Wednesday, October 12, 2005
FR. MITCH PACWA ON GURDJIEFF'S ENNEAGRAM
I found an article by Father Pacwa that I hadn't seen before, and in it he has some new things to say. The article is titled "Enneagram: A Modern Myth".
There is a segment titled "Where then did the Enneagram come from?" in which he documents Gurdjieff as the source, noting that Gurdjieff learned the Enneagram from Sufis in Central Asia, and that "originaly, the Enneagram had been used in Central Asia for fortune telling through numerology." He calls the system "pantheistic" and "monist." Fr. Pacwa notes the teaching of the stages of enlightenment as you move from your ego into your essence, that essence being your inner being which "has the same divine nature as God," a teaching that Ouspansky discusses extensively in his sleep inducing (Great phrase, Lee. Hope you don't mind that I borrowed it!) book THE FOURTH WAY.
But the gem I'm leading up to is this one:
Gurdjieff also came across a spirit that he used to get in contact with called "the pillar of time."
He notes Gurdjieff's amassing a fortune before he returned to Moscow having made his fortune through "shady techniques." He notes the eventual founding of Gurdjieff's institute in Paris, and he notes that Gurdjieff did not teach anything about personality types associated with the Enneagram. Neither did Ouspensky.
Fr. Pacwa goes on to note that when he took the Enneagram course he was told the myth of the 2000 year history of the technique.
Then he introduces "Don Riso, an ex-Jesuit, who studied the Enneagram from the same man that taught Fr. Pacwa, namely Fr. Bob Ochs. Both Riso and Ochs claim that Oscar Ichazo, invented the Enneagram.
Don Riso is the head of the Enneagram research and study in New York city.
Then Fr. Pacwa tells us this:
In one of Don Riso's books, he said that Oscar Ichazo, a Chilean occultist, is in contact with spirits like Metatron, the chief of the Archangels. I said wait a minute. Whose side is that Archangel on? I don't think it's St. Michael's.
Oscar Ichazo claims to have the source of all grace on planet earth today. All grace on the earth comes through Ichazo. He is in contact with all the ascended masters and is himself an ascended master. He was given the Enneagram personality types by his spirit, Metatron. Metatron told him to take the Enneagram — just as a drawing without any names on it — and on the Enneagram place the capital sins.
Wait a minute-how many capital sins are there? 7, so he didn't have enough, so he made up 2 more. For No. 3, appropriately enough, he added the capital sin of "deceit". Then for the No. 6 he added "cowardice". He put the other capital sins-I Anger, 2 Pride, 4 Envy, 5 Avarice 7 Gluttony, 8 Lust, and then of course, indolence is sloth. So he put the 7 capital sins plus deceit and cowardice on the points, and then gave them these names of ego-flattery etc. And that's all that he had. That's all that Ichazo had from the spirit.
Claudio Naranjo, also a Chilean, came down to Chile on a home visit from America. He met Ichazo and said, "I wasn't impressed with Ichazo when I first met him. But when I sat and meditated in his presence, I felt his power and I accepted him as a teacher. I became very fascinated with his Enneagram".
Fr. Pacwa goes on to recount the spread of the Enneagram within the Church:
Bob Ochs, after that course, came and taught it at our theologate, to people like Pat O'Leary from Cleveland, Colly Moloney in Canada, and later on, Gerry Hare who taught Richard Rohr. And I, who'd also taught Richard Rohr the Enneagram (before Gerry Hare taught him). We began to teach the Enneagram course, and it has spread from these people in that course at the Jesuit School of Theology. Don Riso, a Jesuit who'd studied under Ochs, has also been spreading it.
Today, there is not a single Jesuit in my province, or the next province over, teaching the Enneagram: there is not a single Jesuit left in the Society teaching the Enneagram. Either they've stopped teaching the Enneagram, or they've left the Society. Not a single one is left.
Pat O'Leary drove our retreat centre in Cleveland into the red so far that it went bankrupt. He was giving 52 Enneagram seminars a year at this place-plus going out to other places to give Enneagram seminars, and he is still driving it into the ground. Same thing has happened at the retreat house in Western Massachussetts and another one on the coast run by the Dominicans-two Dominicans, a priest and a nun, on full time Enneagram work. It runs them out of business. It's something that people in your dioceses better pay attention to.
Ahhh, no kidding Fr. Pacwa!
Fr. Pacwa's article goes on to critique the Enneagram in detail. If you want the details, go read the article.
Richard Rohr still teaches the Enneagram out there in Arizona at his Center for Action and Contemplation. You can read about it at Catholic Culture.
The Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) is situated on the parish property of Holy Family Church in Albuquerque. From this site, retreats and workshops are made available to the city's progressive Catholics. The center is New Mexico's Call to Action hub, and well-known CTA personalities, such as radical feminist Rosemary Radford Ruether and '60s war protester Daniel Berrigan, have been speakers at the center in the last several years; also offered are alternative spirituality programs, such as Dr. Ruben Habito's annual retreat weekend at the center that includes "instruction in the elements of Zen practice."
CAC's founder, Fr. Richard Rohr, is a prolific writer and retreat master. He has done as much as anyone to spread the study of the enneagram around the United States. He has been a prominent leader of the "men's movement" (see accompanying article, "Coloring Outside the Lines," elsewhere in this issue). And he has been a recent speaker at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress (February, 1997), the New Ways Ministry Symposium in Pittsburgh (March, 1997), and the Call to Action Conference (November, 1996).
It is not surprising to discover, therefore, that much of Albuquerque's Call to Action activity emanates from the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) and from Holy Family Parish. The center describes its "vision" as providing "a faith alternative to the dominant consciousness." It is faithful to its vision.
There's more in the article at Catholic Culture if you want more.
Would you trust a priest who is teaching a divination technique that was channeled? Fr. Rohr would like you to trust him to lead you on a spiritual retreat of contemplation. The question is, is this the tried and true Catholic contemplation which is an infused gift of God--a gift that has been reserved in the past to the men and women in monastic settings, usually cloistered, where austere lifestyles of prayer, work, self-denial, and poverty are embraced. Today contemplation is being recommended for the people in the world living secular lifestyles. Is it the same gift from God? Or is it an hypnotically induced eastern meditation technique?
Contemplation is a big factor in Fr. Richard Rohr's spirituality as the name of his organization implies. As I was checking the linked websites in this blog, I discovered that apparently the Center website is being revised, since I could no longer access some of them. A webpage that described the "Internship Experience" which included references to contemplative prayer went down this morning.
Is Fr. Rohr running a Catholic spiritual retreat facility or is he running a Gurdjieff School that will teach you how to contact spirits? It's hard to say.
In any case, he is spreading his technique.
The World Community for Christian Meditation features Fr. Rohr at this year's seminar. This organization is closely associated with Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. In fact here at this website you will find:
Part of the genius of John Main and Thomas Keating and Lawrence Freeman is that they have provided ways into contemplation for ordinary people living very active lives in the world. Contemplative prayer, though a meditative discipline, can be integrated with life in the midst of society. But whether in the marketplace of (sic) in the cloister, the ultimate inner awakening leads to an experience of non-duality or unity in which the person encounters God and others in this unity, not in separation. This intuition is the fruit of thousands of years of mystical experience in the Indian tradition and verified by most Christian mystics. Jesus' experience of His Father is a model for a Christian form of advaita, non-duality or pure unitive relationship, expressed so eloquently in the words "The Father and I are One."
This is the oneness of monism--of pantheism--of the we-are-god people. Indeed Jesus and the Father are one. Both of them are God. We, however, are not God. The Monastic Interreligious Dialogue is not teaching Christianity. They are teaching Theosophy.
This lay movement isn't Catholicism, it's P. D. Ouspensky's Fourth Way. Ouspensky explains what he means by fourth way in his book titled THE FOURTH WAY:
The first way is the way of the Fakir. It is a long, difficult and uncertain way. A fakir works on the physical body, on conquering physical pain.
The second way is the way of the Monk. This way is shorter, more sure and more definite. It requires certain conditions, but above all it requires faith, for if there is no faith a man cannot be a true monk.
The third way is the way of the Yogi, the way of knowledge and consciousness....
Although in many respects these ways are very efficient, the characteristic thing about them is that the first step is the most difficult. From the very first moment you have to give up everything and do what you are told. If you keep one little thing, you cannot follow any of these ways. So, although the three ways are good in many other respects, they are not sufficiently elastic. For instance, they do not suit our present mode of life....But there is a Fourth Way which is a special way, not a combination of the other three. It is different from others first of all in that there is no external giving up of things, for all the work is inner. A man must begin work in the same conditions in which he finds himself when he meets it, because these conditions are the best for him....So at first one continues to live in the same life as before, in the same circumstances as before. (pp. 97-98)
Does that sound like what Fr. Richard Rohr is saying?
Gurdjieff opened a school outside of Paris which he named the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. The 2006 John Main Seminar will be preceded by a "Pre-Seminar Silent Retreat" titled "Harmony in the Soul" as you can see at the link above.
Language is interesting. Various philosophies have a jargon all their own. One of the biggies in Fourth Way schools is "awakening." Gurdjieff taught that we are all asleep and must learn to wake up. This awakening is an opening up to the spirit world. One presumes that would be the world of Gurdjieff, since it's a school teaching his methods. Are we then to discover Gurdjieff's "pillar of time" that Fr. Pacwa tells us he contacted, or perhaps Ichazo's Metatron?
Fr. Richard Rohr too tells us that we must wake up. At the very least it's a noteworthy similarity.
There are differences. Fr. Rohr's teaching on identification is not like Ouspensky's. Fr. Rohr teaches that we must identify with our suffering brothers and sisters. Ouspensky teaches that we must stop identifying. It is not unusual, however, for Fourth Way schools to put their own spin on the system.
