In this episode of the Awareness to Action Enneagram podcast, Mario Sikora, María José Munita and Seth “Creek” Creekmore talk about the history of the Enneagram, inspired by an online debate. As Mario has studied this model for decades, he provides the timeline of the Enneagram and how it led to how we use it today.

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"Owning Enlightenment: Proprietary Spirituality in the 'New Age' Marketplace" by Walter A. Effross

The origin of the Enneagram - Claudio Naranjo speaks - June 2010

Letter to the Transpersonal Community by Oscar Ichazo

Mythmaking and the Evolution of the Enneagram of Personality, Part 1 by Mario Sikora

Mario Sikora: 

IG: @mariosikora

TikTok: @mariosikora

Web: mariosikora.com

Pod: Enneagram in a Movie

Substack: mariosikora.substack.com

Maria Jose Munita: 

IG: @mjmunita

Web: mjmunita.com

Seth "Creek" Creekmore: 

IG: @_creekmore

Pod: Fathoms | An Enneagram Podcast

Pod: Delusional Optimism

Welcome back to another Awareness to Action Enneagram podcast. My name is Creek and I'm with my antiquarian co-hosts, Mario Sikora and María José Munita. Any guess as to the definition of that word?

Old. Ancient.

Well, it's the study of the old, I believe. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's maintaining. Wait, no no no. Sorry, wrong one. Deeply interested in the past or history. Almost scholarly. Almost scholarly. Scholarly.

Yes.

So today we're talking about the history again, as some of you may be aware of, there's a bit of a scuffle happening on the interwebs as to what is the. Where's the like.

People got nothing better to talk about.

Fascinating.

I'm being forced to go and read all the comments just to be informed. It feels like my responsibility to be informed. But, you know, I. But you don't really. Yeah, but Mario and I talked about.

This like a normal human being.

Yeah, Mario and I talked about this yesterday and I'm like, listen, I don't care where the enneagram came from. Does it work? Like, I love history. I think it's important to have good history because it does affect how we see the world today, how we.

So we don't repeat it. But then, Mario, you also said, another reason is how you do one thing is how you do everything. And I think that makes me care a little bit more.

How we figure out what is truth in this regard will affect all of our other claims, all of our other work, and will shroud how we see the world.

Yeah. So just to give context to what you're referring to, Creek, there's been.

On one of the Enneagram forums, look, I had a little bee in my bonnet over some things I heard. And one of my favorite opening, one of my favorite passages in all of literature is the opening of Moby Dick, where he's just called me Ishmael.

And then he talks about how every so often he just needs to vent his spleen and get out to sea or else he's going to step into the street and start knocking people's hats off. Right?

And I see it coming.

Yeah. Maria Jose has witnessed this so many.

Times coming from afar. So whenever she says, should I post this? Sure, go ahead. And, you know, I know that no matter how much I try to stop it, he needs to get it up.

It's like those people that track earthquakes. It's like, oh yeah, here it comes. The seismic event is happening.

And so what my post was about is that, you know, my assertion that the enneagram is not ancient. And if anyone has any evidence to the contrary, please make me enlighten me as to it.

And, you know, and it caused quite a stir and, you know, quite a bit of back and forth and that sort of thing. And I will note that despite all the pushback, I've yet to see any actual evidence of, you know. But it has.

I'm not prepared to see it, apparently, you know.

So I have not done the deep spiritual work that empower me to see, you know, secrets and, you know, downloaded transmissions and these sort of things, I guess, but.

So can we talk about.

You're very uncomfortable, creek, adjacent to that real quick?

I'm very uncomfortable.

Steve. Creek, you gotta be careful. You get too close to the fire, man, you're gonna get burned, you know.

Oh, man. I'm just trying to convince people that fire is friendly. Well, so what would be accepted as proof for you? What is how in your own journey?

What have you discovered as verifiable?

So, first of all, I mean, before we can even get into that, one of the things we have to do is. Crick, I love your question, but let me talk about something.

Being a co host on this is just guessing where Mario wants to go.

Enjoyed the ride?

Yeah.

Yeah. When we talk about the history of the enneagram.

When we talk about how old the enneagram is, we have to first define what we mean by the enneagram, right? Because it is a term that people use loosely. And it can mean multiple things.

So we have to ask ourselves, what do we mean when we're talking about the age of the enneagram and where the Enneagram came from? Okay, so there's a few ways we can think about it. Number one, we can think about the diagram itself.

This nine pointed diagram that we're all familiar with. Not just any nine pointed diagram, but this nine pointed diagram. Where did it come from? And what evidence do we have of where it came from?

Then we can start talking about the enneagram as a process model, right? And again, this goes to Gurdjieff. And it's like, okay, it's this set of dynamics and so forth.

Then we can start talking about the enneagram as a model of personality style. The Enneagram personality that we tend to focus on. And then finally, we can have a discussion about whether or not the enneagram of personality is.

Incorporates older ideas. And this is where it gets messy. Right? Because what happens in these conversations is people assume that.

Because people teaching the Enneagram today incorporates a bunch of old ideas, then the enneagram itself is old, but there's a fundamental logical flaw in that that people tend to keep getting tripped up over.

And that is.

And what might that be? I'm just checking to see if you're still listening here. So.

So, look, the noise stops, so it forked my attention.

Just because a new idea includes older information does not mean that that older information was the new idea. For example, okay? The Old Testament is part of the Christian Bible.

This does not mean that the Jews were Christians or Christianity existed back then. We can use a million examples of this. Right? Calculus was created around the same time by both Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz independent.

It includes addition and subtraction and all these other ideas that are really, really old. This does not mean that the ancient Sumerians were practicing calculus, just because calculus includes addition, subtraction, and so forth. Okay?

So whenever there's the aggregation of things and the inclusion of something new and the branding, for lack of a better word, of something as a particular thing, we have to say, okay? That's where it started. And all evidence indicates that. All solid evidence indicates that the enneagram of personality starts with Oscar itchazzo.

Okay? Very, very simple. I encourage people to go read his letters to the transpersonal community. You can find it. You just google it. Find it online.

We'll have it in the show notes.

Okay, good. It is a slog, I'm going to tell you, man. You know, zip your way through the first 20 or so pages. It's like 40 pages when you print it out.

But he talks. He says, look stuff out. I do. I got it right here, man. I got it high.

That's the Amazon in your hand right now.

Exactly right. But I only printed out certain pages. But look, he explains where he got the ideas from, okay?

Now, Chazzo is not the most reliable narrator, quite frankly. Okay? Because there was a.

A bit of mythology working its way into what he was talking about, but nobody can point to anyone talking about nine personality types mapped to the Enneagram model called to the Enneagram taught in the same way we teach it prior to a Chazzo. Gurdjieff didn't do it. Okay? Gurdjieff had the diagram, but he did not map personality to it. Okay?

So when there is no evidence to the contrary and you have a guy saying, hey, I created this, and here's how I came to it.

And by the way, there's a very famous intellectual property legal case that acknowledged Ichazo's claims against other Enneagram teachers as the sole source of the enneagram of personality. Well, I'm sorry, folks. That's where it starts, right? So we can say the Enneagram includes old ideas, but we can't say the enneagram is old.

I zoned out there for a second.

Yeah. So if I'm using the enneagram and it works, yes. Why should I even bother asserting that it's old or nothing? What's the difference?

What difference does it make?

So here's the challenge that we encounter.

We have Enneagram teachers out there telling people it's an ancient personality system, that it's part of some perennial philosophy that is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. So when I go into an organization and somebody says to me, oh, the enneagram, isn't that that ancient personality system?

And I have to say, no, okay, that undermines the credibility of it. And more and more people are encountering the enneagram.

And when there are these mythologies about it and people realize, well, wait a minute, what's going on here? That people are claiming that this is thousands of years old when it's not, it undermines the credibility of the system, okay?

And it makes it harder to be taken seriously when teaching it. Okay, so, all right, so maybe, you know, somebody doesn't care about that because they're not teaching it to people.

Isn't there something to be said for knowing what's true and what's not? I mean, don't we study the Enneagram to see the world more clearly as it is rather than through our illusions? Okay?

And shouldn't part of that be wanting to know what fact claims we make are true and which are not? Now, if you don't care, that's fine.

But if you're going to make claims that are not factually correct or evidentiarily supported, then you shouldn't be doing this. You can't call yourself a rigorous seeker after truth.

And as Creek said earlier, quite frankly, the way we think about things, it can't just be situational, okay? If we want to see clearly, we have to work to see clearly in all aspects of our lives. Okay?

We can't fool ourselves in one area and then pat ourselves on the back for being good, rigorous thinkers in others. Does this mean we're going to be great thinkers in every area now? Of course not, because we all fall short. Right? But we should try.

But why is it even a thing to say that it's ancient? You know, what are people? Yeah.

Why do people say that in general? Yeah. Well, you know, so I don't want to assume too much, okay? It is part of the mythology and packaging of the enneagram.

Look, Claudio Naranjo, who, you know, we haven't talked about yet, but he, you know, he kind of, you know, as what we know of the Enneagram personality. He's kind of the one who pulled it out of the areca system with. With achaze and popularized it in a different way, you know.

Look, he was trying to sell it, okay? And there's a, you know, again, a YouTube video on this.

Anybody can find it where he makes up claiming that it came from the Sufis because he wanted people to pay more attention to it. He basically said it was a marketing ploy to get people to embrace my ideas.

So I said that it came from the Sufis, and now that's part of the mythology.

Yeah.

Right. So people believe this when it's just not true.

Can you kind of help build the timeline, a little bit of echazo, Helen Palmer, Claudio Naranjo. Where do they all sit and what's the relation to each other?

Yeah. So Oscar Chazzo, a bolivian mystic. Okay.

Maria Jose, a city in the north of Chile called Areca.

There you go. There you go. Okay, so. And so, thank you for that bone. I'm just trying to make sure you're still with us here. Okay? So, yeah.

Rio Jose's home, where Trini, my daughter, is studying at the moment in that building. Oh, is that very same building.

Oh, wow. That's cool. Is there a plaque or anything?

I don't think so.

Memorial or statue taught there?

Um, not just him. It's quite an important building. But she's. Yeah, as we speak there in class.

That's cool. That's cool. So, um. So Echazo presents this idea, and then, you know, a bit later in the, uh. And. And look, Echazo's model, the.

The Enneagram, is only a little piece of it, right? I mean, he had this big, full blown system of self development and all this stuff.

People were into all this stuff. And so they go down to study with Areco, led by Claudio Naranjo. And, you know, Naranjo stays with a Chazzo for seven months or so. The.

The story is that they had a big falling out. Now, in the letters to the transpersonal community, Ichazo said, no, we didn't have a falling out. It was more complicated than that.

But it just ended up with Naranjo kind of going his own way eventually after this time. So he goes to and he starts his school, the Sat school, and seekers after truth. And he teaches the Enneagram in Berkeley, California.

He does primarily a ten week program. It's one evening a week, is my understanding.

There were a number of people in that program who were forerunners of the Enneagram personality of what we know today. Ah, Almas. You know, who writes his. Ah, Almas? His real name is Hamid Ali.

Sandra Maitrey, who, you know, the two of them are, you know, part of the diamond heart school. Hamid is the founder of the Ridwan school or the diamond Heart approach. Peter O'Hanrahandh was there. Okay. He's part of the narrative tradition.

Now, a woman named Kathleen Spieth, who wrote a little book called the, I think, the Gurdjieff way or something like that. A little introduction to Gurdjieff. Another person there was a jesuit priest and professor named Bob Oaks, who was an important character here.

Now, Helen Palmer was not there. She was, however, friends with Kathleen Spiethen, and Kathleen Spieth taught her the Enneagram. And then Helen eventually ended up writing a book.

Okay? As were other people writing books at the time.

Now, Bob Oaks goes back to Loyola University after week number eight of the ten week program, his notes and his teaching of what he learned from Naranjo became kind of the founding of or the, you know, the. The basis for the jesuit approaches to the Enneagram. Folks like Don Riso, Jerry Wagner, Patrick O'Leary. Okay. And others who then all started working.

Richard Rohr, Enneagram. I would imagine Richard Rohr was part. Well, see, but Richard Rohrer was a Franciscan, or is a franciscan Franciscan?

I'm not sure that he was at Loyola. But he was, you know, he certainly wanted.

He's in that lineage of jesuit training.

Okay. All right. Okay. So now what happens is you get these different branches of the enneagram, okay?

So you have these different seeds, and it starts to take different direction. Now, an important thing is that there was a big lawsuit.

When Helen Palmer was first going to publish her book on the Enneagram, Oscar Ochazzo sued her for copyright infringement, okay? It was a very famous intellectual property lawsuit.

And fundamentally what was decided in that lawsuit was that itchazzo was the source of the enneagram, okay? And he created it. It was his idea. It was his original thought. But the model is not copyrightable, okay?

So even though it was acknowledged that it came from him, the judgment was that he can't stop other people from writing about the why. Now, this is important. Why? Because he said, my understanding of this is, he said, I am just describing laws of nature here, okay?

Now, if you read what he says in the letter for the transpersonal community, he says, no, lucky, you know, this, this came to me. It didn't just come to me in a flash of insight or something. And he describes what he meant when he originally said that.

He said this was years of hard work in understanding human nature that I then codified, okay. Into this thing.

Now, he also said that at one point, after all this hard work, it kind of crystallized to him and it became really, really clear, okay? Almost like this Eureka moment.

Now, there's a tendency for people, and I have been guilty of this, to kind of poke fun at that, as if it was this, you know, inspiration or something. But as I was rereading that in preparation for this podcast. Podcast. Thank you. Is that what we're doing here?

It made me think of something that happened to me one time, right, where I was sitting with a client, and I'd been working with this stuff for years and years and years, and I'm sitting with him, and all of a sudden this idea of the derailers crystallized for me. I'm sitting there with this guy. He was a type nine. And I'm thinking, you know what? I've heard this before, and there are other things I've heard.

And all of a sudden it's like, ah, I get this now, right? So. And that's kind of what he was saying, right?

And we all have these eureka moments where we're like, working with something and working with something, and all of a sudden we're like, ah, now I understand this in a different way. Okay, so that's what a chazzo was saying.

But because we're talking about patterns, because we're talking about descriptions of human nature, we can't really copyright it. What we can do is say, these are my copywritten terms around this diagram.

You may not use them without my permission, which is why every Enneagram teacher calls them different things. Okay? Because once I put my names for the nine types in writing, now, that's my intellectual property. Okay? And you got to call them something.

Else or acknowledge that it's mine.

Or acknowledge that it's mine. Yeah, absolutely right. And again, I'm not just saying that about me. I'm just saying that that's how intellectual property works.

So if he had not claimed laws of nature, then the Enneagram would have been his.

Possibly. I'm not enough. I don't know enough about the law to say yes or no on that. But it did undermine his argument.

Why did he go after Helen instead of Naranjo?

Because Helen was writing the first book.

Naranjo had not done anything.

He was teaching it. So I would have to double check to see when any type structures came out. That was Naranjo's first book on it.

And in the letter to the transpersonal community, Chazzo says the good thing about Naranjo is that he basically gave me credit, and he said, I got this from Oscar and that sort of thing. Helen, to my understanding, was saying, well, Oskar just got it from Gurdjieff. So he's just a pass through sort of holder at this.

And what Ochazo does in that letter to the transpersonal community is say, I didn't get this from Gurdjieff. In fact, I don't have any respect or regard from Gurdjieff. And here's all the problems and why.

I think Gurdjieff is intellectually primitive and not very interesting. And here's what's different from what I did from what Gurdjieff did.

But it is possible that he could have gotten it from Gurjeev but didn't want to admit that he got it from Gurdjieff because he didn't like.

Well, no, the only thing we can suggest that he got from Gurdjieff was the diagram itself. Okay. And that's. Again, that's a different thing. But Gurdjieff didn't talk about nine personality types.

Right, right. But just. Just kind of. There might have been at least the symbol and the idea of a process there.

I would argue that he did, because even though ichazzo claims that he saw the diagram somewhere else in some ancient chaldean mystics and numerology book or something, I've not seen any evidence of the Enneagram diagram existing prior to Gurdjieff. Okay, there is just no evidence whatsoever that anyone has ever shown that the diagram existed prior to Gurdjieff. Okay?

Now, the argument is, well, he got it from some secret school, and it was kept hidden and all this stuff, you know what? That's. That. That's the beginning of every conspiracy theory, right? Well, there's no evidence of it because they were keeping it secret.

Mm hmm. Well, okay, so then show me the secret society, right?

And look, I've been studying the enneagram for 30 years now, okay? And I have been fortunate enough to go to lots of different countries and lots of different cities.

And I always go to every bookstore I can find, and Marie Jose can attest to that. And the more obscure, the better. High and low, all languages, right? I mean, I've.

I've spent hours perusing a korean bookstore, you know, I mean, just because for the heck of it. And I look for books on, you know, ancient, you know, symbology and all this sort of stuff. And the enneagram as we know it just isn't there.

If somebody got evidence of it, send it to us. I'd love to see it.

The symbol of.

The symbol. Yes, the symbol.

Helen Palmer. Naranjo Echazzo sues Helen Palmer, and then he doesn't get the rights.

So as long as all the schools use different terminology, then we can use the Enneagram model.

And this opens the floodgates on different approaches to the enneagram. Right.

And we live in, as the result of that, where anybody and anybody who wants to can start writing about the enneagram and posting and making TikTok videos and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, whether they know it or not.

And this was Achazo's big fear, quite frankly, you know, that people are going to make a mockery out of this thing that he held to be very sacred. I mean, you know, Chazzo, you know, he basically was creating a.

It was a religion, you know, and, you know, people aren't comfortable with that, but fits every definition of it.

And he felt that, you know, the proto analysis in the Areca school was, you know, going to save humanity from self destruction and that the enneagram was a piece of that. And his big frustration is that what everybody was doing with his beloved enneagram was just a superficial piece of.

Of, you know, a much bigger system.

And just a real quick bunny trail. People having this argument of, is it a psychological tool? Is it a spiritual tool? Is it a psycho spiritual tool?

To be fair, it started off as spiritual. We made it into something psychological.

And in some ways it's like, as long as you're clear as to how you're using it or what you think is like, that's fine. But equating both, I don't know your thoughts on that. Maybe I don't have an opinion on that, but I feel like that distinction is helpful.

The enneagram of personality was developed in the context of a psychospiritual system by Oscar Itchazzo. In his proto analysis method, Claudio Naranjo adapted more psychological concepts and ideas to the system.

For example, he associated each of the personality types with some of the diagnoses in the DSM three. At the time, I believe it was the eight is the antisocial personality type. The one is, what was it? The obsessive compulsive type, riose or something.

So we can look at them from a psychological perspective. And from there, people have taken it in lots of different directions. Now, again, if we.

It's hard to fully yank the enneagram of personality out of Ichazo's system because he had this whole kind of neoplatonic spiritual system going on that other people have tried to hold on to.

Pieces of, like the Ridwan school has held on to a lot of those pieces and added some other things that were not, in Achazos approach, the ego essence. So, yeah, so that's a big part of it. Right?

And so now, again, that comes from the neoplatonic stuff that was, you know, that Achazo pulled into his broader system. And he also points out, for example, that Gurdjieff's approach to ego and essence were different from what he was doing with Gurdjieff.

It wasn't quite as harshly neoplatonic as it was with a chazzo. And again, so there are distinctions.

And see, this is the thing is that every Enneagram teacher throughout this chain, from, you know, if we call Gurdjieff an Enneagram teacher, to Ochazzo, to Naranjo, to all those other folks, created their own approach to it, right? They evolved the system. Okay?

And this idea that it is this intact perennial philosophy, which is probably a term we should discuss here in a moment, but it's that this intact point of view and that there is one true enneagram is not consistent with the development of the enneagram over time. The enneagram of personality here, or with intellectual thought in general. That's what religions do. Yeah.

If we were to think that the enneagram is ancient now, what has changed might be, I don't know, nothing compared to kind of where it comes from or. I don't know.

And quite frankly, the reason we don't teach a lot of that ancient stuff is because I just don't think it's very interesting or very useful. Right. I mean, it's important to know the history of these things.

And, look, I've, you know, I hope it shows that I know a little bit about the history of these things.

And I've studied it and I've read it and I've tried to understand it, but this doesn't mean that I have to embrace, you know, the neoplatonic idea of the one, for example. Okay? It's like, it's just not interesting to me. The law of seven, the rays of creation, all this stuff, just not that interesting.

This idea of, you know, humans being a three centered person, just not that interesting or particularly useful to me. Okay? So the reason I don't teach that stuff, we don't teach it in our approach, is because I just don't find it to be that useful. Okay.

And I think the enneagram as a model of nine personality styles is really, really useful. And we have to say, well, what do we. What is it that we're talking about when we talk about those things?

So, yeah, I'd like to hit real quick.

In the remaining time we have left, let's define perennial and then also kind of give us a quick from Rizzo Hudson, Helen Palmer, all of those kind of filtering that sort of what's the history up to now? And what should we be aware of as what may be informing different relationships, different terminology, different schools of thought?

It was a very dark time in human experience. Right? And so Huxley was trying to figure out, you know, what is the good in humanity after the devastation of World War two.

So he popularized this idea that there is a perennial wisdom. Perennial means, I think, reoccurring, okay? Like, you know, perennial flowers, they bloom every year or whatever. So this idea, it caught on.

And he was suggesting that there is a theme of common wisdom that permeates all the world religions. So it's a steady stream of these perennial ideas that keep commonality to all the great wisdom traditions. And it caught on.

But nobody really takes it that seriously anymore, except in some parts of the Enneagram world and some other sort of areas. The problem with it is that correlation does not equal causation, okay?

And just because they're shared ideas found in a multitude of approaches does not mean that there's an intentional coherence or consistency that is a steady stream through those things. So, for example, just to pick one example, the golden rule, there's a version of it in almost every tradition.

Do unto others, don't do to others that which is hateful to you, etcetera. This does not mean that that is some special teaching that carries on in some stream.

Just means that a lot of people stumbled upon that idea and the criticism of perennial philosophy that the reason why it's not really taken seriously anymore is that it doesn't account for all the contradictions and all the arguments between religions and all the disagreements between them. Okay, so it's just. It's. It's pattern hunting, right? It's. Oh, yeah. Look, this idea is here. This idea is here. This idea is here.

So there must be some through line, right? Well, no, that's not how it works. Okay?

And that's.

I mean, that's not to say that, like, it could point to the helpfulness that multiple different people discovered that this is a really helpful concept for humanity. There's a. There's a common humanity thread, but that doesn't mean that there is a universal higher truth that exists that permeates all religions.

Yes.

And what's more troubling about the claim to me is this assertion that there is this kind of secret wisdom that is being protected and that is being brought out by certain people over time with the help of some guidance from above. I've actually heard Enneagram teachers talking about this, right? That this is what's happening with the enneagram.

It's being brought out with guidance from above and these sort of things. There's no evidence of that.

To me, there's no evidence that the enneagram of personality as it exists is part of some ancient perennial tradition it just ain't there, folks. Okay.

Or that it even has the capacity to change the world.

Yeah. I mean, that's a whole nother thing. Right? I mean, look, I'm never comfortable with world changers to begin with. Right.

Because usually cause more trouble than they solve.

But is it just oversimplifying the view that the fact that we're trying to explain human nature makes a lot of different models or ideas around it very similar? If we're trying to explain the same thing, of course they're going to be similar. And exactly doesn't mean that it's the same model.

It's just we're trying to describe the same thing.

Yeah. And so different people who take a, you know, say, hey, I'm going to try and figure people out.

They're going to come up to the same conclusions, you know, in a lot of ways. Right. The golden rule is a great example of it. You know, I mean, it's. It's. People keep stumbling upon it in their own ways because it works.

And so, you know, and so, you know, one of the arguments for the antiquity, the enneagram, is, oh, it was in Homer, right. Sort of. If we squint and we try to justify, we can see things that are very similar to the nine personality types in Homer's odyssey?

Well, there's a couple of answers for that. One way of attempting to explain that is, well, see, there you go.

It's ancient, and it popped up in Homer, and then it went back underground for everything else in the world. Right? Or you could say again, well, two guys happen to stumble upon the same kind of ideas and it's a coincidence, but these things happen.

Or you could say, you know what? Oscar Ochazzo might have read Homer and used this as inspiration for how he mapped the personality types to the diagram.

Those latter two seem like much more reasonable explanations to me than this whole secret society thing that nobody has any evidence of.

So finally, let's kind of just revisit. How did we get from the Supreme Court case tonight?

It wasn't the Supreme Court yet. Okay, well, okay, so, so when?

Five minutes or less.

Yeah. So, look, so here's what happens. Here's what happened. And then here's what happens.

So what happened was once it became okay for, you know, people to write Enneagram books, yet a bunch of people write Enneagram books, right? And so there were kind of books, you know, waiting to be published.

Don Riso's personality types, for example, the Patrick O'Leary and Maria Biesing and I forget who the other author book, their book was ready to go. I think my understanding is Achazo sued.

That's what was before Calum Palmer's.

Yeah, I think it was written before, and I know that Achazo sued them as well. But the Palmer one was the one that really set the precedence for the legality of it going forward. And you can look it up.

I mean, people can look up reading about this lawsuit. It's a very famous intellectual property case.

Are you able to get a link?

I can probably find a link, yeah. Okay.

So we'll put it in the show notes.

All right. From there. Again, you have people in different environments teaching different understandings of the Enneagram because they all got pieces of it.

Like I said, bob oaks only got weeks, one through eight of the ten weeks. Okay, so he didn't say he didn't know anything about subtypes. Right.

And, you know, and he misunderstood the idea of wings, which is where the idea of wings came from. Okay. It's not part of the real teaching, the thing of wings.

Original teaching.

Original teaching or. Yeah, well, so it's not part of the original teaching. No, that's, that's fair.

So you had other people teaching different things because they got different pieces of it and what people are want to do. And this gets to the whole, you know what, boy, we're not going to get through the episode without invoking Popper, are we?

Okay, so here's how things work. Squeezing it in, baby. Okay. Lee. Lee fields. Bingo.

Clip there.

The way knowledge evolves is we come up with an explanation of something, and we run with that explanation until we encounter a situation or a problem that our explanation does not solve. And then we go back and we tweak the theory. Okay, so wait a minute, I'm seeing different kinds of eights. What accounts for that? Okay?

And what the Jesuits did was they came up with this idea of wings, okay?

Now, people who understood the subtypes didn't come up with this idea of wings because they understood why eights looked different from each other and so forth. Okay? So knowledge is iterative.

And the reason that I have ended up, you know, teaching the things that we teach is because I encountered problems with the existing theories in application in the real world and had to adjust the theory to solve those problems, okay? And this is what everybody's been doing, right?

They come up with their own way of teaching the Enneagram because they encounter different problems that they then try to solve through iterations of the theory. And that's how it should work.

And that is a good thing, as long as people are being honest about how they came to their ideas and recognizing that, you know, what I'm doing is different from what this other person's doing. And if you're not teaching a Chazzo's enneagram of personality, then you're not teaching the original Enneagram personality. Real simple. We're not.

Absolutely.

We're teaching. Yes. Nobody's teaching it outside of a Chazzo, I think, is your point, Mario Jose. Right.

Even these people who, you know, they're teaching the Naranjo approach, right?

Or the, you know, the insight approach of, you know, the Enneagram institute, they're not teaching what Ochazo taught when it comes to the types, okay? They're teaching their own version and iteration of Enneagram theory that grew out of what Achazo originally taught.

So, final question. So what people walking away from this episode, is this just like a.

Hmm, that's interesting to know episode, or is there something that we can walk away with?

My hope is that people will understand why there's so much variation in what is commonly called the enneagram. Okay, that's one thing, right? That there's no true enneagram. There are different approaches to the same system.

And then we have to judge each of those approaches, not on its authenticity of, you know, what it's, you know, provenance is or what the bona fides of it are. But does this work? Okay, does this make sense? Is this logical? Does this help me in some way? Okay, so that's, number one. Different approaches.

That's okay. Just like it's okay to be either a Roman Catholic or a Lutheran or a Methodist or a Baptist or whatever you want to be, and you're still a Christian.

Okay? From my view, that's part of it. Number two is we have to be.

Look, if you want to think of yourself as a seeker after truth in some way, try to understand the truth. Try to apply critical thinking to the stories that people tell you.

And this is one of the things, again, that ochazo kind of mocks that people are just being told, oh, this came from the Sufis. So they just swallow it whole and then start repeating the story that it came from the Sufis. And, you know, it's hard to consider yourself.

Now, number one, that's an easy trap to fall into, right?

Because this Enneagram thing, it's so powerful, and it impacts me in such a big way that I'm just willing to believe that it came from the Sufis because it just feels so cool.

There's not really. There's no, like, shame in it. It's understandable.

It's understandable. But it shows us that we shouldn't just believe what people tell us, what our politicians tell us, okay?

What the people in our community tell us just because we want it to be true. We have to be skeptics, right? We have to be careful. But.

But you can still trust some people in your community. Like, it's. It's not a. It's not everyone's out there lying to you, but.

Well, I'm not so sure.

But showing your strategy here.

Showing my community. Yeah. No. So, look, you know what? Again, this is what we. We teach people. Skepticism needs to be in proportion to the claim, okay?

If somebody says, hey, it's raining outside today, all right, or it's going to rain, I'm not going to say, well, what do you know? Are you a weatherman? You know, where's your meteorology degree? Or that sort of. I don't care. But it's not a big deal. Okay?

We always have to measure our skepticism to the claim. And the grander the claim, the bigger the claim, the more skeptical we should be.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence when it comes to claiming that this system is ancient and, you know, that we're having things revealed to us and we're being guided from above. Those are big frickin claims. Okay? And they require big evidence.

And so we hear something like that from people we trust as Enneagram teachers. And I still, if it's. If it's a big claim, it's like, well, that's interesting, but don't buy it hook, line, and sinker.

Either do your own research or hold it very, very, very loosely.

Right.

Okay.

And be careful about what you repeat.

Yeah. All right. So. Well, we also did an episode, I don't know, about a year ago now on the history of the enneagram as well.

Probably repeated a few things here, but we'll have that in the show notes as well. Make sure to check that out. I think we'll also compile a list of resources you can find in the show notes.

And feel free to reach out to us with any questions. I'm sure we'll have more to say on this later, but thanks, y'all.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to the awareness to Action Enneagram podcast.

If you're interested in more information about awareness to action, their certification programs, or events, feel free to reach out to us through the links in the show notes or by emailing infowarenesstoaction.com.