History of the Enneagram: Gurdjieff, Ichazo, Naranjo, Riso, Palmer, Al... http://hubpages.

com/education/History-of-the-Enneagram-Gurdjieff

Updated on January 13, 2016

This image of the enneagram symbol shows the lines as arrows depicting Riso's notion of directions of integration and disintegration, | Source

Introduction to the History of the Enneagram

The enneagram has had an unclear history. Early pioneers in its development claimed to have learned its concepts from ancient traditions,
such as of the Sufis, of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, or of the Christian Fathers, only to later take back their words and say that they
gave credit to ancient or esoteric sources only to get added respect for their own original work. Students of the enneagram are still arguing over
what, if any, influence any ancient philosopher or tradition had on the development of the modern enneagram.

The enneagram as known in our time began with Gurdjieff, and so I begin with him.

The enneagram is a circle with nine points connected by lines in a certain order that can be used as a dynamic chart of processes, according to
Gurdjieff and those who came after him. The best-known enneagram is the enneagram of personality types. It is widely used by organizations, ,
and companies when hiring; by spiritual directors; by retreat centers; by specially trained counselors, and by individuals seeking self
understanding and self-development.

Who Was Gurdjieff? Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1949), an Armenian, was a student
of world religions and wisdom traditions, a teacher of esoteric
spirituality, a philosopher, and a businessperson. Gurdjieff opened
and closed a number of schools around the world to teach his
"Fourth Way" method of awakening higher consciousness. He taught
that most humans are "asleep" when they think they are awake, in
comparison with two possible higher levels of consciousness, which
he called 'self-remembering' and 'objective consciousness'.
Self-remembering is a prerequisite of objective consciousness, which
is seeing things as they really are. Gurdjieff distinguished between a
person's essence -- which is inherent -- and personality -- which is
learned or imitated. {Learn more about The Gurdjieff Work here.}

Gurdjieff and the Enneagram

P. D. Ouspensky, a Gurdjieff follower, included a Gurdjieff lecture
about the enneagram symbol in his 1949 book In Search of the
Miraculous. As best I understand the lecture so far, Gurdjieff is

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saying that the enneagram symbol can be used to diagram any

process. He uses a diatonic music scale as an example and applies
that same pattern to other processes, such as a chemical process.

Without giving checkable specifics, Gurdjieff claimed that the

enneagram symbol came from ancient esoteric sources, but he also
said that the enneagram can not be found anywhere before him in its
complete form.

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff | Source

The Law of 3 and the Law of 7

[[Gurdjieff taught that the seven steps or intervals of any process includes deviations from the original direction or intent.]]

Gurdjieff taught that there are two "cosmic" natural laws called 'the law of three' (or 'the law of three forces') and 'the law of seven' (or 'the law of
the octave'). The Law of Three is that every phenomenon is the result of the interaction of an active or positive force, a passive or negative
force, and a neutralizing or reconciling force, considered relative to one another .

The Law of Seven or Law of Octaves is the tendency of developing processes to occur in seven steps. Starting on page 421, Gurdjieff calls it
"The Law of Sevenfoldness" in his book Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. This book is a science fiction tale that takes place on a space ship.
The importance and universality of the law of sevenfoldness is emphasized. Examples of it mentioned include 7 colors in a white ray, 7 tones in
a sound, 7 sensations in a man, 7 reciprocal thrusts keeping any unmoving thing unmoving, 7 surfaces of a human nose, and 7 days in a week.
I myself have observed only the first and last of those, and I am curious about the other examples.

Gurdjieff taught that the seven steps or intervals of any process includes deviations from the original direction or intent. Watch the video linked
near this text to learn in detail about Guirdjieff's law of seven or law of octaves.

The Enneagram Symbol

Gurdjieff's enneagram, shown on the right, diagrams the Law of
Three and the Law of Seven. It has an equilateral triangle formed by
connecting points 3, 6, and 9, which are multiples of 3. The other
numbered points are connected by lines in the order from 1 to 4 to to
2 to 8 to 5 to 7 and back to 1, to form an irregular hexagon. Or if
starting from 2, the points are connected by lines from 2 to 8 to 5 to 7
to 1 to 4 and back to 2. And so on. The decimals of any whole
number not zero and not a multiple of 7 divided by 7 have the same The enneagram as described by Gurdjieff. |
Source
recurring decimal digits, with the initial decimal digit changing. 1 / 7 =
.142857..., 2 / 7 = .285714..., 3 / 7 = .428571..., 4 / 7 = .571428..., 5 /
7 = .714285..., 6 / 7 = .857142..., 8 / 7 = 1.142857..., 9/7 = 1.285714..., and so on.

Palmer on Gurdjieff
Poll
In her book The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others
Which word best describes George Gurdjieff?
in Your Life, in a few paragraphs about Gurdjieff on pages 10 to 17,
Helen Palmer wrote that Gurdjieff used nonverbal ways, such as Guru
dance and movement exercises on an enneagram drawn on a dance
Mystic
floor, to teach the enneagram as a symbol representing the rhythm
or dynamics of a process. She says that nothing was written about Genius
the enneagram of personality during Gurdjieff's lifetime. Gurdjieff had
techniques for getting his students to get some insight into their Gnostic
personality types, such as by what he called stepping on their
Occultist
favorite corns (what we might call pushing their buttons), but he did
not describe the nine personality types in his classes, writings, or Pundit
lectures.
Charlatan

None of the above words

See results without voting

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Gurdjieff's Sources
Gurdjieff did not take credit for originating the enneagram, but he
was vague about his source(s). Some of those who have studied the
matter have deduced from direct or indirect evidence that Gurdjieff
learned the enneagram and/or his philosophy from Sufis. Learn more
here and here and here.

Others say that Gurdjieff's sources instead, or also, were the

Christian 'desert fathers' and 'desert mothers'. A prominent advocate
of this view is Richard Rohr. Also see these remarks on Gurdjieff and In Search of the Miraculous (Harvest Book)
the eneagram. Mentioned as likely Christian influences were Buy Now
Evagrius Ponticus (or Praktikos) (345-399 AD), Ramon Llull
(Raimundus Lullus) (ca. 1232 ca. 1315), who in his writings used a
9-pointed wheel to diagram human virtues and vices, attributes of God, etc., and Athanasius Kircher (1601 or 16021680), whose book
Arithmologia has an image on its cover with some similarities to the enneagram.

A Christian understanding of the enneagram is discussed in the essay "Religious Accusations Against the Enneagram Proven False" by Kathy
Hurley and Theodorre Donson.

Others assert the enneagram dates even further back, to ancient civilizations, such as to a brotherhood in Babylon or to Pythagoras. However, I
have not as yet found any sites or quotes that do more than briefly mention this possibility.

My supposition is that Gurdjieff in his travels and studies picked up ideas here and there and combined them and improvised off of them in his
own way, which is how philosophies happen. {Learn more here.}

About Ichazo
The next major figure in the development of the enneagram of
personality was Bolivian Oscar Ichazo (born 1931).

The online article "Buenos Aires Mystery School? Oscar Ichazo,

Arica and Castaneda" by Corey Donovan quotes from a 1973
interview with Ichazo published in the 1982 Arica Institute publication
Interviews with Oscar Ichazo . In brief, Ichazo said that when he was
19, he met a man in La Paz, Bolivia who was in a little group in
Buenos Aires, Argentina that studied such consciousness raising
techniques as the Gurdjieff work, the Kaballah, Sufism, and Zen
Interviews With Oscar Ichazo
Buddhism. The group mentored Ichazo for over two years and then
helped him to journey to the East to study such traditions as yogas, Buy Now
Buddhism, Confucianism, and the I Ching. I have not yet found
collaboration of this story.

Decades later Ichazo discussed these and other early influences in his "Letter to the Transpersonal Community." {To read it, at the Arica
Institute website home page click Articles.}

Protoanalysis
From his studies and ponderings, Ichazo developed a system of concepts and practices that he named Protoanalysis. Beginning in 1956, study
groups met in major Latin American cities to learn and discuss Ichazo's ideas. In 1968 Ichazo lectured on Protoanalysis at the Institute of
Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile. That same year, in Arica, Chile, Ichazo founded the Arica School or Institute to teach Protoanalysis to
select students. In 1971 he moved the school to the United States, initially to New York City. Nowadays the Arica Institute website lists a
schedule of group trainings in a number of US states and other countries. [The link is given in the above capsuleon the Arica Institute home
page, click Training Info.]

Ichazo and the Enneagram

As part of his Protoanalysis program, Ichazo developed over a hundred enneagramsthe enneagram symbol taught by Gurdjieff, with different
sets of labels applied to the 9 points by Ichazo for different purposes. One way that Ichazo used the enneagram symbol was to diagram his
concept of nine ego types, each with a distinctive 'fixation', 'trap', 'idea', 'passion', and 'virtue'.

In his "Letter to the Transpersonal Community", cited and linked above, Ichazo said that Gurdjieff had few if any original ideas and traced
Gurdjieff's main ideas to ancient sources, such as the Greek Stoics. Presumably Ichazo got the enneagram symbol itself and the germ of the
personality types concept from the Gurdjieff work, but I have not pinpointed his granting that. In response to criticism that he had not given
Grudjieff all credit, Ichazo seems intent on giving Gurjieff minimal credit. In the "Letter ...", Ichazo clarified what were his own original
contributions to the development of the Enneagram and countered many false claims that had been made or implied about himself.

The table shows Ichazo's English language enneagram labels for the nine ego types.

An example is that a personality type 9 (like me) tends to be slothful (indolent, lazy), which may manifest as daydreaming, being "spaced out",
indulging in escapism, or focusing on busywork and matters of little consequence instead of priorities. A Type 9 avoids asserting hisherself.
Nines tend to feel unlovable and so try to be unnoticed and to keep everyone they encounter placated. Once they get the idea that God's love

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includes them, they can begin to replace habitual sloth with effective action.

Go to this Various Enneagrams webpage to see more than a dozen enneagrams, of which the enneagram of personality types is but one.

Ichazo's Enneagram Labels for Ego Types

Type Fixation Trap Passion Holy Idea Virtue

1 Perfectionist Resentment Perfection Anger Perfection Serenity

2 Giver Flattery Freedom Pride Will Humility

3 Performer Vanity Efficiency Deceit Harmony Truthfulness

4 Romantic Melancholy Authenticity Envy Origin Equanimity

5 Observer Stinginess Observer Avarice Omniscience Detachment

6 Trooper Cowardice Security Fear Strength Courage

7 Epicure Planning Idealism Gluttony Wisdom Sobriety

8 Boss Vengeance Justice Excess Truth Innocence

9 Mediator Indolence Seeker Sloth Love Action

Claudio Naranjo

Claudio Naranjo, trained in gestalt psychology by Fritz Perls and in the enneagram by Oscar Ichazo, brought the enneagram into mainstream psychology. |
Source

About Naranjo
Claudio Naranjo was born in 1932 in Valparaiso, Chile. As a young man he trained as a pianist and composer. In 1959 he graduated from a
medical school in Santiago, Chile, with a Medical Doctor (MD) degree. He then studied and did his residency in psychiatry. In the following

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years he was a teacher, researcher, and scholar at universities in Chile and in the United States. His areas of research were medical education,
perceptual learning, personality assessment, and psychedelic therapy.

For a time he was an apprentice of Fritz Perls, and he began an association with Esalen Institute, where he was a successor of Perls when in
1969 Perls moved to Canada.

Naranjo and Ichazo

In 1970, after his only son died in an accident, Naranjo went on a pilgrimage and retreat under the guidance of Oscar Ichazo near Arica, Chile.
{Learn more here.}

Starting in July 1970, Claudio Naranjo was one of 54 Americans -- mostly individuals with whom at Esalen and Big Sur he had done Gestalt
Therapy and group meditations -- trained in Arica, Chile for ten months under Oscar Ichazo. They studied and practiced Protoanalysis, and that
included learning Ichazo's uses of the Enneagram. When back in the USA in 1971 (the same year that Ichazo moved the Arica School to the
US), Naranjo taught the enneagram to a number of his students at Esalen.

In the YouTube video "Claudio Naranjo - Seeker After Truth - Interview by Lain McNay" (see the link to the right of this capsule), Naranjo's
comments on Ichazo start at about 29:12.

Naranjo and The Enneagram

According to the online article "History of the IEA,", a contribution that Claudio Naranjo made to the development of the Enneagram of
Personality was to use his expertise in psychiatry to correlate Ichazo's nine ego types with major psychological theories and the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM). Naranjo's insights into using the enneagram to chart what he called enneotypes led to further developments by his
students and their students of descriptions of personality types. {Learn more here and here.}

Murky HIstory
Notice in the YouTube video "The Origin of the Enneagram - Claudio Naranjo Speaks - June 2010" (see the link to the right of this capsule), at
1:33 to 4:33, that Naranjo says that Ichazo at one time claimed he learned the enneagram from very ancient Sumerian and Babylonian sources
and then changed his story and said he got his idea of the enneagram of ego fixations from higher sources--meaning, I gather, from his own
intuitive insights. Naranjo then says that he followed Ichazo's example (and the advice of Oscar Wilde that if you want your ideas to gain fame,
attribute them to a famous person) and used to claim that his writings on enneatypes came via Ichazo from ancient Babylonian and Sufi
sources. He says that actually during his months of studying under Ichazo, Ichazo only talked about the enneagram for about six hours and
then said nothing about specific types. Naranjo says he himself got his enneatypes ideas from automatic writing and then verified them through
observation.

When principle figures in the history of the development of something embellish and change their stories and explanations, that makes the
history murky and uncertain. Did they learn it, discover it, or create it, or some of each? Why can't historical figures help historians by being
straightforward?

Naranjo Continued
Naranjo has continued in the ensuing years to apply the Enneagram in his work as a scholar, teacher, and writer. He has written several books
about the Enneagram. He is an important figure in the Human Potential Movement. To learn about Dr. Naranjo's concept of an existential
psychodynamics, his multi layered theory of neuroses, his teaching of the enneagram as a self-improvement tool, his Gestalt theory, his ideas
on meditation, religion, and other topics, and his "Seekers After Truth" (SAT) program combining meditation, the psychology of enneatypes, and
Gestalt therapy, see his personal website and his SAT website, and here is an article about a summer 2010 class he gave on subtypes.

From Naranjo to a Few Students to the World True False Quiz on Naranjo
From what I have read and have heard on videos, it seems that both
Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo have had the attitude that view quiz statistics
esoteric topics like the Enneagram should be taught in confidentiality
to selected students. Esoteric, after all, means for the select few. But,
against their admonitions, the esoteric Enneagram went mainstream. Some of their students taught others, and they in turn did their own
research, wrote their own books, and taught open-to-the-public classes. I think of it as the Jurassic Park phenomenagood ideas escape
restraint and breed spinoff good ideas. Here I will only give some highlights of this process in the case of the Enneagram.

One of those to whom Naranjo taught the Enneagram was the Jesuit priest Robert Ochs. With Naranjo's authorization [see minutes:seconds
5:00 to 5:20 in the "The Origin of the Enneagram - Claudio Naranjo" YouTube video, linked above], Ochs taught the Enneagram at Loyola, the
Jesuit university in Chicago. Two of Ochs's students, Patrick O'Leary and Jerome Wagner, became Enneagram teachers, and O'Leary was a
co-author of one of the first books on the Enneagram, The Enneagram, a Journey of Self Discovery, by Maria Beesing, Robert Nogosek, and
Patrick O'Leary, published in 1984.

The whole while, course notes were getting photocopied and passed around among Jesuits, and then among others in the Catholic Church.
Soon there were Enneagram programs in Catholic retreat centers all over North America, emphasizing spiritual direction and counseling within
Catholic spirituality tradition. There have also been Catholic critics of the Enneagram. See also this defense. The Jesuit priests who taught the
Enneagram included Paul Robb, the founder of the Institute for Spiritual Leadership, and Tad Dunne, who had been one of Ochs's students and
who taught the Enneagram to Don Richard Riso.

Riso

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Don Richard Riso was a Jesuit seminarian studying theology at the

University of Toronto at the time in 1973 that he learned about the
Enneagram from 9 pages of descriptions of the 9 personality types.
From other Jesuits in the following months he collected more
material about the enneagram into a loose leaf binder. By 1975 Riso
was focusing on enneagram work.

One of his contributions to ways of thinking about the Enneagram of

Personality was Levels of Development. That is the concept that a
person of a given personality type is at any time somewhere on a Deep Coaching: Using the Enneagram as a Catalyst for Profound
continuum from psychologically very healthy, balanced, Change
self-actualized, and mature to the extreme opposite, with most
people most of the time being somewhere in the average middle. Buy Now

In his first book on the enneagram, Personality Types: Using the

Enneagram for Self-Discovery, first published in 1987 by Houghton Mifflin, and in his subsequent works, Riso described the levels of
development at length for each personality type. Riso also made a number of other contributions to the development of the Enneagram of
Personality, such as describing the healthy aspects of each type, clarifying and expanding developments by Ichazo and Naranjo, introducing
new enneagram studies terminology, and so on. Through the years Riso often collaborated with his colleague Russ Hudson. {Learn more
here.}.

Palmer
Claudio Naranjo taught the enneagram to Helen Palmer, among
others, in the early 1970s. Harper Row published Helen Palmer's
book The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in
Your Life in 1988, and then Oscar Ichazo's Arica Institute sued her
for copyright infringement.

The Arica Institute mostly lost the case. The case is documented in
Arica Institute, Inc., Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Helen Palmer and Harper &
Row Publishers, Incorporated, Defendants-Appellees. No. 771, The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others In Your
Docket 91-7859. United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. Life
Argued Jan. 30, 1992. Decided July 22, 1992 . {That legal document Buy Now
is available online here.}

The judge of the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals pointed out that
only original expression can be copyrighted and that discovery of facts cannot be copyrighted. He further pointed out that the Arica School's
own publications quote Ichazo as saying he did not invent or create the enneagram or the 'fixations', etc., but rather that those were facts of
nature that he discovered. As regards the law case (and without implying any opinion as to whether the claimed facts are in fact facts), the
Court of Appeals judge (like the original judge) said that he would take Ichazo at his word and pointed out that Ichazo could not with
consistency both claim he was teaching discovered verifiable facts of nature and claim his teachings were copyrightable.

The judge affirmed that, while neither an idea nor a fact is copyrightable, an original expression of an idea or of a fact is copyrightable, and he
pointed out that how a sequence of facts is presented might or might not be copyrightable. Putting historical facts in chronological order [like,
for instance, to give my own examples, a bare list of the emperors of ancient Rome or of the major battles of World War I] would not be
copyrightable, since there is nothing creative in such a list. Given that Arica publications represented the sequence of fixations as a natural fact,
like the rainbow color sequence, and not a subjective choice, it followed that no creativity was involved in presenting that discovered sequence.
However, the judge concluded that Ichazo's putting the sequence of the fixations of the nine personality types as labels on the enneagram was
original -- Gurdjieff's depictions of the enneagram had no words on them -- and was at least minimally creative, and there were other ways in
which others could present the sequence, so that that paticular way of labeling the enneagram was copyrightable. However, he agreed with the
original judge that Palmer's uses of copyrightable Arica material was permissible as "fair use."

While Ichazo and his Arica School mostly lost the copyright infringement case, the case also had positive results for him. It put on record his
role as in some respects the discoverer and in some respects the originator of the Enneagram of the Fixations, the precursor of the Enneagram
of Personality. The case stopped his seminal contributions from being ignored and forgotten. From what I have read, most important, major
works on the Enneagram since then have given due credit and honor to Gurdjieff, Ichazo, and Naranjo.

With exceptions, that is. The 1994 book The Enneagram Made Easy: Discover the 9 Types of People by Renee Baron and Elizabeth Wagele,
on its page 1 gives the entire history of the Enneagram in this sentence, "The Russian mystical teacher G. I. Gurdjieff introduced it to Europe in
the 1920s, and it arrived in the United States in the 1960s." How fickle are fame, honor, and recognition. There are lifetimes of brilliant
innovative work in that "it arrived".

Another effect of the case was to let all in the world know that anyone had the right to give the Enneagram of Personality their own descriptions,
interpretations, and developments, or to put the enneagram symbol itself to whatever other purpose.

Regarding the differences between Ichazo and Palmer, see also Ichazo's "Letter to the Transpersonal Community", cited above in the Ichazo
capsule.

Learn more at Enneagram Worldwide. That is the website of a nonprofit organization founded by Helen Palmer and David Daniels and
dedicated to "enneagram studies in the narrative tradition." That refers to a method of teaching the enneagram by having students observe a

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facilitator interview a panel of volunteers whose personality types have been tested. As the volunteers talk about their ways of responding to life
experiences, students can see what people of the same enneagram personality type have in common. Some sense of this can be cleaned by
searching YouTube on:
conscioustv mcnay enneagram type
and watching that series of videos.

Ali / Almaas
Claudio Naranjo also taught A. Hameed Ali, who has the pen name
A. H. Almaas. He was born in Kuwait in 1944 into a Muslim family.
He moved to the USA at age 18 to study physics at University of
California. By the time he was studying for his PhD, he had taken an
interest in self-development through spiritual and psychological
techniques. In Claudio Naranjo's classes circa 1972, he learned
meditation, bodywork, Gestalt Therapy, and the Enneagram. He went
on to learn from a Zen Buddhist master, from a Freudian therapist Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
who was a practitioner of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way techniques, and
from a Reichian psychologist. He studied depth psychology, the Buy Now

Judeo-Christian mystics, and Sufism.

Ali (or Almaas) synthesized these influences into a mix of techniques -- including teaching the use of the Enneagram of Personality for
self-understanding and self-development -- that he called the Diamond Approach. To teach that approach, in 1976 Hameed Ali founded the
Ridhwan School in Boulder, Colorado. Today Ridhwan School has over a dozen locations in the United States and at least one location each in
Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, and Sweden.

And then ... Riso, Palmer, Ali Quiz

The 1980s were years of Enneagram of Personality research. By the
1990s the Enneagram of Personality was becoming an established view quiz statistics
field of study, with its own professional organizations, trainings, and
standardized tests.

In the year 1994:

* Helen Palmer and David Daniels (who together had already in 1988 begun the Enneagram Professional Training Program and in I think circa
1989 had founded the nonprofit organization Enneagram Worldwide) started The Association of Enneagram Teachers in the Narrative Tradition,
which has since been renamed The Enneagram Association in the Narrative Tradition;
* Helen Palmer and David Daniels convened the first International Enneagram Conference, hosted at Stanford University {Conference
recordings available here};
* Maria Beesing, David Daniels, Theodorre Donson, Andreas Ebert, Russ Hudson, Kathy Hurley, Patrick O'Leary, Helen Palmer, and Don Riso
founded the International Enneagram Association (IEA).

In 1995 Don Riso and Russ Hudson founded The Enneagram Institute. Probably before then, the two constructed the Riso-Hudson Enneagram
Type Indicator (RHETI) personality type test, which they refined over the ensuing years.

By the 2000s, the enneagram was being used for hiring and promotions in businesses and nonprofits. I first heard of the enneagram in 2001
when, as part of the process of a major career advancement, my wife was given both a Myers-Briggs and an Enneagram of Personality test.
Enneagram tests and follow-up discussions are widely used in counseling (for instance, at Chrysalis) and in business.

Conclusion
The Enneagram of Personality has, it looks to me, a rather unsettled, iffy history, with big, as yet unanswered (perhaps never to be answered)
questions -- about whether its direct sources are ancient or entirely modern; about whether the key pioneers of the main concepts learned them
from esoterica in distant lands, discovered them through the study of nature and humans, or made them up, and about whether the Enneagram
of Personality has been, or can be, scientifically validated. Some of the persons important in the history of the enneagram have been
unforthcoming, have prevaricated, have changed their stories about their influences and sources, have not always been straight about who
deserves what credit, or have spun the narrative of the history to spotlight their own significance and downplay the significance of others. But I
suppose all history is murky when looked at up close -- like in the movie Rashomon.

Then there was the whole notion about the enneagram being esoteric, something to be taught in secret to a select few. The copyright court
case seems to me to have been a conflict of cultures -- the tradition in which only those deemed ready are taught a truth or technique and
those students in turn protect the unadulterated purity of the teaching and teach in their turn only when and as authorized by their teacher
VERSUS the tradition of the marketplace of ideas in which innovation is encouraged and rewarded. Encouraging and rewarding creativity and
innovation through copyrights and patents has given modern humans a cornucopia of useful or entertaining products and works. Guarding the
authority of the transmission of the lessons of wise teachers has allowed religions, philosophies, and ways of life to stay somewhat intact
through changing times. Arica Institute, the keeper of Ichazo's Protoanalysis, has continued to thrive at the same time that the enneagram of
personality has culturally evolved in its varieties and complexities.

Many have found the enneagram of personality helpful in self-understanding and self-development, in improving relationships, and in making
career decisions.

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As Gurjieff taught, the enneagram is applicable to many processes. The enneagram of personality, the dynamics of how each personality type
develops and interacts with the world, is just one of them. Just to give a taste of further possibilities, Margaret Smith, author of Money: From
Fear to Love - Creating Wealth, Prosperity, and Love Using the Enneagram, argues "for extending the Enneagram from a type-based
framework to a systems-based framework."

2012 Brian Leekley

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