History is sprinkled with enlightened souls of all creeds and convictions.
Let's learn from them what we need to know.
Let's learn from them what we need to know.
Pythagoras, Gurdjieff and the Enneagram
Lynn Quirolo
The enneagram was introduced to the West by G.I. Gurdjieff in 1916 as a symbol of the harmonic structure and inner dynamic of the cosmos. In the early 1970s, Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of Fixations, an application of the enneagram quite distinct from Gurdjieff’s original diagram of the “Laws of 3 and 7,” began its evolution in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth (SAT) groups in Berkeley.
Gurdjieff never explicitly divulged the sources of his teachings and the origin of the enneagram has been a source of speculation. The most prominent theory regarding the source of the enneagram is probably J.G. Bennett’s who believed that Gurdjieff learned the enneagram from Sufis in Central Asia (Gurdjieff: Making a New World, 1973). Although Oscar Ichazo states that he worked out the Enneagram of Fixations himself using Gurdjieff’s enneagram as a template (“The Arica Training,” in Charles Tart’s Transpersonal Psychologies, Harper & Row, 1975, p. 331) it is a common belief that his typology is “ancient wisdom” stemming from either Sufi or Christian origins.
Lynn Quirolo
The enneagram was introduced to the West by G.I. Gurdjieff in 1916 as a symbol of the harmonic structure and inner dynamic of the cosmos. In the early 1970s, Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of Fixations, an application of the enneagram quite distinct from Gurdjieff’s original diagram of the “Laws of 3 and 7,” began its evolution in Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth (SAT) groups in Berkeley.
Gurdjieff never explicitly divulged the sources of his teachings and the origin of the enneagram has been a source of speculation. The most prominent theory regarding the source of the enneagram is probably J.G. Bennett’s who believed that Gurdjieff learned the enneagram from Sufis in Central Asia (Gurdjieff: Making a New World, 1973). Although Oscar Ichazo states that he worked out the Enneagram of Fixations himself using Gurdjieff’s enneagram as a template (“The Arica Training,” in Charles Tart’s Transpersonal Psychologies, Harper & Row, 1975, p. 331) it is a common belief that his typology is “ancient wisdom” stemming from either Sufi or Christian origins.
Setting the Record Straight
Jack Labanauskas and Andrea Isaacs
We live in an age where our utopian hopes of finding solutions to humanity’s problems through scientific progress have evaporated in the face of human weakness. Not everything “new” or “advanced” has turned out to be an improvement, and it is therefore not surprising that the rebound from this disappointment gave us the New Age movement—another utopia, but one based on debunking common sense and history. Not everything about the New Age movement was worthless—in the mix were some brilliant and unique new findings, as well as some old and venerable wisdom. Be that as it may, serious thinkers learned quickly to regard all new trends with a healthy dose of skepticism, and to favor systems with roots reaching back for centuries. The “New Think” gurus, “no flies on them,” caught onto this trend, and ipso facto, gave legitimacy to their pet theories by concocting mythical tales of ancient origins. Everything just had to have started in ancient Egypt or thereabouts. Sadly, several recent authentic advances in thinking as well as some time-tested truths got lumped in with this cluster foxtrot we call “New Age.”
The “Enneagram movement” did not go unscathed. It too, was taken, used and adapted to meet the need of the moment. The current definition of the Enneagram ranges from applications in the business world as “a personality type system, giving those who master it, powerful advantages for building teams, choosing personnel and in conflict resolution” to the preferred use in circles of psychologists and social workers as “a valuable tool in counseling relationship issues and taking stock in one’s own assets/handicaps” to a more spiritual philosophy as “an esoteric, mystical science of immutable cosmic laws constituting the ego’s dynamic ground.” At times, the proponents of one or the other side of this issue would scoff at the others’ materialistic or air-headed approach.
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