Setting the Record Straight
by 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.
Some of the disagreements about the proper use of the Enneagram begin, without a doubt, with a false representation of its origins.
The common misunderstanding goes something like this: In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oscar Ichazo, a young buck aged 19 is serving coffee to a group of brilliant Gurdjieffians who know all about the Enneagram, the fixations, the passions, the virtues, etc. These wise men allow Oscar to listen in on their conversations and he promptly picks up all the wisdom they received from Gurdjieff. (We never learn the names of these wise men—nor, elsewhere in the world, do we hear from other disciples of Gurdjieff’s who are “in the know” about this topic.) The year is 1950, and written records, tapes and films are broadly available—even in Buenos Aires. Yet strangely, no one seemed to care to record any of this wonderful material except our coffee boy…and if we are not convinced that the “wise Gurdjieffians” supplied Oscar with enough material, wasn’t there a trip to the East where Oscar got “the rest of the story?”
Enter the dictum of the New Age: a link to antiquity must be established. Okay. So if Oscar picked it up from those guys in Buenos Aires in 1950 while making cups of coffee, they must have gotten it from Gurdjieff, who in his turn got it from the Sufis, who got it from the Desert Fathers, who got it from Pythagoras, who got it from…
The myth continues with equal imaginative license, telling of the arrival of Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley, fresh from attending Oscar’s training in Arica, Chile. The year is 1970, Berkeley is cooking, the Age of Aquarius is dawning, sex, drugs and rock-’n-roll rule and many feel that answers to life’s questions are so close they can taste them… “Who cares about proper crediting of sources, respecting agreements of confidentiality or accuracy in reporting; in a minute we’ll all be enlightened and transcend such details anyway...” An overly simplistic account? Not really. How often have you heard arguments like: “It does not matter how we got it, but what we do with it;” “Who cares whose version is a little closer to the truth, it’s all the same truth, and why bother about the origins anyway, it’s here now so let’s use it…”
Unfortunately, the hip cats of the ’60s, the cool beboppers of the ’70s, the arts & croissants crowd of the ’80s and the dudes of the ’90s discovered the old truth that powerful systems have their own built-in safeguards against abuse. Historically, we have always had access to many systems, including magic (every shade, from black to white), and all we needed in order to tap in were sufficient understanding, discipline and skills. To achieve these skills we would have to reach a high level of personal development, which ironically causes us to abhor exploitation. If, however, we persist for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way, we find our efforts frustrated and are prevented from penetrating the real power of a system—and are left with less than its full potential.
In this respect, the Enneagramatic theory is no different from other schools of thought, and at times was raided by the same predator mentality—with predictable results.
Our ambition is to bring facts and reason to the table, starting with the origins of the Enneagram, and to encourage a style of talking about matters enneagramatic that is responsible, constructive, and above all, truthful.
We do not claim to have the only or complete truth about the origins, but we believe that we can offer an alternative view—a view not based on rumors and wishful thinking, but acquired through research, including our conversations with Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, and many other key personalities in the field.
Ancient history aside (a subject for another time), our best understanding of how Oscar first became familiar with the Enneagram as a geometric symbol comes from his own account:
“In 1943, I inherited my grandfather’s library from my uncle Julio, who was a lawyer and a philosopher. It was in an ancient text (a medieval grimoaire) about the Chaldean Seal (enneagram) where I first came across this diagram which, for the Chaldeans, was a magical figure. At the same time, I also found the Chaldean seal (enneagram) in the books of Ramon Llull, who gives the higher sense of the interrelation between the spheres. Here Llull is directly influenced by the Sufi theologists, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Al’Arabi and even more by the great mystic Surawardi. There was also the work of Eliphas Levi, the father of the revival of Theosophy and Esoterism, his important book, The Book of Splendors, and his disciple, Papus (Dr. M. Gérard Encausse), who wrote about Llull’s metaphysical Machine of Thought and the esoteric tarot."
“In order not to produce confusion, it is necessary not to interpret the old theory of the Pythagorean ten spheres, which were always inscribed as nine (the tenth being the totality or the result of the nine), with my enneagramatic theory of Protoanalysis and the doctrine of the Fixations, which interprets the ten spheres upon a different philosophical basis in all the realms of cognition."
“In 1949, I started reading the work of Ouspensky, and in 1950 in Buenos Aires, I was invited to a closed study group of Theosophists, esoteric Rosicrucians, and Martinists, where I participated in long discussions about the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Here is where I first pointed out to this group that all the ideas proposed by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky could be traced to certain forms of Gnosticism and to specific doctrines of the Stoics, the Epicurians, and the Manichaeans. I also pointed out that we could not find any instructions in their books on how to apply the Chaldean Seal (enneagram) and that there were only vague references to music, the days of the week, etc., which parallel the very ancient notions of the Chaldeans reinterpreted by Pythagoras and Plato.”
Oscar took to his family’s tremendous library like a duck to water. Gifted with a memory that would make an elephant green with envy, a mind comfortably at home with concepts and logic, and a will driven by the looming threat of terrifying out-of-body experiences, Oscar devoured book after book in search of a cure. Over the years, as his understanding grew, he began to gain control over his condition and to finally resolve it. In his own words:
“As a six year old child, I had my first mysterious, and yet still unexplained by our current medical knowledge, out-of-body experiences which terrified me. I discovered that these experiences are produced in the transit period between the awakened and dream state, where there is a bridge of contact in which the experience would happen, provoking a violent cardiovascular response that actually paralyzes the heart, while leaving the body with only the vascular pulsation of the arteries, as it is still unexplained, that were enough to keep my brain supplied with oxygen [editors’ note: we were sitting in Oscar’s living room on the L-shaped couch. Oscar leaned over and offered his hand for examination. It was unusual—the palm, the fingers, the entire hand seemed to pulsate]. At this point, I would experience what is now the well-known ‘near-death experience,’ and I would leave my body and enter into pure psychic and mental spaces. It is not strange that I became very dedicated in researching and studying for many years the most serious medical material, but I was completely disappointed by our Western medicine when I found that they ignored this neurosomatological event and our medical science did not have, at that time, any knowledge about it. As I said, regardless of our enormous modern technological advancement for diagnosing and studying the neurology of the brain, we still know nothing about the nature or cause of these out-of-body experiences besides the recognition that they actually happen."
“Because of this fact, I began a serious research into Eastern tantra and the Holy Kabbalah. In 1945, it was at the culmination of my tantric work with the Lalita-Sahasranaman Tantra when, by controlling the ascent of the kundalini, I could transform the experience into a vehicle for entering from the awakened state directly into the Light, known as the Kulanidhi in the tantric Kaula Tradition, or the pure Sambhogakaya state (body of enjoyment) of the Buddhist Mahayana tradition, or the ‘Third Heaven’ of the Gnostics, which is the outcome of the success of the tantra. From this point, my study of Western philosophy became a close reading with a systematic and critical eye of observing that the real essence of the spirit was only superficially touched, ignored or flatly not recognized as existent or even a matter of philosophical study by the current philosophy of Linguistics, Logical Positivism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Existentialism.”
Coffee was the fuel of choice that kept the group awake and discussing into the wee hours. Oscar found what they used for coffee to be so revolting, that he mercifully offered to take on the task of making a drinkable brew.
After 17 years of intense study, at the age of 23 (in 1954), everything enneagon-related fell into place for Oscar (see Letters to the School by Oscar Ichazo, page 70). His subsequent journey (1956) to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and the Pamir was not so much a fact-finding mission with the purpose to pump Sufis for knowledge, as it was a pilgrimage which resulted in a celebration of his discoveries with other profound souls. Ironically, instead of discovering all kinds of “Sufi” knowledge, Oscar was rather the object of curious inquiry by the learned dignitaries (some of them Sufis) who were surprised to encounter a like-minded spirit from the West.
The maturation of Trialectics as a logic was completed by 1960. Ten years later, Claudio Naranjo and 44 others gathered in Arica for a 10-month intensive training offered by Oscar Ichazo.
To our knowledge, almost every book and theory on the Enneagram of personality has been inspired by the material taught by Claudio Naranjo, who continued research with the teachings he had learned from Oscar. While Claudio was teaching in Berkeley, the “other” 44 students from Arica returned to the United States and to other parts of the world and founded the Arica Institute in 1971. The Arica Institute has been thriving ever since, and to this date, some 200,000 students have participated in its courses. Currently, there are about 500 instructors worldwide who continue teaching and offering various courses to the public.
There are many reasons why the Arica Institute and the “Enneagram movement” have remained at odds and avoided “cross-pollination.” Without going into details at this moment, one reason for this distance was philosophical. The “Aricans” use the Enneagram within a larger context of a complete psychology of the human process toward enlightenment, while the “Enneagramers” use it more specifically as a tool to describe personality. There were also legal battles over intellectual property, copyrights, etc. It is our hope that these wounds will be allowed to scab over and that we can begin to focus on learning from each other…
On a more personal level, contrary to many wild rumors about Oscar Ichazo’s reclusive and hostile attitude, we found no such thing. Oscar and his wife Sarah extended us a warm welcome and gladly supplied any information we asked for. The coffee was indeed excellent and we can imagine how that may have pleased our “old Gurdjieffians.” Many hours of explanations filled gap after gap in the mosaic of Enneagram history, forming a completely credible picture. In three days of conversation, we never felt the presence of resentment, bitterness or a hidden agenda. We are not too naive and would usually smell such undercurrents within minutes—none here. Quite the opposite; Oscar and Sarah had an aura of class, nobility and modesty. A tour through their house revealed a scholar’s paradise:—room after room filled with books and mementos we recognized as Tibetan tankas, mandalas, zen roshi apparel and other sacred objects. Onyx the cat followed us through the house and the Japanese/British/tropical-styled gardens. The atmosphere was peaceful, bright, serene and warm at the same time. Our occasional excursions into conversations about Chinese Medicine, herbs, acupuncture, other languages, or Florentine and Renaissance art left us surprised by the extent of their knowledge. We asked for permission to publish a brief biography but Oscar declined. “I would like the ideas to stand on their own merit, independent of and untinged by personality” was his answer. “Why tempt ego by giving in to what feeds it?” was another musing afterthought. It reminded us that in fact, the Arica Institute hasn’t published a biography either.
All things considered, we were left with a feeling of having had a meeting with two truly remarkable people, who do as they say—a rare privilege indeed. Thank you, Oscar and Sarah.
__________Enneagram Monthly, Issue 21, November 1996
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.
Some of the disagreements about the proper use of the Enneagram begin, without a doubt, with a false representation of its origins.
The common misunderstanding goes something like this: In Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oscar Ichazo, a young buck aged 19 is serving coffee to a group of brilliant Gurdjieffians who know all about the Enneagram, the fixations, the passions, the virtues, etc. These wise men allow Oscar to listen in on their conversations and he promptly picks up all the wisdom they received from Gurdjieff. (We never learn the names of these wise men—nor, elsewhere in the world, do we hear from other disciples of Gurdjieff’s who are “in the know” about this topic.) The year is 1950, and written records, tapes and films are broadly available—even in Buenos Aires. Yet strangely, no one seemed to care to record any of this wonderful material except our coffee boy…and if we are not convinced that the “wise Gurdjieffians” supplied Oscar with enough material, wasn’t there a trip to the East where Oscar got “the rest of the story?”
Enter the dictum of the New Age: a link to antiquity must be established. Okay. So if Oscar picked it up from those guys in Buenos Aires in 1950 while making cups of coffee, they must have gotten it from Gurdjieff, who in his turn got it from the Sufis, who got it from the Desert Fathers, who got it from Pythagoras, who got it from…
The myth continues with equal imaginative license, telling of the arrival of Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley, fresh from attending Oscar’s training in Arica, Chile. The year is 1970, Berkeley is cooking, the Age of Aquarius is dawning, sex, drugs and rock-’n-roll rule and many feel that answers to life’s questions are so close they can taste them… “Who cares about proper crediting of sources, respecting agreements of confidentiality or accuracy in reporting; in a minute we’ll all be enlightened and transcend such details anyway...” An overly simplistic account? Not really. How often have you heard arguments like: “It does not matter how we got it, but what we do with it;” “Who cares whose version is a little closer to the truth, it’s all the same truth, and why bother about the origins anyway, it’s here now so let’s use it…”
Unfortunately, the hip cats of the ’60s, the cool beboppers of the ’70s, the arts & croissants crowd of the ’80s and the dudes of the ’90s discovered the old truth that powerful systems have their own built-in safeguards against abuse. Historically, we have always had access to many systems, including magic (every shade, from black to white), and all we needed in order to tap in were sufficient understanding, discipline and skills. To achieve these skills we would have to reach a high level of personal development, which ironically causes us to abhor exploitation. If, however, we persist for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way, we find our efforts frustrated and are prevented from penetrating the real power of a system—and are left with less than its full potential.
In this respect, the Enneagramatic theory is no different from other schools of thought, and at times was raided by the same predator mentality—with predictable results.
Our ambition is to bring facts and reason to the table, starting with the origins of the Enneagram, and to encourage a style of talking about matters enneagramatic that is responsible, constructive, and above all, truthful.
We do not claim to have the only or complete truth about the origins, but we believe that we can offer an alternative view—a view not based on rumors and wishful thinking, but acquired through research, including our conversations with Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, and many other key personalities in the field.
Ancient history aside (a subject for another time), our best understanding of how Oscar first became familiar with the Enneagram as a geometric symbol comes from his own account:
“In 1943, I inherited my grandfather’s library from my uncle Julio, who was a lawyer and a philosopher. It was in an ancient text (a medieval grimoaire) about the Chaldean Seal (enneagram) where I first came across this diagram which, for the Chaldeans, was a magical figure. At the same time, I also found the Chaldean seal (enneagram) in the books of Ramon Llull, who gives the higher sense of the interrelation between the spheres. Here Llull is directly influenced by the Sufi theologists, Al-Ghazzali, Ibn Al’Arabi and even more by the great mystic Surawardi. There was also the work of Eliphas Levi, the father of the revival of Theosophy and Esoterism, his important book, The Book of Splendors, and his disciple, Papus (Dr. M. Gérard Encausse), who wrote about Llull’s metaphysical Machine of Thought and the esoteric tarot."
“In order not to produce confusion, it is necessary not to interpret the old theory of the Pythagorean ten spheres, which were always inscribed as nine (the tenth being the totality or the result of the nine), with my enneagramatic theory of Protoanalysis and the doctrine of the Fixations, which interprets the ten spheres upon a different philosophical basis in all the realms of cognition."
“In 1949, I started reading the work of Ouspensky, and in 1950 in Buenos Aires, I was invited to a closed study group of Theosophists, esoteric Rosicrucians, and Martinists, where I participated in long discussions about the work of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Here is where I first pointed out to this group that all the ideas proposed by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky could be traced to certain forms of Gnosticism and to specific doctrines of the Stoics, the Epicurians, and the Manichaeans. I also pointed out that we could not find any instructions in their books on how to apply the Chaldean Seal (enneagram) and that there were only vague references to music, the days of the week, etc., which parallel the very ancient notions of the Chaldeans reinterpreted by Pythagoras and Plato.”
Oscar took to his family’s tremendous library like a duck to water. Gifted with a memory that would make an elephant green with envy, a mind comfortably at home with concepts and logic, and a will driven by the looming threat of terrifying out-of-body experiences, Oscar devoured book after book in search of a cure. Over the years, as his understanding grew, he began to gain control over his condition and to finally resolve it. In his own words:
“As a six year old child, I had my first mysterious, and yet still unexplained by our current medical knowledge, out-of-body experiences which terrified me. I discovered that these experiences are produced in the transit period between the awakened and dream state, where there is a bridge of contact in which the experience would happen, provoking a violent cardiovascular response that actually paralyzes the heart, while leaving the body with only the vascular pulsation of the arteries, as it is still unexplained, that were enough to keep my brain supplied with oxygen [editors’ note: we were sitting in Oscar’s living room on the L-shaped couch. Oscar leaned over and offered his hand for examination. It was unusual—the palm, the fingers, the entire hand seemed to pulsate]. At this point, I would experience what is now the well-known ‘near-death experience,’ and I would leave my body and enter into pure psychic and mental spaces. It is not strange that I became very dedicated in researching and studying for many years the most serious medical material, but I was completely disappointed by our Western medicine when I found that they ignored this neurosomatological event and our medical science did not have, at that time, any knowledge about it. As I said, regardless of our enormous modern technological advancement for diagnosing and studying the neurology of the brain, we still know nothing about the nature or cause of these out-of-body experiences besides the recognition that they actually happen."
“Because of this fact, I began a serious research into Eastern tantra and the Holy Kabbalah. In 1945, it was at the culmination of my tantric work with the Lalita-Sahasranaman Tantra when, by controlling the ascent of the kundalini, I could transform the experience into a vehicle for entering from the awakened state directly into the Light, known as the Kulanidhi in the tantric Kaula Tradition, or the pure Sambhogakaya state (body of enjoyment) of the Buddhist Mahayana tradition, or the ‘Third Heaven’ of the Gnostics, which is the outcome of the success of the tantra. From this point, my study of Western philosophy became a close reading with a systematic and critical eye of observing that the real essence of the spirit was only superficially touched, ignored or flatly not recognized as existent or even a matter of philosophical study by the current philosophy of Linguistics, Logical Positivism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Existentialism.”
Coffee was the fuel of choice that kept the group awake and discussing into the wee hours. Oscar found what they used for coffee to be so revolting, that he mercifully offered to take on the task of making a drinkable brew.
After 17 years of intense study, at the age of 23 (in 1954), everything enneagon-related fell into place for Oscar (see Letters to the School by Oscar Ichazo, page 70). His subsequent journey (1956) to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and the Pamir was not so much a fact-finding mission with the purpose to pump Sufis for knowledge, as it was a pilgrimage which resulted in a celebration of his discoveries with other profound souls. Ironically, instead of discovering all kinds of “Sufi” knowledge, Oscar was rather the object of curious inquiry by the learned dignitaries (some of them Sufis) who were surprised to encounter a like-minded spirit from the West.
The maturation of Trialectics as a logic was completed by 1960. Ten years later, Claudio Naranjo and 44 others gathered in Arica for a 10-month intensive training offered by Oscar Ichazo.
To our knowledge, almost every book and theory on the Enneagram of personality has been inspired by the material taught by Claudio Naranjo, who continued research with the teachings he had learned from Oscar. While Claudio was teaching in Berkeley, the “other” 44 students from Arica returned to the United States and to other parts of the world and founded the Arica Institute in 1971. The Arica Institute has been thriving ever since, and to this date, some 200,000 students have participated in its courses. Currently, there are about 500 instructors worldwide who continue teaching and offering various courses to the public.
There are many reasons why the Arica Institute and the “Enneagram movement” have remained at odds and avoided “cross-pollination.” Without going into details at this moment, one reason for this distance was philosophical. The “Aricans” use the Enneagram within a larger context of a complete psychology of the human process toward enlightenment, while the “Enneagramers” use it more specifically as a tool to describe personality. There were also legal battles over intellectual property, copyrights, etc. It is our hope that these wounds will be allowed to scab over and that we can begin to focus on learning from each other…
On a more personal level, contrary to many wild rumors about Oscar Ichazo’s reclusive and hostile attitude, we found no such thing. Oscar and his wife Sarah extended us a warm welcome and gladly supplied any information we asked for. The coffee was indeed excellent and we can imagine how that may have pleased our “old Gurdjieffians.” Many hours of explanations filled gap after gap in the mosaic of Enneagram history, forming a completely credible picture. In three days of conversation, we never felt the presence of resentment, bitterness or a hidden agenda. We are not too naive and would usually smell such undercurrents within minutes—none here. Quite the opposite; Oscar and Sarah had an aura of class, nobility and modesty. A tour through their house revealed a scholar’s paradise:—room after room filled with books and mementos we recognized as Tibetan tankas, mandalas, zen roshi apparel and other sacred objects. Onyx the cat followed us through the house and the Japanese/British/tropical-styled gardens. The atmosphere was peaceful, bright, serene and warm at the same time. Our occasional excursions into conversations about Chinese Medicine, herbs, acupuncture, other languages, or Florentine and Renaissance art left us surprised by the extent of their knowledge. We asked for permission to publish a brief biography but Oscar declined. “I would like the ideas to stand on their own merit, independent of and untinged by personality” was his answer. “Why tempt ego by giving in to what feeds it?” was another musing afterthought. It reminded us that in fact, the Arica Institute hasn’t published a biography either.
All things considered, we were left with a feeling of having had a meeting with two truly remarkable people, who do as they say—a rare privilege indeed. Thank you, Oscar and Sarah.
__________Enneagram Monthly, Issue 21, November 1996