8 Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 was to teach this, which I felt necessary because I was under a commitment of reserve with Ichazo at the time. Robert Ochs, a Jesuit priest who attended the SAT Institute, took extensive notes during Naranjo’s teaching on the Enneagram and taught it to other Jesuits at Loyola University in Chicago, making these teachings available to the Jesuit community at large. Those who had access to these teachings were Patrick H. O’Leary, Paul Robb, and Jerome Wagner. Before long, these notes on the Enneagram teaching had spread throughout North America. Considering the popularity of the Enneagram within Catholic circles, it is significant to consider this interest in light of the events following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which have fundamentally compromised Western Christianity, as these desacralizing forces also inevitably spread to Protestant denominations leading to the pervasive secularism that is found throughout the West today (see Coomaraswamy 2006). The faithful have been cautioned: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Timothy 4:3–4). While efforts have been made to claim Christian origins for the Enneagram (see Rohr and Ebert 2001), some have become very critical of its application to personality types, and lament its ties to the New Age movement within Christian circles (see Pacwa 1992). September 1984 saw the first book published on the nine-pointed symbol (The Enneagram: A Journey of Self Discovery by Maria Beesing, Robert J. Nogosek, and Patrick H. O’Leary). Don Richard Riso (1946–2012) encountered the early Enneagram material made available by Ochs in 1974, through one of Ochs’s initial students by the name of Tad Dunne (while Riso was in a Jesuit seminary in Toronto). In 1987, Riso published his first book on the Enneagram, Personality Types. Helen Palmer, psychic and self-proclaimed “Queen of the Enneagram” (Ichazo 1991, 112), published her first book on the subject in 1988. According to Palmer, she did not breach Naranjo’s pact to secrecy, as this was not a requirement within the SAT group in which she participated: “I did attend nine sessions of a public enneagram class with no ‘secrecy’ requirement” (quoted in Special Forum 1997, 13). Palmer has no qualms over having aided the popularization of the Enneagram, as long as it has been in the service of consciousness expansion: “I’m happy to be a popularizer, as long as what I’ve accomplished stands for popularization of the fact that type plays a part in accessing higher consciousness” (quoted in Smoley 1994, 19). Shortly after Palmer’s book hit the marketplace, Naranjo published his Ennea-Type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker in 1990. From this juncture on, interest in the Enneagram has spread like wildfire. Naranjo (1996, 16) laments the fact that his early teachings on the Enneagram were released and that his students did not honor his request for secrecy: I want to only say parenthetically that I was not happy with the fact that the commitment to secrecy was not kept, that the enneagram came to the streets a little prematurely. I felt critical of people taking initiative in writing about information that had not been originated by them, and who were acquainted with only a fragment of a traditional body of knowledge that is considerably more complex. Ichazo makes a thought-provoking and no less sobering assessment of the explosion surrounding the Enneagram of personality types on the global marketplace: “The types that have become popular are ‘mind games,’ with rather no foundation whatsoever” (quoted in Isaacs and Labanauskas 1996, 18). Gurdjieff makes a cautionary remark concerning the popularization of the Enneagram, and of its limitations when devoid of the esoteric knowledge that is necessary to access its inner dimensions: “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” (quoted in Ouspensky 1949, 294). 5 Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, and the Fourth Way teaching It is important to note the connection between Ichazo and Naranjo, in relation to the teachings of Gurdjieff, as both were very familiar with the latter’s Fourth Way system. Ichazo confirmed that he came in contact with the ideas of Gurdjieff in the early 1950s through Ouspensky’s book, In Search of the Miraculous. An early exponent of both Gurdjieff’s teaching and the Enneagram to the Spanish-speaking world was Rodney Collin (1909–1956), a British disciple of Ouspensky’s. Rodney and his wife immigrated to Tlalpan (on the outskirts of Mexico City) in 1948, accompanied by a number of Ouspensky’s followers and, in 1952, he published The Theory of Celestial Influence (Es. El Desarrollo de la Luz).
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