the enneagram global summit · and not the enneagram but he announced to me that i would have a...

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Claudio Naranjo | June 8, 2017 | p. 1 The Enneagram Global Summit™ The Enneagram and Awakening: Personal Journey, Universal and Emergent Teachings Claudio Naranjo Jessica: Welcome, everyone. I am delighted to be beginning the second session of a two- part presentation with Dr. Claudio Naranjo, who has just given us a lecture on "Trinity & Multiplicity." We're going to have a chance now to take some of these concepts deeper and to learn something about both his personal teaching and philosophical journey with many of these ideas and concepts. I just want to remind people and also for those of you who are joining for the first time that Claudio is a Chilean psychiatrist who became a leader in the human potential movement and was part of the early Esalen Institute and one of the successors of Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy. Claudio developed the psychology of enneatypes and he founded the SAT Institute for Personal and Professional Development and became an activist for the transformation of education worldwide, the work for which he was nominated in 2015 for the Nobel Peace Prize. Claudio, thank you for joining us for a second session. Claudio: Thank you for inviting me. Jessica: That was a fascinating lecture on "Trinity & Multiplicity." I want to start with placing this in some kind of context. I know that you were interested in consciousness and the development of a human being before you even learned from Oscar some of the fundamental principles of the Enneagram and the way that he was working with it, and then went on, of course, to articulate and develop some of your own orientations to the Enneagram and its theory. Consciousness, the awakening of a human being, this is something that we human beings have sought after since the beginning of time because we know what it's like to have these extraordinary experiences where you feel like you're really present, and then that there's some part of yourself that some people call "soul," other people call "spirit" and some people call it the "development of the real self," but it's that search for consciousness. How does the Enneagram come into that in the 21st century? Do you feel that it's essential for people who are studying consciousness? Do you feel like it's bringing in important principles that may have been missed in the past? Give us a little context for all of that. Claudio: I might say that I was a seeker already very early in life. At the age of 11, I came in contact with somebody who had been a seeker for many years. He was in his 40s when I was 11. I met him as a preceptor because I missed a year of school due to family traveling and my father called this man he had known already when he was at high school. This was a companion of his and this man had

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Claudio Naranjo | June 8, 2017 | p. 1

The Enneagram Global Summit™ The Enneagram and Awakening:

Personal Journey, Universal and Emergent Teachings Claudio Naranjo

Jessica: Welcome, everyone. I am delighted to be beginning the second session of a two-

part presentation with Dr. Claudio Naranjo, who has just given us a lecture on "Trinity & Multiplicity." We're going to have a chance now to take some of these concepts deeper and to learn something about both his personal teaching and philosophical journey with many of these ideas and concepts. I just want to remind people and also for those of you who are joining for the first time that Claudio is a Chilean psychiatrist who became a leader in the human potential movement and was part of the early Esalen Institute and one of the successors of Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy. Claudio developed the psychology of enneatypes and he founded the SAT Institute for Personal and Professional Development and became an activist for the transformation of education worldwide, the work for which he was nominated in 2015 for the Nobel Peace Prize. Claudio, thank you for joining us for a second session.

Claudio: Thank you for inviting me. Jessica: That was a fascinating lecture on "Trinity & Multiplicity." I want to start with

placing this in some kind of context. I know that you were interested in consciousness and the development of a human being before you even learned from Oscar some of the fundamental principles of the Enneagram and the way that he was working with it, and then went on, of course, to articulate and develop some of your own orientations to the Enneagram and its theory. Consciousness, the awakening of a human being, this is something that we human beings have sought after since the beginning of time because we know what it's like to have these extraordinary experiences where you feel like you're really present, and then that there's some part of yourself that some people call "soul," other people call "spirit" and some people call it the "development of the real self," but it's that search for consciousness. How does the Enneagram come into that in the 21st century? Do you feel that it's essential for people who are studying consciousness? Do you feel like it's bringing in important principles that may have been missed in the past? Give us a little context for all of that.

Claudio: I might say that I was a seeker already very early in life. At the age of 11, I came

in contact with somebody who had been a seeker for many years. He was in his 40s when I was 11. I met him as a preceptor because I missed a year of school due to family traveling and my father called this man he had known already when he was at high school. This was a companion of his and this man had

Claudio Naranjo | June 8, 2017 | p. 2

become a seeker. He was a person, one of the earliest people who recognized Krishnamurti. He had been part of the Theosophical Society. For me, an 11-year-old, it was a very rich experience and he became my first real friend. Since then, I became a seeker without even having so many words for it. He lent me some of Vivekananda's books and that was for me a big stimulus. I would say that already in puberty I was more interested in the next world than in this one. I was fascinated with the unknown. I had an intuition of a goal much higher than just ambition or love.

In time I became a follower of real teachers, and before Oscar, I had become a

Zen meditator who contact with Suzuki Roshi and was seeking more. When I met Oscar Ichazo, he wanted to know what more I thought and I said I want it all, and he called me Claudius Maximus, a little bit in humor that I wanted it all but also with approval that we should want it all. He had approval that I knew that there was more to find. I was not particularly interested in the Enneagram but he told me that that was a specialty of his that he would pass on to me very especially, that I would become a specialist, and I was not so interested. I was interested in the full enlightenment experience. For this reason, he sent me to the desert. He sent me for 40 days to go through a process he explained to me as a very secret thing that has been transmitted over the centuries only for teachers who have already come to realization but because it will be something important for the future. He saw me as qualified in spite of not having gone through the stages. He made a big exception, and I wouldn't have stayed with Oscar Ichazo, because I didn't believe enough in him, if he had not given me this opportunity. "I'll send you to the desert. This must remain a secret between us," he explained, "But you will get what you're looking for." Indeed it was during those 40 days in the desert in Arica that I had my experience of awakening and it was due to certain circumstances in addition to the blessing or the techniques involved. My son had just died and I was very much needing to give significance to his death through a great breakthrough. Only my being born to a higher life could justify in some sense his death, or at least I felt I needed that. I was looking for enlightenment and not the Enneagram but he announced to me that I would have a responsibility, and that this was a moment in life and a moment in history through the birth of psychology and the development of psychology where this would become precious and that it would help very much.

But now, answering your question of why is it important for consciousness to

know about the Enneagram, I would say because the process of self-knowledge is not just a cognitive process. Self-knowledge is transformative. When it is through knowledge, when it is experiential knowledge, when it's not just information gathered through something like lectures on this or that or on personality, when a person is made to realize deeply, being in a certain pattern of relationships, being in a certain kind of cage of conditioning that comes from childhood, this comes along with a certain ability to detach what we know well

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to be a part of us. And at the same time what we understand to be not really part of us, what we understand to be an introject or a conditioning, a mechanism that limits us, what we understand to be something like a mind parasite. I would call that that's the nature of the passions, what once was called for such a long time the "sins," the cardinal sins. The nature is neurotic motivations that are akin to mind parasites. They take our energies. They take our time. Our desires go in that direction instead of realizing who we really are. We sweat for the devil. We give our blood to these passions.

Self-understanding is what does the tricks. Self-knowledge, that's important, and

the knowledge of personality is very precious. I have learned that through time, beyond what faith I may have had originally which was not so much, in the work I developed inspired after Oscar Ichazo's, I didn't replicate his work, what he called the Arica Program. I didn't do the same. I created something I called the SAT Program with different ingredients but my inspiration was Gurdjieff. My inspiration was this idea of working on all fronts, which was a little bit like also Aurobindo, the integral yoga idea, working at the cognitive level, the affective level, the spiritual level and the physical level at the same time. The core of that was the association of meditation with work on personality, of meditation and therapeutic development.

Many times, I thought of the Enneagram information that I brought into these

meetings that I had with my early groups of something less important than actually it became. People through time have told me, even people who had been psychoanalyzed or psychotherapized very deeply who have become leaders in the field and people I had questions about how much more it will help them, they kept reporting to me how grateful they were. I see people that have had many, many years, let's say, in contact with me because people that go through my programs don't disappear after three years. Many of them follow me in different things I do and I informally keep in touch with them. They keep being grateful for so many developments in their lives that they attribute to this knowledge of their personalities that keeps getting deeper and deeper.

It's because the main problem of human existence is sickness and the main

problem and the nature of sickness is what we might call the "ego." It's development of false self, the development of a kind of mask of ourselves that entails also a repressive system. We become identified with a part of ourselves that we have more or less fabricated to cope with the environment, and living as an islander does in this island self, we learn to repress our animal nature. We learn to repress also our caring mind. We all are born caring people. We all are born with a mother nature within us that is part of our mammalian ancestry. We are mammals before being humans. Mammals are very empathic and very attentive to their young. Humans are intrinsically more mammalian than other mammals. We mature more slowly. We spend more time developing than any

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other animal. It seems to be built into nature, naturally into our human nature so we can develop certain aspects of life that go beyond survival. We have an intuition of what we may be, what we may come to be, and some people follow this intuition but not everybody is a seeker in the world. There are seekers and there are non-seekers, a little bit like in the New Age or in the '60s there was the, how do you call them?

Jessica: The hippies. Claudio: Well, there were the beats and the square, to use this terminology. There are

people who are square who are people who don't want to change, people who don't want to know about themselves, people who are not interested in looking inside and who tend to become a little bit persecutorial to those who are the seekers. They are the people who would like to concentrate in the practical world and seem to be born for doing something like that, nuts-and-bolts people. They have a tendency to become antagonistic to seekers. Seekers have had a minority situation in the course of human development and history even though they become leaders when they come to the end of their quest. What can I say about the Enneagram as part of consciousness? The Enneagram dissipates some unconsciousness, helping spiritual guides and helping people in general in this process of undoing of the ego which is difficult to do by oneself completely. The therapeutic process with or without the Enneagram needs two to tango. Relationship is very important to heal relations. Our problems are relational. We have fallen from Eden by falling into bad relations in a difficult world, in a sick world. I call it a patriarchal world, a world in which there operates conscious or unconscious authority. The more we mature, the more we become ourselves and the more we become aware that there is an ogre in town that is a kind of oppressor. And the tale of the hero that students of mythology formulate as a kind of map of the quest, as a synthesis of so many legends and stories generally is one in which the hero kills the monster and liberates the princess, which is of course the in-dwelling soul or the essence.

Jessica: It's absolutely beautiful, Claudio, and I want to go deeper into a couple of things

that you've said and things from the lecture, too. Before I do, I just feel like I want to tell you the highest respect for your journey and for the vulnerability with which you just shared, for instance, about your son's death and your seeking at such an intense level. And how you were so open to not only the guidance of Oscar, who was really giving you that great gift that we do need from our teachers that it really is okay to go for the real thing and the whole thing. I think Buddha also did that. He really said to his students, "If we don't speak to each other about enlightenment, that it's possible, and we don't tell other people, then we're really keeping each other in a kind of poverty consciousness."

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Claudio: I wouldn't have believed in Oscar had I not been a student of Idries Shah, who was said to be the "Grand Sheikh of the Naqshbandis." Idries Shah in a way directed me to Oscar in that his writings were the first to mention that there was such a thing as the "Rapidness," a method developed by somebody in the 8th century in India that few of the Naqshbandis Sufis are able to teach. Oscar identified himself as one who would work with that Rapidness. The Enneagram was part of a larger scheme, and why I believed in Oscar was because he fit in this larger scheme. I was prepared by the information put out by this great Sufi which is beyond any discussion, I would say, Idries Shah. But in spite of the fact that I felt very disappointed in Oscar's personality, I had to validate him because every day I spent with him was a day of growth, and the fact that he could predict what would happen to me in the desert I think was very much to his credit. Who can predict enlightenment? It was only the first stage of enlightenment. But also, I must grant him, he knew very much the kind of direct knowledge when he told me on the last day of my retreat in the desert that I would lose all that and I would have to earn it again by myself. It was a kind of loan. When that happened, and it took some years for that to happen, I had to return to give him much credit. In the Sufi world he's what's called a "Malamati," those people who take a lot of blame upon themselves and who act in ways that are very suspicious and break many rules. Oscar seemed to be one of these, one of the people who had many characteristics of a charlatan. I think that's why if I had had not a very special nose for real things, I would have dismissed him as most of the world has dismissed him, as a charlatan that happened to pass on something very precious that I picked up and developed.

Jessica: Well, I want to honor that, what you're calling your very real nose, because like

some other very real practitioners, you also were very open to lineages from many different perspectives because you've mentioned Aurobindo and Vivekananda as well as Gurdjieff.

Claudio: I have had teachers in all the important lineages. Most important of all has been

the Tibetan. I did get the white mantle of a Tibetan yogi some years ago, somebody empowered to teach. But more than these very well-known lineages and beyond even the lineage of the prophetic tradition that Oscar is said to represent, I see myself as the inheritor of a very unique teacher who didn't call himself a teacher and whose name was Totila Albert, who was a poet. It's from him that I got what he used to call the "message of the Three." He was the first critic of patriarchy, historically speaking, much before the word came into feminism, much before, what's her name? The woman who wrote The Chalice and the Blade.

Jessica: Riane Eisler.

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Claudio: Before Riane Eisler went beyond feminism saying it's not just a matter of social injustice for women, it's a matter that affects us all. It's a core world problem that we have, patriarchy, the problem of violent authority. Much before this, I was fortunate to have contact with this man called Totila Albert who was born in Chile even though his culture was and his family was German. He had realized through his own enlightenment process the inner trinity which he addressed in terms of father, mother and child. The father, the son and the mother, much as the theologists of liberation that insist that the Holy Ghost, the principle identified with love, is really motherliness that's not recognized in the early Christian, very patriarchal tradition. That came into my life before the Enneagram, and the Enneagram was very coherent with it because the Enneagram being a representation of the Law of Three glorifies threefoldness, not just the analysis of personality but as cosmic principle. This was a man who had realized himself the trinitarian basis of the mind, the core of consciousness. At the time when I was in touch with him, I was somebody who didn't quite understand him. I could understand him with my intellect but I couldn't fathom the inner trinity except as a hypothesis. Even when I came to know the idea of the triune brain or when I became familiar with Gurdjieff's work on the three centers, this was still far from the mark. I would say truly understanding our inner three, the critical father, the protective mother and the wild child, we need to have awakened them in our inside life.

While we are islands imprisoned by our intellect, we are something like

phantom-like creatures. When we are prisoners of our thinking, we cannot really live. The therapeutic process and the process of successive development in whatever tradition it is involves restituting our threefoldness, recovering our threefoldness that comprises a caring, compassionate self and very especially the principle of freedom that belongs to the inner child. To have this means to overcome castration, a civilized being who have been castrated in the sense of domesticated and taught to undervalue pleasure, to undervalue instinct and to undervalue spontaneity. When you ask about creativity, yes, creativity does require the recovery of the inner child and its spontaneity. We have even lost neurons that we had originally, what we as grownups don't have so many as a newborn child. We have lost so much that we didn't use in time when we came into this impoverished culture of an impoverished world that doesn't even give children enough place to play since education is taking over in a patriarchal way that makes everything obligatory and forbidden.

Jessica: Yes, and you're really bringing to life for us how and why the Enneagram is such

a powerful vehicle for dissolving all of the obscurations that you're talking about and developing something that is actually real, true and wholesome about awakening. It's bringing me back to some things that you said in the lecture, that you were talking about that out of the Tao arises yin and yang and out of the union between yin and yang comes the ten thousand things. Then later in the

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lecture you said that you could both talk about that there was both the triad that goes beyond duality but then there's also the triad that originates all things. So, a question that I have for you about that is this place where there's sort of the beyond the duality where we go back to the origin, we see the thing that originates, and then the triad that has to do with something being born out of the duality, the ten thousand things. Would you say that those two triads are actually just different expressions of the same thing? Would you say that those two triads are like a model, like Ken Wilber might talk about that one transcends but includes the other? I'm just wondering how you would contrast and have a unity between those two.

Claudio: Well, the understanding that I received in the tradition through Oscar Ichazo but

also through Gurdjieff, in whose school I had also been, is that the work consists in the development of the reconciling factor. If we call the yin and the yang the affirming and the denying, life is a process where we need to make our path between this polarity all the time. To live is to be opening a path that contains a balance of yin and yang or a balance of the affirming and the denying. We have to determine our own position between yes and no step by step, and the inner force that allows us to take the step that is the necessary step is a kind of neutrality. Buddhism calls it "non-attachment," that's the essence of spirituality, or in the words of Gurdjieff that called his approach the "Fourth Way" but actually it was an esoteric Christianity according to Oscar who could say more about it.

[30:15] Its reconciling factor is what allows the synthesis, what allows us to do the right

thing, what allows us to be open and to open to intuition, to know which is the next step we need to take, but the neutrality is also a mirror of the source. If we say that Tao is above all things, an emptiness is at the origin of yin and yang, we need to become empty ourselves. In becoming empty ourselves we can do the synthesis between our opposites and we can become mirrors of the original unity, or in the Christian terms we are the Son. The human being is whether you call it the Son or the Buddha, but the Son is the embodiment of unity before creation. This takes on meaning when you have training in meditation so you can elevate your mind to unity states. It takes meaning when you have to actually do something embodied like work with the body or work with the feelings, which is also work of polarities all the time. We want to be the echo of the divine being, and the divine being is something about whom we cannot say anything or something about which we cannot say anything, so that's why Taoism and also Buddhism calls it the "nothing." But the way to come close to being divine beings or to grow into our potentially divine nature is to become ourselves empty, and emptying the mind is not accomplished just by work on personality. It does require work on meditation. It requires very especially the ability to stop thinking because just like the passions of mind parasites, also thoughts are a kind of parasitism of the mind. We're distracted so much by our thinking that it amounts

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to dreaming. We have very little capacity to be there, to be present, to be in the here now as it is said, and this has to be part of the work. My work has been like the work of practically every great teacher. I don't say it's great because it echoes that aspect, but Oscar's work worked for me because it was much more than the Enneagram. Buddha's work was much more than one thing, it had eight ingredients, and Aurobindo's work, too. I think that if I leave a legacy, and now it's the time almost to say good-bye to this life for me, I will probably do a little teaching more but not very much. I think what I leave is the development of the people who have been near me and can teach a body of ideas that emphasizes, I like to say, the development of existential competences. It's not one thing like "love your neighbor" or one thing like self-understanding, and much less understanding one's character. Understanding one's character should be part of a mosaic of approaches that involves being in the body, involves developing spontaneity, involves expression, involves authenticity very much, involves relatedness and involves even devotion, devotion not necessarily to a divine being personified but devotion to the work and devotion to certain ideals.

Jessica: I'm very much agreeing with you, Claudio, that so much of this, the experiential,

has to come in because otherwise we grasp on to an incomplete cognitive understanding of the teachings and we actually don't end up being able to harvest the real truth of them. There's something like our ego is just using the teachings to prop itself up.

Claudio: Exactly, yes, very good statement. I agree completely. Jessica: And when you gave us the direction about emptying ourselves so that the Son

can come through, that is the beginning, in a way, of the experiential where you're clearing space. You're weeding things out so that the divine, as you use that word, or the truth has some space to actually teach us itself. That is an experiential alchemical process.

Claudio: People who are diminishing their ego probably are likely to discover whatever

paths are available to them. As people became a little bit freer, they discover what there is to discover. But I think it's a mistake to claim that the Enneagram can heal by itself so much as it becomes a nostrum once there is too much an ego interest in it invested in it. Or when a teacher who says, "I have the answer to your disease," it becomes like one more pharmaceutical company that wants to sell its product. Medicine is not very good for healing many of our ailments and medicine is obstructing many things that even people from the Amazon know about plants. I'm using it as a metaphor but essentially to say we shouldn't make an idol of it. It's a very valuable resource but this resource becomes alive when we are working, when we are working on ourselves, whether on our feelings or whether on our lives, and there is a kind of vice of demanding everything from the knowledge of the Enneagram and Enneagram talk. There's a

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place for Enneagram talk and Enneagram theory, but it shouldn't take the place of the whole of what we might call the "path."

Jessica: The power of it is what you said your students have brought back to you over

and over again is simply that it allows us to see the ways that we're tricking ourselves in all those different paths.

Claudio: Yes, exactly, yes. Jessica: Yes, this really brings it around for me, Claudio, that when I first conceived of the

Enneagram Global Summit, it was very much in my heart that at this time in history, humanity is facing unprecedented multi-dimensional challenges. There's a level of complexity. Going back to your title of "Trinity and Multiplicity," there's a level of multiplicity and complexity both at an outer level and maybe even at an inner level that's unprecedented. We literally have come to the point where there may be the potential for a breakthrough in humanity as has never been known but there's also the potential to completely destroy it. I'm wondering with the Enneagram and just with your work with consciousness in general if you can say something about doing the inner work and the experiential work, to work with the Law of Three and how that opens us up to multiplicity. And if you think that that has potential implications and contributions for people to be able to be present with these unprecedented challenges that we're facing because certainly new levels of creativity are required that we've probably never had before.

Claudio: With a more widespread enlightenment. It's as if for a long time it was enough

that a few seekers got enlightened every generation. It's now where we need a kind of Exodus crossing of the Red Sea as in the Book of Exodus. We need a collective shift of consciousness. We need many people to wake up and leave their egos behind in the land of Pharaoh. We need to leave behind our slavery to the ordinary consciousness. So yes, it is an emergency. I have been teaching in Europe and in South America even at the age of 84 and I continue even though I'm about to retire, because I am getting indications I should do that. But I wouldn't have done that if it were not out of the expression of intense need, not only of the world but of the people who are midway in their journeys. The deeper people go into their journeys, the more they need to continue to devote a lot of energy. It's like a condition of cocooning. When a caterpillar becomes a cocoon before becoming a butterfly again that can contribute to the world, that's the time that there's a kind of incubation or a time of transformation.

I have felt very responsible for keeping people nourished and cared for on the

path, and I don't think we need so many new ideas. There's a lot of wisdom out. There are innumerable books and we shouldn't be limited to the Enneagram. We should be interested in everything that makes us more present, anything that

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makes us more loving and anything that makes us more compassionate. We should strive to improve ourselves and the main resource we have is the seeking impulse, the thirst for that which we envision because it's a faculty we have to envision completeness. We have a sense that we are missing ourselves and that's very deeply to be respected. It's the motor of the quest to have this sense of what I am yet not. What we are seeking can be called "God," it can be called "self," but it can also be called the human potential, what we yet are not but carry in our potential, in our genetic code, so to say.

Jessica: It's so beautiful to hear you talk about your dedication to caring about

supporting people in developing these parts of themselves and how you have felt a responsibility for it especially at this time in humanity's history. And Claudio, I was very moved and in alignment with what you were saying about the need for a collective awakening as never before and what Gurdjieff would call almost a shock kind of awakening that would be a whole new level of something that would be happening, even though it is, as you said, the consciousness that has existed throughout time. I'm reminded of Al Gore when he was talking about our environment. He talked about the African proverb that says that if you want to move quickly, then you move by yourself, but if you want to move for a long distance, then you move with a group. Then he said, "But we are now in an unprecedented situation where we need to move very quickly very far." It is this kind of analogy that individual awakening both has to be accelerated but it has to be accelerated within a collective awakening. I'm wondering if in your experience of working with groups of people over such time that you have seen any evidence of this possibility.

Claudio: Well, I see that everything goes very slow, too slow for the speed at which we

are sinking, the speed at which things go worse and worse where the world is increasingly destructive of species, of people and of cultures. My answer to that predicament is the educational change. I think I'm very much in agreement with the often-quoted thought of Einstein that, "The problems we see won't be solved by the people who created them." The problems that really matter won't be solved by the kinds of minds that created them. We need another kind of mind. The world problem needs a generation that is better than us. It needs a generation that has more kindness and more freedom than ours and more intuition too. I think we can do that if we wanted, through education, to create a better generation, if we emphasize not what education emphasizes now which is conditioning. Now we have a system of obligation and education is like the injection of irrelevance into the minds of the young to pass exams. It's almost education and discipline for a workforce.

If we instead educated for development, if we educated for the existential

competences like for self-knowledge, for love, for ideals, for self-love, for freedom and for non-attachment, that kind of education would bring us a new

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generation that can bring us out of dated institutions and modes of way of life. I have chosen to concentrate as much as possible not on seekers any longer. That was the beginning of my work, and not so much on therapists, that was the middle part of my work. I was concentrating in helping professionals do a better job. But now I'm more interested in teachers or people who can transform the young. That can go faster and less effort is needed to heal a child who has not crystallized an ego than to heal an adult.

I think what we need is to educate teachers with the help of the Enneagram and

not to corner children into being different from what they are but to be able to allow for diversity and for making children not have to be alienated from their real selves. Children make a transition from their relative childhood innocence to the ego development of an adult and they forget their childhood self. We all forget ourselves when we were less than seven years old, more or less. And that would not happen so much. We wouldn't lose so much of our essence or our given nature if we didn't feel we have to be different from what we are. But every child is taught to be different. I think education is a great mistake in the way it's conceived in America, that you have to learn this and learn that and learn to be like this and not to be like that. Some professor of education here in Berkeley has written a book against parenting. Love, yes, but parenting, if it is conceived in teaching children how to be should be an idea that we transcend because people are mysteries that have their own inner law. They have a great potential to develop if we don't get in their way, but we have the superstition that everything that a child becomes is something that we have to give them or teach them. I'm very much against that ordinary notion of teaching. I call it "patriarchal teaching." It's a kind of implicit agenda not even very self-conscious but which we should transcend, just like we need to transcend the personal ego.

Jessica: That's beautiful, Claudio. For the last question, you actually brought in the word

"essence" and I'm curious. There are people that are working with the Enneagram, some of them working very, very deeply, teachers and practitioners. Of course, as they're working with the blind spots and the obscurations of their type and they become more and more empty, some of these qualities of essence begin to have room to be seen, to embody. Sometimes people describe those as the higher side of a type, like they'll say that's the higher side of Seven or the higher side of Three. I'm wondering, do you think of those essential qualities as the higher side of type or do you think of essence as or do you experience essence as something that's just there that isn't even really about type but it's what's there when the type structure is dissolved more?

Claudio: There's a level of essence that's beyond type but if you use the analogy of the

inner journey as a journey to the top of a mountain, I would say that people with different characters or different personalities approach the mountain from different angles or from different points in space. There's approach from the

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north, approach from the south, east, west and the intermediate directions. What happens is even if the mountaintop is the same for all, it will be perceived through a different lens.

Even if the types are perfected in the process of getting to the top of the

mountain, this perfection is not the same. It's like the development of the pearl in the oyster. The pearl is not the grain of sand. That is the sickness of the oyster. The oyster produces as a defense the substance of the pearl to deal with that grain of sand. So, to deal with our personal neuroses we developed certain abilities, certain ego characteristics, and in the end the ego may disappear but the characteristics of the ego have developed. In one case, it could be the capacity to be alone, in another case a capacity to assert and in another case the ability to give love. All these abilities that were in the service of coping with the environment and are part of the ego remain as assets. They remain as something that is available to the person to do his or her work or to put in the service of the higher mission.

Jessica: Yes, that is my experience too and you said it so beautifully. That is after all what

all of this, the path that you referred to, it is about that, isn't it? It's about clearing the dross, the misperceptions and the missteps that keep us from allowing that particular beauty that each one of us is to manifest. Claudio, it's such an honor to have you on this summit. The generosity of you sharing about your personal journey and your dedication to working with others, your caring for the world and for people about not only truth but love and the development of the self and awakening to our true nature is really just a gift to all of us. Thank you so much for being here on the planet with us at this time.

Claudio: Thank you. Do you think it would be relevant to tell people that I have a

website? Jessica: Yes, would you please tell them what the website is? Claudio: It's claudionaranjo.net. Jessica: Everyone, you can go to www.claudionaranjo.net and you'll be able to see more

about Claudio's work. Claudio: There are different ideas, including Enneagram among them. Jessica: This has been an honor and a delight. I know that there are going to be

thousands of people all over the globe that are going to be so happy, fulfilled and really inspired by listening to these two sessions that you have brought to us. Thank you again for being with us.

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Claudio: Thank you again. © 2017 The Shift Network. All rights reserved.