. During the training, Naranjo is said to have gone into a satori state and refused to return. Ichazo had to bring him back. Angry, Naranjo returned. Things apparently went wrong with Naranjo after that, for after seven months he was expelled by the group as undesirable. According to Ichazo, "Naranjo was rejected by 100% of the vote [of the group]. The main reason being that he could not drop his 'messianic' attitude that was felt as very individualistic and egocentric." Lilly stayed on and had many conversations with Ichazo, among them a talk about divine grace in which Ichazo used the Sufi term for it, baraka. Then they discussed the training:
Lilly: What sort of name are you giving it? Is this the Sufi thing or is this something else?
Ichazo: We call it always "The School."
Lilly: People want a label. The Sufi name in the United States has a lot of prestige....
Ichazo: It is better for us, John, that the name is something new because the teaching is completely new. If we confuse our names, for instance with Sufism, everybody is going prepared for that way. Let us make it something new.
Lilly left Arica before he completed the program. He gives differing accounts of when he left, saying after six months, later eight. He left then either a month before or after Naranjo. A lot of reasons are given, but it seems clear that he wanted to maintain what he considered his independence as a "scientific explorer." He said, "I did not like the idea of being in a closed group, esoteric or otherwise. I have pursued my own path, learning from whomever and wherever I could...."
Returning to Berkeley, Claudio Naranjo focused his entire energies on understanding the enneagram material that Ichazo had presented. Naranjo had first learned of the enneagram in his teens when reading Ouspensky's Search. It is not clear but he may have joined a Gurdjieff group in Venezuela, leaving after a short time. Having a negative attitude toward the existing Gurdjieff teaching represented by Lord Pentland---"I had been disappointed in the extent to which Gurdjieff's school entailed a living lineage," he says---Naranjo had to rely on his own research abetted by the likely use of feeling and imagery enhancers.
Intently studying all the publicly available Gurdjieff literature and Ichazo's enneagram material of psychological compulsions, Naranjo saw a correspondence between what Ichazo was saying and Christianity's seven deadly sins. He then related this, along with information on the zodiac, to the various psychological typologies (histrionic, compulsive, avoidant or schizoid, and so forth) elaborated in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and soon developed, as he would say, his own enneagrammatic "collage." However, he was "under a commitment of reserve" to Oscar Ichazo in regard to teaching the personality enneagram. So Naranjo wrote to Ichazo asking for permission to teach. Ichazo never answered. "I took the fact that he didn't reply," said Naranjo, "as a sign that I myself had to decide."
In 1971 he formed his own school and called it SAT (Seekers After Truth). This was a particularly fertile time to start an 'esoteric school.' Having sought the spiritual with drugs---"LSD is America's Jesus Christ," said the Indian holy man Meher Baba---many young people were looking for a way to get high without them. With his extensive knowledge of drugs, human typology, and now a version of the enneagram, Naranjo's school soon had upwards of a hundred students.
Last updated 1999.01.15, 5 06.00 GMT.
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