The History and Meaning of the Enneagram

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Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris, as always, here to talk about the

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Enneagram once again. We've talked about it before. I gave a little bit of an introduction to the

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Enneagram and the threat that I think it poses to Christians. And yet, it seems to be so popular in evangelical circles specifically.

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If you Google Enneagram or if you go on YouTube and type in Enneagram, up to half of the, on the first page

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I'm talking about, resources you're going to get are from some kind of a pseudo -religious and in particular

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Christian perspective. And this startled me and of course set me on a path to discover more about this.

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And because I haven't done as much research, and there's people who are more knowledgeable than I am on this, I decided to get the help of Pam Frost.

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Pam is a board member at Truth Exchange, which is a great apologetics ministry.

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You can go check it out at truthexchange .com, truthexchange .com.

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And Pam has been studying this for about 20 years, not just the Enneagram, but also the mystical movements within Christianity, specifically those threatening evangelical churches.

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So with that, Pam Frost, thank you so much for coming on and just being willing to answer some questions about the

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Enneagram. Well, thank you for having me, John. I really appreciate it. So let's start with a basic question, and this will give you the opportunity,

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I suppose, if you want to tell a story. You can tell a story about your first experience or the first time you heard about the

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Enneagram. But what made you interested in studying this? Well, it was the invasion of the emergent movement within evangelicalism, which came into the church

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I was in. And, gosh, I was trying to think. It was 2003, probably, 2004.

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And I ended up starting to research these things. I started reading books by the emergent authors, and I found the

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Enneagram in there. And then I got connected with Truth Exchange, and I ended up going as a researcher to the

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National Pastors' Convention in San Diego, which is where I live, specifically to do research.

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I am not a supporter of women pastors. I just want to clarify that.

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I went because that conference was really taken over by contemplative spirituality, which is mysticism, and the emergent movement.

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And I went to listen to people like Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Doug Padgett.

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I think they were there. And there was a five -hour course, a critical concerns course, on the

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Enneagram offered by a woman named Alice Freiling, who is the wife of then -intervarsity press publisher

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Bob Freiling. And she did a five -hour course on the Enneagram, and she has since written a book called

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Mirror of the Soul. And I was amazed. I mean, this is a deep dive within the center of yourself.

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It kind of amounts to, I believe, an idolatry of the self because once you plunge into the center of you, there's, like, no exit.

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It becomes like an abyss. And she was teaching this to pastors, and we're having a rainstorm, so I apologize.

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And we have a skylight right in the other room, so I apologize. Oh, no worries. No, no worries at all.

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And I can hear you fine, so, yeah, you're good. Okay, good, because it just started another downpour.

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It's been on and off all morning. But anyways, Alice Freiling, what she was doing, she was combining the contemplative mysticism of Father Thomas Keating, who had developed what he called

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Centering Prayer, which is a technique that you focus on what he called a holy word, like Jesus or holy.

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You use it. It's really like transcendental meditation. You use it to empty your mind.

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And then he said the technique, you focus. It's like he said.

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You're looking at a river with boats going by. You focus on the river rather than the boats.

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You don't let your mind get distracted by what's going down the river.

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You just meditate on the river until you go into an altered state of consciousness in which you think you gain, well, really, enlightenment.

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It's really like transcendental meditation. So she was combining that with the

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Enneagram and teaching senior pastors and all kinds of pastoral leaders to empty their minds and plunge within the interior of their self.

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So that was my introduction, really, to the Enneagram. It came out of the emergent movement.

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It's interesting to me the trajectory that this started.

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Well, I guess there's debate as to when the Enneagram started, but the personality types became popular in the

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New Age movement. I guess, for lack of a better term, that sort of spirituality movement in the 70s and 80s is my understanding.

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And then it took another 20 years for it to get into Roman Catholic and then emergent circles.

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And then it's another 20 years now. So you have like 20, 40, 60. It's like a 60 -year story here that now it's in more conservative, supposedly evangelical circles.

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And if you were to go back, and I think you said, what was the conference, 2010? When was that?

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It was either 2006 or 2007. I went for two years.

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And you probably would never have thought at that time that this would be, maybe you did, make its way into the heart of conservative supposed churches at that time.

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Because, I mean, you're talking about Doug Padgen and Brian McLaren. These guys are way out there.

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Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're hardcore New Agers where they have all ended up as pretty much in mainline denominations that are critical of the true biblical gospel.

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They went into progressivism, which is antithetical to the biblical gospel.

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But what I would like to say is that you had mentioned in your first podcast on the

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Enneagram, Claudio Naranjo, who you showed the video clip of him saying that he got the

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Enneagram through automatic writing. And he is the popularizer of the

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Enneagram. And as you pointed out, he had taught it in the context of an occult mystery school.

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And he had never intended for it to go public. And as you mentioned, it went public through the

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Jesuit priest Robert Oakes, who then started teaching it to everybody.

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And people like Don Richard Risseau, who was a Jesuit novitiate at the time, he wrote the first book on it, making it public.

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I believe that was in 1990. No, that was in the 1980s. I can't remember. I think it was 1987.

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And then Richard Rohr, who also learned it at a Jesuit retreat, he wrote a book shortly thereafter on the

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Enneagram for Christians, the Christian perspective. But the thing

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I think people need to understand is that the Enneagram of personality can be directly traced back to George Burgess, who was in the early 20th century, the first years of the 20th century.

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He was an occultist involved in spiritism of every imaginable type, contacting spirits and anything you can think of.

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He was involved in esoteric religions. He called himself an esoteric Christian.

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He is the origin of the symbol of the Enneagram. Now, he incorporated a lot of ancient wisdom traditions, going back to Pythagoras and, you know,

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Buddhism, Hinduism, mystical Islam, which is called Sufism.

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He incorporated a lot of those ideas, but he is the one who developed the symbol of the

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Enneagram. And he credited also Pythagoras for a lot of his ideas, and he designed the

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Enneagram according to numerological divination. And I just thought it would be interesting, you know, the

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Enneagram has nine points, nine personality types. I just wanted to read on numerology .com.

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This is what the number nine means in numerology. The energy of the number nine represents completion but not finality.

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Think of it more in a cyclical sense. It's about the ending of one cycle and the potential it creates for another cycle to begin.

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So he designed that star of the Enneagram based on numerological divination.

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And I think people, especially I want Christians to understand, the symbols of the

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Enneagram, it's made up of an equilateral triangle in the center of it that George Gurdjieff said represented what he called the

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Occult Law of Three. The Law of Three represents a trinity of evolutionary forces that are both creating and sustaining the world.

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This is not the trinity. I mean, he called himself an esoteric

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Christian, but he was not a Christian in any biblical sense of the word. And though he was applying the use of the word trinity to the triangle, he didn't mean

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in any biblical context. And yet those terms would come in, but they're completely redefined in a very esoteric kind of mystery religion kind of way.

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And then the next symbol is a hexad, which is an unusual six -sided symbol that, well, for him, it represents the

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Law of Seven, which, according to Gurdjieff, represented the

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Law of Seven or the Law of what he called Octaves, which he was trying to evolve within man through the

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Law of Octaves in conjunction with the Law of Three, an ascending octave in man that would lead man back to integration in the ultimate one, the spirit.

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Very similar to Hinduism, like with Brahman, an impersonal, unknowable, unintelligible one, the source.

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And so that's what the hexad represents.

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And the outer symbol of the Enneagram is a circle that encloses the two inner circles.

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And I want to show you the different symbols that make up the

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Enneagram, because it's made up of a triangle and a hexad overlaid within the circumference of a circle.

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And this is really important to understand because it was designed according to numerological divination by George Gurdjieff.

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The Law of Three for him represented a trinity of evolutionary forces that were, in fact, if you could envision the triangle rotating and spinning, they were in motion for him.

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And so it represents these three evolutionary forces, both creating and sustaining the world.

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And then the Law of Seven, represented by this unusual six -sided shape called a hexad, represents the evolution of creating an octave, an ascending octave within man, in his consciousness, back to reunion in the source, in his cosmology, out of which the planets and everything spontaneously overflowed and emerged on their own.

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There's no creator. Gurdjieff absolutely denied the creator -creation distinction.

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And then the circle, while Gurdjieff did not call it the Law of One, it's really what it does represent.

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And so you have in the Enneagram the circle encompassing the triangle and the hexad.

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And in Gurdjieff's students' work, some of them portray the circle as the

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Ouroboros, which is a very ancient symbol, meaning all is one, all is divine.

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You can see this way back in Greek mythology and in Gnosticism, for instance, this

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Ouroboros symbol. So what the Enneagram symbol as George Gurdjieff designed it, what it actually means is the circle surrounding the world and man.

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I mean, just go back to Genesis 3. You will be like God, knowing good and evil for yourselves.

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I need to stop you just for one second. So is this diagram you're displaying right now, and for those listening,

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I know you can't see it, but it's a snake over this geometric Enneagram formation.

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Is this George Gurdjieff's or is this, like, where did you get this from?

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What iteration of the, or is this ancient? Is this something from? Well, the

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Ouroboros, which is the serpent devouring its own tail, that is an ancient symbol that comes out of Gnosticism.

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And that symbol of the Ouroboros indicates all is one, all is divine.

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That's what it means. So he appropriated that for the Enneagram, that's all I'm trying to.

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Well, he didn't, I didn't find the symbol in Gurdjieff. He didn't actually do a lot of writing.

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He did a lot of lectures, his students took notes, and it was his students that then wrote most of the books on him, from their notes on him.

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So I can't remember exactly which one of his students included this in one of their books, which is where I got it.

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Oh, that's fine. Okay, so I just, yeah, I guess what I was trying to figure out is this particular image here, because I haven't seen that.

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If you Google Enneagram, right, you don't see the Ouroboros. But this is part of the history then.

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Because that's, to me, that screams, okay, there's a cult stuff going on here. Yeah, very definitely.

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And the reason I show this image in my PowerPoint presentation is because I want people to understand that visually this is what's happening.

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And without going into detail on what Gurdjieff believed, well, let me,

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I should probably just give a little bit of that. He established, the

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Enneagram came to the West in 1922 when he established the Institute for the

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Harmonious Development of Man near Paris. And the

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Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was symbolized by the Enneagram symbol, not with the personality types, but the symbol.

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And let's see, figure out how to go back here. He does have a nice mustache,

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I will say. Yes, he has a very nice mustache. Say something positive about him. Yeah, about poor

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George Gurdjieff. Anyways, he divided the

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Enneagram into the instinctive center, the feeling center, and the thinking center in what's called fourth way teaching.

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And these three centers represent Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism.

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Islam is the instinctive center, Christianity is the feeling center, and the thinking center is

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Islam, or it's rather Hinduism. And he believed that the

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Enneagram symbol and the work you do around and within the occult laws of the

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Enneagram represented what he called the fourth way, which was integration of these other three ways of Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism that would put you on a fast track to self -realization.

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Now, his version of self -realization, he believed that man was born in essence, which is divine, but by early childhood you develop an outward personality, which is a false egoic self.

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So the essence you're born in is your true self. The personality, which we understand is just a normal personality of personhood, that was a false self that had to be gotten rid of.

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And so he designed the fourth way as a fast track into an altered state of consciousness beyond the thinking mind where,

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I should back up and say, he understood man to be mechanical and to be asleep to the reality of internal divinity, of essence.

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And so he wanted to, well, this is, I should probably share some of this.

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His idea was that man is mechanical, he's in a sleep state, and he doesn't have a soul. If he dies in that state without a soul, he becomes food for the moon, which is a planet that is going to evolve into another earth and will be inhabited just like the earth.

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I mean, of course it's utterly nonsensical. Whoa, we just took a big left turn there.

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Wow, so this is crazy. This is more crazy than, or more, yeah, just out there than I thought.

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You start out with thinking this is personality types, and now we're talking about the moon is going to become another earth.

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And it's going to eat you if you die without developing a soul. And it feeds on the sentient material of dead human beings.

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And because it's ravenously hungry, it's growing and evolving. I mean, this, and this was articulated by his student,

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Uspensky, P .D. Uspensky, in his book, In Search of the Miraculous. He goes into detail on being eaten by the moon or not.

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And so if you do the Gurdjieff work and you practice his fourth way, which was a very secretive cult in Paris, in his

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Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, if you practice his cultic techniques, you will start to develop a soul.

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It will then become crystallized. And then when you die, you won't be eaten by the moon.

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And it gets really bizarre because Uspensky said, not many people attain crystallization of a soul.

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And he said, that's really actually a good thing. Because if too many people became enlightened like that, they wouldn't want to be eaten by the moon.

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And then the moon would starve to death and the whole cosmos would collapse. So this is more, yeah, this sounds more

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Scientology now, almost than, than Myers Briggs.

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So this was, this is before though, the personality types. We haven't even gotten to that.

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This is just a cultic teaching, a cultic symbols, a cultic ideas.

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And only for a select few to reach enlightenment is what you're saying. It's your self -realization,

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I think is the word you use. Yes. He did not develop personality types. What he did, he did develop the idea that everybody has a chief feature that is negative.

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It's the thing that keeps you in personality and obscures your divine essence.

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Now, none of this is logical. I mean, within his own system, it's not, it's not logical at all.

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But the, he taught in order to awaken remembrance of divine essence, your original essence, your true self, you had, and this is what applies now to the

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Enneagram of personality. This is his idea. You find your chief feature by a deep dive within the center of yourself to awaken self -remembering of divine essence through radical self -observation.

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So he is the one who said you've got to dive deeply within the core of your being and understand yourself, have self -remembering, self -observation, self -knowledge.

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And yes, he did not develop the Enneagram types. They were developed, the initial development of those was done by Oscar Echazo, another occultist who was a follower of the

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Gurdjieff work, but claimed that he received the Enneagram by direct revelation.

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I should put a picture of him up. This is

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Oscar Echazo. He believed that he was an ascended master who was in direct contact with the angelic realm, with spirits.

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We would call them demons. And he believed that he got the Enneagram by direct transmission from the spirit realm and that he was told by his archangel

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Metatron to put the seven deadly sins of Evagrius Ponticus, the early father of Roman Catholicism, around the

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Enneagram plus two. I guess Evagrius actually had eight, but it was the seven deadly sins of the desert fathers plus two.

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And he designed the Enneagram as a means, again, to transform consciousness from,

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I just want to read a quote from him, from personality to divine essence.

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This is in the book Interviews with Oscar Echazo. The interview was from 1973, done by Sam Kean, then editor of Psychology Today.

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And he says, this is Oscar Echazo speaking. He says, we have to distinguish between man as he is in essence and as he is in ego or personality.

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In essence, every person is perfect, fearless, and in loving unity with the entire cosmos.

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There is no conflict within the person, between head, heart, and stomach, or between the person and others.

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Every human being starts in pure essence. Then something happens. The ego begins to develop.

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Karma accumulates. There is a transition from objectivity to subjectivity.

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Man falls from essence into personality. So you can see right there, it's a

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Gnostic understanding of the fall. In Gnosticism, the fall isn't of man in a righteous state in fellowship with God into sin.

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The fall is from spirit into matter.

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And for Echazo, it was from essence into personality. So he used the

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Enneagram, and he called it the Enneagon. He developed 108

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Enneagons, but four only are really used and pertinent to the

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Enneagram of personality. He designed the Enneagram of fixations based on the vices, the deadly sins, and then their counterpart, the

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Enneagram of holy ideas. And so once you recognize your fixation, then you can work your way up through his occult system of the

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Enneagram to attain the holy idea. And then he also did the

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Enneagram of vices and the Enneagram of virtue. So it's very much a system of mystical, esoteric transformation.

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Really, his goal was transforming humanity into divinity by means of this esoteric

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Enneagram system that he used. And I know this is hard to grasp.

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I wrestled with understanding the Enneagram for years before I could grasp what this is because this is hardcore what we now call or used to be called

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New Age spirituality, which is now called the New Spirituality. And then he had an occult school in Arica, Chile, and it was attended by Claudio Naranjo, who is the developer of the personality tags.

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So Claudio Naranjo was also a student of the

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Gurdjieff work in a hardcore occultist, I mean, hardcore occultism.

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Thank you. And Claudio Naranjo, he developed it, as you know, from a combination of his knowledge.

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He was a psychiatrist, and he was doing research psychology in the

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Santiago, Chile, medical school there.

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He was a teacher on their faculty, and he was doing research there into psychology.

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He was also using, he incorporated into his work on personality and into his personal psychotherapy practice, he used

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LSD, and he used ayahuasca, which is used by South American shamans, and he used ibogaine, which is used by West African medicine men, witch doctors.

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And both of those substances, ayahuasca and ibogaine, are known, the theory is they open the pineal gland in the brain to directly contact the spirit world.

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This is what he was doing. I just want to stop you there for one second. So this is,

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I've heard this before, but not from him. So I don't know how specific

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I want to get on this, but there's a, I'll just say they're supplements, but there's some supplements out there that you're supposed to take.

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There's an organization or a company, I guess, that promotes these supplements. And anyway, I know some people who take these supplements, but one of the things that the founder of this company believed is that it opens the pineal gland.

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I've never heard this before. You're the only other person I've heard to talk about this. And that's also called the third eye.

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Right. In order to interact with, or I guess, reach a self -realization or enlightened state or something to see reality as it really is.

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So is that across the board a new age teaching or a mystical teaching? Absolutely. Oh, it is?

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It is. It's deep out of occultism, actually. Yeah. Why the pineal gland?

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Well, you probably don't know. I actually don't know. That's so weird to me, but there's got to be some reason for that.

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That's interesting. So he was trying to awaken this using the Enneagram. Yes. And he was very actively involved with shamanism, very actively involved with shamanism.

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So his goal, well,

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I'll fast forward. He ended up moving to the United States, and he became a teacher at the

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Esalen Institute, which is in Big Sur, California. The reason I'm going to Esalen at this point is because Claudio Naranjo was a leader, a pioneer in what's called transpersonal psychology.

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Transpersonal psychology is a synthesis of the science of psychology and occult spirituality, spiritism, direct contact with the spirit realm.

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That is what transpersonal psychology means. He was a pioneer in this field.

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Now, actually, if you go, let me just share one thing that he wrote about.

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In the Gurdjieff work, Gurdjieff was actually synthesizing the psychology of man.

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Now, he was not a follower of psychology, but he was actually analyzing man in personality, and he was combining the occultism of mystical

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Christianity, mystical Hinduism, and mystical Islam in the

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Enneagram. So the more I have studied this, the more

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I actually see transpersonal psychology as the root of Gurdjieff.

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I see it going straight back to Gurdjieff. In some of his followers, I am listening to some of his followers.

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I am more convinced of that than ever. So Claudio Naranjo, he goes to study with Oscar Hichazo in Arica, Chile.

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And he went out. Hichazo had him go on a 40 -day solitary meditation retreat in the

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Arica desert. And during that time, he had an awakening, a spiritual awakening that he refers to as a time when he was born again.

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And it was when he sensed the embryo of a spirit come into him and start to grow and take over.

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He experienced having his hands move spontaneously in circles that he was not controlling.

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He was demon -possessed. He was demon -possessed. Right. And then he studied with Oscar Hichazo for 7 months out of a 10 -month course.

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I mean, mystery schools are intense. They take over your life. And so, anyways, he had a disagreement with Oscar Hichazo.

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They did not get along well, and so he left early. And then he came back to Berkeley, California, where he started his

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SAP group called Seekers After Truth, which is taken directly from Gurdjieff, who called himself and others seekers of truth in their esoteric quest for the masters of wisdom, the hidden knowledge of the ages.

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He was unlocking, trying to unlock the keys of all the knowledge of the universe. I should actually go back.

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This is actually very important. Gurdjieff believed that the Enneagram was the key that unlocks all the knowledge of the universe.

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And for him, if you think of it, go to Genesis 3. This is so clear in my mind that what he was doing, this occult key that unlocks the spirit, all the mysteries of the universe, that's the knowledge of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, the forbidden knowledge.

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That's exactly what it is, the serpent in Genesis 3. He was following. And he believed that you didn't need education, you didn't need philosophy or religion.

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Everything that you needed to know could be interpreted and known through the

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Enneagram. That was Gurdjieff's understanding of the Enneagram. I mean, and honestly, knowing that alone about the

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Enneagram, why would Christians dabble in occult symbols?

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I mean, it's mind -boggling to me that people are so swept away by the

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Enneagram. Well, maybe, so one of the things, I don't think most people know the history you're bringing out, but one of the things that I think most people who have been exposed to pop versions of this think is that it's just a personality test like Myers -Briggs.

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And so what if it had some occult attachments or origins? Right. We're not buying into any of that.

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I don't think the moon's going to eat me or anything. Yeah. So what do you say to people like that? Because I have the same thought.

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In fact, someone sent me even an email from the other side of it saying we shouldn't celebrate Christmas because of attachments to paganism and so forth.

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So what do you say to people who, on both sides of that, who just any kind of the slightest bit of an attachment means it's bad, and then people who say no, that you can use these tools.

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Just flesh that out for me a little bit. Yeah, sure. Well, let me just say, as you know,

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Claudio Naranjo kept it in the context of an occult mystery religion.

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It wasn't to go public. It went public. Claudio Naranjo in his book

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Healing Civilizations, and I believe this pertains directly to this idea, the complaint, well, what about Christmas and isn't the

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Enneagram, can't you just leave behind the occultism? And the reason I'm bringing this up is that Claudio Naranjo called the personality types, he called them

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Ennea types. And he believed they were part of what he called in this book, he writes of it,

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Healing Civilization, he called it part of a shamanic zeitgeist.

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He envisioned this shamanic zeitgeist as taking over Western education, removing the

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Judeo -Christian foundation from our education paradigm. He was anti -patriarchal.

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He wrote several books that were against patriarchy, and by that he didn't mean macho men.

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He meant Western Judeo, he meant Western Civilizations Foundation and Judeo -Christianity.

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He wanted to get rid of that. Okay, so the reason I bring that up is because people then think, okay, you can separate out all of that.

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Okay, Naranjo thought that. We don't believe that. I want to jump ahead now.

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I actually would like to discuss how the

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New Age is very much alive and well in Christianity. I want to discuss the writers of this book,

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More Than Your Number, Beth and Jeff McCord, because this really answers the question.

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Let me see here. Here we go.

39:45

This is the slide I wanted. These are Christians. Beth and Jeff McCord are believers.

39:54

I have no doubt. But when Beth McCord became aware of the

40:00

Enneagram, the only people that were teaching it, they were hardcore

40:07

New Agers. She took several courses. Let me just read you the list of courses that she took.

40:19

She took several certification courses. She took the six -month online course, and this was from a website.

40:33

She has since taken it down. The Enneagram for Healing Practitioners, which is what

40:40

I'm picturing here, with master Enneagram teachers, Helen Palmer, Russ Hudson, David Daniels, and Jessica Dibbs.

40:48

This was her way of describing it. Then she also took three courses with teacher

40:57

Catherine Fovre on typing, tri -typing, and type number eight.

41:03

She was actually certified in the Enneagram by a woman named

41:09

Gingela Pidboga, who runs the Enneagram and Business Network.

41:21

I just want to start with this course on the

41:27

Enneagram for Healing Practitioners. This course is put on. Think of this.

41:33

This is a six -month course. This course is offered by the

41:39

SHIFT Network. Let me see. I think I have a slide here.

41:47

Maybe it's behind. These are some of the other classes, courses offered by the

41:55

SHIFT Network. Sacred Evidence -Based Mediumship. That's direct contact with demons.

42:03

Intentional Dreaming with European Be -Shamanism. Shamanic Lucid Dreaming.

42:09

Exploring the Cosmic Mind through Psychedelics. And from Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Naranjo, you can say what they're doing is trying to awaken the cosmic mind.

42:22

And they were not Gurdjieff, but Ichazo and Naranjo were using psychedelics.

42:28

Heal Yourself with the Secret Language of Plant Spirits. Energy Healing with the

42:34

Divine Mothers of Darkness and Light. Visionary Activist Astrology.

42:39

God, Sex, and Enlightenment. And then Spiritual Evolution through the

42:45

Enneagram, which is one of 16 occult courses that the

42:51

SHIFT Network teaches on the Enneagram. So she took the course from Helen, from Russ Hudson on the left,

43:01

Helen Palmer, David Daniels, and Jessica Dipp. Russ Hudson and Don Risso, who learned the

43:12

Enneagram from Claudio Naranjo, and he wrote the first book on it, Breaking the

43:17

Code of Silence and Secrecy, and made it public. He and Russ Hudson founded the

43:24

Enneagram Institute based on, well, I should say both

43:29

Don Risso and Russ Hudson were followers of the Gurdjieff work. Russ Hudson is still alive.

43:35

He's still a follower of the Gurdjieff work. He is on the faculty and staff, well, on the faculty rather, the teaching faculty of the

43:44

Esalon Institute and the SHIFT Network. Helen Palmer learned the

43:49

Enneagram and she was a follower of the Gurdjieff work. She learned the Enneagram from Claudio Naranjo, who incorporates

43:56

Gurdjieff into the Enneagram. She learned it from him and she's now retired, but she was on the faculty of both the

44:07

SHIFT Network and the Esalon Institute. Dr. David Daniels was a psychiatrist on staff with Stanford's medical school where he taught psychology, and he learned the

44:21

Enneagram from Helen Palmer, and he had a very oneness worldview or in unity and union with the cosmos, and there's no such thing as sin.

44:33

And Jessica, rather, yeah, Jessica did taught a course, another course on the

44:43

Enneagram with Russ Hudson and Claudio Naranjo in 2017 called the

44:50

Enneagram of Essence Awakening Your Divine Inner Being.

44:57

Now, the course name is the Enneagram of Essence. I'm describing it as the awakening of the core of your divine inner being.

45:06

On the description of the course, she described it as getting in touch with the divine within you, which she called

45:16

God, and that's your real self. So this is hardcore

45:22

New Age spirituality. Okay, so Beth McCord took those courses, and then she also took a course from Catherine Fovre, a student of the

45:36

Gurdjieff work, and the important part was, if you've noticed, all these people are students of the

45:41

Gurdjieff work. So it really, George Gurdjieff hasn't gone anywhere. Okay, that's interesting because I thought, and I was saying

45:48

Naranjo, I think it's Naranjo in Spanish, but I thought Claudio Naranjo was the, since he came up with the personality types, he was more the inspiration, not

46:00

Gurdjieff. But what you're saying is that actually Gurdjieff is still very much the inspiration for the

46:06

Enneagram. Yeah, Gurdjieff is really lurking in the details. And Catherine Fovre, she developed what's called the tri -types of the

46:15

Enneagram, which is taking, you have one dominant type, and then two subordinate types, that one each is taken from Gurdjieff's three centers of head, heart, and gut.

46:27

And what's very interesting and important to understand with Catherine Fovre is she says, you cannot understand the

46:38

Enneagram types unless you view them and understand them through the lens of Gurdjieff's occult laws of three and seven.

46:49

This is her teaching. And she is a contemporary

46:55

Enneagram teacher. So we have a bunch of people running around right now who say that they are experts on the

47:04

Enneagram, or not experts, but they're very into the Enneagram. But according to some people like Catherine Fovre, she'd probably say, no, you're not really in the

47:13

Enneagram world. Like she would say, you're doing the surface level thing, but you need to go deeper and get into Gurdjieff's work to be able to actually utilize it correctly.

47:28

Yes. And absolutely, I thought that was very revealing. I heard her in an interview say that you can't really understand the types unless you view them and understand them fully through Gurdjieff.

47:42

She says that. But the next person, this is just so important to understand.

47:48

Ginger Lapid -Vogda is the head of the Enneagram and Business Network, and she is the one who certified

47:55

Beth McCord in the Enneagram. She got her Enneagram certification from this woman.

48:01

This woman believes that the universe is the energy of the universe, pulses through the course of everybody and everything, and that God and the divine is within you.

48:14

So you turn within to find God. Very interesting article that she wrote called

48:23

Spirituality in the Workplace. Very, very revealing. She teaches the

48:28

Enneagram for management and just how to align your staff and your systems and everybody, how to place personnel.

48:39

She says when she goes into a business, she doesn't teach it as a spirituality because she believes in non -dual spirituality.

48:48

She denies the creator -creation distinction. She's a hardcore New Ager. So she doesn't tell them.

48:57

She's teaching them religion because she knows she'd get pushback. People wouldn't want to do the

49:03

Enneagram if they knew it was religion, and this is in her article. So instead what she does is she teaches them the

49:10

Enneagram, believing that doing the personality -type structure of the Enneagram alone will convert them to a non -dualistic way of thinking.

49:26

This is the non -binary, the denial of the creator -creation distinction.

49:33

So I'm really – I'm actually not really meaning to pick on Beth McCord, but I think this is a very good illustration, and I'd like to go through some issues in her book where, frankly, reading the book,

49:49

I was appalled. I'm going, okay, that's Gurdjieff, that's Gurdjieff, that's Gurdjieff. I'm sorry.

49:54

I'm familiar enough with Gurdjieff to go, okay, how can you study with these people and then you're learning this system that you think is completely expunged of any occult ideology, but how can you study with hardcore

50:13

New Agers who are into the occult and not be influenced by it?

50:20

And that is my real concern with Christians doing the

50:29

Enneagram. And the sad part for me is at first I kind of thought, okay, she must not understand what the

50:37

New Age movement is, and this must have gone whoosh over her head. That's not the case.

50:43

She recognized – she and her husband both recognized that it was a different worldview entirely, but they reasoned, well, the

50:54

Enneagram of personality is so important that we've got to – we're going to teach – we're going to put the gospel on it, so we're going to say it's the

51:04

Christian Enneagram, it's the gospel Enneagram. Okay, let me give you some examples from the book where the worldview – you just can't detach.

51:21

You can't study a system with hardcore New Agers without retaining some of their influence.

51:29

I don't know how you could. Personally, I could never have submitted to studying anything with any one of these women.

51:37

It's like you with the supplements I think you were talking about. Right, yeah.

51:43

Yeah, and I was like, I can't take this if that's the intention. Yeah, and the argument is – and that's why

51:49

I brought it up earlier about how much is too much as far as being connected to these occult practices.

51:57

The arguments, well, you're not – we don't use it for that purpose.

52:03

We use it for other – it's health -related. There's basically side effects or benefits that you can glean from these teachings, but we're not going to use it for the central purpose that they've been created for.

52:19

To me, I think the same thing that you think as far as that goes. That's syncretism.

52:25

I can't separate those two things. I don't know. This podcast isn't – we're not here to talk about Christmas trees and things, but I think there is a separation, though, between Christianity coming into a pagan society and then – and maybe there is a little bit of a gray area here, but as far as taking symbols that were once used for pagan practices and then reappropriating those things for Christian purposes when there are things like, for example,

53:00

God owns – trees are gods, right? It's not something that – the devil didn't come up with trees.

53:09

The devil didn't come up with things that are actually gods in his creation, and so it's not like those things in and of themselves are evil, but when you have something like the

53:21

Enneagram – and I think I tried to make this point in my initial podcast on this. It is fundamentally created.

53:30

Its whole origin is something that's separate from God. It only exists in the minds of people who are trying to construct something to oppose

53:41

God with. It's not like a Christmas tree. It's not like some of these other things that people try to say, well, that's pagan too, so why don't you – there's a difference there.

53:54

And if the Enneagram – I don't know. I'm going on a tangent here. But if the Enneagram was, let's say, the personality types, there's a scientific basis for this, and that's where it was developed is through observation and looking at the world, and this is part of God's creative order.

54:09

And then some Satanists wanted to take advantage of that or something and use that for their own purposes. That's much different than this, which is no.

54:18

This wasn't observation. This wasn't science, real science. This was actual occult activity and coming up with ideas to directly challenge the creator, and as you said, the creator -creation distinction.

54:33

So that's how I see it at least. I don't know if you would add to that or think of it differently.

54:39

No, I think you did a really great job illustrating the difference, whether the symbol had been developed, the types had been developed by observation as a helpful tool rather than by occultism.

54:54

And then if Satanists used it, well, they're using it. But no, this came out of, honestly, out of the demonic realm of people in direct opposition to God.

55:09

I don't know if you can see that. Kind of. Yeah, it's hard to see.

55:14

Just to give an idea of what I'm looking at, it's a chart. Everybody has a wounded child or a beloved child.

55:21

And what they do is the beloved child of – Beth says she's an

55:27

Enneagram type 9. So her beloved child of her type 9 she calls

55:33

Coach Beth. Coach Beth teaches the Enneagram. That's where she feels beloved by God.

55:39

Her wounded child of her 9 type is Little Bethy. This is a very wounded inner child.

55:48

But then she also has – the Enneagram system is so complex.

55:54

Besides her main type, everybody has two wings, and then you have two Enneagram paths.

56:00

So it gets very convoluted and confusing. But just with these other parts that she calls parts, one is named – this is in the beloved child column –

56:13

Victorious or Virtuous Victoria. And then she has the wounded child,

56:19

Vicious Victoria. And then Remarkable Regina is Beloved. Raging Regina is

56:26

Wounded. Noble Natalie is Beloved. Not good enough Natalie is

56:32

Wounded. Wonderful Wendy is Beloved. Worrying Wendy is

56:38

Wounded. Now these – they talk about in this book that everybody has parts.

56:46

Well, before I give it a psychological analysis, one of the teachings of Gurdjieff is that you aren't just a unified self.

56:59

You aren't just an I, the pronoun I. The I who wakes up and gets up in the morning is not the

57:09

I that makes breakfast or goes shopping. So you have – and this is very confusing,

57:16

I understand. But this is Gurdjieff. You have all these different parts that are different I's.

57:24

They're different U's. And you can just have dozens of them all over the place.

57:30

And part of Gurdjieff's process is trying to – there's one book written by a student of his called

57:39

Eating the I. It's trying to get rid of all this perception of I put my hand on the book and I feel that sensation.

57:53

I do all these other things. You want to integrate and transcend all those

57:59

I's. And then in another part of the book, which is directly applicable to this, they teach a system called

58:09

AWARE, where you're supposed to become aware. It's the acronym for AWAKEN, WELCOME, ASK, RECEIVE, ENGAGE.

58:23

Okay, AWAKEN. Awaken to your thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and inclinations.

58:32

Okay, that is Gurdjieff. Those are from the three centers of head, heart, and body.

58:39

And it was illustrated by one of Gurdjieff's students,

58:45

William Patrick Patterson, who does podcasts. And he still does the

58:52

Gurdjieff work. He said that this intensity, for instance, of focusing on becoming aware of your body sensations would be like he lives in New York, so you can relate to this.

59:07

In the winter, he would go and put his hand on the doorknob, and when he was focusing, doubling down attention on it, he could feel, oh, that's really cold.

59:21

He had never noticed it before. You go about your day. You don't just stop and go every little thing.

59:27

Oh, that's cold. The snow is cold. You don't do that. So this is an example of how you're becoming aware of your body.

59:37

You're becoming aware of everything you touch, everything you feel inside, your sensory perceptions.

59:43

And then the next step of the

59:48

McCords is welcome. Welcome these experiences without judgment.

59:54

You suspend judgment. There is good and bad, and we have to even judge ourselves.

01:00:03

You know, am I operating in the spirit or in the flesh?

01:00:09

And I have to repent of sin. I don't suspend judgment. I want to operate in biblical judgment and discernment.

01:00:19

I want to repent. I want to grow in faith in Christ. I want to reflect his image, and I want to live for his honor and glory.

01:00:31

I want to worship him, not myself. So anyways, and then they say, ask, inquire of your internal parts what they're feeling.

01:00:46

Well, that's a dead end. I mean, honestly, if I'm obsessed with how

01:00:51

I'm feeling, my emotions can take me down. And this is a book.

01:00:57

This is marketed to Christians, right? Yes, it's a bestseller. What was the name of it again?

01:01:05

More than your number. More than your number. Okay. So this is one of the popular ways of getting into even churches that we would attend with some of the members there.

01:01:16

And you're hitting on something that I had this thought. I don't know if I shared it, but the obsession with self, and then the obsession with personality types, and getting as deep as you possibly can into what makes you tick, supposedly, has a tendency,

01:01:34

I think, to make excuses for sinful behavior. And what

01:01:40

I found with the few people I listened to who are advocating Enneagram is they have to have a clause.

01:01:48

They have to say at the beginning of their interviews or their speeches on the subject that we affirm that mankind is sinful.

01:01:58

And so they want to kind of, I think, cross their I's or cross their

01:02:04

T's dot their I's to say we're Orthodox. And then let's talk about the Enneagram.

01:02:09

But you can't really hold the two together. One's going to eat up the other. One's going to be the focus.

01:02:18

So the question I guess I'd have is when you are looking deeply into yourself to say, why am

01:02:24

I the way I am? Why do I feel the way I feel? Why do I do what I do? How do you distinguish then between this is my personality or my

01:02:33

Enneagram type and this is the sinful part of me? I would suspect in that book, do they market it as a way to try to identify potential sinful tendencies at all?

01:02:49

Is that part of it? The subtitle is a Christ -centered Enneagram approach to become aware.

01:02:55

The acronym I just went over of your internal world. So not really, probably.

01:03:04

Well, and they, I mean, to their credit in the book, they spend several pages where they're saying, you know, they're sharing

01:03:11

Orthodox belief. They're saying, okay, we're Orthodox. We believe this. We believe the right stuff.

01:03:17

But let me just give an example of how distorted this can be in, in their understanding of the fall in the garden of Eden.

01:03:29

Eden. I'm quoting from them. This is what, this is a sentence they have in the book. Adam and Eve hid themselves to try to keep their misaligned patterns of relating from being seen by God.

01:03:43

Genesis three, eight. What? Okay. And I'm not,

01:03:51

I'm, I'm not actually trying to be critical of the McCords. I they're believers.

01:03:58

I have no doubt about that, but I'm just trying to point out. You can't separate out ultimately sound doctrine.

01:04:08

I mean, they hid because they were fallen and sinful. Right? So they're, they're, they're saying they're substituting something.

01:04:15

That's less than sin for sin. They're saying it right. So, I mean, that softens the blow, doesn't it?

01:04:20

I mean, I feel a lot better about myself if that's what I'm doing. And I feel better if I can find a solution.

01:04:26

That's just, you need to understand your personality better or something, rather than you need to repent before a

01:04:32

Holy God is going to judge you and condemn your soul for the sin that you've committed. That's those are two different things.

01:04:39

So I think that's helpful. That's probably, that's the bottom line is that this is syncretistic to some extent.

01:04:46

And even if you listen to teachers who are trying to bring this into Christianity and they, and you hear them say

01:04:54

Orthodox things, which we do in all the woke movement and a lot of other heretical movements, the devil's in the details.

01:05:01

You're going to find areas. They might be even subtle where there's what you just example is what you just read, where there's a, they're introducing an idea to you to get you to soften on sin, to get you to actually to rearrange anthropology.

01:05:19

So you humans is not what they are before God. Now I want to come full circle to something you said at the beginning, because I know you work for you do work for truth exchange.

01:05:29

And you said that this is the conflation or the trying to, to take the distinction between the creator and the creation, and then kind of collapse these things onto themselves.

01:05:42

So you have one category. So one ism instead of two ism. Maybe in just a brief few sentences, how do you see the

01:05:48

Enneagram functioning in this way to promote one ism? Okay.

01:05:55

That's a really good question and I actually really appreciate it. The Enneagram is seen as a universal personality type indicator that applies to everybody on the planet.

01:06:07

According to the Enneagram, everyone is born with an immutable

01:06:12

Enneagram type. You can't change it. You were born with it. You're going to die with it.

01:06:17

And because of that, and here's where I'm getting to the one aspect because of that, if you study the

01:06:26

Enneagram, you're going to understand the personality types and the behavior that you're going to understand the core fears, the core motivations of every other person, the core desires of everybody on the planet, as it becomes a kind of lingua franca, as a universal language for relating to everybody in every, in every culture.

01:06:52

And in fact, Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest who wrote one of the early books on the

01:06:58

Enneagram, he's the one who calls it in his book, the

01:07:04

Enneagram, a Christian perspective. He calls it the lingua franca and he says it has the ability to transcend cultural boundaries and to unify religions, philosophies, and psychologies around the world.

01:07:24

So it it's breaking down distinctions. It's unifying everybody in everything.

01:07:32

It's utopian in that sense. And I'll take this right back to Gurdjieff.

01:07:37

Gurdjieff had a utopian desire that people should awaken to divine essence or the world was going to be destroyed.

01:07:48

And so here's Richard Rohr saying, I believe he says this in the foreword to his book on the

01:07:56

Enneagram, that, that it's a tool to unify and integrate all religions and all philosophies and all psychologies.

01:08:10

So right there, one of the goals of the one ism that you mentioned that Dr.

01:08:16

Peter Jones speaks about in his ministry is the idea that you can unify the religions of the world on the ground of shared mystical experience.

01:08:32

So you can unify all the personalities of the world and create global harmony by if everybody in the world would only study the

01:08:43

Enneagram, then there would be peace on earth. This, this is a completely humanistic, oneist ideology.

01:08:53

and that's kind of to answer your question that way.

01:08:59

And, and it ultimately, if you think of it, you're trying to unify

01:09:05

Christianity with Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and remove the cultural distinctions, the religious distinctions, the philosophical distinction.

01:09:18

You're trying to create a unity, a oneist global mindset of a cosmic mind to unite people.

01:09:31

So that's kind of my answer to that question.

01:09:36

I hope that makes sense. Fascinating. And it makes sense of why so many cling to it so tightly because there are

01:09:43

Christians who just, they live by this and they think it's so important.

01:09:50

In fact, there's a conference coming up on the Enneagram and the gospel. I don't know how those things merge, but if it was just some kind of helpful tool out there that a

01:10:00

Christian could use, but didn't have to use, you wouldn't see conferences like this, I don't think. You wouldn't see the attempt to merge this into spiritual categories.

01:10:09

It would just, there wouldn't be blogs and websites and books. It would just say, well, that's a tool just like, you know, physiological and medical procedures are helpful for Christians.

01:10:20

Like that might be helpful or just like, it's okay to enjoy art or music, you know, but you wouldn't have

01:10:25

Christians making this part of their identity, becoming Enneagram coaches.

01:10:31

And because what are they, that's not discipleship when you're an Enneagram coach, but you do have a goal.

01:10:37

And so what's the goal? And so what you're saying makes sense that they think that, and I've gotten that flavor that there's a, on the other side of understanding these things, you do wake up to the world around you and how people interact and who they are, and it's going to make more peace and more harmony in your life.

01:10:56

And if everyone got on board, we'd all understand ourselves and each other better. And that way it would, it would bring this about and it would just be a much better use, just as pragmatically speaking of people's time who are

01:11:10

Christians and believe the Bible to just says about those things, what makes for peace, reconciliation with God, and then the one and others, that would be a whole lot better, but we're looking for things in other places.

01:11:25

We don't think the Bible is sufficient, I guess. Yeah, it really is. It's, it's what is the final authority?

01:11:32

Is it the Enneagram or is it the Bible? And also, I just want to point out that Christians are pointed to suffering life.

01:11:40

We're going to suffer. If we stand for Christ, we're going to suffer. I mean, everybody suffers.

01:11:46

We're in a fallen world. So you, you, and you know, children can rebel.

01:11:52

They can, you know, go astray. You can have relational difficulties with other people, even other believers.

01:11:59

You know, we've all experienced the difficulties of life. We're appointed to suffer for Christ, for the sake of Christ.

01:12:07

We're to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him. And we're to live for the glory and the honor and the worship and the praise of Christ.

01:12:17

And then also, I just, I just wanted to, well, I just wanted to, Romans 8, 29 and 30 says, for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to become conformed to the image of his son.

01:12:35

This is the image we're being conformed to, not the image of the Enneagram. Not the image of ourselves even, because we need to be conformed as believers to the image of his son so that he would be the firstborn among many brethren and those whom he predestined.

01:12:52

He also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified this.

01:13:04

So Paul writes, there's an eternal weight of glory that the sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with.

01:13:17

And we're looking to the eternal, though our outward man is decaying daily. Our inward man is being renewed in Christ.

01:13:25

And we're looking to that eternal weight of glory. You know, Hebrews 12, verse two, we're to fix our eyes on Jesus.

01:13:35

The author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross on our behalf because we're sinners, despising the shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

01:13:48

We're to look to him. And then the next verses go on. We're to persevere in him because we have not yet endured to the shedding of blood in our striving against sin.

01:14:01

And that just made me honestly think it says for consider him who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself so that you will not grow weary and lose heart because you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood and you're striving against sin.

01:14:22

There is suffering. You know, how is the Enneagram going to help brothers and sisters in Christ in Africa, Indonesia, other parts of the world who are being imprisoned, who are being tortured for their faith in the

01:14:39

Lord Jesus Christ? What on earth good is the Enneagram going to do for them?

01:14:45

Yeah, it's a very first world. It exists in suburbs. Exactly.

01:14:51

In urban environments where people have it pretty easy. Well, with that, I think we need to probably land the plane, but Pam, I really appreciate you sharing some of your knowledge on the history and the background of the

01:15:02

Enneagram. I didn't know much of what you shared. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the moon eating people, but no, it's fascinating and it's helpful.

01:15:12

I think it gives people a greater context and understanding what this is. So God bless.

01:15:17

If people want to reach out to Pam, they can contact office at truth exchange .com.

01:15:24

That's the email address office at truth exchange .com, or you can go to truth exchange .com to find out more about Pam's writings on this subject of the

01:15:33

Enneagram and other things. So thank you, Pam. Appreciate it. Yeah, you're welcome.

01:15:38

May I just close with one thought. The truth is a counter to all of this truth exchange.

01:15:43

The title of our symposium this year is the hope of ultimate meaning.

01:15:50

Knowing God, the creator and redeemer. That's awesome. That's great.

01:15:56

That's great, Pam. Well, um, I look forward to it. I hope people listening can attend that.

01:16:01

I'm assuming it's online where they can watch videos and so forth. Uh, so, uh,