Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Wednesday afternoon here in New York. We’re in the middle of a major cold period here and storms may be coming this weekend. So what better time to learn about tactics for resisting the eight evil thoughts or tempting thoughts or logismoi.

So let’s get right into it. We’re picking up where we left off on chapter 15.

Chapter 15: Stabilizing the Three Faculties

The wandering nous is made stable by one reading, two vigils and three prayer. Burning epithumia, that’s desire, is quenched by one hunger, two toil and three solitude. Churning thumos, indignation, is calmed by one, the singing of Psalms, by two, patient endurance and three, mercy. But all these practices are to be engaged in at proper times and in proper measure. What is done untimely or without measure is temporary. And what is temporary is more harmful and not beneficial.

So I did some research on this because here Evagrius is presenting some new vocabulary with epithumia and thumos. And it seems like he’s creating a new kind of framework of these three faculties: wandering nous, burning epithumia (desire), churning thumos (indignation). You could map this onto the three faculties of the Enneagram or the three faculties in Buddhism. There are a lot of pre-existing maps, but just so we can ground ourselves in Evagrius’s own influences, this is from Plato’s tripartite model of the soul with kind of the logical center. I place it in the head, the logical center. Desire, epithumia in the lower body could say in the gut. And then thumos, indignation in the chest. And thumos, or indignation is a word that we’re going to visit many more times in these chapters. So let’s continue.

When our soul longs for a variety of different foods, then its portion should be reduced to bread and water to make it thankful for a little more soul. It is satiety that desires variety in food. Hunger considers it blessedness just to have satiety of bread. A great aid to chastity is deprivation of water, as persuaded by 300 Israelites who defeated Midian in company with Gideon.

Just as life and death cannot coexist in the same subject at the same time, so also is it impossible for love (agape) to coexist with wealth. Love destroys not only wealth, but also this agape, our temporal life. The one who flees all worldly pleasures is a tower inaccessible to the demon of gloominess. For gloominess is the deprivation of pleasure that is either present or anticipated. So it’s impossible for us to drive away this enemy as long as we have any earthly attachment. He sets his trap and produces gloominess just where he sees our inclinations lead us.

So, you know, typical kind of monastic advice here around receding from pleasure, down to, you know, receding from food and water.

Understanding Anger and Indignation

Anger and hatred amplify indignation. Merciful compassion and gentleness decrease it even when present. So anger is this logismos that amplifies the natural indignation, thumos. So I think, as we’ll learn later, thumos, indignation is a natural state for Evagrius, but it gets inflamed by anger and cooled in contrast by compassion and gentleness.

He continues: The sun should not set on our anger so that the demons do not, rising up by night, terrify the soul and make the nous more cowardly the day after for the fight. For terrifying phantasms are produced by the disturbance of indignation. And nothing makes a deserter out of the nous so much as disturbed indignation.

When the irascible part of our soul, that’s the thumikon, so there’s an inherently irascible part of our soul, seizes some excuse and is troubled, then the demons suggest to us how good it is to withdraw into solitude, thus keeping us from resolving the cause of the gloominess and freeing ourselves from the disturbance. But when our desiring part, that’s the epithumeticon, is enkindled, then they make us sociable and call us hardened and uncivil, so that by desiring bodies we then come into contact with bodies. We should not obey them, but instead do the opposite.

Actually I think this is very good, simple advice here, which is when our anger is inflamed, we do have a way of retreating, I think. I know for myself I can withdraw where it’s easy for me to tell myself the stories that further my anger, as opposed to, say, calling a friend, seeking to resolve the cause of the gloominess. In contrast, when we’re in a desiring state, we want to be with other people, when actually maybe we should be withdrawing.

The Danger of Mental Combat

Do not give yourself to the tempting thought of anger by fighting mentally the distressing person, nor to that of fornication by spending most of the time in fantasies of pleasures. For the one darkens the soul, the other summons it to burn with passion. Both of these pollute your nous. And thus at the time of prayer, you will fantasize images. And not being able to offer pure prayer to God, you will immediately fall victim to the demon of acedia. This demon readily leaps upon such states and like a dog with a young deer, tears the soul to pieces.

Again, acedia has this sort of special property for Evagrius. And he’s naming kind of, I would say, the three temptations that are most closely associated with these three parts of the soul. So, and I’m applying more framework and more structure than I think we ever see Evagrius do. But because we’re in relationship to the Enneagram, we’re inclined to do that kind of connective work.

So he talks about the wandering nous. And I would say this wandering nous is closest to the demon of acedia. The inflamed indignation is most closely associated with the temptation of anger or orge. And then here, he’s saying the desire, inflamed desire is most, susceptible, you could say, to the demon of, here he says, fornication or lust. We could call it elsewhere.

Interesting. Those are the eight, nine and the one. So, in some ways maybe that’s, that top part of the Enneagram is in some ways sort of the falling point of the mind or of the soul. That’s where the soul first errs in these, in potentially these three ways, depending on which part of this tripartite soul is activated.

Again, like, why do we want to even do this kind of analysis? It’s to create a map of sorts for experiential sense making. And we’ll get to that soon. What do we do here? So we’ll get to instructions, I think, in this episode. And the point of the map is to facilitate a kind of inner combat ultimately that Evagrius is going to give us.

The Nature and Role of Indignation

Here he says the nature of indignation, so that the nature of indignation, the natural quality of this part of the soul, thumos, is to fight the demons and to struggle over any kind of pleasure. I did a little bit of translation inquiry on struggle over any kind of pleasure. And what I got back from the Greek was not struggle against any pleasure but to essentially, you could say wrestle with pleasure or, you know, either fight for pleasure or fight against pleasure to some extent. But it’s ambiguous, I would say for this reason. The angels suggest to us spiritual pleasures and the blessedness coming from them. They encourage us to direct our indignation towards the demons. The latter, however, dragging us toward worldly desires, violently force our indignation against nature to fight human beings so as to darken the nous, separating it from knowledge and thus making it a traitor to the virtues.

Take heed to yourself that you never so provoke any of the brethren that he runs away, or you will never escape during your lifetime from the demon of despondency, which will always become an obstacle for you at the time of prayer.

Gifts quench memory of injury. Let Jacob convince you of this. He insinuated himself into Esau’s graces with gifts when he came against him with 400 men. But as we are poor, we should make up for our lack by hospitality at the table.

When we are oppressed by the demon of listlessness, then with tears let us divide our soul in two. Or perhaps tears, let us divide our soul in two, one part encouraging, the other sowing good hopes within us, soothing with David’s chant, why are you downcast, my soul? Why do you trouble me? Hope in God, for I will confess him, the Savior of my countenance and my God.

That almost feels like sort of prototypical parts work here, tearing one soul into two, such that one part of the soul can console the other.

Facing Temptation

We must not abandon our cell in time of temptation, making eloquent excuses. We should stay seated within and persevere and bravely receive all comers, especially the demon of acedia. It’s interesting: receive all comers, receive all demons. So this is sort of the Ajahn Chah instruction of put a chair in the middle, sit down and see who comes to visit. That’s the attitude that’s being advocated for here.

The demon of acedia, the most oppressive of all and thereby most highly proving the soul’s quality. Fleeing from such conflicts and trying to shun this teaches the nous to be incompetent, fearful, and fugitive. So Evagrius is not saying flee demonic thinking. He’s saying sit and face and receive demonic thinking. That’s the attitude here.

And then use indignation, we’ll learn more about, to fight it. I think it’s important for us to learn more about what is the nature of this indignation, how does it function?

Our holy teacher, who is greatly experienced in asceticism, said the monk must always be ready as though he were to die tomorrow, but he must as well treat his body as if he were going to live with it for many years. The first approach cuts off the thoughts of acedia and makes the monk more zealous, while the second maintains the body and keeps its control in balance.

And from a little bit of research about Evagrius and the background of Origen and Gnosticism, which I know very little about, this is one of the areas where Evagrius actually starts to get in trouble with the Church, I think, is his defense of the body and the importance of the body and spiritual work.

Dealing with Vainglory

It is difficult to escape the tempting thought, that’s logismos, of vainglory, since whatever you do to subjugate it becomes the occasion for renewed vainglory. Right. When our indignation is successful at fighting off a demon, of course, we get that vanity there. So our proper thoughts are not all opposed by the demons. Some of them are opposed by our own individual vices.

I have observed the demon of vainglory chased away by almost all the other demons, but then when its pursuers failed, it shamelessly came forward, proclaiming to the monk how great the monk’s virtues are. So this is the beginning of Evagrius’s sort of more advanced teachings on the demons. And he’s starting to note that while they all maybe serve the same purpose of having the spirit fall, they oftentimes work against each other.

One who has reached knowledge and harvested the pleasure it brings will no longer be persuaded by the demon of vainglory, setting before him all the pleasures of the world. For what could it hold out to him better than spiritual contemplation? But to the extent that we have not tasted the savor of knowledge, we should eat eagerly, engage in asceticism, demonstrating to God our goal, namely, that we do everything for the sake of knowledge of him.

By the way, asceticism here is translating as practice. This is the praktikos. So these are ascetic instructions for a monk I mentioned before. These are sort of groundwork instructions that are very much for someone in the phase of renunciation.

Remember your former life and your old trespasses, and how, while subject to passions, you transitioned to apatheia by the mercy of Christ. And how you then left the world that had so frequently and in so many ways humiliated you. And reflect on this for me, who kept guard over you in the desert and drove away the demons who gnashed their teeth against you. Thoughts of this sort will instill humility and deny entry the demon of pride.

Chapter 34: On Passions

If we have memories full of passion of certain things, it is because we once welcomed these very things with passion. Whatever things we welcome with passion, these things we will later remember with passion. This is kind of cause and effect, a sort of a simple karmic teaching here. So anyone who is defeated by the demons which activate such things makes light of the things they activate. The immaterial battle is harder than the material battle.

The passions of the soul originate from human beings. Those of the body originate from the body. And while the passions of the body are cut away by self control, those of the soul are cut back by spiritual love. So there’s sort of a two layered cutting here. And he’s being clear that the body is in some ways easier or really in many ways easier than the work of the immaterial battle. And the antidote is different: self control versus spiritual love.

There’s a deep teaching, this idea that these two battles actually have different weapons, as it were. And of course then the weapon of spiritual love is going to have a really different feel than that of self control.

The demons that preside over the passions of the soul, for example, anger, persist obstinately until death. Those that preside over the passions of the body withdraw more quickly. And other demons are like the sun that rises and sets, affecting only one part of the soul. But the noonday demon acedia generally envelops the whole soul and suffocates the nous. For this reason, the solitary life is sweet after we’ve emptied out the passions, then our memories are simple. And the monk’s struggle is thus not to prepare him to fight, but rather to contemplate the struggle itself.

So he’s making a claim here that the demons are never going to give up. That their battle will continue so long as we’re alive. But the nature of the battle changes as we empty out the passions first of the body and then as we move through the later stages of renunciation. We’re not entering a mode of fighting so much as a mode of contemplation. And it’s a gentler, sweeter life.

We must consider whether it is concepts that move passions or passions that move concepts. Some people have held the first opinion, others the second. By means of sensations, passions are naturally aroused. If both charity and self control are present, they will not be aroused. But if absent, they will be aroused.

Indignation requires more remedies than desire. And because of this, charity is called great. Because it bridles indignation and therefore holy Moses in his natural science symbolically names it snake fighter.

Recap of the Framework

So a lot of deep teaching there that we could go into. Just for what it’s worth, like I checked that Bible passage here with Moses. That’s Leviticus 11:22. And at face value it just reads about instructions about what you can and cannot eat. So, you know, this is pretty esoteric teaching here. But let’s just quickly recap here as we finish the Passions, Chapter 39.

On account of the strong stench in demons, the soul is usually inflamed against tempting thoughts when it perceives them approaching, being affected by the passion associated with a demon that is annoying it.

So in a kind of subtle, brief way, he is really laying out quite an energetic framework here where we have these three parts of the soul: the nous, which is the seat of reason, the head, and in some ways the sort of entire soul in Evagrius’s framing. In the chest we have thumos, indignation, natural indignation. In the gut we have natural desire.

And these natural parts of the soul have passions, through memories of having passions that happen in our lifetime and before our lifetime, right? The fall of Adam and Eve, the fall of Satan. These are all events that have wounded the tripartite soul of human beings. And therefore we have certain susceptibility, certain weak spots that demons seek to exploit.

Of these demons we have acedia attacking the nous overall, anger attacking natural thumos (indignation), and lust or fornication attacking desire. And he has very kind of practical advice, right? When indignation is attacked, seek others. When desire is attacked, seek solitude.

He talks about indignation being more in need of remedy than desire. In some way desire conquering the physical passions of the body, that’s sort of the initial work that requires more self control. But by the time we move toward indignation and protecting it from inflammation, that work becomes more subtle.

One of the subtleties he’s naming is demons themselves are so repulsive, they are stinky, nasty that the soul will already, thumos will already become inflamed against them when it perceives them approaching. Therefore this inflammation is already being activated.

And so if we take the approach that we took with the initial round of renunciation of self control of the body, the problem with that I think is that indignation was deployed to control the desire. But indignation’s inflammation can’t be used to control indignation’s inflammation. That only produces more inflammation, more anger.

This is where we need to call in charity, mercy, compassion, love. And the fight changes in nature. It becomes one of contemplation. Contemplation. It becomes sweet. We draw on Christian love, you know, in the Evagrius framework here. We draw on Christ’s love to, as he says here, to bridle indignation and turn indignation back on the demons to become snake fighters.

I don’t know. We’ll read the instructions. But I still think, what is the nature? You know, how does Christ, I guess, would be the question, right, for a Christian perspective here. What do we know about how Christ fights demons? How does he show this holy indignation? I think would be very important for us to study if we’re going to take up spiritual warfare in this framework. Is he angry? Or is he, you know, to use kind of Buddhist language, is he manifesting wrath? Is he wrathful presenting, but his thumos is calm? Not clear yet.

Instructions

It is not possible at all times to carry out the customary rule, but it is necessary to be watchful of the opportune time and thus to perform whatever commandments we can as best we are able. Again, discernment becomes so primary here that Evagrius is saying, as he did at the beginning of the last section, there’s, for every given time there’s a right intervention. There’s no playbook exactly. Even though he’s simultaneously sort of giving us a playbook. This is never rote. There’s never a protocol. This is never automatic. There’s a constant kind of watchfulness here that’s required.

Regarding these opportune times and what concerns them, the demons themselves are not ignorant. Thus in their movements against us, they prevent our accomplishing what is possible and force us to undertake what is not possible. They prevent the sick from giving thanks in their pain and from being patient in receiving their ministrations. And they exhort the weak to fast and those who are weighed down to sing psalms while standing.

So two really important points here. One is that the demons themselves are aware of, the demons are incredibly smart. They see the whole battlefield. Going back to Ignatius’s spiritual exercises, he compares demonic thoughts to a very brilliant general who sees all, you know, who’s on a hill and sees the whole battlefield.

So we actually are not going to outsmart the demons having access to this framework itself doesn’t put us ahead of the demons. Actually, all it sort of does is allow us to see what the demons already see. So the Enneagram in this way is kind of a demonic, I’m very sympathetic to the Christian subset who find the Enneagram demonic. It is in some ways demonology. It is a study of demonic thoughts and these ways that, you know, we move from one to another.

It is, we are not gaining transcendent wisdom that we use to fight the demons. Actually, Evagrius is very clear on this, that the demons already know all this stuff. We’re not going to outsmart them.

So that’s thing one and then thing two is given that they’re already making it hard for us to do the right intervention. They’re already ahead of the curve. So that even if we know what needs to be done, it’s going to be very difficult because the demons are already in their movements preventing us from applying the right remedy to the right sickness.

When we are compelled to spend time in cities or towns, we should especially maintain our self control on occasions when we interact with secular persons, lest our mind become coarse and be robbed of its accustomed diligence because of the present time, and so become a fugitive thrown about by the demons.

Using Anger Against Demons

Do not immediately pray when you are tempted. First speak some words with anger to the one pressuring you. For when your soul is acted upon by tempting thoughts, prayer cannot be pure. But if you speak to them with anger, you will confuse and utterly destroy the ideas that come from your enemies. This is also the natural result of anger in the case of good ideas.

Okay, let’s analyze this a little bit. So this is the first time he’s talking about speaking words with anger. I don’t know, actually, should we quickly Google, what, you know, let’s find out quickly how he’s using anger here. I’ve been using Claude. It’s been very helpful for these kinds of inquiries. So let’s paste that in and say, you know, say, what’s the Greek here? Anger here compared to indignation.

So I’m interested in this because this is really the first time that Evagrius is giving instruction about how to apply anger to demonstration. And indeed it is the same word, orge. So there’s, even though orge is listed as one of the evil thoughts, here he is advocating for speaking with orge to the one pressuring you. I mean, when he’s talking about one pressuring you, he’s talking about demons. So here he’s advocating essentially for using a demonic thought to fight another demonic thought.

Unless he’s just being maybe careless with the word orge. But you would certainly hope he’d be more intentional in the use of that word. Now, I’m not sure if he’s saying feel anger, succumb to anger, but he’s certainly saying the words, speak words of anger. Actually, don’t go to prayer first. Speak with them. Speak to them with anger. Why? Because you will confuse and destroy the ideas that are coming from them.

He says this is also the natural result of anger in the case of good ideas. I don’t quite know what he means by that. Like, natural result of anger in the case of good ideas. Maybe part of what he’s saying is because anger destroys bad ideas, the good ideas come through.

Well, since we’ve got Claude open on that, okay. He says this is actually, he’s saying the opposite, at least according to Claude’s interpretation of the Greek here. Anger naturally confuses and destroys any ideas, even beneficial ones. So again, we’re getting into really discerning territory here. We’re near the end of the treatise, and so any idea will be destroyed by anger. So be careful.

Okay. Continuing: It is necessary to be aware of the differences between demons and to interpret their different occasions. This we shall know from the tempting thoughts and the tempting thoughts from the objects they depict. Thus knowing which demons are less frequent and heavier, which are more frequent and lighter, and which leap suddenly and snatch the nous off to blasphemy. These things it is necessary to know. So that when tempting thoughts begin to move their own particular matter, and before we are driven too far from our proper state, we may speak out to them and indicate which one is present. For thus we shall, with God’s help, readily make progress, amazing them and forcing them to flee from us.

So Evagrius wants us to study this for ourselves. He wants us to say, that’s orge, that’s gluttony, that’s lust, etc. And to drive them off. That’s what he’s advocating for here.

The Intelligence of Demons

When the demons are powerless in their struggle with the monks, they withdraw for a little and carefully note which of the virtues the monks are meanwhile neglecting. And then they suddenly rush in and tear the wretched soul to pieces. The evil demons bring along even more evil demons to assist them. Temperamentally, they’re opposed to each other, but they all agree in seeking solely the destruction of the soul.

And from my coaching work and my training, this is really apparent. We can call it polarization when we get caught in these eddies of competing stakeholders or voices. Vanity and truth telling as an example. Right? Like they are at war with each other. And so even though these demons are in some sense in combat, they actually share an overarching goal, which is to destroy the soul, to tear it to pieces.

We should not be disturbed by the demon that seizes and carries off the nous towards blasphemy against God and towards unspeakable fantasies that I have not even attempted to record in writing. Nor should such things hinder our eagerness. The Lord is knower of the heart, and he knows that even when we were in the world, we were not guilty of such insanity. The goal of this demon is to hinder our prayer so that we do not stand before the Lord, our God, or dare to raise our hands on account of having these kinds of ideas.

There’s a very gentle piece of instruction here. He’s basically saying, no matter how awful the thought or the fantasy is, don’t beat yourself up over it. Actually, that’s the point of it. The demon is trying to make you feel so lousy that you abandon your prayers altogether.

The sign of the passions within the soul is some word which we utter or some movement of the body. Through these, the enemies perceive whether we have their tempting thoughts within us and are in labor of childbirth with them, or whether we have cast them away and are concerned with their salvation. For it is only the God who made us, who knows our nous and does not require signs to know what is hidden in our thought.

That’s very interesting. Another subtle point here. But the information that demons get is solely through the body. Now, the mind body. Right. I mean, I think the intellect here is part of the body. And the enemies are able to watch us labor. That’s such a gestalt metaphor. We are impregnated by these thoughts. And there’s some sort of gestation cycle. And they’re monitoring that very closely to try to induce birth of these tempting thoughts. And therefore, make us fall even further. But God is the only one who knows our nous. That’s sort of our soul. And so doesn’t require signs to know what is hidden in our heart.

Different Battles for Different Lives

While the demons prefer to fight persons who live in the world by means of external matters, they attack monks primarily through tempting thoughts. For they are separated from things because of the desert.

And someone commented on the previous barcast I did, pointing out how interesting it was that the way that Evagrius conceives of, for instance, gluttony is like fear of deprivation, or avarice as fear of destitution. So rather than these positive greedy qualities, they were actually a response to sort of not having, an aversion to not having. And here Evagrius, I think is clarifying that, you know, that’s sort of the deeper level that monks experience this. For people in the world, demons will employ external, external wanting. But for the monks it’s an internal battle and a battle with the thoughts themselves.

Since it is easier to sin mentally than by action, the mental war is more difficult than that which arises because of external matters. The nous is something that is easily moved and hard to restrain when confronted with all his fantasies. Such a simple way of putting it. But like the body isn’t that easy to move compared to the nous, that can move a mile a minute.

The Primacy of Prayer

We are not commanded to work the whole time or to keep vigil the whole time or to fast the whole time. But there is a law that we should pray ceaselessly. The first three which heal the part of the soul in which the passions are, need the body for their practice. And it is congenitally too weak for such labors. But prayer makes the mind strong and pure for the struggle, since the mind is naturally made for prayer and it is natural to it to fight demons even without the body, on behalf of all the powers, excuse me, of the soul.

Practice Instructions

If any monk wishes to experience of the savage demons and to become acquainted with their art, he should observe his tempting thoughts and note down. So here’s really clear practice instructions. And so with Lent coming up, you might want to spend your 40 days in the desert doing this. I’m not sure if I’m going to, but I’m thinking about it. So if you want to put on your monk’s habit and engage in a kind of warfare with the demons, this is how he thinks you should do it. It’s through observation.

Observe and note down their intensification and diminution and their interconnectedness and their timing and which demons produce what, and which demon comes after another and which does not follow after which. And he should seek from Christ the inner meanings of these things. They dislike, that’s the demons dislike those who approach the ascetic life with greater knowledge, for they wish to shoot in darkness at the upright of heart.

So this is observation. This is a very painful, difficult part of spiritual practice that is also an indispensable part. And in this framing it’s observation of the demons themselves. And in particular it’s so dynamic. It’s so much like the Enneagram here. Noticing which comes after the other, etc.

Buddhism in my training doesn’t have anything quite like this. I think the closest would be the six realms. And then kind of extending the six realms into the psychological domain being described here. Maybe using the five elements too. But for me there’s something very kind of useful about the Enneagram or about these thoughts that come in, particular around their relationships. How one one seems to reliably follow the other.

And you know, I mean, I think any amount of observation here will, to some extent, at least from my experience, you can’t help but see a kind of intelligence behind this attack. You know, it’s not one after another in a neutral way. There seems to be a demonic intelligence, if you want to call it that, behind this.

And I love this very brief passage. He should seek from Christ the inner meanings of these things. And I think that’s maybe for the first time that’s where I see in Evagrius, some wiggle room about, do we really need Satan in this undertaking? I mean we certainly, we’re certainly invited to. But what are the inner meanings of these things? That’s just such a great question, you know, what is underneath this gluttony that I think that invites a kind of curiosity that doesn’t have to conclude in there’s an external force that wants my soul to be destroyed. I do think that, you know, I do think that there might be other possibilities there.

Final Chapters

Okay, we’re wrapping up the instructions, last couple chapters. Through observation you will discover that two of the demons are the sharpest, so quick that they almost overtake the movement of your mind: the demon of fornication and the one which drags us off to blaspheme God. But the second does not last for long, while the first, provided it does not stir our thoughts with passion, will not impede our knowledge of God.

This is interesting. I don’t think I read this carefully the first time. Let me finish the next two sections, chapters.

To separate body from soul belongs solely to the one who united them. But to separate soul from body belongs also to one who longs for virtue. Withdrawal into solitude has been called by our fathers meditation on death and flight from the body.

Those who wickedly cherish the flesh and take thought for it to satisfy desires should blame themselves, not the flesh, for they know the grace of the Creator. Those who obtained apatheia, dispassion, of the soul by means of the body, and to some extent zealously strive for the contemplation of beings.

He mentioned zeal frequently and zeal is sometimes one of the words used as a passion in the one which is anger, orge, indignation. What I’m really struck by and what speaks so much to my spiritual practice is this deep ambiguity about what to do with ire, wrath, indignation, to what extent it is our natural gift and it’s just a matter of pointing it in the right directions, versus to what extent it itself is an obstacle that the best course is simply to kind of cool it, through mercy, compassion, love, etc.

So I just want to return as we close to this chapter 51. Two demons are the sharpest so quick that they almost overtake the movement of your mind: the demon of fornication, the eight, the lust, and the one which drags us off to blaspheme God. I’m going to just quickly go, I say Google, I mean, check with Claude about this second one. I think you would be talking about pride here.

Let’s see. You know, he’s calling it blasphemy. I’m just going to push a little bit because we have blasphemy hasn’t come up. Yeah, so Claude doesn’t know, which is fine. I do think it’s pride, because, I mean, when we talk about blaspheming God, isn’t that pride? I mean, isn’t that Satan, Satan’s thing?

Yeah. So, I mean, I guess all we can say for sure here is Evagrius is saying, go observe it for yourself. And in part, maybe, you know, part of what we could say here is that he’s, you know, he’s really encouraging us to see for ourselves how these demons operate. And, you know, this is some of the more poetic language he’s used, the one that drags us off to blaspheme God. So maybe, you know, maybe in his spiritual work he had a real relationship with the demon that would come and attack him again and again. I haven’t read other treatises yet and I’m interested to do so.

Maybe through observation, these demons start to take on much more personality. You know, we develop more of a relationship with them. Whereas I think what he’s given us as a starting place is the eight tempting thoughts. None of which is blasphemy, but if we’re thinking about the Enneagram in our head, the nine acedia, forgetting, sleepiness. The eight to the left, lust or fornication. The one to the right, ire, wrath, anger. And then down there, right after that is pride. And so, you know, we could think of the fall of Satan as one of initially forgetting, followed by indignation, potentially toward God, anger toward God, moving into pride.

Again, take of that what is useful. Really, the only thing that matters with this mapping is to somehow plant it in a way that is meaningful for us. So that, yeah, we have a kind of experiential map and a little bit more fluency and agility as we’re navigating this sort of thick, thick experiential air in our renunciation work.

So we’ll end there. The next chapter, I will review one more time to see if they’re worth recording another Barrcast on. But they’re concerning things that happen during sleep. And then some comments on apatheia, which is dispassion, which is sort of the goal of renunciative work.

So thanks for listening. See you next time.

Transcript

Welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and cold winter morning here in New York.

We are going to start reading the Praktikos today. So this is 100 chapters. It’s not long, but I expect this to take two episodes.

Why are we reading the Praktikos? This is a work by Evagrius Ponticus. If you’ve followed previous videos, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work on the Enneagram and reading through Claudio Naranjo’s contributions. If Naranjo is sort of the father of the Enneagram of personality, then Evagrius is the grandfather. He’s a desert father, a Christian mystic from the three hundreds who lived in Egypt and led a nomadic life.

And so we’re going to dive into the Praktikos. And I think the only piece of context that I want to lay out now is I’m just getting started on Evagrius’s work. But what I know about the Praktikos is it’s sort of considered groundwork on his end. So what we’re going to be reading here could be thought of as sort of foundational or training material or groundwork. If you practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, you maybe have heard of the word ngondro. This is kind of like training material. And so it’s written for someone still very much working on the foundations of practice. That doesn’t mean exactly that it’s like junior varsity material. But there’s a kind of a tone and approach to groundwork spiritual training that pervades here. And I think basically we’re going to be talking a lot about fighting demons and resisting demons. And it’s written for a spiritual practitioner who’s at a stage of practice where that’s really central in their practice is this kind of combat with temptation. And let’s get started.

I love the way he starts it. So it’s a letter to Anatolius. And he begins, since you recently wrote to me in Scetis from the holy mountain, dear Brother Anatolius, demanding that I explain to you the symbolic habit of the Egyptian monks, for you believe it to be neither accidental nor superfluous that the habit is so different from what other people wear. I will therefore tell you what we have learned concerning this from the Holy Fathers. So he’s going to describe his habit, the clothes he wears.

The hood is a symbol of the grace of our Savior and God. It shelters their mind and nurses their childlike relationship with Christ in the face of those who are always attempting to beat and wound it. Anyone who bears this hood on his head is truly chanting the inner meaning of the psalm quote, “Unless the Lord builds the house and guards the city, in vain did the builder and watchman labor.” Recitations like these produce humility and uproot the primordial vice of pride that cast down to the earth Lucifer the dawn rising star.

The nakedness of their hands manifests the absence of hypocrisy in their way of life. Vainglory is terribly clever at covering and darkening virtues, always hunting for the esteem that comes from men and chasing faith away. “For how is it possible for you to believe,” it says, “when you receive glory from one another and the glory that comes only from God, you do not seek?” For the good ought to be chosen for no other reason than itself. Apart from this, anything that moves us to do good will appear far more precious than the good itself. And nothing could be more absurd than to consider and assert that something is better than God.

And again, the scapular that wraps around the shoulders in the form of a cross is a symbol of the faith in Christ that supports the gentle and always, despite obstacles, permits them to work unimpeded.

The belt tied around their loins repels all impurity and declares it is good for a man not to touch a woman. They wear the sheepskin, those always carrying around in their bodies the death of Jesus and muzzling all the body’s irrational passions, cutting back the wickedness of the soul by their communion in the good and loving poverty, but fleeing from avarice as the mother of idolatry.

The staff is a tree of life to all who hold it reliable, for those who lean on it, just as they lean on the Lord.

The habit, then, is like a symbol that summarizes these things. And these are the words the fathers always say to them. “Faith, oh, my child, is steadied by the fear of God. And this fear in turn is strengthened by continence. The latter virtue is made unshakable by patient endurance and hope. From these is born apatheia, or dispassion, which brings into being love. Love is the door to knowledge of nature, which leads to theology and the supreme blessedness.”

So that’s the conclusion of this first part, which is the description of the habit. And I find it very beautiful. I don’t know yet enough about sort of this system that we’re approaching, but you can hear certainly the hood as a symbol of protection from pride. The naked hands as a protection from vanity or vainglory. I think I need to make sure I understand what vainglory exactly means to Evagrius. And check if vainglory is another word for pride or is for vanity. And then other adornments there. And so he mentions apatheia. So, you know, you maybe hear apathy, but it’s dispassion or non attachment. Or you could maybe try equanimity out. This is freedom from the passions. And this is the purpose of the groundwork of the Praktikos is to birth dispassion, birth apatheia. And so these qualities here—continence, endurance, hope, humility—these are the qualities that will birth dispassion, which brings into being, he says, love. Love is the door to knowledge of nature which leads to theology. And so that’s his progression: the Praktikos to the knowledge of nature to theology. And so we’re just focused on the Praktikos for now.

He concludes the prologue by saying, and so, concerning the holy habit and the teaching of the elders, these things we have said should suffice for now. But concerning the life of the ascetic and the knower, I now propose to describe in detail not only what we have seen or heard, but also what I’ve been taught by the elders to say to others. I have compactly divided ascetical matters into a hundred chapters and matters of knowledge into 50 plus 600.

So we’re going to be reading the hundred chapters on ascetical matters here. And some things I’ve concealed and shadowed over so that we do not throw holy things to the dogs, nor cast pearls before swine. But this will be clear to those who have embarked on the same quest. So I think he’s hinting here that there’s going to be some twilight language, some secret language here, that we can keep our eyes out for as we go without totally rabbit holing on it. So here we are. The treatise on the Praktikos. 100 chapters.

And these first chapters are incredibly dense, sort of deceivingly so. So let’s see how we go. Christianity is the teaching of our Savior Christ, consisting of ascetical practice, the contemplation of nature and theology. This is this trifold progression. The kingdom of heaven is apatheia, dispassion of the soul together with true knowledge of beings. The kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the capacity of the nous, mind or intellect, but surpassing it in incorruptibility.

So he’s just sort of outlined the whole project here and hinted that the kingdom of heaven is what we can hope to achieve, or become through this practice of dispassion, the ascetic practice. If you want to make a Buddhist connection, you could call this renunciation, that plus true knowledge of beings that will come later in his contemplation of nature. But even then, if you have this sort of practice of equanimity, that is dispassion combined with some sort of seeing into the true nature of things, that is exceeded still by the kingdom of God, which he says is direct knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the structure of the nous, structure of the mind, but surpassing it in incorruptibility. We can just leave that aside for now. Just knowing that that’s there. For whatever person ardently loves, he uses eros here. Loves he will want completely and what he wants, he will struggle to acquire.

Now, every pleasure is preceded by desire, epithumia. And desire is born of sensation. Thus, that which is not subject to sensation is also free from passion.

Against the hermits, the demons engage in naked combat. Against those laboring at virtue in monasteries or communities, they armed the more careless of the brethren. For the second battle is much lighter than the first. Since there cannot be found on earth men more bitter than the demons, or able to undertake all their evil doings at once.

So where are we here? He’s making a general statement about what it’s like to be a being. You know, a person on Earth, a human being. For humans, we love things. And what we love we want. And what we want, we struggle to acquire. Again, you know, you could map this into a Buddhist framework pretty easily.

So every pleasure that we experience is preceded by desire born of sensation. And so, you know, putting two and two together, I think part of what he’s trying to say here is that pleasure seeking is incompatible with dispassion. Because when we seek and experience pleasure, it’s because we’ve given into desire born of sensation to some extent. And what we’re looking for in dispassion is something that’s not born from sensation. It’s not contingent on sensation.

So he continues. There are eight principal kinds of tempting thoughts. So here I think, and I don’t have the Greek available, but it’s on this website. All you have to do is just search Ev Ponticus, Praktikos. So, if you’re a scholar here, you can do more tracing than I can. But I think for the first time he’s introducing this word, logismoi, the singular being, logismos. These are like tempting thoughts.

I think they’re tempting thoughts that are born of sensation. So these eight kinds of tempting thoughts, he says, contain within themselves every tempting thought. And this is the origin of the Enneagram. First, that of gluttony. And with that of sexual immorality. Third, that of love of money. Fourth, that of sadness. Fifth, that of anger. Six, that of acedia or sloth or torpor. Seventh, that of vain glory. Eighth, that of pride.

I just want to check. Yeah, I guess vanity would be an acceptable translation of vainglory. It’s not the same as pride, although they’re certainly related.

He says we cannot control whether these tempting thoughts can agitate the soul or not. But whether they remain in us or not and whether they move the passions or not, that we can control.

So the basic framework, as far as I can tell that Evagrius is laying out is this soul or, I think he would use that interchangeably with nous, Mind. This mind of ours is assailed by logismoi, tempting thoughts. And it is outside of our control whether these thoughts agitate us or not. The mind has sort of wounds in it that date back to the fall of man and before that the fall of the angels and Satan. So we are already subject to agitation. We are already subject to passions. So agitation is part of life. Though what we can control is whether they move the passions or not. So the passions you could think of as sort of grooves in the mind that if animated or moved by these tempting thoughts, if captured or captivated, then those actually move the mind. That’s where our responsibility begins.

* The tempting thought of gluttony suggests to the monk the sudden rejection of his asceticism. And it’s interesting he starts here. Naranjo also starts with gluttony. He says something interesting about gluttony, that in a way gluttony is the door to all the other passions, in the sense that, you know, here if you give up your asceticism, everything will fall from there. Right? So it’s interesting that Evagrius starts with gluttony. The stomach, liver, spleen and resultant congestive heart failure are depicted along with long sickness, lack of necessities and unavailability of physicians.

It often leads him to recall those of the brethren who have suffered these things. Sometimes it even deceives those who have suffered from this kind of thing to go and visit others who are practicing self control to tell them all about their misfortunes and how this resulted from their asceticism.

Super interesting depiction of gluttony here, where what’s being presented to the mind, to the nous in this logismos is not a banquet table full of delicious things. It’s actually the possibility of sickness, of destitution. You know, you’ve got no access to health care. We could say as a monk, you think about all of your brethren who died or suffered from ailments. You might even go out and tell people about misfortunes. So it’s basically gluttony is getting people off the ascetic path through fear. Although, you know, fear interestingly, is sort of the great missing element in the these eight evil thoughts. So fear is the, you know, if Enneagram is nine and the eight evil thoughts here are eight, fear is the one that’s missing.

So anyway, that maybe contributes to why gluttony goes first.

* The demon of sexual immorality, that’s porneia, compels desiring for different bodies. Especially violently does it attack those who practice self control so that they will cease as if achieving nothing, contaminating the soul. It bends it down toward these sorts of deeds. It makes it speak certain words and then hear them as if the thing were actually there to be seen.

So these are these sort of temptations off the ascetic path—gluttony on the one hand and immorality on the other.

* Love of money. Avarice suggests a long old age, hands powerless to work, hunger and disease yet to come the bitterness of poverty and the disgrace of receiving the necessities of life from others.

So again, the presentation of the logismos is not abundance, is not, wouldn’t it be great if I had wealth. It’s the presentation of poverty. So stinginess is my preferred translation of avarice rather than greed. And here again the mind is being presented or assaulted with things that are basically undesirable fears, things that we want to avoid.

And if we’re just keeping track of the numbers here, you know, avarice is the five, sexual immorality is the eight, is lust. And gluttony is the seven. So we kind of have, while that’s not a traditional triad of the Enneagram, and it skips over the six, that is a pocket of the Enneagram. And which is interesting to think about. And they are in some ways all in relationship to threat. I think you could safely say, 5 and 7 are in the fear triads, more explicitly avoidant or fearing types. The eight being a neighbor that sort of responds to fear in that kind of aggressive way of lust. Again, we don’t need to map these perfectly onto the Enneagram. That’s not really the point here.

He continues. Gloominess sometimes arises from frustrated desires, but sometimes it is the result of anger. When desires are frustrated, it arises thus, certain tempting thoughts first seize the soul and remind it of home and parents and its former course of life. So there’s that nostalgia and the melancholy of the four. When they see the soul following them without resistance and dissipating itself in mental pleasures, they take and dunk, literally baptize it in gloom. Since it is the case that these earlier things are gone and cannot be recovered due to the monk’s present way of life, then the miserable soul, having been dissipated by the first tempting thought, is humiliated all the more by the second.

So some subtleties around how gloominess or melancholy can arise. Sometimes it’s frustrated desire, but sometimes it’s anger at the course of life that one has taken.

Anger or orge, is the sharpest passion. It is said to be a boiling and movement of indignation thumos against a wrongdoer or person, presumed wrongdoer. So now we’re in the one. It causes the soul to be savage all day long, but especially in prayers. It seizes the nous, reflecting back the face of the distressing person. Then sometimes it is lingering and is changed into rancor, menace or menos. And thus it causes disturbances at night, bodily weakness and pallor, and attacks from poisonous beasts. These four things associated with rancor may be found to have been summoned up by many other tempting thoughts.

So you can see how relational and interdependent all these thoughts are here. That anger can arise from other thoughts, gloominess can arise from anger and so on.

* The demon of Acedia, which is also called the Noonday demon, is the most burdensome of all the demons. So he’s using demon and logismos or logismoi interchangeably. I don’t know if in Evagrius’s system, all thoughts, all logismoi are demons. I think he’s using them interchangeably now. And that’s how we’ll do it. But certainly not all thoughts have to be demonic, I would think. And we’ll learn more about that I think later in the Praktikos.

It, that’s Acedia, besets the monk at about the fourth hour, which is 10am of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eighth hour, 2pm. First it makes the sun appear to slow down or stop, so the day seems to be 50 hours long. Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell to observe the sun in order to see how much longer it is to the 9th hour, i.e. 3:00pm. And to look about in every direction, in case any of the brothers are there. Then it assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life and the work of his hands. That love has departed from his brethren and there is no one to console him.

If anyone has recently caused the monk grief, the demon adds this as well to amplify his hatred of these things. It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier and more convenient craft. After all, pleasing the Lord is not dependent on geography. The demon adds, God is to be worshipped everywhere. It combines this with remembrance of his relatives and his former way of life, and depicts to him a long life, placing before his eyes a vision of the burdens of the ascetic life.

So it employs, as they say, every possible means to move the monk to leave his cell and flee the race course. No other demon comes immediately after this one. Rather, after the struggle, the soul receives in turn a peaceful state and unspeakable joy.

Very interesting. So, he has a lot to say about the nine, sloth, laziness, torpor, acedia. And again, it’s so interesting that, you know, you can really hear the sequencing of demons. So this particular demon is not followed by another demon. Actually after this one, there’s a peaceful state and an unspeakable joy. Evagrius seems to have the deepest relationship with this one. This is quite a long description of how the demon operates. Quite detailed. Yeah, very interesting.

Continuing. 13. The tempting thought of vainglory is especially subtle and easily sneaks into those whose lives are going well, wanting to publish their efforts and go hunting for glory among men. And it imagines demons shouting and women being healed and a crowd wanting to touch his clothes. It prophesies his ordination to the priesthood with people seeking him at his door. And even if he resists being carried off to be ordained by force. So really fantasy of fame.

And having raised him up with these empty hopes, it suddenly leaps off, leaving and abandoning him to be tempted by the demon of pride or the demon of gloominess. So quickly there, you know, we have the three, which is the temptation of vanity. And then in the departure of the three, one either goes up to pride or down to gloominess, up to the two or down to the four, bringing on tempting thoughts, the opposite of his earlier hopes.

Sometimes it also hands him over to the demon of sexual immorality, the man who shortly before was being carried off to be made a holy priest by force.

That’s interesting. There’s kind of something a little sexual about that phrase, being carried off to be made a holy priest by force. So there is almost a little bit of that sexual fantasy. No, is that just me picking that up?

* The demon of pride conducts the soul to the very worst fall. It urges it, one, not to acknowledge God’s help. Two, to think it is responsible for its own success. Three, to be arrogant towards the brethren as unintelligent because they do not all share the same opinion concerning this. This demon is followed by anger and gloominess and the ultimate evil, complete insanity and madness and visions of throngs of demons in the air.

So that’s an introduction to the eight tempting thoughts. I think we’ll pause there, before continuing where he’s going to talk about tactics for resisting these temptations.

The order here is roughly. Let’s look carefully. So we went 7, 8, 5, 4, 1, 9, 3, 2. I don’t, that doesn’t speak to me in any profound way, but certainly within these descriptions, he makes some really interesting claims that do, some of them do continue on to the Enneagram today. For instance, the way that the 9 is somehow sort of special and different from the other numbers. And you know, his description of the nine here is one in which it sort of assails him with the other thoughts. Right. I mean, I think that’s part of what he’s talking about in terms of hatred of his place, grief, desire, remembrance of other ways. Right. So there’s sort of this assault that comes from what he says is the most burdensome of all the demons. And conversely, it is never followed by another demon. So there’s a way that the nine kind of exists outside of the cycle that we see in other places. And I would say the modern Enneagram kind of reflects that in some sense.

In contrast, when you think about vanity, he’s saying vanity, you know, oftentimes moves him either into pride or gloominess or sometimes sexual immorality. Right. So anyway, we’re not getting stretch and release points. We’re not getting wings exactly. But you can see how that kind of dynamic mapping is so core to Evagrius’s eight tempting thoughts.

Okay, we’ll pick up next time. Thanks for watching.

In this episode of the Barrcast, we get to know the Sexual Two, whose keyword is conquest. Unlike the Social Two's ambition to impress groups, the Sexual Two channels their energy into one-on-one relationships, employing seduction as a tool for eliciting affection, loyalty, and recognition.

Transformation for the Sexual Two involves dismantling pride and embracing humility, vulnerability, and authentic connection.

Talking Points:

🌱 From Pride to HumilityTransformation begins when the Sexual Two acknowledges their limitations and relinquishes the need to be seen as perfect or irreplaceable. This journey includes learning to ask for help, accepting their shadow, and discovering the beauty in ordinary, unadorned love.

💔 The Wound of AbandonmentAt the heart of the Sexual Two's psyche is a fear of abandonment. This fear often leads to patterns of manipulation or preemptive withdrawal to avoid being left behind. True growth requires facing and feeling abandonment fully, allowing it to dissolve their false sense of invulnerability.

✨ Revisiting SexualityFor the Sexual Two, sexuality can often be a means of control or conquest. Healing involves reframing intimacy as an experience of mutual surrender, sensitivity, and connection, moving away from performance-driven interaction toward tenderness and trust.

In this episode of the Barrcast, we get to know the Social Two, a personality structure driven by the need for ambition and recognition in the social sphere. The Social Two’s pride fuels their desire to be "above," leading them to craft an image of importance and seduction to win admiration from groups. The Social Two’s transformation work moves them from leadership to equality, in which they embrace humility, vulnerability, and genuine relational intimacy.

Talking Points:

🔗 Superiority vs. AmbitionEchoes of the Social One (Superiority/Inadaptability) are here for the Social Two, but the Two’s need to be above is ultimately more about relationship than it is about getting things right – a reflection of the Two’s position in the feeling triad.

💰 Confessing criminalityThe journey of the Social Two includes confronting their own "criminality"—the covertly selfish motivations behind their actions—and replacing these with empathy and accountability. The practice of giving and receiving genuine feedback helps dissolve pride and deepen their relational authenticity.

🐆 Reconnecting with the mammalian SelfAt the heart of transformation lies the reconnection to one's emotional and relational needs. By emerging from the "reptilian" mindset of conquest and control, the Social Two can embrace the humility and humanity that allow for true intimacy and belonging.

🌱 From Leadership to EqualityGrowth for the Social Two involves moving from a position of dominance to one of humility and equality. This transformation entails relinquishing the "golden child" role, acknowledging personal vulnerabilities, and embracing the needs of others without an agenda for self-glorification.

In this episode of The Barrcast, we wrap up the One with the Self-Preservation One, whose keyword is concern, a constant worrying. Unlike the other subtypes, the SP One accesses perfectionism through being painfully attuned to their own imperfections.

Talking Points:

🫵 The Inner CriticUnlike the Social or Sexual Ones, the Self-Preservation One internalizes their imperfections acutely. This fuels an obsessive cycle of self-improvement that masks their anger with benevolence and service, often at great personal cost.

🎭 Acceptance and pleasureThe path to growth includes reconnecting with instinctual life and allowing space for pleasure. This involves letting go of guilt and embracing moments of silence, leisure, and sensory enjoyment—freeing themselves from the grip of self-denial.

💡 Perfection as a gift, not an attainmentUltimately, perfection is revealed not as a result of effort but as a gift that arises when one accepts life as it is. In the words of St. John of the Cross, "I no longer tend my flock… my only practice is love."

In this episode of The Barrcast, we explore the Sexual One, whose keywords are vehemence and zeal. Unlike the other One subtypes, the Sexual One channels their anger into a passionate pursuit of justice and righteousness. The result is a personality whose trust in the instincts of their body overrides other inputs.

Talking Points:

⚔ The CrusaderThe Sexual One feels a fiery, embodied urge to address injustices and “make things right.” Their instincts become a vehicle for justice, resulting in a confident and determined approach to life.

🛡️ The Warrior's PactFrom an early age, the Sexual One may forge an inner pact with their “warrior self,” prioritizing confrontation and strength over vulnerability. While this leads to a commanding presence, it can come at the cost of spontaneity and playfulness.

⚖️ Between Aggression and BenevolenceThe Sexual One oscillates between passionate anger and genuine warmth. As they soften and transform, their vehemence gives way to serenity, and their perfectionism shifts to a tender acceptance of life as it is.

🎭 Pleasure and PlayFor the Sexual One, a significant part of growth involves accessing sensuality, spontaneity, and play—experiencing pleasure for its own sake rather than tying it to ideals of justice or righteousness.

In this episode of The Barrcast, we learn aboutthe Social One, whose keywords are inadaptability and superiority. Unlike the other subtypes, the Social One asserts their correctness and moral high ground through a subtler, more withdrawn approach.

Talking Points:

🧍 Sitting at the grownups tableFrom a young age, the Social One often assumes a grown-up role, gravitating toward adults rather than peers. This early sense of responsibility reflects their drive to distinguish themselves and avoid the perceived mess of childhood.

🏔️ Moral High Ground as RefugeThe Social One’s need for superiority often manifests as a retreat to their “moral high ground.” Maintaining this ground, and separating it from the rest of the environment, requires constant effort – resulting in rigidity, isolation, and tension in relationships.

🔥 Anger Beneath the SurfaceUnlike other subtypes, the Social One rarely displays anger outwardly. Instead, their frustration transforms into a quiet demand for perfection—both from themselves and others.

In this episode of The Barrcast, we introduce the Enneagram One, known as the Reformer. As part of the doing triad, the One is characterized by the passion of anger— not the fighting instinct, but something more primordial, rooted in the frustration caused by the friction between what is and what ought to be. The result is an internal, fiery drive to correct what is perceived as wrong or imperfect.

Talking Points:

🎄 The Divine Memory of PerfectionRichard Rohr’s account of experiencing perfection as a child—a perfectly trimmed Christmas tree—illustrates the One’s simultaneous longing for and burden of enforcing perfection.

🫸 Pushing the RiverThe phrase highlights the One’s tendency to impose their will on the world, striving to reform external contexts rather than adapt to what is.

🧹 Occasional PeaceUnlike other types, Ones sometimes achieve the perfection they seek, but this fleeting success only reinforces their belief in their “special access” to what is right.

In this episode of The Barrcast we wrap up the Nine with the self-preservation subtype, a character shaped by “appetite.” Unlike the overt hunger of other types, the Nine’s appetite is a more instinctual desire for comfort, stability, and numbing pacification. We discuss how this appetite manifests not just physically but as an unconscious strategy to avoid the deeper question of being.

Talking Points:

🍽️ I Eat, Therefore I Am

The unique Cartesian expression of the self-preservation Nine reflects a substitution of being with physical satiation. We explore how this subtype’s appetite goes beyond food, encompassing a craving for the mundane comforts of everyday life—sleep, routine, and possession—that mask a deeper existential void.

📺 Life on Standby: The Remote Control Metaphor

Emilia Ligi’s metaphor of living life like a TV on standby mode captures the essence of the self-preservation Nine’s strategy. This subtype often hands over their metaphorical remote control to others, allowing external influences to dictate their experience while they remain passive and disconnected from their true desires.

🪞 The Elusiveness of Presence

Despite their grounded, physical presence, the self-preservation Nine often lacks a metaphysical depth, presenting as elusive or hard to pin down. We explore how this subtype’s tendency to retreat into comfort leads to a life lived on the surface, with little engagement in the deeper currents of self-awareness or transformation.

(This is an edited transcript of the video)

I’m going to do something a bit self-indulgent here and just riff for a few minutes. I’ve been asking myself: what is this project I’ve been working on for the past 18 months? It started with implementing Internal Family Systems (IFS) in ChatGPT, and now I’m translating Naranjo’s book on the Enneagram subtypes. What connects all this? It’s not like I have a tidy answer. I’ve been doing the work without naming the project, which is the beauty of independent work—you just do stuff and figure out why later. But it feels like it’s time to start naming it.

I think it begins with describing the moment we’re in and the energy behind it. Dreyfus is my guide here, specifically his book What Computers Still Can’t Do the follow-up to his first critique of AI. Dreyfus isn’t around anymore to comment on the current state of affairs, but two quotes from his work frame the urgency I feel right now.

The first quote:

If we are on the threshold of creating artificial intelligence, then we are about to see the triumph of a very special conception of reason. If reason can be programmed into a computer, this will confirm an understanding of man as object, an idea Western thinkers have been moving toward for 2,000 years. But if AI turns out to be impossible, we will have to distinguish human from artificial reason, changing our view of ourselves. Thus, the moment has come either to face the truth of the tradition's deepest intuition or to abandon the mechanical account of man's nature.

The point here is that things are coming to a head. We’re either about to prove that reason – the supposed essence of human nature – is mechanical, or we’re going to have to throw that intuition away. This is 2,000 years of Western philosophy culminating in this moment. It’s a big deal.

But Dreyfus goes further. He argues that this isn’t just a spectator sport where we wait to see who wins. He highlights the deeper issue: our nature is malleable. This malleability, according to Dreyfus, is in fact more core to our nature than pure reason. Here’s the second quote:

Man’s nature is indeed so malleable that it may be on the point of changing again. If the computer paradigm becomes so strong that people begin to think of themselves as digital devices on the model of artificial intelligence, then, since machines cannot be like human beings, human beings may progressively become like machines. The risk is not the advent of superintelligent computers, but of sub-intelligent human beings.

So this isn’t a spectator sport where we observe the outcome from a safe distance. The stakes are existential. We could end up reshaping our own being to fit the machine model, essentially lobotomizing our human faculties to commune better with AI. This self-fulfilling prophecy could have us saying, “Look, machines can reason just like us,” when really we’ve just reduced ourselves to fit their capacities.

I’ve long wanted to play some role in refuting the notion that human nature is mechanistic. But the irony is, I’ve also seen just how mechanistic we already are. So much of our behavior runs on automatic patterning. This is something I’ve encountered thanks to my training in Buddhism, initially through Ken McLeod’s Wake Up to Your Life, and also through working with the Enneagram.

In IFS, we talk about parts—sub-personalities that act like little machines, each with their own job. They have a kind of programmed logic: if they don’t do their job, something terrible will happen. They work tirelessly, often in conflict with each other, like subroutines in a computer program. Despite their human-like qualities, they’re built on stories and instructions. There probably aren’t even that many of them—maybe 200 possible parts, give or take. Through their combinations, we get the full spectrum of human behavior. It’s super programmable.

The Enneagram offers another lens. It’s an architecture of the psyche that lays out nine core ego patterns—or 27 if you include subtypes. Each represents a distinct “pattern imperative,” a kind of automatic rule we live by. For example: Must fit in, can’t stand out. These imperatives drive our thinking, feeling, and doing, and they operate in a mechanistic way. Human reason can’t be pulled out and dropped into a computer program, but much of our reasoning is automatically produced by these stories.

And yet, there’s a non-mechanistic element—the awareness piece, what IFS calls the Self. This is the spacious, loving capacity within us that isn’t ruled by any part. The work in IFS is to become increasingly self-led, to identify more with this capacity than with any single part, no matter how urgent its job feels. When awareness touches a part, something shifts. It’s this non-mechanistic awareness that brings me back to the Enneagram’s spiritual dimension, the upward motion that points to a non-mechanical, mysterious, embodied reality.

We’re at a psycho-spiritual crossroads. Freud’s model of a libido-driven psyche gave way to attachment theory and object relations, focusing on the early templates set by our primary caregivers. But there’s a third stage emerging, one that the Enneagram speaks to more directly. It acknowledges that our character structures—these patterned imperatives—are built on flimsy, ungrounded stories. They persist because part of us maintains the illusion that they’re real, that they stand on solid ground. This is what Naranjo calls the ontic vacuum—a kind of emptiness or void at the core of our character structure.

The inner work is about dismantling this, facing the void, and discovering that there’s more to us than these stories. It’s scary, sure—it feels like looking into the abyss. But both IFS and the Enneagram create a framework for this exploration, helping us see that there’s an abiding presence capable of being with and holding the most intense experiences.

So what’s the project? It’s about creating an architecture of the psyche that can be mirrored by machines in a way that helps us see our own automatic processes. By holding up this mirror, we can reclaim our true, non-mechanistic nature. The goal isn’t to program humanity into machines but to use the reflection to help us break free from our conditioned behaviors and stories.

“Buddha nature is what remains when the confusion of samsara is cleared away.” -KM

In this episode of the Barrcast, we explore the Sexual Nine, a character defined by their drive for “symbiosis” or deep fusion with others. The Sexual Nine’s yearning for union stems from a profound sense of disconnection within themselves, leading them to seek a complete merging with others as a way to feel whole. Topics include: the difference between true connection and codependent fusion; the neurotic game of symbiosis as a substitute for true selfhood; and the Sexual Nine’s journey toward reclaiming their autonomy and discovering genuine intimacy.

Talking points:

🕶️ The “Nowhere Man” – how the Sexual Nine’s tendency to fade into the background, becoming invisible in relationships, stems from an unwillingness to occupy their own sense of self.

🦁 The “lion’s roar,” in which the nine incorporates their eight wing to pronounce No to some way of life that cannot go on any longer, creating space for the Yes.

🌱 Reclaiming Self in Relationships. The shift from seeking union through others to building self-worth independently, allowing for real partnership and mutual respect.

In this episode of the Barrcast, we get to know the Social Nine, a character defined by their need for “participation” or “belonging.” The Social Nine’s longing to belong stems from a chronic feeling of not fitting in, leading them to overcompensate by taking on roles that make them indispensable to the group. Topics include: the self-sacrificing, good-natured qualities of the Social Nine; their tendency to avoid personal emotions in favor of maintaining group harmony; and the driving need to feel included, even if it means working tirelessly to earn a sense of acceptance.

Talking points:

🐘 The “elephant skin” of the Social Nine, a thick protective layer that shields them from responding to their environment in ways that may threaten homeostasis

꩜ The existential void a Social Nine is confronted with when an anchoring relationship is removed

🏋️‍♀️ How practices that build the capacity to be with anger, fear, and other emotions help in the transformation process

In this episode of the Barrcast, we introduce the Nine, a personality type often described as peaceful and self-forgetting. Positioned at the top of the Enneagram, the Nine is sometimes considered the "baseline" type, able to look down on with unique challenges in self-awareness and motivation.

Key Points:

* Nines possess a unique ability to empathize and see the perspectives of other Enneagram types but often struggle to assert their own identity.

* The nine’s “sloth” is more than lethargy; it represents a resistance to inner change and personal awakening.

* By avoiding conflict, nines may ultimately face physical or emotional burnout, especially when life calls for decisive self-awareness.

Quotes from the Episode:

* “Nine is the least egoic, the least motivated to change. It’s as if the nine is asleep to their own needs.”

* “Self-forgetting only works for so long…eventually, life requires us to be an ‘I’ capable of making decisions.”

In this episode of the Barrcast, we explore the Self-Preservation Eight, whose passion is “satisfaction”—a need driven by survival and self-interest. Topics include: the lion-like nature of the Self-Preservation Eight, their pursuit of security and control; how they express strength through commanding loyalty; the reasons behind their instinct for protection and their rejection of love and the good. We examine the challenges the Eight faces in letting go of material and emotional control, and the transformative potential of embracing vulnerability and trust.

In this episode of the Barrcast, we dive into the Sexual Eight, whose core passion is “possessiveness.” Topics include the voraciousness of the Sexual Eight, their intense need for control, power, and autonomy and their tendency toward detachment from intellect. Discussion touches on their amoral perspective – it’s right because I do it – and how their need for power manifests in a vicious cycle of possession and isolation.

In this episode of the Barrcast, we look into the Social Eight, whose passion is “complicity;” a particular flavor of friendship that is defined by teaming up against a shared enemy. Topics include: the rebellious yet loyal nature of the Social Eight, the origins of their opposition to authority; how they defend their loved ones through intense and paradoxical behavior; the motivations behind their drive for protection, solidarity, and justice.

In this episode of the BarrCast, we start our journey into the gut triad, starting with the Eight. Topics covered include: the passion of lust in type eight, their need for intensity, and the psychological underpinnings behind their pursuit of justice, autonomy, and dominance.

Transcripts now supported on web and mobile. Hooray Substack!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the BarrCast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a windy Friday afternoon.

So we're jumping into the social six and the keyword for the social six is in Spanish, in English duty, duty or obligation. And remembering that the background passion for all of the subtypes of the six is fear. We've also been playing with angst as a keyword there.

But it's funny because I've been sitting with fear versus angst. And I think angst is a better description of a condition that the six might find themselves in. But fear might be a better word to describe the passion, right? The engine, the motivating, sort of the battery source of the six. The six scans their environment from a place of fear for danger and through that projects danger onto the world and sometimes even manifests danger where there wouldn't have been any uh previously and so that's that self-fulfilling prophecy that's that um see you know see that means i need to continue to scan for fear right so there's that pattern that reinforces itself

And angst doesn't, as much as I like the word angst, it doesn't quite lend itself as clearly to that passion.

So let's look at duty. And the other thing we need to keep in mind as we dive into the subtypes of the six is two things. One is that the six and the four have the most diversity in the subtypes. And secondly, that another way sixes are presented in the Enneagram is along the lines of phobic and counterphobic. So you can roughly think about this as people who have more of a flight response or more of a fight response. Do they move toward the danger or do they move away from it?

So all that's just background as we begin our translation work. Doody, here's what I call a Prussian character. The social six is cold, very formal. Kant, for example, was a great philosopher. He was Prussian, and the Prussians had this type of character. It feels great love for precision and intolerance for ambiguity. This is precisely the complete opposite of the conservation six or self-preservation six who is warm and feels too much permissiveness for ambiguity among the nazis there were many social sixes their behavior is very visible this is the line the party line the line that defines who the good guys are and who the bad guys are and what we need to do and we do it very efficiently in efficiency the six the social six is similar to a three.

Ichazo used the word duty, which is more than just being concerned with duty, as social sixes are primarily concerned with the point of reference. They have the mind of a legislator with clear categories. Their intellectual orientation is to know very well where the north is, where the south is, where the west and the east is. And if they were ever to become human beings, they would first need to go crazy and forget all the reference points. They need to forget duty, no duty, and connect with instinct and intuition with life.

So here's another reference to Nazis. Sixes are... The Nazi party comes up a lot. Hitler as a six. And the German identity before Hitler and after Hitler. This need for precision. So a certain kind of, it's got to be this way, it can't be that way. This efficiency.

So poor sixes are always getting... uh tagged with nazism um and of course uh that's that i i think that the job that that's doing is twofold one is it helps us it's always helpful to have like a country or a culture or another handle in mind and so germany in general or they call the prussians that german character is six-ish

And then I think part of the reason that teachers oftentimes reference the Nazis is because it shows a few things. It shows that

I guess what we need to keep in mind with the six is that there can be a clustering or a herd energy of this good guys and bad guys and the good guys need to stick together. The six has a very... There's a lot of we energy in the six. There's a lot of wanting to be with... An inside an institution and it shows how dangerous that thinking can be on a global stage, even if individually thinking is quite understandable.

Something kind of falls apart, you know, duty, right? This duty, I need to do what's right. I need to have a role. I need to know that my role fits inside of a system that's right. This need for orientation is really significant. Yeah.

So duty with respect to right and wrong, duty with respect to a role, duty with respect to a job or an institution or an organization.

So let's hear the Transformation in the Social Six by Gerardo Ortiz. And I love this. He starts out, let's just listen to the style of the writing. And if you've been along for this, you maybe can go back and remember what the fives writing sounded like and the fours writing sounded like. Listen to the writing of a six here.

It seems a very difficult task to make a self-assessment of my process over time and not fall into the conscious or unconscious temptation to favor myself in the evaluation, pretending to sell the idea that I am currently better. However, recognizing the great subjectivity in which I can fall by doing this self-evaluation forces me to be stricter and more demanding when applying this test to myself, making an exercise of honesty.

I mean, this person is really in their six energy as they're writing that. Can you feel that? First of all, he's saying, oh, this is good because it forces me to be stricter and more demanding. He's applying this rigor to the task of his self-assessment process. There's a lot of there's so much doubt. I need to make sure that I don't fall into temptation. So it's just really rich with six language here.

And this is sort of the sweet quality of sixes too, is it's like they have a lot of doubt. And I almost find myself wanting to put my arm around the author and be like, you're good, man. It's okay. But that's a bit of the fear reassurance loop that sixes can fall into. They kind of, in their way of being, they need reassurance from the outside. And giving them that can serve them in the short term, but in the long term, no. It potentially exacerbates the passion of fear, the operating mechanism of fear.

With this preamble made explicit, I can refer to my conclusion, sharing that a significant element in this diagnosis is the feeling of well-being with myself, achieved in recent times. This is a real novelty, as for many years in my life I felt a deep rejection of being as I was, and maintained a fierce fight against myself. This felt sensation, as Eugene Gendlin calls it in his book on focusing, of deep well-being, pleasure, and joy for being as I am, is the seal of guarantee that I'm not deceiving myself, and that this appreciation I now feel for myself is the fruit conquered over years of work and commitment to my personal transformation.

That's quite lovely, like he's... He's letting in joy, not merely for its own sake. Joy, just simple joy. Joy of being himself. Joy of being alive. Joy of well-being. Not simply as delightful, but also as the fruits of his work. That he can feel appreciation for himself. And that's his permission to let doubt go.

I recognize that several characteristic and defining traits of my personality have not ceased to manifest. However, I can confidently say that their intensity has decreased. I have not stopped feeling anxiety, but it is no longer an experience that traps and takes hold of me. Now it is lighter and sporadic in its presentation and most of the time controllable. I'm learning to be patient and not to get angry when things do not go as I intend or do not have control over them. Likewise, I've incorporated flexibility into my behavioral repertoire and my body through dance and body expression, which helps me not to obsess over the idea that everything has to be done according to my codes or points of view. I've also managed to significantly reduce judging.

And, you know, as we as we explore judging, I want to refer back to that question I posed in the introduction to the six was around guilt, the guilt that the six feels that they might be the cause, the underlying cause of the separation. And

So therefore, in that framing, then judgment is above and before all else self-judgment. He says here, recognizing that this aspect, judgment, is intimately intertwined with self-esteem. As every time I made a judgment, I was indirectly manifesting with arrogance that the people I put on trial were inferior to me.

And yet sixes don't have a superiority problem. They have an inferiority problem. Sixes, I think Richard Rohr says this, have the smallest sense of self. So they feel that somehow they are smaller than they really are compared to the eight who actually feels that they're bigger than they are, has a bigger energy.

I'm no longer afraid to show myself, nor do I feel guilty for not being as others want me to be. Episodes of inadequacy appear less and less intensely. So again, that guilt, that fear that one might be attacked, one might be found out, I'm still working through this guilt quality of the six, and I'm not quite sure if I... have grasped it and how it operates.

Let's keep diving in.

By making decisions from strength and courage, I have felt my self-esteem increase and I have been able to let go of the belief that everything is going to go wrong. This same happens to me when I dissent from authorities and express it, and also when I handle frustration better, accepting that I cannot please everyone and stopping imagining what others might think of me while avoiding self-judgment and judging others.

Again, that fear doesn't feel so profoundly connected to guilt to me. The fear just feels more core, feels natural. Everything is going to go wrong. The world is dangerous. Someone's going to hurt me. Someone's going to disappoint me. They're going to abuse or lie to me.

I don't know if the six, when I think about guilt, I think, and I somehow deserve it. And I don't know if sixes show up that way so clearly to me. So there might be guilt about like, I made something out of nothing. There might be guilt about like, I brought this on myself. Six might feel that kind of guilt. I did it again. Six might feel the pain of operating from doubt. There's a lot of doubt for a six.

But this feeling of being somehow responsible, that feels more one-ish or four-ish to me. Because there's a certain quality of largeness in that, you know, in the four, I am uniquely broken or in the one, I am bad.

And it has a different quality. Sorry, I'm kind of rabbit holing on this a little bit, but as I mentioned before, I'm still trying to get the feeling of the six more deeply. And so I'm really poking at guilt here and the nature of guilt.

describing his development. He continues, I trust myself. I'm more secure in my physical appearance, the energy that my presence radiates, my knowledge and wisdom, my sexual power in touching and being touched. I live with pleasure. I enjoy it. I live pleasure with enjoyment. I enjoy it. That's a pretty rough translation.

I'll just say I live pleasure with enjoyment. I savor it. What helps on the path? I confess that in my case the path is still being made, and nevertheless I have walked with decision.

So you see that kind of... Six language, and I'm not picking on Gerardo at all. I think this is, you know, a perfectly humble way of communicating. But it's the sixes, the six plays out their doubt. You know, I think when I contact my six energy, the sort of hemming and hawing and caveating and look, this is just my opinion and I haven't really thought it out well, but I do want it like that, that whole thing. That's kind of maybe one way into the six energy, right? And it comes from a really good place. It maybe comes from not wanting to make oneself be bigger or more authoritative, right? You're basically saying, I don't have authority here. You really want to reassure the other person that you don't have authority, right?

And while there are all sorts of healthy reasons for that, if you are a Sikh, if you've made an art form out of this practice, learning to actually say, you know, I actually do have authority here and either declaring it or just living it, as Gerardo says, like just sort of coming with that presence, letting yourself embiggen. That can be some of the work there.

I confess that in my case the path is still being made and nevertheless I have walked with decisive steps thanks to unblocking or completing through therapeutic exercises intimate situations that have been barriers in my life. For instance, facing fear.

expressing my disagreement with authority and defending my position now so this is something that's really key is that for some sixes the work will have to be to defend their position and disagree with authority however a common thing that sixes experience is they think they need to do that but the authority itself is already experiencing the six in disagreement

the six sort of says, I'm going to need to stand up for myself. But the authority figure is like, this person keeps kind of nitpicking or either passive aggressively or actually just aggressively sort of objecting to my things. And so the six sometimes isn't in contact with how critical they can be. This is why the six, I think, in terms of titles i like the loyal skeptic because it both communicates their loyalty to institution as well as this skepticism they're always in relationship to authority doesn't mean they're always following authority they might be rebelling against authority they might be seeking authority but they're always in relationship to authority and in their less integrated states authority is always somewhere out there never in here

By expressing my disagreement with authority and defending my position, I manage to act with determination and strength, with courage, feeling the impulse regardless of what they say. On the other hand, practicing compassionate love with myself has helped me to heal from self-demand and self-criticism.

Therapeutic theater has helped me. The SAT program used and uses a lot of therapeutic theater. I'm really interested in exploring that more. I think that's really promising.

Meditation, body work, more particularly working with my parental figures has helped me. It has allowed me to detach from my mother's toxicity, a very fearful woman who breastfed me with her insecurity. That's tough. As well as to shake off the gray shadow of a father without courage.

So his mother was fear and his father was a lack of bravery in his internal world.

Knowing, recognizing, and accepting myself as a coward has been a painful and sad mission, and it has also been the catapult that has launched me to come out of myself and start to dare. I have learned to live without a previous script, with a certainty of having the courage to face whatever comes, knowing that at every moment I will have the right answer. I'm learning to tolerate uncertainty.

And he says here, I think this is valuable. I recognize my fears, doubts, anxiety, and ambiguity, although paradoxically, I find serenity and joy with less mental dispersion.

So I think the six lives in fear. The six lives in simulating these paranoid chess games. And of course, not doing that is wonderful.

But the six, I think, The six is probably so inclined to sort of have this self slapping on the wrist. Ah, you did it again. You know, someone, I think it was Rohr again, this great word called scrupulousness. And it's basically like OCD before there was OCD and it was a problem in the church. So it's scrupulousness was described, it was a way of describing certain priests or people in the church who were like over, they were getting too like rigid and like got to do the rules just right and really needing to do all that. And so, again, I'm not saying that if people with OCD are in their six energy, I don't know enough about OCD to make that claim. But that is very, the thing that's six-ish about that is, again, like, focusing all your energy on the external getting that right as if that will make the inside okay when in fact it's the opposite and so i think you can't just say i'll stop doing that it's about connecting with your inner authority like like he says at the beginning about connecting with his joy his well-being as a sign of his okayness

Gestalt, body therapy work, energy work, breathing, body expression, holotropic breathing exercises with classical music. He really credits so many different modalities, which I really appreciate.

He's a therapist. And I love that, you know, working with the wounds of others generated in me the effect of the drop of water that constantly falls and by force of hitting the stone gradually wears it down.

sacred plants, yopo, I don't know, yopo. He's done it all.

Connecting with his ancestors who have been his teachers, his helpers, his healers.

More plant ceremonies, yahi, I think that's ayahuasca.

a mystical presence manifested in me in a deep voice that emerged from within, called me to surrender to the divine, recognizing in all existence and all people the manifestation of God. And yeah, if we go back to angst and fear and describing that wound as a loss of the paternal father,

In a way, I think a healing journey for the six is reclaiming a connection with God. It just might be a different kind of relationship with God. As he described here, this was a voice that called from within and recognizing everyone as manifestation of God, which is different than maybe, and I don't know what his own childhood religious experience was, but that might be a different...

a relationship with God than imagining, you know, a paternal figure outside of us kind of looking at us. That relationship, then you're constantly going to be living in fear if I'm living in his good graces or bad graces, right? And maybe that's the guilt, really. It's just sort of like, am I in... There's a camera that's watching me. Am I getting it right or am I getting it wrong? Am I with the good ones or am I with the bad ones? Am I on the path or am I off the path?

And so living as if there's this view from the outside onto oneself that maybe starts to speak to that guilt, the connection of guilt and fear. Like why do I need to be so oriented toward others

Um, one reason is I think the actual danger out there. Um, and so that's, it's one way of describing it. And I think then the other way is the guilt that there's some feeling, some, the fear is not just a danger. The fear is also that I am in sin essentially. Um, and, and, and underneath that fear, a guilt that I really am in sin, that I'm not getting it right. That's where that scrupulousness I think can emerge.

Okay, I think we're wrapping up the social six here.

I don't know Gurdjieff's stop technique. It helps to meditate and even practice Gurdjieff's stop technique where several times a day we stop to respond to what am I doing? What am I thinking? And what am I feeling?

Balancing compassionate love with devotional love. which is almost always the most developed. You know, I think sixes, that makes sense that sixes have, they might have more access to devotional love than they do to compassion love. So love for the other, whereas like love from the self maybe is one way to frame that.

Generating self-confidence. And I noticed that in the literature about sixes. I think the literature tends to be kind to sixes. And I think part of that is because they're maybe sort of people who could use some kindness from themselves, from others. And they also could use some reassurance. But in that reassurance, it has to serve the purpose of your own capacity and facility for self-soothing and self-assurance and self-confidence.

The optimal state of an Enneagram type 6 social subtype, in my opinion, is the full acceptance of oneself and one's fears. Acceptance of one's fears, not the cessation of fears. This acceptance will allow me to relax and conceive a deep state of gratitude, joy, and self-confidence. Freed from the sense of duty, I will be able to choose the life I want to live every day, trusting with my heart and intuition, feeling loved for what I am and not for what I do. And that's kind of a connection to the three.

In this way, the next step will be to live my emotions freely, containing myself with kindness, being sober, but with a sense of humor, optimistic, joyful, experiencing life with serenity, calm and peace, open to fun, enjoyment and pleasure. I will express my unconditional and non-judgmental love, balanced in the three loves. I will show myself and be assertive and trustworthy without explaining or justifying actions, accepting error and the ability to correct in myself and others. I will live creating a world of possibilities with more tranquility, facing what comes at the moment without thinking about hypotheses, risks, or danger.

Those are nice commitments that he's making at the end there. And, yeah, I think freed from the sense of duty is probably really scary for a six. I think there's attachment to duty. And my impression of sixes is, you know, compared to, I think, many other types, drawn to being freed from the sense of duty, I think a six would find that quite scary and would also be scared of what would happen to me on the one hand, the danger, and also what would I do to the point of the guilt.

So therefore, I need duty both to avoid dangers because I know that I'm doing the right thing and I'll get a pat on the head as opposed to a slap on the wrist. And also a suppression of guilt, because if I'm doing my duty, then as we learned from the trials, I was just doing my job. There's an absence of guilt because I was doing my job. But we see that that doesn't work.

And so the six has to move into that open space that was described at the beginning of this section of guilt. No orientation, no responsibility, no duty. And I think what the six might find is that they're just fundamentally have goodness in their hearts and they're not going to be some reckless monster. I guess the great irony is that the reckless monsters in history who have been sixes did that in the service of duty rather than the freedom from it.

Okay, that was the social six. We'll do the sexual six next time. See you later.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host Nick Barr coming to you on a rainy gray Thursday morning here in New York.

We're moving on to the six today and I'm excited for that because the six is the type that I feel the weakest on in terms of my understanding of the operating mechanisms behind the six.

And so, yeah, this will be this will be good education for me. And we're going to start with the social six.

But each each type has this little prologue. And so we're going to just read a little bit about the passion of the six overall, which in Spanish is el miedo or fear. Although I've also heard it rendered as angst by Russ Hudson and i think that's a pretty compelling alternative so we'll talk about that in a second. Let's read this translation.

If the nine seeks to overcome the anxiety of separation with forgetfulness or the illusion that it never existed.

The six has a surprising awareness of loss and in the face of it reacts compulsively to defend against the danger inevitably spread in the external world. The passion fear implies a compulsive need not determined by internal or external events to move in relationships and in the world, always in a state of alert.

The anxiety of the loss of meaning becomes constant background anxiety, which it manages to mitigate with a clear separation between good and evil. It is as if, faced with the anxiety of feeling lost and fragmented, the Six finds relief only in constantly defending against danger, with the illusion that fear will guarantee control to foresee from where or from whom that danger will come. The anxiety is channeled through the search for the enemy, the cause of the suffering experienced, even preferring to feel guilty to avoid navigating an uncontrollable ocean.

This tension implies a disconnection from one's own emotions and a paralysis of action, because since each action would be a possibility of error, guilt that deserves punishment, and each error would be irreversible, it paralyzes in the face of experience.

They try to anticipate difficulties using thought as a way to control and study the causality of causes and effects, like a game of chess. Deep down, the anxiety is intimately connected with the fear of being the cause, guilt, of separation, rejection, and therefore their interpersonal style and philosophy of life are always based on self-accusation and devaluation, a deep self-rejection, fixation.

I know this is heavy, so let's just breathe our way through it. There's a lot of material getting thrown out here, and so if you recognize sixness in yourself, we're going to get through it.

During childhood, there is often a lack of a guiding or paternal authority, understood here as a function not necessarily identifiable with a physical father connected to reality, irrationally punitive or emotionally dangerous, and a relationship with a father or mother experienced on the one hand as castrating and harmful and on the other as a source of protection. Like all schizoid types, it just means splitting. Don't take that as a diagnosis.

The six splits good and evil, identifying alternately with one or the other, in a constant attempt to feel good, to be safe from the danger of being punished, and therefore deserving rejection. They find refuge in the search for meanings and interpretations of reality, with a ruminative and labyrinthine way of thinking, completely losing contact with reality itself.

Regarding interpersonal relationships, this attitude often focuses on perceiving the other as a potential enemy, cultivating distrust instead of maintaining contact with the difficulties or pain that intimate relationships may involve. Accusation is their style of contact with themselves and the world, aiming to control where the evil is, where the enemy is, ultimately reaffirming themselves as their own enemies.

We'll come back to that in a minute just to close the loop on these ideas of guilt. Instinctivity must be controlled and kept at bay because surrendering would mean opening the doors to a devastating external invasion, thinks the six. The head must always be in command of experiences.

Okay, so that's a lot. And maybe we'll break this out as its own piece. There's a way that the experience of the six, this fear, is in some ways a very fundamental human experience. And this is captured in the Enneagram in two interesting ways.

First, the six is a core type. Six, nine, and three are all core types. And without over-defining that, one way to describe the core type is having sort of an essential relationship with separation. And that's named at the top here. The six's essential relationship with separation is being aware of and compulsively trying to sort of defend against that separation.

This is why I love angst, as Hudson posits, as opposed to fear, because angst points more specifically to that post-separation state that defines really European, at least, society, you know, the Western society, post-Freud, post-Darwin, post-God, there's no authority. We've become rudderless and compassless, and we've been cut off from God, not merely fallen or separated from him, let's just say for now, because I think him-ness, we'll talk about authority and paternal authority, is relevant for the six.

So I'll actually kind of invite in the paternal God, not just because we're separated from him, but in contemporary society because he maybe doesn't even exist. And so we're just left in this background anxiety state that pretty much every great philosopher in the West has tried to wrestle with since, what to do with this background anxiety.

And the reason that these philosophers wrestle with this is because we can see how wrecked we are by our background anxieties, how we try to avoid it and mitigate it in a number of ways, captured by the nine Enneagram types, but perhaps most sort of dealt with directly by the six, who is saying the world is threatening, I don't know who to trust. And so it becomes very important for me to categorize the world and people into good and evil.

In this fragmentation, what else would I do other than to start to sort of categorize the fragments, pick up the pieces, not to put the thing together again, but just to sort of make some sense of the world so that I know who to seek refuge with, who to avoid, the institutions to trust, the institutions to distrust, the people to throw myself onto, the people to avoid at all costs. Right? That's like a very sort of natural and arguably even universal human instinct.

And this speaks to the other quality that I think the Enneagram points to here, which is that so all these passions are rooted in the seven deadly sins and before that the eight evil thoughts from Evagrius Ponticus in the 300s, who was a desert father who went out and fasted for however many days in Egypt and came back with this discernment of spirits, this idea that there's these eight evil thoughts. And of course, by naming these eight evil thoughts, then there maybe are eight prescriptions, right? Eight ways to deal with these evil thoughts and avoid sin and be redeemed, be closer to God.

The one that wasn't in his eight evil thoughts is fear, is angst, whatever we want to call this passion. And I think the most natural explanation of why is, again, because it's so universal. It's so backgrounded. It's fear and anxiety and angst in our thoughts. in this world that we find ourselves in is sort of the human condition. There's just a way that the six has made that their home base and it becomes really amplified.

So the six is at once sort of familiar and simultaneously, just like the other types, has their own way of what Richard Rohr says, making an art form out of it, right? They've made an art form out of angst, made an art form out of anxiety and fear. And I love the reference to chess here because I think it it both shows how the six is a neighbor to the five, but has also kind of gone in a different direction, right? Because the five is a highly mental type.

Their schism, their splitting happens in a way earlier, more deeply, really between mind and body, right? The five is quite you'll meet fives who really do think that when they die, maybe their head can be put in a freezer and they can continue on in some ways. And I'm not even evaluating the quality or the feasibility of the idea. It's just a rare idea that's held by a small number of people who feel deeply connected with their mind consciousness. and feel like that's actually really the essence of who they are. So we're in the mental type there.

The six as trapped in their heads as they are in a different way, They're simulators of reality. So they're much more engaged with the world around them than the five. And we talked about refuge. We talked about fortress, cave. We talked about totem. We talked about ivory tower. And we talked about, I mean, those are the three subtypes, right? So the social is the totem. And the confidant, right, the sexual five who seeks in the other some sort of divine holding presence, right? So in those instincts... Sorry, I lost my train of thought there.

Well, there's a withdrawing that's universal for the five, right? The six is a little bit more engaged. They're simulating. They're feeling the threat of the world and they're not choosing to withdraw from that threat so much as navigate that threat. So there's an engagement in the world on the one hand with the six. But on the other hand, they're just as removed from reality. They live in their heads. They live simulating possibilities. And we're in such a simulating culture now that that just gets exacerbated.

I was listening to some talk that Sixes gave and the Six was just describing, they Google everything. They just, you know, someone asks something, they're the ones who are like, let's Google it. And they're probably going to read a few different articles and then they're going to, which one can I trust and which one can I not trust? So they'll sort of like make, they'll sort of make chess out of everything. And so that's what I love about, they try to anticipate difficulties using thought as a way to control and study the causality of causes and effects or the consequences of I would change that to consequences.

So again, I think we can all connect with that fear. And if you hear suspicion in that, I think that's right on, right? There's behind all these games, they're not neutral. So the five has a neutrality. If the five is playing chess, what would happen if I did this? What would happen if I did this? And on another hand, A and B. So the five has quite a neutral... way of simulating because they've already done a deeper cut that makes them feel safe. They've already withdrawn into the world of ideas. So the world of ideas is fundamentally safe for them, allowing them to actually have quite productive simulation.

The six is not yet safe in merely simulating things. They need to simulate so that they can determine safe paths and unsafe paths. And this is where the problem starts is that they're not good at doing that. And it may in fact be impossible to do that effectively. I'm not saying that they're incapable of making good decisions, but the six is not a productive thinker the way that the five is a productive thinker. And Suzanne Stabile has been working on this a lot, and I think it's helpful. She focuses on the centers of intelligence and the repressed centers.

And so the six is a mental type. Their center of intelligence is thinking. and their repressed center is also thinking so they're thinking dominant and then their thinking isn't as productive compared to the five or the seven at least so um paranoia suspicion you know thinking that the other person is thinking something that they're not thinking but then accusing them of that and then they then it becomes real right you you don't like me You know, you did that thing because you didn't want to spend time with me. Well, that wasn't true. But now that you say that, you're not making me want to spend time with you more. Those kinds of sort of self-fulfilling prophecies, those accusations.

And so a lot of what happens to the six is their chess games, their anxiety riddled chess games fail. And they fail in a couple of ways. One is the way I just described. essentially by having a fear-driven, by being so attuned to danger, danger will come to you. And then the other is guilt. And so let's go deeper a little bit on this.

Deep down, the anxiety is intimately connected with the fear of being the cause of separation, rejection. And therefore, their interpersonal style and philosophy of life is always based on self-accusation and devaluation. So there is a... It sounds like for the six, there's a deeply held suspicion that they're the cause. They're to blame for the separation.

We could draw a comparison to the one here. The one and six are quite different. I don't think there would be much confusion between discerning those types, but the one also is really preoccupied with right and wrong and good and bad. And the one also may have a deep fear of being the cause, the wrongness there. So what would be the difference then between the one and the six? Well, for one thing, the one is actually on a mission to make things right, to make things good.

So we talked about this fragmentation. The one actually, I think, is sort of trying to put the pieces together again. And they have a vision for how to do that. They're in the gut triad. They're a doer. They're action-oriented. The six is not on a mission to do any kind of restoration. The six is on a mission to navigate safely through this fragmentation, through the categorization of what is good and what is bad.

And similarly, when it will come to institutions, which will surely come up a lot because the sixes are the joiners of institutions. the ones are the creators of institutions, the ones are the reformers, the ones tend to be the visionary kind of we're going this way people and tend to be visionary in that way, in a way that the six just simply isn't wired to do.

The six wants to follow someone else's vision or argue against somebody's vision or be in relation to somebody's vision, but they're not necessarily at that level of having vision in the same way. Not that sixes can't be visionaries, but sixes are always in relation to authority, I would say. They're always in relation to authority, including the absence of authority.

So I'm going to hold on to that guilt piece because I don't think I fully understand that That anxiety intimately connected with the fear of being the cause of separation. And therefore, their philosophy of life will always be based on self-accusation. I'm going to keep an eye on that as we do the subtypes.

I don't know if there's anything else we need to say as way of introduction for the 6th. I love this compass. There's sort of a talk of, or maybe that's in a subtype, but it's sort of obliquely mentioned here in this, you know, this labyrinth finding your way. And so you need a compass. You need orientation. The six wants to know where they are and where others are.

Accusation is their style of contact with themselves and the world, aiming to control where the evil is, where the enemy is, ultimately reaffirming themselves as their own enemy. Again, Naranjo really wants us to come back to the six concluding with great, I would imagine, desperation and sadness that they are the cause of this fragmentation. that they are the cause of the wrong in the world. And we'll continue to flesh that out.

But certainly they have, it's almost like a radar technology that rather than this sort of neutral ping, ping, ping, who's there, ping, ping, ping, it's accusation, accusation. And you either will get you know, the accusation validated, or you will get the accusation invalidated, but at great expense to you and to the relationship, right? Because accusation is sort of fundamentally a violent... There's...

If you live through accusation, you will further isolate yourself and feel further fragmented, one would think. But at the same time, you know, I mean, I do think that as we get into sixes more, sixes do find safety. It's just sixes find safety and it's like they need to kind of hunker down with that person or that institution or that group. Right. And so I think there's some ways that like from a psychological perspective, I don't know if the six passion is like so unhealthy.

You know, some of the none of these passions are meant to work well, but some of them kind of get you by in society better than others. Right. And I think the six, three and the nine, the core types, all of their passions, I think, will get them, you know, can potentially help them land in some stable psychological social position, right? And the spiritual project is another thing. And so, you know, a six coming to the Enneagram, a six coming to inner work is probably coming to inner work because their strategy has broken down in some ways.

But sixes, you know, sixes, I think, do throw themselves into institutions, into groups, into families that then they really are loyal and they really do feel safe. So I think we need to be a little bit careful as we proceed through the type, the instincts of the six. Like there's the spiritual journey where all these passions will inevitably fall apart. But then there's sort of the psychological everyday piece of it where I'm not sure if I'm ready to say, as I think Naranjo seems to be implying here, that it's like... You know, this approach will always fail because it'll always reconfirm them being the cause of their guilt. You know, I don't think we need to come in as strong on that as maybe these words are initially applying.

But again, it all depends on the project, right? Like is the six trying to wake up from this pattern or is the six trying to build a stable life where they feel safe, right? And those don't have to be the same projects.

Okay, so we'll pause here and then we'll jump right into the social six whose keyword is duty.

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Sunday evening. We're getting a lot of rain in New York, so we've got hot, muggy weather. And it's a good time to seek refuge, and so that's the keyword of the Enneagram Type 5 self-preservation, or in Spanish, conservación, or refugio. Beautiful word in Spanish, translated neatly to refuge.

But let's get right into it and find out what keyword makes most sense for us. This is a really wonderful chapter, so I am going to go deep on it because I actually think this is... The self-preservation five is the fiviest of the fives subtypes. And so I want to go deep on this. It's also the best written chapter, in my opinion, because it goes into more of the five in their less integrated state. I've also had a glass of wine, so I'm amped up to do this. So let's see how it goes.

The need to retreat is a clear characteristic for the conservation type five. However, it must be taken into account that each subtype of the five has some of that, a need to withdraw. In the case of conservation, the passion has a lot to do with finding refuge, erecting high walls that separate them from a world that can invade them, that can take them out of a small precious world hidden inside them. The idea of self-conservation becomes clear if we imagine them as firm supporters of retreating into a cave.

The five conservation extremely limits their needs and desires as each desire could mean a status of dependency for them. Like every conservation subtype, this one is also linked to survival in the concrete, attached to objects in personal space, but as a five, which is the most mental of the mental characters, it is in thought, in incessant reflection on the way to survive and live by limiting external disturbances where they find the greatest refuge.

So already just like really wonderfully lucid writing. I think we're seeing themes again of why Buddhism... might appeal to a five, a practice that literally talks about going into a cave. And then we're also starting to touch on a few different metaphors. We've talked about the cave, but then we also talk about high walls. And at least one of the popular Enneagram organizations, I forget which one, calls this subtype castle is their keyword.

And I think castle is I wish there was one word for castle meets cave. Refuge, the problem with refuge is it's a little bit hopeful, and so you might actually think that. You might get away from what the passion is trying to do here. It is not a successful strategy. None of these strategies is ultimately successful. Instead, it's a self-perpetuating strategy. Retreat, you know, retreat is actually not a bad keyword. Refuge is also fine.

It's a radical act of separation. It's a removal from the possibility of invasion. But castle and cave, maybe these are sub-subtypes. Cave is an act of renunciation. Cave is private. Cave is... retreating and then castle is more of a fortress defense it so castle is prepared for interaction and heavily boundaried we think about moats we think about spires we think about little little windows for archery to stick through Cave is removing oneself from the possibility of interaction.

So there are two different versions of refuge, and I think this subtype covers them both. Castle, and I think we'll cover this later, castle does a good job of describing, maybe part of this is just like, do you have a family or not? Because the family-oriented SP5, you can't have a cave. I mean, you can have a castle and you can have a man cave in your castle. And man cave is a perfectly good thing to have in the back of our heads here for the five.

I think men who have their man cave are accessing their five. It's probably, you know, and okay, so let's just touch on that. If you have a man cave, are you a five? No, not necessarily. You might be a five. But the, I think this is maybe a good point to touch on masculine feminine energy in Enneagram. According to Naranjo Naranjo. Roughly speaking, the left side of the Enneagram is masculine, the right side is feminine.

So five, six, seven, eight have more masculine energy. Not that women can't be those numbers, they just have more masculine energy. And then a five connects to all those. A five is the wing of a six, and then a five goes to seven and eight, and seven and eight go to five. So all of those numbers may have times where they want this cave-like retreat. And I think for people in relationship with a man who needs to withdraw, these are classic, at least in the U.S., like classic gender stereotypes, the man cave. I think learning about the SP5 and the passion of refugio, refuge, is instructive.

So let's go deeper. The transformation in the social preservation five by Jose Ignacio Fernandez. I got to know the Enneagram in 1998 and had a great impact on me. I'm not going to diligently read all of this. I'm going to skip it. How the process starts seeing the cave that I'm in. At first, the main work for ego healing consists of becoming aware of one's own vengeful attitude towards the world, which manifests itself with separateness. It involves undoing the victim image that judges the world as hostile, inadequate, hypocritical, ignorant, brutal, etc. When this issue becomes clear, one becomes aware that withdrawal and hiding are forms of aggression toward others.

And I think this is a really important point for the five that I don't think came up in the previous subtypes. becoming aware of one's vengeful attitude toward the world one's one has certain beliefs about the world that are maybe not so obvious to the five the five might think that their separateness comes from a quirkiness or an introversion or an inborn innate inclination But according to Jose Ignacio Fernandez, connecting with this vengeful, the world is not merely scary, the world is brutal, hostile, full of idiots, but full of dangerous idiots, potentially.

The process also involves becoming aware of one's own vulnerability, hypersensitivity, and fear of being crushed, and realizing that these difficulties are so great that they lead to avoidance and disconnection. It is about seeing how little life one has that the choice to manage with little implies living little. That giving up needs means having a rather unsatisfactory life. That giving up needs means having a rather unsatisfactory life.

In the end, it's about seeing that there's great passion for not wearing oneself out, for conserving one's energies. That's why the SP5 is the five-iest five, conserving one's energies, as there's no faith in being able to obtain more. It is necessary to identify the unattainable ideal of the self. This unattainable ideal then harkens back to our talk about the social five, totem.

Yeah, so fives want to avoid conflict. That's why they're going to the cave, to the castle, to the fortress, to the refuge. So why is that? Conflict is experienced internally, and it is necessary to see the toll this entails. This is really starting to point now to the energy deficiency that five experiences. On the one hand, the price is self-aggression by internalizing anger, internalizing rage, also killing the other internally, the inner beheader.

It is useful to recognize the mechanism by which, when what is perceived as a particularly painful aggression occurs, a great resentment develops internally, which, however, the conservation five barely allows themselves to express outwardly. I mean, I would go farther to say they barely allow themselves to experience internally. The most common consequence of this resentment is withdrawal.

resentment is a constant so um and let's let's listen to this quote from Ignacio Fernandez I have indeed left many relationships after feeling hurt by something the process is always very similar first something happens that hurts me I do not express it I keep it inside and later I start to have feelings of rejection or devaluation toward that person and I withdraw stop having contact with them Normally, the person in question never knows the reason for my withdrawal, says Ignacio Fernandez.

So again, we now are connecting back to the self-preservation for whose passion or whose keyword is tenacity. And we can see the connection here, this self-aggression, this biting, this clenching. The difference seems to be that where the self-preservation four will, from time to time, explode. That that rage is never really... It's bottled up, but it's quite alive.

For the five, and the SP5 in particular, there's more of a self-killing, a deadening that happens. And it's dual. It's... If you hurt me, I have to do two things. One is I have to behead the other. I have to behead you. I have to defang the other. It's not that they hurt me. There is hurt. And I'm not going to experience that hurt.

So instead, there's sort of there's the experience of aggression, but maybe it's sort of uncoupled from the other. Take Jose Ignacio Fernandez's example. He starts to, it's almost like, I almost feel like you get impersonal about, you know, you get impersonal about hurt and aggression and devaluation. So who's rejecting who? You know, his partner offends him. And then he's sort of just like left with feelings of rejection, left with feeling of devaluation that he ultimately feels toward that person.

But wait, they were the one who rejected you. They hurt you. But it's almost like the five kind of moves into this world of phenomena. Not you hurt me, but there is hurt. Not you rejected me, but there is rejection. And then the five almost sort of then grabs the rejection. Like, well, I guess I have to leave this person. So their responses aren't as, they don't feel like detonations to me.

They don't feel like, okay, there was a wound and now I'm holding it and then I'm going to explode back at you. That might be more of a flourish response. It's less explosive, but there is a seething quality to it. And I think what Ignacio Fernandez is pointing to here is starting to open up that resentment, which the four swims in resentment, but the five has to start to admit that there might be some resentment that starts to point to the differences between the two.

The typical way of living the conflict is to inhibit the response, sometimes changing it for the opposite behavior to what is felt. Okay, so it's just what we're talking about. For example, when someone unexpectedly shows an aggressive and demanding attitude toward a conservation five, they may accept what is demanded of them to escape the pressure, but at the same time begin to feel a sense of anger inside for not having reacted in a way more in line with their desires, displacing the action.

Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. You know, there's this feeling of abandoning oneself, right? So you hurt, you know, you say, you demand something of me and you accuse something of me and it's so hurtful, but I kind of do it. I take it seriously. Okay, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm going to do it. And then I'm just left with this like feeling of injustice or feeling of abandonment or rejection, right?

But it's not just that you rejected me. It's also I abandoned myself or rejected my own. Hey, that's not right. I'm standing up for myself. But then the anger can sort of morph in any number of ways. In all likelihood, I'm not going to hold on to it as that was me abandoning myself. I'm going to hold on to it as I'm angry at you. But I'm not going to express that anger. I'm just going to withdraw back to my cave.

Clandestine action, acting in secret so that their actions do not compromise them, becomes a way of avoiding confrontation and avoiding generating expectations or relationships of dependency. The hyper-adaptability manifests, for example, in a compulsive way of saying yes to an external demand if the refusal can be uncomfortable or lead to conflict.

So this starts to point to the passive aggressiveness of the five. And it's how would you, I don't know if other, maybe we'll get into this. I don't know if other people would experience fives exactly as passive aggressive, but the five is passive aggressive in the sense that, you know, you ask them to do something and they say, yep, I'll do it. And then they don't do it. Or you ask them to do it and they do it, but they do it with resentment that's private.

Or they kind of maybe half do it. And so there's this... And I don't think it's necessarily conscious passive aggression. I think it's the five's way of... Finding a way to meet the needs of others without losing oneself, without having to leave the cave.

Let's see what else Ignacio Fernandez has to say about this. There's an internal idea of not wearing oneself out by paying attention to things that are trivial to oneself and resistance to remembering such things. The tendency to anesthetize oneself, to forget, and to mental confusion is another notable trait of this character. Appearing invisible, playing deaf, that was a way to hide from my own sense of discomfort of perceiving myself as a coward, a fearful person who, at any sight of threat, would run to hide inside the house.

I never knew if my perceptions were correct, if my reactions were appropriate, if my feelings were acceptable, said Luciano, describing his childhood. So that's interesting. So that speaks a little bit to the core number of the head triad, right? The six. Cowardice, fear. I mean, which is sort of the most relatable reaction to fear. There's fear, so I'm going to hide.

And so refugio, refuge, has a taste of that. But the five's version of refuge isn't directly fear from threat, running inside the house from a threat. It's more complicated than that. And Luciano points to it. Is this a threat? I'm not sure, I have doubts, so I need to retreat into my world of thinking and question my perceptions, question what's real, question what's not real, and retreat potentially physically into a man cave or a woman cave, but also potentially into a mental cave of thoughts.

And then maybe try to communicate with my partner in that mental realm, which no one will ever meet you there. That's your own thought fortress, your own thought castle, your own thought cave.

Seeing one's own withdrawal as aggression helps. Yeah. The five isn't aware of how aggressive or passive aggressive their withdrawal can be. It hurts others, this withdrawal from contact.

The avarice of time. Not wasting time is an obsession. In the self-preserving five, there's a passion for making the most of time, but without a clearly defined purpose. I'm laughing at recognition. It is rather something diffuse that is connected with when wasting time. This character needs to see to what extent they feel attached to objects and safe places, even transferring their emotional bonds to these. Something similar also happens with the fewer relationships they establish. Although they have little awareness of their attachment to them, they often feel great attachment and possessiveness.

That tends to be particularly true with family. I'm not sure if that'll come up here. I think it will. The SP5 also needs to realize the great attachment they have to their own intuitions, ideas, or deductions, and the impoverishment that entails by clinging to them, closing themselves off to others' point of view, realizing that many times criticism or disagreement with these ideas are experienced as personal devaluation and aggression, and also how this leads to a reaction that can be of offense or arrogance, but also of self-devaluation.

starting to connect. The first point of reconnection with oneself is to recognize one's own needs. And that's the same for two. but it leads in really different directions. During my first year of therapy, I lived through a situation that was decisive for me. I remember a night with my partner when suddenly I started to see her cry. I don't understand anything. Then after a few moments, she tells me that she's decided to leave me.

I'm left in suspense and I begin to think, well, it's okay. I'll meet others more interesting. I'll be free, better, and things like that. However, after a few moments, I begin to feel very great pain and infinite pain. Something inside me said, you see, it has happened to you again. You've lost it again. Then I felt that I was playing everything in that moment and I cried like never in my life. I literally felt like I was breaking inside. That also reached her heart and the relationship continued. It was the first time in my life that I realized that I needed another person, says Ignacio.

And again, if we want to take a kind of a slightly pastiche view and go back to the man in his man cave, does he appreciate his wife? Probably not. He probably takes her for granted and then she threatens to leave and maybe does leave. And then for the first time he realizes how dependent he was on, on her. Um, um, and, and so the, the SP five, um, They haven't neglected their own needs. They've just been unaware of their own needs.

And so in the story that Ignacio is telling here, he was getting his needs met unconsciously by his partner. And it wasn't only until the threat of her leaving was presented that he started to see, I'm going to lose her again. Now, I mean, the story is ambiguous in the sense that one interpretation is for the first time he became aware of how much he needed her and made adjustments to keep her.

That sounds like that's the case here. But there's another story, which is that... if the five is to truly be left alone and have to fend for themselves, then they're going to come face to face with the absolute futility of their survival strategy, which has been to not have needs. It's a fantasy. I won't need other people. I won't have needs. The paradox of surviving alone is that you have to rely on other people, the friendship and love and support of other people, your neighbors, your friends, your neighborhood, your church.

So there's no such thing as living alone. And the five, maybe in relationship, had a fantasy of living in their cave, but they were actually getting their needs met, just as maybe a monk in a cave is getting food dropped off at the mouth of his cave every few days. And so it doesn't mean that the five should stay in that relationship, that Ignatius should stay in the relationship, but Ignatius is going to have to reckon with his needs either way.

Either the way that his partner was meeting his needs and he wants to keep that, or the way that he now needs to figure out a way to actually get his needs met that she wasn't doing.

Taking care of the body, appearance, and personal image, realizing that is not something for others. Another case of that, allowing oneself to please others and oneself. All of this is fundamental. Taking care of myself, treating my body with love and delight. We've talked about body a lot in the five. Nutrition. There can be a lack of interest, neglect, eating for the sake of eating. Other times it can be compulsive eating to fill the void. And again, these are things that can show up for the two as well.

I guess these are behaviors or lack of behaviors that can emerge when one's just not connected with one's own needs. Now here's something not two-ish. At first, there's a great disinterest in people in general. For example, wasting time getting to know someone is not interesting for something, who is not interesting for something. The change comes by paying attention to names, to the trivialities they tell one, but it is about loving attention.

And one must learn to say no when one really doesn't want to pay attention. Experiencing situations of joy, jubilation, uncontrollable laughter, spontaneous play. Those are other elements of transformation. Not taking things so seriously. Go back to the ivory tower or the sexual five who wants the one. Not taking oneself so seriously is an attitude that also helps. Experiencing pleasure helps. Realizing that one can only enjoy from trust in the other. Experimenting with one's own assertiveness.

Here anger comes up. When the anger is so characteristic of the Conservation Five, I guess that goes back to the resentment, the quiet resentment. When the anger comes into play, consisting of punishing in silence, not speaking, showing a bad face. So it's withdrawal, but it sounds like there's withdrawal with resentment there.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think the five has to connect with their anger usually. I'm not sure if they recognize the anger in their behaviors because it won't show up necessarily as anger. But if we have an argument and I withdraw to my room and close the door without explanation, that is an act of aggression. And I think the five has to see that. It might not come easy.

Showing oneself more, coming out of the cave, just having conflict and realizing that for many types, having the conflict and expressing the anger, expressing the hurt, that's relationship, that's contact, and that's what the other person wants from you.

Sometimes the fear of generating expectations in others is so great that there is an intentional concealment of oneself, hence the appearance of being strange. The work is to realize that one can share information about oneself, one's opinions, emotions, tastes, while reserving a space of intimacy.

That's interesting. Yeah, I do think that the five struggles with balance there in going back to the core wounds of the five relating to contact and boundary that One of the ways to look at the five's childhood wound is either there was an invasion of the five's space, that they're hypersensitive and somehow the parent or somebody intruded, invaded too much and they had to withdraw. Or the opposite, that there was neglect and there was not healthy.

In either case, it's a lack of healthy contact. And so I think the five can reenact that in a way as described here of like, either I'm not going to give you any of myself or I'm going to give you all myself. And you've got to love all of it. And if you don't like all of it, it's like, well, no, you can share this much and keep that much. And that takes a lot of practice, I think, for the five to develop a sense of a healthy boundary there.

Sometimes there is a desire to share everything intimate and is about being able to share the space with whom one wants and when one wants. Detaching from cherished objects and safe places is a big step forward. Transformation consists of feeling more alive, acquiring a new version of oneself in the world. It is also discovering that life hurts And above all, it is discovering what love is. And this is a great discovery. It opens the door to living relationships more intensely, developing trust. From there, there can also be a new intuition of what spirituality truly means.

Taking one space. Hmm. Pretty much just repeating quite a bit of what we've talked about. But yeah, taking one space. I mean, this goes back to a right that the four and the five both struggle to connect with, which is the most basic right. I have the right to be here. I have the right to be here. I have the right to take up space.

Refuge is intimately tied up with not feeling the right to take up space. I can contact this a lot where it's like, I feel like I have to be small until I'm in my space and then I can sprawl because I've been holding in because it's not safe and because I'm not safe. And if I were to be myself, then something bad would happen.

Often will be necessary to do what is most difficult for conservation five teaching groups leading therapy groups doing individual therapy giving lectures leading a team to name a few examples.

Some comments about sexuality and letting go of sexual fantasy and this goes back to the sexual five right like. Sexuality and fantasy are so linked for the five and so kind of ordinary sexuality, ordinary wanting, ordinary desire. Connecting with one's masculinity or femininity or both. Recovering one's own aggressiveness.

For me, says Maurizio, it is allowing myself to do crazy things, giving myself the luxury of saying what I think, allowing myself a bit of narcissism, self-promotion, self-indulgence, giving myself a break, a satisfaction.

Let's hear again from Ignacio on blooming. During my therapeutic process and my training as a therapist, I went through several phases. At first, it was something I did for my own growth, I never imagined being a therapist. Later, the desire to be a therapist someday appeared in me as I realized how much it helped me to be connected. But I saw it as something distant, someday when I had sufficiently prepared and obtained the necessary titles. Finally, I started to practice as a therapist with my current resources.

first it was organizing and leading a zen meditation group then the idea of doing a gestalt workshop arose then a series of bioenergetic workshops next someone asked me for individual therapy then a colleague sent me another patient throughout this process i could experience my fears my insecurities my ignorance but i also discovered that i had many more resources than i believed and increasingly trusted myself signal nasa you know i've been meaning to write about this um but i'll just mention it here in my own work

moving into independent practice and coaching, I've come up with like three arenas of my practice. And I call it the stage, the field, and the lab. And so the stage is if I'm going to be teaching or running a workshop, teaching what I know. And that speaks to my threeness. I'm teaching, here I am, I'm teaching. I'm conscious of the image that will help people learn and it's a one-to-many thing. So there's sort of a slightly on quality.

Then there's the field, which is one-on-one work, either as a client or as a coach, which is deeply intimate work. It's interesting, this also goes to social-sexual self-preservation. So the stage is social, the field is sexual, it's one-on-one, it's intimate, it's intense, it's open, the boundaries are less sharp.

And the field is also where a lot of the magic happens. It's like the frontier. And then there's the lab, which is what I'm doing now. It's like translating neuronal or reading some new thing or learning some new methodology or coming up with a new theory or planning some idea. And that's my refuge. That's my cave.

And my own, even though I think of myself as a four, this is interesting. I think... This is a good example of where the instincts and the Enneagram converge. I definitely feel like my home base is four, but my home base is also self-preservation.

i i mean also maybe that's just a self-preservation thought but like when you really feel unsafe don't you want to be by yourself i guess some people maybe truly seek safety in others but for me when i feel like my most threatened i just want to be by myself in the lab so that's why i like that's why i love doing these because it's like when i'm having a

when I don't have the energy to do stage work or do field work or build out those practices, I can just be in the lab here. Of course, there's a little stage quality here. I'm talking to, I don't know if anyone's listening, but this is lab work. I mean, at some point, maybe I'll do some more deep, more prepared work, but this is pretty, this is just like if you were sitting next to me doing lab work with me.

So going back to the five, then I think the five, especially the self-preserving five, they love being in the lab, but I think all fives are lab people. And so maybe the five can feel into, as Ignacio was describing, workshops, meditation groups, dinner parties, just subtle ways to like get out. And then they can think about it through the lens of the lab. Well, I can't sit in the lab forever. I've got to apply some of these things in the field. So I'll practice some conversation starters, you know, or learn about conversation starters, then I'll have a dinner party and I'll practice some of that. I think that'd be very five-ish. That would be like a nice way for a five to start to step into some of these things.

Leading, motivating, taking the reins, in any case, from a purpose with personal meaning or transformative elements. Healing, helping others to heal is another step. From where one is and with one's own resources, whether as a therapist or as a teacher, parent, sibling, friend, or whatever, this can lead to connecting more and more frequently and counteracting the tendency towards self-absorption.

Finally, it especially helps to work and balance the three loves through relationships, giving more space to compassionate maternal love, and recovering, giving life to erotic love or love, I don't know, these three loves. That's not, we've got enough going on. We don't need to learn about the three loves right now.

Okay, so that's it for the self-preservation five, which I think refuges a perfectly reasonable definition word for it. I just want to, what I would add to it is from my working with some fives, especially fives who have families, they really lean hard on, you know, fives don't need many relationships, but as we saw, there are a few relationships where they really depend kind of on all of their needs getting met. There's a high dependency.

And so a five in their midlife with family and kids, they're more of a castle five. We need our fortress. All I need to do is make sure that we're good. So that's, I think, the only limitation of kind of cave or refuge. And let's just see if we can kind of name, we've captured it, I think, in the other subtypes, but why does this break down? And paradoxically, why does it break down is also the same question as how does this self-perpetuate?

So I must withdraw to my refuge when I'm in threatening relationships or when I'm hurt. When there's contact that is unpleasant, when there's friction in contact, I must retreat to my refuge. That's our key word, refuge. where that hurt, aggression, contact won't happen. And I must remove my needs. I must be strange. I must not show up as whole. And then what happens?

Well, I think there's two things. One is the other person is going to feel deeply Actually, they'll feel like there was aggression there, reciprocal aggression. And so if they're a seeker, they're going to come back and say, hey, don't walk away from me. We need to talk about this. And so that's one way that refuge will break down is refuge is an act of aggression. But because it's not visible to the five, they'll be so perplexed and concerned. I'm just trying to get my own space. Why is this person chasing me?

And then the other problem is that they will retreat into a place that's a fantasy place. You can't go through life not needing things from other people. You can do it for a little bit, but you can't do it forever. You're going to get sick. You're going to get horny. You're going to get lonely. You're going to need sugar. There's going to be a flood and you're going to need someone to bring you food.

And what's gonna happen then is the five is gonna come out of their cave and they're gonna be a little bit weird because they haven't had the practice and they're gonna need something. But the way they need it is gonna be quote unquote ugly or gonna be like, it's like the, just imagine someone who comes out of their cave after years, I'm like, I need this. It's like, whoa, you're not showing up in healthy ways.

So exactly because they've withdrawn so much They won't know how to, they just don't, they won't be equipped to have healthy friction. So then they'll come with some need and it's going to be overwhelming. You know, in the case of a partnership, they might dump out all their stuff. In the case of a party, they might be like way too on whatever it is and they'll get disappointed. the contact will disappoint them in some way. They'll be hurt. They'll feel rejected. It'll be really deeply rewounding. And they'll say, see, this is what happens when I come out of my cave.

So that's the passion. That's the passion of refuge, which is inside the passion of avarice, of stinginess. So we covered the ivory tower, the totem, which is, you know, one version of refuge. We covered the confidant or trust, which is putting all of, you know, seeking the other to complete you and be your refuge. And then finally just refuge, you know, a cave, a mental cave or a physical cave, some version of withdrawing into safety.

And so with that, we complete the five. Okay. And again, you know, this is really more focused on the passion. So I'm sorry if I didn't give people enough of like the, the healing journey. But I think these chapters did quite a bit there too. And really the project here is just to translate, not do too much beyond that.

So next time we'll move into the six and start to talk about fear, angst, and doubt. all of the qualities of the six and, you know, as the core type of the head triad, we'll bring in all that fiveness, but then see that the six has quite a different set of ways of engaging with what's fundamentally sort of the same starting place, which is the world is scary. Okay, so look forward to that. See you next time.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host Nick Barr coming to you on a Tuesday afternoon. We're trucking along here with the five and we're on to the sexual five today. The keyword for the sexual five is confianza which is translated here as trust. If you also hear confidence in Confianza, I think that's a connection.

But in the deeper sense, maybe like the confidence man. I guess that's where con man originates from. Should we just start with a quick etymological investigation of the word confidence? Because there's something about contract and trust here that I don't think I fully understand so let's look at the etymology of confidence.

Of course, right we have confide, confiding having full trust. Let's see what else we have to say here. Assurance or belief in the goodwill veracity of another is the original meaning of confidence. Firmly trusting, fully trusting, full reliance. So there's a, the origin of confidence is relational. Assurance or belief in the goodwill of another. And so I think that's where, you know, it can connect with trust.

And then Con, Con Man. Confidence with a sense of assurance based on insufficient grounds dates from the 1590s. Con Artist is attested by 1910, but Confidence Man is a Melville book. So obviously, yeah, 1840s, I would guess.

So let's just invite in all of that association, trust, contract, fully trusting another in sort of a formal way that sort of establishes reliance on the other. And I'm going to, once again, I'm not going to read the whole chapter, although this is actually the shortest chapter I've seen yet after the social five, which was quite long. And the keyword there was totem.

And the points made multiple times that fives have, as it says here, is if one tries to find the difference between the sexual five and the other type of five, it will not be easy. But if one engages in conversation with them, they will hear them say that they're very passionate about a person, generally about a person they cannot find in their lives.

So we've got the four who I call the romantic because I think the individualist leads one astray and too far away from how fundamentally dependent on relationship the four is. And the sexual five is also a romantic type here, very passionate about a relationship that seems not to exist in the ordinary world. It's a relationship that would finally give them the security that they never had.

Here occurs a case similar to the extraordinary search of the social five. The extraordinary would be what is at the top of the totem pole. The sexual five seeks a very high specimen. The same happens to them in love. This subtype is on a quest for absolute love. And their search is so strong that if you are the one being sought, it's very difficult to pass the test.

If someone is looking for the absolute, it is very easy for them to feel disappointed. We must understand this passionate search in the sense of trust, of being able to trust the other. The sexual five is looking for that person who will be there for them and with them no matter how or what, far beyond the normal vows of a commitment or marriage.

The thought of the sexual five is that they must be able to present themselves to you with the worst of their inner world, and that you, as their partner, should maintain complete equanimity in front of their inner monsters, since they love you so much. So they live the love of a couple as a kind of ideal, but it is an ideal that does not exist in the human world.

Excuse me. They go on to mention Chopin as kind of an example of a sort of romantic person who's not generally open to intimacy, doesn't have many friends, doesn't have many relationships, and is sort of saving all their trust for the one. Not the type one, but the soulmate.

So I think this is a pretty understandable passion here. So again, we're all of the subtypes of the five return to avarice or stinginess, which is I have so little. I have so little, so I need to be very, very deliberate about what I give. Why do I have so little? It's because the world is threatening. Relationship is threatening. Emotions are threatening.

And so to need and be needed are pretty frightening for the five. And so the five seeks ways to avoid being needed or needing. And really becomes very stingy with the few interactions or the few relationships where they allow themselves to be needed or allow themselves to need others.

So that's the basis. And we covered totem already. Let's just hit a couple of the beats from the essay by Mireya Dardar.

We isolate ourselves, we do not expect anything from others, and we do not trust life. So there's that word trust. So as someone said in the last chapter, this feeling of like locking your heart in a box, and so the sexual five is saving. In a way, there's almost sort of a virginity there, that they're saving themselves. They're saving their trust for that special somebody.

We do not trust life. Both people and life itself constitute a cosmos situated behind a glass that separates us from everything. And it's the five who, in early, early childhood or even infancy, created that glass separation. Or we talked about muffling before.

On one hand, we live any relationship with the outside world as threatening, which at best will cause us pain. At the same time, deep down, we perceive ourselves as guilty when interacting with others because we feel we may hinder them. We believe that if we do not need and are self-sufficient, we can survive, and thus they will not hurt us and we will not hurt them.

We live the emotional world as threatening and complicated, as something we can do without since it causes displeasure. Therefore, we prefer not to get emotionally involved and stay in the role of observers of life, the investigator, the observer. The same non-involvement gives us a certain emotional infantilism and, at the same time, an inhibited hypersensitivity, since we do not put our own emotions into practice.

And I think that's true of the five is sort of emotionally frozen potentially at a really early age. And so the path for the five to recover that can be really rocky. And for the sexual five maybe in particular, they're going to be putting a lot of pressure on that relationship to sort of like birth their emotional life, birth their maturation that is set up for disappointment, right? Because that's too much to put on another human being.

And by putting that much on the relationship, you're also setting yourself up to be disappointed, thereby saying, see, I knew I couldn't trust, right? And so all these words, we just have to remember with the totem or trust, these words are always just keywords meant to point to a self-perpetuating or what Naranjo calls elsewhere, a deficiency motivation. A motivation that comes from some sense of lack and when acted out, reinforces that sense of lack.

So I must not trust the world or relationships until I find that special somebody. And then when that special somebody inevitably disappoints me or is nowhere to be found, then that just reinforces my sense of distrust, which all reinforces this stinginess, stinginess of energy, stinginess of love.

It does seem that for fours and fives, these wounds are really early. I know that's been the case for myself, that working with some of this material tends to be pre-verbal. It's really deep in the body.

Here, the author says, the wound in the bond usually occurs in the first months of life, when the baby has not yet established the differentiation between the world and themselves through the maternal bond. So there's a disconnection that runs very deep. A splitting is sometimes used as the word, a splitting.

The sexual five has locked themselves in, creating a safe inner world filled with ideations, theories, romantic fantasies, and utopias about the search for unconditional love. And that totem would be there too. So it's detachment. It's detachment.

Again, that detachment comes with many gifts of neutrality, of intellectual rigor and honesty, incredible categorization, gifts of making sense of data. But the five themselves are not in that world. And so the quality of the data is always sort of corrupted. The five really is living in a fantasy world.

Waiting for the right person to appear with whom they can exist and show themselves as they are, since this person in their fantasy will accept them unconditionally. And they will be able to live with the obtained security, everything they do not dare to live in the world. Waiting for that encounter, the only time they allow themselves to be themselves is when they are alone, feeling isolated in everyday life.

So there's this emotional non-dependence as sort of a basis for relationship, except for this imagined partner where there will be a full unloading of exaggerated dependence. And so the transformation story here, very similar to what we covered in the totem, first is sort of realizing the existence of this fantasy world. And abandoning the project of idealism, which, as covered extensively in the Totem chapter, can be really painful for the five.

Transformation begins when one leaves the world of reason and makes room for sensation, recognition of needs, inhabiting the body, body work, massage, yoga. Talk about Tai Chi in the last one. When one gives themselves permission to exist, and it is that sort of lower chakra, like right to exist work, right to be here, and leaving renunciation as a way of life, then a psychological change can occur, influencing their way of thinking.

The author here says, it's necessary to go through the process of psychologically killing the parents, which is certainly evocative. And what they mean is all the interjects we have swallowed about how we have to be and act will die, leading to paralysis and isolation compartmentalization.

That might be a little bit above my understanding this idea of killing the parents, but I mean, let's just connect with it. So the five in sort of this way of talking about it, the five didn't get some really basic stuff from their parents that didn't, it didn't take root in them. And so they don't have internal nurturing parents.

They don't even have necessarily a sense of, you know, there's not going to be like an inner critic necessarily, voicing that, but, the five builds up a defense mechanism. We've called it muffling or filtering or separation or hypersensitivity. And that's kind of their parent in a way.

That's sort of the parent that they've invented. And I think what this is saying is that that internal parent communicates a very deprived sense of self, a very weak or easily destroyed sense of self. And therefore, the five, and I think this would probably be true of the four, will, when we talk about interject, you know, I must, I must not need, I must not be needed or else I will be destroyed or else I will be annihilated.

That's sort of like the inner parental guidance. And it's all grounded in a deep sense of lack of safety. So those are the parents that have to be killed. That's how I take that.

See if this says anything else. When we finally begin to release the chains that bind us to our parents and feel more rooted in life, the heart also begins to open and the feeling of being the authors of our own destiny emerges, recovering the paternal or inner authority figure castrated by an excessively authoritarian family member.

Let's just see the Spanish there. It's a good translation. It's just a lot of parents here. So there's the recovery of the paternal figure who was castrated by an authoritarian family member.

And this isn't my area of expertise, this kind of like depth psychology or parent archetypes, but I want to try to contact it if we can. The internal parent that we were just talking about that the five develops is a parent that says, you are not safe. It is not safe. The world is not safe. You will not survive. You will be annihilated.

So recovering the inner father is recovering this sense of authorship, of sovereignty, of agency. And something happened in the five's journey that they didn't get that. And so they have to recover it. And part of that recovery process is by sort of undoing this, what they call authoritarian family member, which may or may not be external. It may just be this internal authoritarian parent figure.

That may have been self created by the actual absence of contact from the family. In other words, like, if the five was neglected emotionally by father and mother, then the internal parent that they formed may be this sort of authority that says it's not safe, you're not safe, etc.

And so that's the parent that has to be killed so that a healthy internal mother and a healthy internal father can be grown. We can leave behind the fear and guilt of existing.

Fear of annihilation, which is mentioned here, I think is there's something about annihilation that for me really clicks with the five. Overwhelm and annihilation, which is different from the four. I think the four can recognize annihilation in their own deepest fears, but the four is almost more concerned with like non-existence.

And again, that's that difference between the heart type and the head type or shame and fear. Being annihilated is like terrifying. Being invisible or being nothing or being broken, those activate the heart center more when I touch those.

Connection with the body as a path to the recovery of the senses is fundamental, especially body work as a way to recover lost vitality and energy. As one feels vital, they can go out into the world to meet others. The body is also where needs can be felt to be satisfied from there. In body work, it is important to recover the feeling of grounding and in this way, energy.

I think recovery of energy is an essential project for the five. You know, that's another way to look at the stinginess is the five is very energy conscious. And that will always be the case for the five. It's not like that's going to magically disappear. But, you know, I think it just comes over and over again how important body work can be for the recovery of energy.

Something has happened where when the five locked, you know, locked their heart in that chest, they locked a lot of their energy in there too.

We'll just touch on this last piece with the mother again, because this particular chapter talks a lot about interjection and internal parents. So I think it's good to just follow that thread all the way through.

Recovering the bond with the nurturing mother, once the interjected, demanding, absent, and invasive mother is dead, helps to feel that there is no separation, that we are part of the same. Part of the same what?

I'm just gonna check the Spanish here. Yeah, it doesn't, it's sort of like the, we're all, we're all part of the same, we're all, we're part of the same, I don't know how you translate that. Parte de lo mismo. Que formamos parte de lo mismo.

I'll just leave it. Well, yeah, exactly. Here we have the introjected. So first of all, introjected as in self afflicted. Should we look up introjection just to double check our Freudian terminology? When I think about introjecting, I think Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes like a syringe, like a needle. It's like a self-injection of negative stuff.

And so let's look at these descriptions. Not the nurturing mother, but the introjected, demanding, absent, and invasive mother. So there are contradictions there, right? How can something be absent and invasive? How can it be absent and demanding?

But I think the story here is again, through neglect or through some failure in the family system for the five to internalize their mother, there is an absence. There is a void. And there is an exposure, there is a lack of safety that is resolved through story, through interjection of deficiency, of particular lack of safety of risk of annihilation.

And, the demanding aspect is maybe pointing even more precisely to this trust quality that it's like, I must not trust just anybody or else I will be annihilated. I must only trust the most trustworthy. I must wait. I must save all my trust for that special mother, essentially, for that, for that special caregiver, the caregiver that I've, I've created a fantasy for, cause I never, never experienced it.

And so that's the demanding piece. Once that whole story subsides, then there's the opportunity to recover a bond with a nurturing mother. Again, internal, not like the actual mother, not the physical mother, but the mother who loves all her children. You know, the mother Mary, the mother of all beings.

And that's that feeling also that, you know, the four can find refuge in of the ordinary. And from there, there's a feeling of non-separation that we're all part of the same. And through that bond, the key to loving and being loved fluidly opens, wanting to stop feeling it only through the partner.

So then it no longer is bottled up in just the romantic partner, but can be seen through the lens of all relationships. Then finally, the sexual five can fill themselves with love to give it without exclusive or highly selective relationships and can love life and people in general, simply because they exist.

The work will involve expanding the circle of relationships where we can express our emotions and allow that flow to nurture spontaneously so we can see that exchange is necessary not to dry up.

And the chapter concludes with also just comment on not just relationship through human interactions, but also art, dance, poetry, stories, tales, so that this internal happening can be externalized, can receive an outlet.

Okay, so that is the sexual five, trust, confianza, and we will wrap up the five next time with the self-preservation five or the conservation five, which is refuge. See you then.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the BarrCast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Sunday evening here in New York, a little muggy. I've had some recording issues and I lost the audio for some reason. It dropped in the last couple of attempts. So I'm just going to try something a little different, mix it up. And rather than go through the translation... We're just going to try to make meaning out of and make sense out of the keyword for the social five, which is Totem.

And so remembering that the passion for the five overall is avarice. And like all the passions, really, it's not quite what you'd expect. So take avarice at face value and you're thinking about greed and wanting more. And that's a really odd word to describe the five who is oftentimes the least materialistic, least interested in monetary gain. They might be a minimalist.

So what kind of avarice are we talking about here? The five and we're moving into the head triad from the four so we're talking about um people who kind of uh their head their thinking and their mental simulating is sort of their uh control tower from which they're experiencing a lot of the world um

And there's a lot... The five in general is really out to protect themselves from kind of sensory overload, you know, is one way to start talking about it. And... I think the five is probably the most important type to understand from a cultural perspective right now, because I think the five was probably in most of history was very rare and would sort of be the absent-minded professor, brilliant researcher, scientist type who used to be a rarity, but culturally we're living more and more in a five space in the sense that there's more withdrawn

Were more withdrawn from the frictions of human interactions. And that's what the fives organized their life to sort of avoid is friction and just sort of unpredictability in human interactions. That is to say, sometimes people are going to be too much and they're going to be kind of invading your space. And that's going to be overwhelming for a five and the five is going to want to retreat. But also the five may have wounding around not getting enough interaction. And so then sort of building a sort of buffer around not needing other human interactions.

And so the five becomes really essentially obsessed with knowledge and obsessed with perceiving, obsessed with understanding, and really underlying this fascination with the world and fascination with knowing things is a fear that if I don't know, then I will be subject to the bewildering messiness of human interaction and will either be invaded or not helped or whatever. And so just better to know.

Naranjo writes, you know, in the introduction to the five, about the five early on replaced mother's milk with books. And that's a simplification. And, you know, fives have all sorts of different life stories, but that's not a bad handle on the five. So fives are also going to be pretty skeptical oftentimes of the Enneagram, and that's maybe touching to their six wings. They might get really interested in the Enneagram, but they're also going to say, oh, this isn't quite right, or it's not like that. And that's fine. The five can do that. Just the wise five will recognize in their own critiquing of... these descriptions, that is their own passion, their own fixation at work. This need to perceive, this need to understand, this need to know. Because if somebody knows, excuse me, somebody knows better than me, then that's not safe.

So the totem is the social five. And, you know, the way I think about it is like, there's sort of this dramatization of and sort of kind of the social five turns the world into a heaven and a hell and so at you know to the left there is heaven that's where we want to be that's the totem you could call that the ivory tower and ivory towers are uh A great metaphor for fives and I think a lot of fives have some connection to the ivory tower and that's where they want to be in in a world of facts and ideas and ideals.

It's a totem totem both speaks to kind of an academic ivory tower image, but it also speaks to that as a as an idea of worship and so a social five might might, for instance, have as their hero, let's say, like a Richard Feynman or a John von Neumann or even a religious figure or it could be a regular person, but just somebody who lives and breathes the ideals of brilliance, of genius, of that kind of pursuit. And they want to be up there.

I must strive for these ideals. I must strive to accomplish what my God-given rights are. Fives oftentimes are really gifted intellectually. So they really want to be there and at the great cost of basically the ordinary world is like, this is like an octopus, you know, kind of a chthonic monster down there. It's hell. It's basically the ordinary world is hell and to be avoided. And then, you know, the really clever five will be like, how can I turn... How can I take every opportunity to convert the ordinary into the sublime?

So the social five is always kind of trying to make lemonade out of lemons of the ordinary world, which is interesting, but usually fails. So if we're kind of trying to create a provisional story for the social five, it must be something like, you know, I must strive to be among the greats or else I will be

In my image here, there's a fear of being pulled in and under. The five's fear can be around overwhelm and annihilation in the mundane needs of people and the world. The world is a little bit threatening for the five. Yeah.

There's a lot of overlap, I think, between the social five and the four, particularly the self-preservation four. I know those are very different instincts, but I think we'll see that. And the four, of course, also sort of despises the mundane. But for the five, the mundane is sort of a threat to their would-be greatness. Sort of else I will be annihilated by the ordinary.

And I'm just sort of still playing with this I must X or else Y. I'm really interested in seeing people create their own stories that resonate for them. I don't think that there's like one for the five in general or one for the social five specifically. But let's bring up the book and see what it has to say here.

The passion of the social five is somewhat akin to a need for the essential, the sublime, we could say, instead of the need for what exists. Totem simultaneously suggests height and the character of being a constructed object rather than a human being. The height of a totem evokes a tendency in these individuals to look upward toward the ideal and to relate to the most outstanding and remarkable among people, somehow like how Midas wanted everything he touched to turn into gold.

And yeah, you know, I think for the spiritually curious among us, for Buddhists, I mean, having poked around Substack a little bit more since I'm publishing some of these videos to Substack, I'm just, there's so much spiritual talk. It's really interesting. And for me, it feels kind of unfamiliar and fresh and new. And, you know, for sure, I have like one foot in it.

But... I'm not, I don't want to like type anybody, but I think the, the four and the five are very prevalent types among like Western, especially Buddhists and, um, there's a lot this there's a lot that's like catnip for that type and so let's just read this paragraph the tragedy is in their quest for a super value the social five implicitly scorns ordinary life and common people they're only interested in the quintessence of life the elixir of existence the ultimate meaning

However, in this orientation toward the stars, they become someone who is not very interested in life down here. They become overly spiritual because emotional impoverishment, which distances them from compassion, is contrary to spiritual achievement. We're going to go back to that. Thus, in this character, a polarity is established between the extraordinary and what makes no sense. So nothing makes sense until the extraordinary or magical is attained.

So if we go back to our little doodle here, this is like the ordinary. This is... So what happened to the five is, and this is true of all subtypes, not just the social five, is something happened to the social five, their ability to experience emotions that, well, I don't want to, let's not put words in anyone's mouth. And again, these are written by people of the type.

Emotional impoverishment, which distances them from compassion. There's a numbing or a muffling or a quieting or a distancing or a boundary-ing. This is the avarice, right? The five becomes very protective of what little energetic resources they have. The five is the most... aware of their energy in terms of resources and seeks to protect it. And so there's a stinginess. Stinginess is probably the best synonym for avarice here. There's a stinginess with who do I give my energy to and how much energy can I give to others before I am destroyed?

So that's what they mean by emotional impoverishment. And so to some extent... this whole project, the five, right? The five might be like a tantrica who says, I'm actually extraordinarily involved in the ordinary and in the ordinary, I'm able to perceive and see through the ordinary and find its quintessence and the divine non-dual, orgasm that is in stuff as mundane as you know argument with my girlfriend or making dinner and if I will say that and if that might be true I don't you know I don't know for the five but check the five has to check their heart

And see if as um is put in here elsewhere someone says i feel like my heart was locked up in a trunk and i i kind of threw away the key that original self-protecting um urge

And the five has to check and be honest with themselves about whether all of this sublimation of the ordinary toward ideals is really working for them in terms of opening their heart and helping them feel more compassion and helping them feel more connection with other people. Or is there an ongoing sense of emptiness that fives generally are aware of? Fives are generally like, yeah, there's some emptiness here. It feels like something's missing.

And so for the spiritual five, they just have to be on a quest to be honest with themselves about after a few years of this... avoiding the ordinary or sublimating the ordinary into the ideal, whether that's working for them. Is their heart broken open or not?

So let's see what else is in this account by Angelo Contarino. Like the self-protecting four, and I would say like the five in general is a self-protecting type. There's a swallowing, there's a deliberate dampening of intensity. It says previously perceptions arrived muted, resentment is often expressed indirectly and veiled. So the five very early on made a decision to hamstring their own intensity through boundary, right?

The crazy idea is to prefer not to feel. Nothing's happening here. And if it is, I'll endure it and hide it. We just talked about the endure in the self-preserving four. I'll endure it and hide it even for myself. This is when type five puts on a poker face as if everything slides off of them and they're above good and evil to the point where they neither feel nor suffer. What happens is that type five decided at a very early age to lock their heart in a trunk to avoid suffering and threw the key to the bottom of the sea. Amen.

The five is not that spontaneous. The five needs to take time to process things. The five needs time to sort of translate the intensity of events into sense-making, into knowledge, into meaning-making, into a formal symbolic logic that then they will be wonderfully neutral about. I mean, the five doesn't have a lot of ego because the five's egoic structure is around basically choosing the... playground or choosing the battleground the the five as long as the five is in the world of ideas and intellect and logic and analysis the five is safe so from there the five is actually wonderfully neutral seeing things objectively the five is a great uh partner in that way but the the five needs to play in that arena that's that's where the five's insecurity is is if we're if we're having it out that's um the five doesn't want that

So the five is very controlling in terms of how the game is played, but they're actually very expansive in terms of the content. It's what makes them great spiritual seekers because Oh, if I'm in the... I think this is why Buddhism appeals to so many fives. And, you know, we just covered the four. If you're new to this, I'm a four. I have a very strong five wing. And I also feel like I have a strong three wing. So nothing is coming from they here. Like I'm describing, you know, I'm in contact with this for myself. Like...

What joy to deal with a world of phenomena, right? Buddhism basically says everything is phenomena. Oh, well, once everything is phenomena, then there's sort of this game that I get to play in. And the five is like really kind of in heaven when they're swimming in the world of phenomena, the world of objects, the world of things. Just one layer of abstraction, right? past the kind of raw, messy, violating, scary. And again, the five will even be interested in that world as long as they get to systematize that world too. Yeah.

And then there's clearly superiority here. So when we look at this, the social five, the totem, is a move of distancing and aloofness and superiority over the ordinary. Who would want an ordinary life? But it's impersonal for the five, so unlike maybe some other types. the social five's sense of superiority doesn't come from a personal agenda. They want to be in the world of the ideal.

But conversely, then they're always falling short of that. And so their own, their own, you know, ineluctable connections to the ordinary and just drive them crazy. So as it says here is the feeling of imagined superiority in relation to others dissipates. and we devote ourselves more to friendship rather than an expert and teacher relationship, we also abandon the feelings of inferiority and guilt. We let go of the identification with the bad breast or the one that never existed. More Melanie Klein there.

We won't get into good breast, bad breast, but I think it's really important for the four and the five. I'm just scanning this to see if there are any other key points. Most of this section is really about the dissolution, the giving up of the ivory tower, the giving up of the totem, the giving up of the ideal, which I think is extremely destabilizing.

Descending from the totemic limbo, we discover how we have entangled ourselves in conflictive situations. We find ourselves wounded and in pain with an explosive load of aggressive feelings. It has been a relief for everyone to see themselves capable of shouting, attacking, rebelling, and releasing a ruthless and wild inner animal that enjoys the fight. After having discharged everything that was boiling inside, we realized that it was an important vital energy, part of our animal heritage, and not synonymous with violence as we previously believed.

When anger is detached from long-held resentment and one is open not only to feeling emotions but also to confrontation and conflict, it becomes easier to say no without too much trouble. The old behavior of swallowing and renouncing to respond and clarify things no longer makes sense because we feel prepared to set our limits with words and posture. So again, so much overlap with the self-preserving four.

And, you know, in my own self-typing, I think sometimes it's been a challenge to discern some of the different pieces here. But I would say if you were comparing the self-preserving four and the social five, for the social five, and again, the social instinct here manifests as having these ideals, these role models, whether they're human role models or role models of ideas, comparing oneself to the greats and being on a never-ending quest to be among the greats that is never satisfied.

Um, but you know, it's not, it's not futile. I mean, I think social fives, uh, some of the social fives I know are some of the most brilliant people I know, and they really are kind of among the greats. Like I'm like, wow, you know, this person is just completely inspiring. And so it's not that the social five can the, the, so, okay.

So ways to discern between a five and a four, uh, especially these two subtypes, um, The self-preserving four and fours in general, there's a lot of unproductive struggle. Fours are essentially in love with and entangled in lack and disappointment and discouragement.

And so a four who wants to be great is going to have a preoccupation with their own deficiencies and their own lacks. And it's going to be marked by a lot more struggle there.

The social five, I think, is going to be more successful, more productive, potentially. I mean, productive from their own perspective. I think a lot of outsiders might think of five as like, what are you doing? But a lot of fives, a lot of academics are perfectly happy doing research and writing papers and You know, being fairly impenetrable to others and that doesn't really bother them so much.

So I think I think a social five is probably going to be more successful in in their endeavors, in their attempts to be great, although they will beat themselves up absolutely for falling short.

The other difference, right, is we're talking about a heart type versus a head type. And so that fours preoccupation with lack will be connected with a lot of feelings around shame and torment. And so one thing about, you know, a self-preserving five, even the self-preserving five, is there will be a lot of, they won't feel dead.

They maybe will be suffering horribly. They maybe wish they were dead. But there will be a kind of vitality to them. And an intensity that's just bubbling underneath the surface.

For the self-preserving four, that's the most muffled. Well, I wouldn't say muffled. I would say that's the most tamped down. That's the most clenched energy. But the clenching of that energy, the SP4 is a clencher, a holder. We talked about tenacity. So there's a lot of intensity there.

The social five, like the other fives, they've locked their heart in the box at the bottom of the ocean. And they know that. And so there's a kind of an emptiness. There's a little bit of a not there-ness. Kind of ephemerality, maybe, or a... distance and aloofness. We talk about superiority.

Part of the healing journey for that social five is to reopen that box and go through some of the same intensity that an SP four maybe has to go through. But I think fives in general are going to be much lower intensity than fours. And there will be much more aversion, aversion to conflict, aversion to messiness, aversion to people taking up their resources and energy.

And they'll experience the lack that a four experiences, but they won't be preoccupied with it. They might say, yeah, there's a certain emptiness. I wish I felt more alive. But they won't, um, that lack itself will become its own obsession and its own source of energy.

The battery for the four, right? The passion, the battery, the motivator is lack. The passion, the battery, the motivator for the five is avarice, is stinginess. Um, what little I have, I really need to hold on to.

So I think we'll end there. Let me just quickly scan the rest of the social five to see if there's anything else that adds to this for us. This particular chapter is quite long, but refers extensively to the importance of embodiment activities. And I think that's valuable for the four and the five, but especially the five is just being a body. So yoga, tai chi, qigong.

Returning to the earthly and real world entails giving up our expectations and our fantasies about personal transformation. Entering the I don't know and sustaining oneself there. Yeah, that's huge. Renouncing the extraordinary life. Being in contrast, more present in everyday life, taking care of ourselves, attending to ourselves, establishing more satisfying contact.

Just sitting in the I don't know is, I think, a beautiful practice for the five. And it's really scary, I think. If you can contact the fear of not knowing the answer, I just don't know. And how without an or, you've got nothing to steer with, I don't know. That's I think that's the easiest way to connect to the fear that underlies all mental types but for the five I don't know is um what does it feel like not to know it feels terrifying because annihilation is right there

Miguel writes about resolve to stop flagellating, mistreating, censoring myself, calling myself useless. Those might be negative self-talk that a five could experience for his failure to be a good worshiper of the totem.

Okay, so that's the social five totem. I'm interested in these stories and I think this one is just one example. I must strive to be among the greats or else I'll be annihilated by the ordinary. I must be great or I'm nobody. That's a little bit four-ish. I don't know, or else I'm nobody.

For the social five and for the five in general, it's not about being nobody so much as just, I think, I talked to one five and they were like, they wouldn't mind being a brain in a vat just as long as they could still have their intellect. So it's, if I didn't have my intellect, that's really scary, I think, for fives.

So, you know, I must strive to know as much as I can or else I won't know anything. Just things to play with.

We'll pause here and then we'll talk about the sexual five.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the BarCast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Wednesday evening. I am taking off for a few days, flying out to Miami tomorrow, but I thought before I do that, I want to carry on this project and record another session. So we're doing the sexual floor today, which...

0:31

which is closer to home for me than the social four. I think I'm still yet closer to the self-preservation four, but we'll get to that. So the sexual four is classified by Ichazo as odio, hatred. So it's an intense keyword. And the sexual four is an intense person. So we're going to learn about it.

0:58

And before we dive in more, just a word on sexual as a subtype. So the subtypes, the instinctual subtypes, social, sexual, and self-preservation really are a somewhat distinct invention specific to the Enneagram. In a way, that's kind of a bummer. You would like the vocabulary to be common across other paradigms, but

1:26

It has a little bit to do with attachment, right? It has a little bit to do with survival. And the idea is a pretty simple one. As a child, we quickly develop not just survival strategies, but strategies on whom our survival depends. So if our survival depends on a close relationship with a caregiver,

1:55

then we might develop a sexual, or sometimes it's called one-on-one subtype. So this is someone where the intensity and depth of one relationship becomes of utmost importance for the survival strategy. I don't know enough about why it's called sexual. It certainly can show up as sexual in terms of sort of seducing the partner or

2:25

seducing the other person in relationship. But of course, it would have its roots in caregivers, a mother or a father. Then there's the social subtype where survival is to be found in belonging, in fitting in. in not standing out, maybe you've got a large family or, um, or your family of origin, you know,

2:56

wasn't where you were safe, but school or, uh, you moved around a lot. So you needed to sort of blend in. So, so the social subtype is going to be much more focused on fitting in and belonging. Um, there might be more chameleonic able to sort of, um, work with a lot of different personalities. And then finally,

3:19

the self-preservation subtype is somebody who ultimately relies on themselves and security of the situation. So this type might be avoidant of risk. They may seek out safety in terms of resources, wealth, security, housing. So security, you know, security, belonging and intimacy could be three synonyms for self-preservation, social and sexual subtypes. So today is the sexual four.

3:55

And let's get right into it. If the E4 social subtype suffers more than the other subtypes feeling guilty about any desire, the sexual four turns against shame by becoming shameless to satisfy their intense desires. Therefore, even if it's shameful, they will bang on every possible door.

4:17

They become insistent even against frustrations as if thinking that the loudest baby gets the most milk. The more I complain, the more I'll get, they seem to think. Only the strategy works, which works well in childhood doesn't work so well in adulthood. People who are too insistent, demanding and exacting tend to be annoying and get rejected.

4:37

And thus the vicious circle emerges where rejection leads to protest and protest leads to rejection. So it's. These are all flavors of envy, which is the core keyword for the four, the passion for the four, the fixation for the four. And this is a different vicious circle than the social four who I ended up going

5:04

with the word abasement. Kind of like abasement, even though it's obscure, because it literally has the word basement in it. And I think that that's evocative for us. If you ever watch a film, you know, who's in the basement, right? That person who has been rejected, who is sort of unloved, who is less than, who's lower, right?

5:26

So the social four puts themselves in the basement. And then they say, they lament, nobody loves me. That's why I'm in the basement. But then, of course, their vicious circle is, well, you're in the basement. That's right. Come come in the kitchen and we'd love to hang out with you.

5:39

But this person wants to stay in the basement. So that's their vicious circle. The sexual four, it's more aggressive and it's less of a victim mindset and more of a argumentative, insistent, as I said, or frustrated mindset. Stop rejecting me. Stop it. You need to accept me.

6:07

Well, I would like to accept you if you weren't so aggressive and demanding. And so that's the vicious circle that Naranjo's introducing here. Continues, the name Ichaso, again, that's Naranjo's teacher, gave to the characteristic passion of the sexual four was hatred, which is descriptively appropriate for these people who are very expressive about their anger. However,

6:36

this might not sufficiently explain their motivation. So it seems better to talk about competition or competitiveness. I really like this point that I think Naranjo is pretty rigorous about seeking a word that describes not the behavior, but the motivation. The fixation has to have an I must or else logic to it. It has to have this

7:04

engine behind it. And so hate doesn't really point to an engine, whereas competition starts to point to an engine or a fixation or a vicious circle. I've been thinking about the sexual four in anticipation of doing this recording. And I'd like to tentatively introduce another keyword closer to competition, which would be rivalry. Rivalry.

7:30

And we'll explore rivalry in more detail as we go on. But I have to do an etymology thing here. I wondered what the etymology of rivalry was, and it's a really good one. So if you hear river in it, that's right. Rivalry is an ancient word to describe.

7:50

I think it's old French to describe one who drinks from the same stream as another, one who drinks from the same stream. And so it both denotes or connotes proximity, right? We might be in neighboring towns that share a stream, but it also connotes

8:13

a competition and what we would call today a zero-sum game or a scarcity mindset, i.e., when you drink, I am thirsty, and when I drink, you're thirsty. So it's a zero-sum game that the four is stuck in, in all subtypes. But the sexual four is in the most of kind of a war-like state. And so rivalry is

8:40

is the keyword that I'm tentatively going with as we continue. We could characterize the envy of the sexual subtype as an aggressive oral envy, one that bites. Psychoanalysis speaks of cannibalistic impulses. It's not just about wanting, but wanting with anger. This is the sin of Cain, our ancestor. I envy you, so I kill you.

9:04

I envy the rich and start a revolution. I envy your intellectual superiority, so I'll cut off your head and then I'll seem taller. And when talking about beheading, we're discussing invalidation, contempt, and the aggression expressed in devaluing what's enviable. Like the fox claiming the grapes it can't reach are probably sour.

9:23

Okay, so that's a good introduction to the the motivation or the fixation or the passion of the sexual four. And I think we'll go deeper as we get into the essay. This is Transformation of the Sexual Four by Annie Chevreau. Again, this collection, which is so beautifully assembled, each subtype after being introduced by Naranjo,

9:50

somebody who identifies with that subtype or writes their own sort of journey, psycho-spiritual journey. So this is Chevreau. The major obstacle for the sexual four in deeply working with its character is to recognize itself as sick, to surrender to the evidence, to step off the stubbornness that assumes that most of the time,

10:12

what it considers sincere and authentic in its way of expressing is actually pure hatred and competitiveness. I'm glad we're starting with the four, both because that's me and I can connect with it. So the four is hard and the four has work to do.

10:30

And I think it's good to start with my own work and to confront how brutal some of the feedback here is so that we can give ourselves some slack when we work with other types. This need for authenticity, which is so central to the four, for the sexual four,

10:56

the sexual four has to reckon with this need for authenticity is nothing more than pure rivalry. There is no true wish to be authentic for its own sake. It really is a battle with others who seem to have something that we don't. And that might not resonate. I'm sure it won't resonate with some fours.

11:24

And that's up to those folks to make sense of for themselves. Ultimately, this is just about finding your own kind of animating story, your own animating fixation. But I think for me, I recognize... Hatred, I think, is a little bit tough. But what I've noticed with myself is I do a lot of what I call white knuckling.

11:50

And this is a recent thing where I'm recognizing how much of my creative work is done with white knuckles, i.e. gripping really tightly. Now, I'm not sure if I'd call that hatred, but there is this sort of intense... It does feel like a battle. It does feel like a battle when I'm trying to express myself.

12:12

Now, am I battling other people? Not so much. We talked about envy in the beginning not being so necessarily so obvious that you're envious of what someone else has who's real and might be What you remember yourself having in a past that never was or envy of an ideal.

12:33

I'm not even so clear on what or whom I'm envious of, but I do think that there's some rivalry for sure with myself. It's essential for the sexual four to understand that hatred is a hard drug, an addiction from which one never truly recovers.

12:49

I stress this point because it relates to the extremist stances that those of this subtype usually adopt, which are true barriers to growth. The euphoria of seeing progress in the healing process, like the despair when one stagnates, are dangerous emotions that justify getting discouraged, giving up, surrendering to chaos.

13:10

These emotions feed back into self-hatred and projected outward with all the unhappiness it brings to oneself and others. I experienced all of this through my therapeutic process. The following texts are excerpts from my autobiography. So we need to go so slowly here. These are such dense paragraphs. And I want to bring up the Spanish here.

13:32

This euphoria of seeing progress. I don't completely track this, but what I'll say about this that I recognize in myself is both the highs and the lows are dangerous for me. In the same way with rivalry, whether you're winning or you're losing, you're in rivalry, you're in competition, you're in hatred. And so

14:24

as things are getting better and you're getting excited and maybe you have visions of what you could be, there's this feeling of winning, but you will get dragged back into the battle and you will lose. And so I think that's what I wanna talk about there.

14:40

I think that's what I recognize in the euphoria of seeing progress that she's describing. So these are her excerpts from her autobiography. In the first individual sessions with the master, I suppose that's Naranjo, I fully encountered the childhood lack, the terror and fascination for my father, the sexual fears.

14:59

As I begin to rid myself of the guilt for feeling like the villain of the story, responsible for things not going better at home, I felt heard and valued by Claudio. Until then, no one had given me this opportunity to talk about what was happening to me without being labeled a liar like my father did.

15:16

This marks the beginning of the work for me and within the work, the first healing memory. Then came less idyllic sessions, those where it seemed nothing was happening beyond realizing my own limits. Even if I seemed to handle those situations well, I think I couldn't fully endure the tedium of the inner desert. That's beautiful.

15:34

It felt as if nothing mattered without emotional intensity. That's a very four feeling, this desert. And if you work with the elements at all, I think the four, especially the sexual four, would be really kind of connected with the the fire element.

15:53

And the desert, that's a great way of describing that feeling of burnout after you've exploded in it. Just imagine sort of, if you've watched Oppenheimer, right, like the nuclear explosion in in Santa Fe, and then are outside of Santa Fe, and then and then just a vast desert, where everything is destroyed, and you're all alone.

16:18

So this feeling of being all alone and how unbearable that is for the sexual four in particular here. Nothing matters without emotional intensity. Nothing matters without relationship. But the only way I can have relationship is through rivalry, is through competition, is through hate. That's the plight of the sexual four.

16:42

I tried to calm myself, but I knew I became agitated, distracted and from the void. It was so unbearable that I would divert my attention outward. In group work, when peers felt differently than I did, if I was in pain and they were joyful, I labeled them frivolous and shallow. If the opposite occurred, they were boring.

16:58

By constantly looking outwards and comparing experiences, I lost my center, my focus on what I needed to work on. Over time, I realized I was puffing myself up. thinking I was the most transparent, the most mature of all. But deep down, this was all a way to avoid addressing my spiritual laziness.

17:16

If things were going well, I got excited. If it was a period of emptiness, I got moody. Reflecting on the process now, even though I've worked hard, I understand that what drove me back then was the belief that I was a part of a very special group, something extraordinary.

17:31

The SAT school, that's the Naranjo school, was my Arcadia, my Camelot, and my personal Bloomsbury. We were also family back then, and I wanted to make up for my real one. I was still naive enough to think this one would be perfect and idyllic. Stepping away from that childlike belief was what made me grow the most.

17:48

So she really went through quite a powerful, you call it transference or whatever, but this healing circle itself became a replacement family for her in which she experienced all that competition, all that hatred, all that comparison that is so characteristic of the four. Recognizing one's addiction to hatred is healing in itself because it implies accepting relapses,

18:11

not to get discouraged, but to learn from them and how one has been dragged down. In this self-observation task, the sexual four encounters an internal barrier that must be named without deceiving oneself, even if it stings, or precisely because it stings, for there begins the real commitment to inner work.

18:34

This barrier is called intellectual laziness and manifests in attitudes we of this subtype are prone to. Impatience, resistance to continuous effort, too much faith in improvisation and impulse, with all the difficulties it entails to face the void without filling it with disparate words and emotions that distract and overwhelm. When one becomes aware of this limitation,

18:59

they begin to develop the right attitude for deep work and set the necessary tasks to grow. It's not about distrusting impulse as it's the engine to get started, but learning that it's not enough and that perseverance is required. I became aware of this challenge professionally. It's interesting when we talk about intellectual laziness,

19:21

I think a four might bristle at that and say, well, I'm quite intellectually rigorous. And that might be true for the four. These are personal stories. But in myself, I recognize a certain preference to do it live. I'm much better extemporaneously. Like this is an example of this podcast.

19:47

That here I am kind of blundering my way through this and talking. I don't really, I haven't necessarily put in a tremendous amount of intellectual rigor or thought in terms of what is this project. I feel really kind of prone to just sort of just run with it and fill the void maybe with these explorations.

20:10

I do think that there's something here, and to her point, this impulse is the engine to get started. But yet, I do lack a certain perseverance with my projects, especially when they're my own projects, when they're company projects. I'm a great perseverancer. I persevere. But I can think of so many projects that I

20:37

It's not that I didn't finish them, but I launched them without that deep, slow, stable, clear, independent, solid vision. It oftentimes is in relationship to a perceived or to a real other. And it's almost like as long as it's better than that or good enough.

21:00

But again, it's that rivalry, because as soon as you get hooked into rivalry, you're You're a goner. There is no real winning. Precisely because the four doesn't want to win. To win would be to end the relationship, to end the rivalry. The four's neurotic fixation is to be in constant, permanent rivalry.

21:20

And so no matter how well something goes, there will inevitably be a reversal in which one is lowered and then has to fight to get higher again. She continues, at the same time that I began training in assault therapy, I was interested in tarot and Claudio showed me how to work with the cards.

21:39

My first workshop was a resounding success that went to my head. I recognize that. I thought my future was set and that people would flock to me. People loved the way I worked with tarot, but of course it wasn't that easy to get clients and I grew impatient. Now with experience as a psychotherapist, the same thing happens.

21:56

I know the new experimental work proposals I make are interesting and useful to people, but I have to be alert not to get discouraged or abandon everything. There's that abandoning that we heard about in the social floor, who they themselves abandon projects and abandon people just so that they can feel abandoned. right?

22:18

They give up so that they can say, well, nobody wanted to work with me. Abandon everything when there isn't a quick and unanimous response. Instead, I should revisit the idea, see what's missing or what's in excess in a word work, not give up.

22:31

I think it's crucial for the sexual four not to confuse a lack of perseverance with a lack of talent because it leads to disconnecting from reality, hating it, hating oneself, and by extension, hating others. Self-realization and transformation then involve allowing oneself to be frustrated, to de-dramatize, and to develop compassion. Allowing oneself to become frustrated.

22:58

And so we'll, we'll now move on to the section to become frustrated. Maybe we can translate that. That's a, that's just like a reflexive verb in Spanish, frustrarse, like, um, and just call it frustration. I don't know. Maybe not. It's just not a great title. I also... I don't think that's self-frustration. Let's just call it frustration. Good.

23:29

The sexual four must understand that they are bound to feel frustrated because they mistake their desires for reality. They need to... They mistake their desires for reality. So, well, let's finish the paragraph. They need to accept that neither they nor the world are as they had imagined. So fours have this rich imagination in a way,

24:02

I say in a way because I struggle to, there's fantasy versus imagination. I think fours live in fantasy. They live in fantasy lands. Fours are nostalgic. Fours are fundamentally, and Suzanne Stabile talks more about orientation to time. They are past oriented. They are romantics.

24:26

So we're not talking about manifestors here who imagine things and then they want that to be real. They have imaginations of how things should be or should have been or used to be or could have been or would have been, if only. That's the kind of fantasy that I think we're talking about here.

24:47

They need to accept that neither they nor the world are as they imagined. Not everything will be unbearably bland and boring if they set aside their romanticized view of life. And this is a classic question you could ask a four of like, well, what do you think about going to the supermarket?

25:04

What do you think about routine tasks? And if you're a four, you probably experience a dread about these routine tasks, these mundane aspects of life that few other types actually would recognize. It kind of blows my mind personally when I learned about this that, yeah, the daily chores aren't soul-sucking for everybody, really, even for most people.

25:36

This unrealistic way of grasping the world is not harmless and excessive aesthetic valuation harbors hatred and contempt for basic survival aspects. Excessive aesthetic valuation or aesthetic perfectionism. The four and the one share this kind of perfectionism at times. But the four's perfectionism is aesthetic, it is artistic, it is the experience we could be having right now.

26:06

How many times do I get frustrated when I want to share something with my partner and I just want her to experience it as powerfully as I experienced it? And I'll work really hard to create those conditions. I want a transmission to happen. And when it doesn't happen, I'm disappointed and get grumpy and moody, etc.

26:30

Healing comes from self-nurturing, realizing that one is flesh and blood like everybody else. And that to survive, one needs to eat, clothe oneself, organize, develop a practical sense. In essence, learn to be in one's favor as a way to stop hating oneself. Learn to be in one's favor. Yeah. I think that's good English.

26:58

Learn to be in one's favor. Just learn to... Learn to be on your own side, really. If we're taking rivalry further, it's an inner competition, right? I mean, I think the outer competition is just projecting the inner competition. And so one is constantly in competition with oneself. One is constantly dissatisfied with one's lot.

27:30

And to be on one's side... Learn to be on one's own side. Learn to be in one's favor. I'm on my own team, essentially, is what has to happen for a four. And a four isn't on their own team by default. Because they have to have that lack.

27:56

Something has to be missing for them to be in relationship. And relationship is the most important thing for them. One must curb the tendency towards self-destruction, impose tasks and schedules, be productive to avoid sinking into chaos. Discipline is needed in anything that makes one feel good about oneself. The discomfort caused by low self-esteem increases hatred,

28:19

and it's a vicious circle from which one must force oneself to exit. It's a matter of will. Yeah, it's interesting to see her really pounding away at discipline, at will, at perseverance. There's this sort of, Suzanne Stabile might reframe that in doing, right? So the for is in this thinking, feeling loop. I feel something very powerfully,

28:48

then I think about how I felt about it, then I feel some stuff more, and then I think about it, and I never do anything. And so perseverance, willpower, discipline, these are all kind of doing words. Not doing as in taking action,

29:06

but a kind of willing that is unperturbed by the ebbs and flows of emotion and thought. I believe what's transformative is realizing that it's not just about maintaining a discipline that sexual type four must impose on themselves to escape chaos and sickly disorder they tend to sink into, but also discovering that attending to the everyday is gratifying.

29:30

It's not a mere parenthesis in life while waiting for something more exciting. It's life itself unfolding. My first realization of how I distorted reality by embellishing it came through work with a master where I discovered the obvious way of looking, using eyes to see, not for the

29:47

The staircase was the one I saw in the present, not from some place or movie or museum from years ago. There is no need to romanticize distant mountains or strive to remember the last mood or special circumstance I saw. The mountains were there, and I was looking at them. Now, with time and deeper introspection,

30:05

I see this cognitive and emotional distortion led me to detach from reality, not belonging to the environment in which life flows. What was transformative was later realizing how often merely adding adjectives to reality was a subtle way of discriminating against it, of distancing myself from it, of not living.

30:25

I discovered that car or bus trips weren't mere transient episodes, and that daily tasks made sense if I didn't yearn to finish them quickly, to engage in what I thought was my real life. To savor every moment, I often treat myself as a whimsical child and remind myself,

30:42

you must feed on what's available now because there's nothing else to consume. Sure, meeting this person or today's task may not excite you, but you can do it without enthusiasm. A lot of powerful stuff there. But what struck out to me was using eyes to see, not for the sake of imagination. You know,

31:01

I've talked in the past about aphantasia, which is a phenomenon of not having visual imagination. So in other words, if you say imagine a blue circle, someone with aphantasia... They say, sure, yeah, I'm imagining a blue circle, but there's not actually in their visual field of the closed eyes, sort of this field, there's not actually anything there.

31:26

It's just blank. So when they say imagining, they're doing things like thinking about a blue circle or energetically feeling the qualities of a blue circle, but they don't see the blue circle. And I wonder for a sexual four with F and tissue, I wonder if part of that is like the eyes...

31:47

The eyes imagination is happening in the actual visual field, sort of like layered in there. What does it look like when you can actually see the chair in front of you and not the fantasy of the chair or the idea of the chair or what kind of chair it is? other chairs that you liked more, et cetera.

32:06

So there's such a kind of a prolific noise that's always happening with the four, always comparing, always producing. And she's describing a kind of a quiet seeing things as they really are, which of course is the spiritual project. So a four is by no means unique in needing to do work to see things as they are.

32:36

For the sexual type 4, it's essential to consistently forbid discriminating against what daily life brings. It's an antidote to the almost automatic tendency to always oppose and to enjoy being alive. As a child, I was told I was very imaginative. Now, with a broader view in time past, I realize I've made up many stories, cultivated legends,

32:54

invented roles, and embellished reality to survive the hate I had for myself. For what? For being physically clumsy? For having been poor, inadequate, and fearful? Overprotected by my grandmother and overly watched by my father, I grew up distant from other girls. I was forbidden from going to the park for fear of catching bad manners and diseases.

33:16

Clumsy in games and social interaction, I tried to be the center of attention during breaks by performing my father's theater operettas. I had partial success as my songs sounded strange and ridiculous to them. I covered up the pain of feeling inadequate by aligning myself with immigrant girls. I strived to understand them better than anyone.

33:37

With them, I built a world apart, opposing the local girls whom I labeled as insensitive and mediocre. I killed them internally with hate and disqualification. In reality, we lived modestly because my father was a stagehand, not a theater decorator, as he claimed. I was also ashamed of my neighborhood.

33:55

I said we were from Montmarche, but that wasn't entirely true. Our house was much lower, on a street increasingly filled with prostitutes. The place had declined, but the way I used that fact was exaggerated. Later in Madrid, I never stopped lying about my origins and my great performance in May 1968.

34:14

First, that revolution ended before I entered university. At best, I'd experienced it from the distance of high school, where I attended student meetings. But it wasn't political commitment that interested me, because it seemed boring. I had enjoyed the fashionable sexual freedom and originality in dressing.

34:30

So she's really showing a lot of, I think, the courage of the four She's owning the lies that she told, small and big. And this is the fine line of healing for a four, I think, and I experienced this myself, which is... There's a bravery that we have that seems to be our superpower.

35:05

We have this courage and intellectual honesty of going as deep as we can into our experience, certainly in the experience of others, but first and foremost, our own, because we have the most access to. And we can really go in there and bear it and show it.

35:24

And when we do that with pure intention and not from fixation, it's such a gift. People will tell you, thank you for being so vulnerable. And you won't recognize it because it wasn't vulnerable for you. You maybe felt scared, but There wasn't vulnerability,

35:51

just as this woman didn't feel any hesitation to stand in the middle of her friend group and sing the opera. But any little fault in the motivation can be very dangerous for the four because of the four's emphasis on lack and because of the four's aesthetic perfectionism. So when I share this, am I turning it into art?

36:23

Am I performing, right? And so the four might slip into performance and then they're lost. Or the four might lie and be lost. Or the four might just get lost in their own internal world and start to look a little bit like a five who can go on and on and on and just not read the room.

36:47

Nobody's with you. That can happen to a four. And I think another thing that can happen to the four when they share their inner things is sometimes there's masochism there. Sometimes they're sort of dragging their inner child out by the hair into the public space. And saying, anyone want to beat this kid? So that can happen too.

37:10

The four has to be showing care for themselves when they are vulnerable and they easily won't. And then, of course, because the four has this obsession with lack, the four won't let any of these things slide, right? The unhealthy four will then just devour themselves, beat themselves up for the way in which it wasn't done perfectly.

37:36

Not the perfectionism of the three, not the how could that have gone better, but the see, I knew you were no good. She cultivated an outward image of a free and daring girl. This is, you know, this woman in 1968 and kind of the summer of love. I don't know what was going on in Europe.

37:58

Knowing deep down and hating myself for it that she was so fearful, so terrified of police beatings that she didn't participate in the protests. The sexual four finds it hard to recognize that in this creation of characters, even though it seemingly provides security and makes them interesting, they hate and kill themselves. Moreover, as one works on oneself,

38:18

one realizes that this somewhat unrealistic way of being in the world, with an emphasis on aesthetics, is not harmless and also turns into hatred toward others, competing with them in the name of exquisite sensitivity. Yeah. So I think the sexual four in particular is more prone to kind of this creation of character.

38:40

They might fashion themselves in a certain way. I think they might dress in a particular way. They might have a very strong aesthetic style. I think these would all be characteristics of the sexual four that does, as Annie's saying, make them interesting and does sort of

38:58

create some thin veil of security but it also at least according to her you know there's some way in which it's simultaneously a condemnation of who she really was that her image her self-image couldn't accommodate her fear of being beaten by the police so she had to be this fearless uh you know um daring daring young woman

39:27

This elegant way of attacking relies on another more warrior-like, forceful, sectarian, and Manichean way of judging others. In friendship, elitist affinity, tastes, hobbies, opinions, and shared moods prevails over simply being with another without having to prove anything. I have to look up Manichean. Okay. Some kind of Gnostic thing.

39:57

I don't, I don't have any capacity right now for another, another belief system, but, uh, i don't so i just don't you know i think we'll just have to stick with the other descriptors warrior like forceful and sectarian yeah and i certainly remember in high school being an elitist i still remember being in somebody's car and just

40:25

dismissing them for liking dave matthews band and it came from just like pure elitism and you know okay so it's high school right like a I should forgive myself for that. But I, why I wonder why I remember it. I probably remember probably being shocked by my own venom.

40:47

Yeah.

40:50

It's hard to admit without deception or justification that one isn't as empathetic as believed, that one is clumsy in relating to others due to a lack of naturalness and treatment as if affectation wasn't enough. Upon introspection, the sexual four encounters a subtypes narcissism. They don't see the other. They only see themselves trying to impress, provoke, exuding brilliance,

41:09

humor, et cetera, to be the center of attention. You know, there are words that are so... Andrew Merrill- dangerous in the year of our Lord 2024 and narcissism is certainly one of them and the four by no means has exclusive rights to narcissism narcissism comes up throughout the. the Enneagram, but certainly, I mean, you know,

41:35

certainly some types are more narcissistic than others, but I just like, let's just sort of narcissism. As soon as you start to get into diagnosable words, you're just, you're, you're at risk of running off course. So when we talk about narcissism here, what we just want to leave it as they don't see the other.

41:56

Now, of course they think they see the other. They might say, what are you talking about? I'm very sensitive to other people, right? I pick up, I can imagine a sexual four or a four type saying like, if I'm so narcissistic, then how come I'm so sensitive to the feelings and emotions of others?

42:17

Well, you're so sensitive to the feelings and emotions of others because those are clues, right? to validate your fixation or passion on lack and, you know, in the case of the sexual four, on rivalry or competition or hate. See? See, you hate me, so therefore I hate you. So that's the narcissism. They're not...

42:44

It's not easy for that person to experience this person as a whole other being, you know, an I-thou, a person with their own set of experiences. And in fact, you know, there are little things that the four rarely hallucinates, but, you know, the four is just ultra sensitive to,

43:05

it just might not have anything to do with you. That's the irony. Once you see the other person, you realize how rarely you truly are implicated, even when they're accusing you. And that can be a source of tremendous healing, but it's extremely dangerous to the fixations of the four. It's essential to learn to calm down and focus.

43:30

The sexual four needs to understand that most of the time they believe they're explaining themselves when they're merely getting agitated. They must acknowledge that it's challenging to follow them where they're passionate, hard to understand, and not break contact with the speaker when that happens. It's essential to observe how one sends mixed messages when communicating with another.

43:47

Excessive gestures, sighs, laughter, jumping from one topic to another, seeking complicity, seducing with winks and insinuations. All these are smokescreens, performances that distract from the real content of the conservation, conversation, and encounter. As one heals, one realizes that this is another form of aggression, of fighting.

44:08

The stance of power against the world deflates when the sexual four is alone. Healing involves discovering how external verbosity turns into internal cannibalism. we'll have to come back to this, constantly revolving around one's navel, revisiting moods, recalling who offended, overlooked, praised, who agreed or disagreed, etc. For healing, it's necessary to inhibit inner chatter,

44:34

realizing that it freezes one's existence, fossilizing it in the past. Okay. This is dense, dense stuff. This is a very four-ish, I mean, a wonderfully healthy four, just beautifully written, poetic, evocative, verbose. There's a lot of commas, you know, but also so, I mean, just really tremendous self-reflection. Yeah. So external verbosity turns into internal cannibalism,

45:18

meaning oftentimes that the inner four, the four, when they're alone, there's a lot of inner chatter. And I don't know enough about what the literature says, but I know for myself that my inner chatter is very frequently, especially when I first discover it, when I first notice it, is between me and another person. It's not always argument.

45:42

It could be me and a teacher or me and a friend, but we're actually rarely a friend. It usually is power. Power is at stake in the inner chatter. That's very important. I don't think I had fully reckoned with that. But if I look at the composition of inner chatter, even if it's me exploring an idea,

46:04

it might be me exploring an idea with someone who I admire and my inner chatter, the inner Nick is talking almost as if to seek validation from the teacher, which of course never comes. This is just neurotic chatter. So at this point, when I become aware of that inner chatter,

46:23

I stop it rather than picking up the contents of it. But that did not come fast to me. On the other hand, the extreme demand for transparent friendships, the impossible search for the ideal friend who understands and shares everything, leads to a labyrinth with no exit where one faces the reduced, absurd hatred.

46:50

My unconditional and perfect friend should be just like me, but it turns out I hate myself, so there's no solution. I believe this is where the root of hatred hides, touching the genuine feeling of lack, the real deficiency. It's better to realize, though it's chilling to acknowledge, that when alone with oneself,

47:06

there's a tendency to want to die because one doesn't truly know who they are, what they want or desire. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think there's truth in it. sort of this unbearable not knowing who you really are quality. So while there's a tendency to want to die, quote unquote, is maybe dramatic,

47:45

it's not arbitrary because it does feel like death. not to know who you really are but that is the truth that the four has to face because the four doesn't seem to know who they are when they're not describing themselves in contrast to or in relationship with another the four is like kind of

48:07

along with maybe the two and well in the three in some ways i mean they're it's it's sort of a codependent triad which makes sense because they're the feeling triad. And I think emotions are so relational, sort of almost essentially. This friendship thing is interesting because sometimes I wonder whether it's what Annie's describing here. Is it Annie?

48:45

Annie? Sorry, I was just talking to another Annie. So this is also an Annie. Annie Chevreau. There's something a little bit tricky about the four, which is like, it's easy and tempting. And this is what she's doing is to say like, oh, you have this impossible standard of what friendship ought to be. And everybody disappoints you.

49:15

And just so that you can play out your thing. But there's also a slight counter argument to that, which is I think if the four holds themselves in high regards, they can be very selective about friendships and honor that the kind of friendship that they're seeking is quite rare.

49:31

but it's somebody who cares about intimacy and wants that as desperately as they do. And I think fours get along with fours. I think I read somewhere that most types don't like They don't like people who have the same type as them. So threes dislike threes, twos dislike twos. Because you can kind of spot their thing.

49:55

And then it triggers you in some sense because there's recognition there. And it's like a mirror that doesn't feel good. But fours don't seem to have that as much. And it kind of makes sense, right? Because in a way, the four is playing another game, which is just like,

50:15

a game of lack, a game of self-hatred to some extent. And so we see this, I think, I'm trying to think if there's any pop culture examples, but the elitists kind of like each other. They like shitting on the same bands. I think people who share a love of art,

50:37

I think some of the kind of classic storybook relationships between artists, I think artists like being married to artists. Artists also constantly s**t on other artists, but Yeah, I guess all I want to say here is I wouldn't just dismiss a four's demand for this radically transparent friendship as a sort of device that exists just so that

51:01

they'll be disappointed. I would say that might be the case. And they really have the right to want those friendships and to pursue them and just to be realistic that they're very rare. Yeah. and probably what you want is a mix right you probably want a mix of one or two

51:21

extremely intimate powerful soulmate type relationships and then accommodate a lot a lot more that are lighter maybe or maybe just the four wants very few relationships how are we doing on time we're already an hour in oh my goodness look we're not here to we're not here to get likes So we're just going to keep trucking on.

51:49

I make no apologies because this is like the raw material that we're working with here. But we are so early. I think we've got quite a ways to go. It's crucial in the process. To recognize the tendency towards self-destruction and wanting to destroy another because it highlights lacking aspects that arrogance covers up.

52:18

It helps to see oneself as a spoiled and indulged child when the common biography of the sexual four attributes that to another sibling. It's not easy to accept that one hasn't been the favorite. Okay, I need to track this because I'm getting a bit lost. I've got to find this section about sibling. It's probably not.

53:03

I don't know.

53:05

Uh-oh. Here we go.

54:03

Ayuda a comprender mejor algo del subtipo del verse como niño mimado y consentido cuando lo común en la biografía del sexual euphoria es atribuir eso a otro hermano. Okay, well, let's try to unpack this, not through the Spanish, because that didn't really help me. But this is very important.

54:49

I remember reading this the first time and feeling major recognition here. And maybe this is specific to the sexual floor, but it's not easy for them to contact their lacking. Aspects of their lacking, they feel safe confronting aspects of their lacking. I'm not... good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not attractive enough.

55:29

This person is that lacking is safe for them, but that they lacked that there was real lack that they really didn't get something. That pain is very, very difficult for the four, not, not self lacking that's easy, but, um, actual lacking. that maybe they weren't loved or cared for as much as they, you know, as they deserved.

56:12

So when she says it helps to see oneself as a spoiled and indulged child when the common biography of the sexual four attributes that to another sibling, it isn't easy to accept that one hasn't been the favorite. One knows, but it's necessary to surrender to the evidence without making up stories,

56:32

without placing oneself above surrendering to the pain of reality that one hasn't been overly cared for or attended to. The sexual complains laments is unsatisfied, suffers a lot, but doesn't fully let oneself be touched by what hurts. It's necessary to deeply feel it without escaping the harshness of discovery with excessive crying, tantrums,

57:01

hateful outbursts that distract from the real deficiency. Healing involves replacing complaints and laments with the conviction that if one has the strength to oppose, one also has the strength to face reality no matter how painful. This last part reminds me of my childhood memory of, quote,

57:22

how I defended myself from not being the favorite by competing with my sister with qualities I had and she lacked, end quote. So, OK, so I mean, that clears things up. Really just phenomenal stuff. So, yeah, a classic quote. feature of the four childhood feature of the four not true for me not true for

57:47

plenty of people but is that like another sibling came along and became the favorite and um the four may end up telling a story of their own you know being spoiled or being indulged they might even tell a story of not being loved

58:03

But the one thing that they won't do is let themselves feel the pain of that bereft child, feel the pain of not being loved, feeling the pain of being neglected, feeling the pain of deficiency. And so just sitting in that hurt is the work for the four, at least as captured here. and not telling stories about it.

58:40

And she makes a great point. If you need to do this work, you can cheer yourself knowing that you've been fighting your whole life, opposing everything. So you're very strong. You've been, you you've, you've developed an incredible strength. And so there's really nothing that the four can't face.

59:00

And I think the four knows that maybe that's a way to trick, trick the four. I think every type sort of has a way to trick themselves into healing by appealing to their own fixation. And of course, I don't know if that's a good idea, but if I were to do it with a four, I would say.

59:21

you know, or let's just say with myself, I would say something like, you pride yourself on being able to really feel the full spectrum of experience. That's your superpower. That's what makes you you. So then you should be able to sit in your own hurt and be honest with yourself.

59:45

Go ahead and do that and just notice if you're able to contact it. And if you're not, that's okay. But then maybe that's something that you'd want to be doing. With maturity and by delving into working with character, the sexual four realizes that they remain particularly vigilant when it comes to affection, struggling not to become envious,

1:00:07

measuring whether they are loved more or less than others. It's healing to cool down the emotion, stop feeling so much, and use their head, realizing how absurd it is to want to control something as uncontrollable as affection. Moreover, they shouldn't deny others what they freely allow themselves, expressing love and hate as they please. Thus,

1:00:26

the path to healing involves no longer feeling exceptional, in the sense that everyone is in their own way, and leads to a genuine desire for equality and belonging. Anger and moodiness often serve to avoid feeling clumsy, tired, or depressed. It's therapeutic to soften, not fight, not go against what one considers as weakness,

1:00:47

and recognize feelings shared by all, including dependency, which is the battleground for the sexual four because they vehemently deny it. Yeah, codependency is another one of these words that I wish I had have known how dangerous it was when I identified myself as not codependent in contrast with my previous partners who I experienced as codependent.

1:01:11

I think codependency is no longer really has that taboo quality that it did 10 years ago, but maybe 10 years ago, the worst thing you could be is codependent. I think we're getting a little bit smarter in how we talk about that now. And any here mentions no longer feeling exceptional and that sort of quality of

1:01:34

equanimity that we're all in it together, both as beings and as emotions and experiences and phenomena, just taking as it comes, accepting as it is, not even going to tell a story about it. That's kind of, those are some of the markers of the healing journey.

1:01:56

It's as if their life depends on it because of the deeply ingrained and distorted internal image of being free and independent. Life depends on not being codependent. While it's true that many have lacked support in life and had to fend for themselves, it's essential to note that their complaints and vulnerability manipulations are so

1:02:16

convincing that they easily find someone to help or rescue them. Personally, they know they've had to walk alone, but have clung to strong supports along the way. Partners, teachers, people who have stood up for them, instructors who supported them in challenging times. It's been hard to admit they've received more support than believed,

1:02:34

perpetuating dissatisfaction and justifying mistreatment toward themselves and others. See, it's so hard, this work, because it goes in both directions. The four both has to admit that they've received less love than they deserved. Less support, that they have been alone and feel that hurt. And they have to feel that they have been supported, that they're not alone.

1:02:59

Both of those moves are anti-rivalry moves. All those moves are softening moves. It's not so extreme. I'm not so much better and I'm not so worse. All these moves are undermining the battle, the battleground, the rivalry that fours experience. The sexual four becomes, sorry, I lost my place here.

1:03:28

It's been difficult to dissolve the arrogant attitude of not feeling indebted to anyone, believing that successes were only due to personal charm or worth rather than the generosity of others. The sexual four becomes passionate with the belief that if the credit isn't entirely theirs, they get nothing.

1:03:41

The words everything and nothing are especially dangerous for this character as they open the doors to irrationality, leading to a hateful hell. They need to prohibit entering there and accept their deficiencies and vulnerabilities, which humanizes. As the belief that they've made themselves fades, they begin to genuinely express gratitude. When they manage to do so,

1:04:03

they realize they can follow their own path, free from the burden of counter-dependency. Well, that's a great word, counter-dependency. As in, you don't have to carve your own path, no matter what you're going to. So sharing a path with others is a beautiful thing. Working with your teachers is a beautiful thing.

1:04:27

Feeling dependent and grateful to them and their work. That's what I take from counterdependency, a kind of inverted form of codependency. Ceasing to place oneself above or below in personal relationships helps integrate character aspects that are often projected outward. Let me quickly check. Okay, we have a lot more to do.

1:04:48

So, and now even I am mindful of my own time. So I'm going to kind of start powering through this. And we're going to have to do this probably with the fours and the fives because the fours and the fives have the most to say.

1:05:07

I think I remember seeing some of the other types and they're much more... they don't go as deep or as thorough or as long. Ceasing to place oneself above or below in personal relationships helps integrate character aspects that are often projected outward. Sexual four resists seeing themselves as authoritarian, intolerant, rigid.

1:05:28

Profound change comes when they become aware of how they silence or intimidate with moodiness, anger, and tantrums. They especially can't tolerate changes in plans and often blame those responsible as if they'll never forgive them for ruining their imagined perfect scenario. I don't do that. But that sounds unpleasant.

1:05:48

They detest unexpected visitors and show their displeasure for the unforgivable sin of disrupting their day's plans. The real reason for their anger is not having time to prepare, ensuring the meeting isn't mundane, and the rational explanation they give themselves is a lack of food, even when the fridge is full.

1:06:05

In such cases, empathizing with others helps understand the impact of hateful behavior. It's healing to develop an out-receptive attitude, which this subtype lacks. This aids in recognizing how often others become diplomatic with them. Taking seriously the suspicion of being feared is transformative. That's true. Taking seriously the suspicion of being feared is transformative. It's vital to inquire, listen,

1:06:29

and especially hear feedback regarding harshness, aggressiveness, and outbursts without defending oneself with a common excuse. Yes, I'm unpleasant, and so are you. Admitting harmfulness helps in relinquishing the right to attack when something is bothersome. It's a wake-up call for the subtype to realize they don't have the exclusive right to be offended by others in consideration.

1:06:49

In any case, it's therapeutic to delve into this, questioning why they deny others the feeling of being offended when they themselves are so sensitive to offense. I'm going to skim now and look for gems. I mean, there's such good stuff here. I love this. In the role as therapist,

1:07:19

it's crucial for the sexual four to trust their ability to absorb the group's emotional atmosphere. The four does have this tremendous ability to absorb, and we'll get into the self-preservation four. That's their almost go-to move is absorption. We have just tremendous capacity for all of the emotions. And so trusting that capacity is important.

1:07:40

And that aids in what she's describing is that receptivity. I can receive this. I can I can allow this and I don't have to interject it. I don't have to experience it. It's true about me, but I don't have to attack it. I can just include it in my experience.

1:07:57

And when fours start to tap into that superpower of theirs, they don't have to get aggressive. And often the four, at least for myself, I know that I oftentimes, when I slip up in reactivity, oftentimes I'm taking the other person's aggression or aggression that's there and then I'm jumping on it.

1:08:19

Because I already have so much latent aggression that that's an area that I get sensitive around. The sexual four is maybe different. The sexual four probably doesn't have as much held in aggression. But they also seem to have a bottomless amount of it. This is great.

1:08:49

It's therapeutic to endure the void or tell the patient, I don't know how to help you right now. I don't understand you or how does my feedback resonate with you? We'll see that again in the five, how difficult it is for the five to say, I don't know how to help you right now.

1:09:03

I don't know what the answer is. Not knowing is unbearable, both for the four and for the five, for somewhat different reasons. So for the four, how are you experiencing me right now is a great answer. question because the four doesn't know okay moving on to de-dramatization You know, so the Ford wants to dramatize everything. And, uh,

1:09:33

that, you know, tendency, the tendency then sabotages turns everything into drama, which then turns everything into conflict, which then reinforces rivalry, which then reinforces winning or losing either way. There's a codependency or a counter dependency. And I, I get locked into relationship with my rival. The Celtics aren't anything without the Knicks.

1:09:54

The Yankees aren't anything without the Red Sox. No. How do you become a whole independent person with your own path? Not independent as alone, but independent as someone, a full being. Full being with work to do that doesn't exist in competition with anyone else.

1:10:17

For healing, the sexual four must develop a continuous vision of their process in life. Often any reproach made to me, no matter how trivial I experience it, is a disqualification to my entire person. So that's the dramatization. Although discovering this is disheartening, it's important to rescue how much fragility is hidden beneath the apparent ease and

1:10:39

security of the persona one has built. To heal, it's necessary to inhibit the temptation to caricature oneself internally as a dangerous monster or as inferior. It's transformative to discover how dramatic exaggeration often involves matters related to guilt. From the outside, it's easy to recognize the sexual four as deeply guilty. However,

1:11:04

the subtype commonly feels they've denied guilt due to excessive confidence in the veracity of their impulse. They don't recognize themselves as guilty because guilt is a natural state in which they systematically and robotically apologize without knowing why. Healing involves taking responsibility, being attentive to when truly hurts another. Apologizing also means forgiving oneself naturally without dramatizing,

1:11:31

without beating oneself up, without giving oneself too much importance as hatred is rekindled. So when we see this with all the types and we see this in our relationships, I am sure there's a name for this, but it's what she's describing is that the four The four can't handle guilt. So if the four has something,

1:11:55

especially the sexual four, if the sexual four has something they really need to apologize for, I'm sorry that I hurt you. It's very hard for the four to experience that real guilt, that real remorse. I'm not talking about negative feelings. I'm talking about like, I'm so sorry that I hurt you. That's not okay. You know, whatever.

1:12:18

It's very difficult for the four to access precisely because they're so deeply guilty. So they live in guilt. Therefore, they can't stomach taking, you know, accepting guilt for something, accepting remorse. Guilt is that natural state. And so then what is that healing state? Well, it's twofold. One is developing the capacity truly to have guilt,

1:12:47

but then also letting go of all that guilt, which I assume here she's describing kind of the primordial guilt, the original guilt, which is that there was some painful separation and some painful loss of connection. And it's my fault. It's because I'm bad. And we talked about that in the introduction to Enneagram 4.

1:13:12

It's necessary to develop a vision of the future, project oneself there and draw on experience. One knows that the pleasure of exploding is short lived compared to the remorse and guilt that torment after. Yes. Developing compassion. For the sexual four’s subtype, it's a matter of will to find peace. Again, that will, the doing.

1:13:47

It's a kind of mental and spiritual exercise to feel good and cultivate well-being. To feel pity is to recognize that one is made of the same stuff as everyone else. Everyone is as they are, has their own life story and path, and we all do what we can. We are all equally both awful and divine,

1:14:05

as Pearl said, even though the sexual four tends to value themselves either too high or too low. Yeah, everyone has their own gifts. So the four, yeah, I think the four has to learn that it's both the discernment and the sameness. For the four, it's a learning experience to discover that being calm and in agreement with the

1:14:37

environment is not living half-heartedly, but a state to which we all naturally aspire. She shares some stuff about the importance of breathing and meditation. Being compassionate is also about regaining self-esteem, feeling worthy. It's not about being solemn or arrogant, but an open, benevolent, natural way of being in life. Personally, I associate it with renouncing excessive histrionics.

1:15:19

I know I have to be attentive because the tendency to trivialize or make light of what I want to say is pure automatism. And I often realize later because of the bad taste it leaves me. It's like debasing myself, selling myself short, not standing firm in what I maintain, losing my footing,

1:15:37

and thus attacking myself and deceiving others. Fours have profound self-esteem issues. I think it's sort of a simple way to describe it, but it's true. feeling compassion is continuing to work on oneself knowing that one can't always stop the runaway horse of hatred watching oneself and not persecuting oneself i

1:16:04

think we i think we've got it but i love the way she ends it the sexual four must come to understand that this is a crazy idea this being um So let me back up. One fears dissolving into the world, becoming bland, losing one's place, disappearing.

1:16:23

The sexual four must come to understand that this is a crazy idea, a cognitive distortion. What sounds to them like inauthenticity and fluff is actually letting oneself be guided by the true loving feeling that naturally flows when one stops being hard on oneself. I've learned about all of this in gatherings with friends when I realized the

1:16:41

pleasure I got from listening to them, recognizing their gestures, their way of laughing and speaking, so familiar and comforting for being so. I also enjoyed sometimes not understanding them at all, but just being there, laughing, being silent for a moment, and taking a break from always wanting to be the center of attention.

1:16:59

To have compassion is to admit you're wrong, to lose in emotional intensity and gain in clarity, realizing everything is simpler than one imagined, that one has a very bad temper and a very good heart. So that's the sexual four. We covered it in 80 minutes. So for all you fours out there, thanks for making it with me.

1:17:26

And we'll do the self-preservation four and complete the four next time. See ya.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a lovely Monday morning here in Brooklyn, New York. We're going to continue on with our Enneagram journey, our close reading of Claudio Naranjo's 27 Personalities in Search of Being.

0:19

We are on the four, and today we're going to be looking at the social four. Quick housekeeping notes. For some reason, last time, the screen recording didn't scroll when I scrolled, so I apologize for that. Hopefully that's fixed this time. And if you're a longtime listener to the Barrcast,

0:37

you may be interested to know that I post these on YouTube as well as Substack. You can check out polytrope.substack.com. So if you're getting this on the feed, that's great, and I'll make this listenable. But if you do want to see the visuals, they're up on YouTube. Okay, so...

1:01

We're in the four and we're gonna talk about the social four first. And so maybe a little bit of context here. So Naranjo's book is a collection of essays. He does some framing, but then the essays are largely written by psychotherapists in this community, in this circle.

1:29

So each person writes about their own psycho-spiritual development for their type. So we'll get into that. And each subtype has a kind of a keyword. So for the social four, the keyword is shame or vergüenza. I think vergüenza is... pretty straight ahead shame, but let's just quickly see if there's nuance to that.

2:02

Maybe it doesn't come through in English. It's maybe a bit lighter. I don't know if that's just my own imagination. It maybe is a little bit closer to embarrassment than shame is. One of the tricky things with shame is that shame is also used to describe the whole heart triad.

2:38

Two threes and fours all have their core emotion as shame as opposed to fear for the head triad and anger for the gut triad. So shame is being used elsewhere in the Enneagram. And let's get into it. Naranjo is going to point out another limitation of the word shame.

3:02

The contrasts between the character types of the four are the most striking as their different subtypes seem more differentiated than in the other passions. When I explain this topic in Spanish, we talked about this last time, I usually say there are sufferers, let's call it sufferers, endurers, and the insufferable. Sufridores, sufridos, e insufribles,

3:29

which I'm going to translate as sufferers, endurers, and the insufferable. It would be nice if we could make endurer maybe suffering. But suffering, it's sort of the suffered. if we choose to translate this, you know, really fully later, we can come back. Maybe I'll actually even since, you know,

3:55

so part of this is I'm tempted to turn this into a translation project and that's kind of the background here. So I'm just going to even give this a slightly different highlighting color so that I can come back to it. So the social E4 is a person who complains too much.

4:11

They are very tearful, and often play the victim role. In the DSM-IV, a category of person given to self-sabotage is suggested. The characteristic indicated by Ichazo for this character, Ichazo being Naranjo's teacher, is shame, vergüenza, which descriptively seems accurate but doesn't fully describe a neurotic need. So this is an important point.

4:37

Indeed, these are people who undervalue themselves and therefore feel less than others. But how can we explain that these people are so prone to self-blaming and unfavorably comparing themselves to others? So what I love about Naranjo and take from this is each each types or subtypes keyword needs to be a shortcut for

5:02

the story that they tell themselves, the story that they're fixated on. And it has to have some internal logic. I mean, that logic will be fatally flawed, but it has to sort of make some sense. So we can't just sort of say, oh, yep, they have shame.

5:16

Vergüenza has to be doing some job for the social four, for their neuroses. So what is the job that it's doing for their neuroses? And let's find out. The answer, it seems to me, is found in what Melanie Klein calls the depressive position, through which the child prefers to blame themselves rather than vent their anger against the mother whom they desperately need similarly we can consider that the social four prefers to swallow their own poison rather than express it towards their loved ones they've learned to internalize their aggression due to an exaggerated emotional dependency. So as we explore the subtypes, we're going to keep all of this in mind,

6:09

which is these are sort of three different ways of coping with the same wound, which is separation and rejection from the mother figure, from the parent figure, from the caregiving figure, from the sort of first external object. Melanie Klein is a really important figure in, I think, modern psychology around kind of object relations.

6:39

So the social four has chosen to lower themselves. They've chosen to blame themselves rather than express anger. And let's talk about more about the way they do that. And I'm not sure. We'll maybe have to come back to it and really make sure we understand as it's meant.

7:05

So this is, now we move into the essay from, this woman's name is Sonia Gajnaj. That's how maybe you pronounce it. It's a very interesting last name. G-A-J-N-A-J. The Transformation of the Social Four by Sonia Gainai. In the past, I didn't recognize the chained thoughts of envy or the envious emotion.

7:30

The world was against me, and nobody gave me what I wanted or needed. I didn't push away. I was pushed away. So that's that victim, victim orientation. This way, I often set up situations where I was the victim and others were my perpetrators. I projected my own hatred onto others. and didn't take responsibility for my envy.

7:54

It's a pretty direct articulation of that shame. And so that's also maybe why vergüenza, embarrassment, is maybe actually, it's like, Shame is so primordial. And I think it can be different for different people. But if you have that dream where you're in class and you're in your underwear, do you feel shame or do you feel embarrassed?

8:32

I feel more connected to embarrassment in that moment because shame... Shame feels to me more connected to I've done something bad, so I'm bad. I'm bad. Embarrassment is like I'm in a... I'm... And of course, embarrassment, we'll have to do some etymology work on that, but... It's more... Oh, this is embarrassing. It's like... It's closer to victimhood.

9:13

I think that's the key point. Shame, I don't think neighbors victimhood in the same way. Shame feels more identifying as the perpetrator. Embarrassment feels more identifying with the victim, sort of a victim of the circumstance, a victim of the situation. Even if you've done something bad, you still feel victim-y. So I think that's really important.

9:39

So I'm hanging on to embarrassment here. And in fact, I do want to, let's take our etymological detour right now. So vergüenza etymologia. I don't know if it's still online. Oh, here it is. Is this it? The Castellano in linea. There's a nice... etymological dictionary for Spanish. Oh, here it is.

10:52

Humiliation, humility.

11:06

Yeah, so the more I get into Vergüenza, the less adequate shame is. It's certainly not sufficient. I don't think it's wrong. But I do want to look at the Latin. Yeah, so its root is the Latin vericundus. feeling shame, shame-faced, bashful, shy, modest. And so actually veracundia can be seen as a virtue, knowing one's place, coyness, modesty,

12:07

shyness, bashfulness, shame, awe. So there is, I think bashful is also really nice. That's one of the seven doors. What does he look like? That's kind of the aw shucks one. So there's, so now we're starting to move into the aw shucks, not me. That's that lowering.

12:44

That's that self lowering that I think is core to the social four. And by the way, bashful is just such a fun word. That's from abashed. I think abashed, bashful. I just want to invite some of these words in because that helps us expand the, the space of story,

13:30

the space of fixation that we want to ultimately kind of be able to name for the social for. So abash, perplex or embarrassed by suddenly exciting the conscience, discomfort, make ashamed, lose one's composure, be upset, right? That's a big part of it, right? That sort of, um, that feel right. So the,

13:53

the dream where you walk into the class and you're naked, it's that feeling of almost frenzied heat of trying to remedy it, you know, covering yourself up with a, a textbook, right? Like that sort of, um, that, that, that, that loss of composure. So when Adam and Eve feel shame, if we're narrowing in in Genesis,

14:27

the moment of covering up with fig leaves or desperately trying to sort of hide themselves. So there's a more, I think it's more active. It's embarrassment in addition to shame coming closer to victimhood than perpetrator, that pole of experience. It also is much more active than passive. Shame I find to be debilitating. Shame is sort of paralyzing.

15:00

Whereas embarrassment or bashfulness is kind of aw shucks. No, not me. That, you know, that that kind of thing. So there, there's sort of a dancing, there's sort of a dancing quality to, to this. Okay. Let's talk, let's, let's hear from Sonia. I projected my own hatred onto others and didn't take responsibility for my enemies.

15:28

So when she says she projected her own, her own hatred onto others, just to be clear and slow, what she means is she couldn't own the hatred that she felt, let's say toward her caregiver, So she projected that hatred onto others, i.e. she said, they hate me.

15:48

They have to hate me so that I don't own the hate toward somebody who I really depend on. I felt a fierce competitiveness that I couldn't acknowledge, a competition for recognition, to be unique and special, to have a place, a place to exist, but sought from an internally boycotted ego always consumed with complaints and laments.

16:17

My immature personality. The rage I felt was intense, and I had turned it into crying and victimhood. It also became an excuse to let up. So rage, I think rage is core to the four, especially the sexual four, but that separation is so, it's not just painful, it's also infuriating in a way.

16:47

And the social four is gonna take that rage and project it onto others. They are angry at me. And so then my sort of roundabout way of expressing my own rage is expressing my own victimhood. Let's make it more real. It also became an excuse to let others make decisions for me and thus repeatedly

17:11

return to feelings of dissatisfaction and hatred towards the world and myself for not being able to make my own choices or maintain my perspectives. Confrontation naturally became impossible. Love only came through complaints and pain. I put myself in situations where someone could leave me so I could only see my partner through my self-devaluation and self-hate,

17:33

despising them more the longer they stayed by my side. That's heavy. And that's that for quality, that lack, that envy, right? Because I lack, you stay with me. But the more you stay with me, the more you rub salt in my lack. This manipulation, right? This is manipulative behavior was evident in all the relationships I formed.

18:01

It served so that others would give to me and was also the way to reflect my hatred and envy toward others. Another common aspect of my relationships was my dependence on the maternal figure and the deliberate deceit used to maintain the relationship at any cost. I'm not quite sure what she means by dependence on the mother figure.

18:22

So let's just check the Spanish to see if there's any clues there.

18:25

No, that's pretty direct.

18:47

Deliberate deceit used to maintain the relationship at any cost, I often felt abandoned and at the same time believed that I was being abandoned. First, I would indulge in excessive contact and then completely withdraw. I often felt abandoned and at the same time believed that I was being abandoned.

19:10

También solía ser muy abandónica y al mismo tiempo creía que me abandonaban. I'm just looking at, solía ser muy abandónica. Google here is translating abandonica as neglectful. Of course, that loses the abandonica and me abandonaban. But it didn't make sense to me to say I felt abandoned and at the same time believed I was being abandoned.

20:05

I think she's actually indicating the other. To be abandonica is to be like abandoning, I think. I don't know if that's a very common word. You know, I mean, this is like psychotherapy Spanish, so. Abandonica. I think we're going to have to go faster for our poor listeners.

20:35

Abandonica es el nombre que en psicología y ciencia se afina hacia la de sujeto que muestra los síntomas provocados por la situación de la enfermedad. I'm just gonna say I often felt, I often abandoned, I often abandoned and at the same time believed that I was being abandoned. I would indulge in excessive contact and then completely withdraw.

21:14

And I suppose there's a third talking about abandon is like doing things with abandon. In other words, like just sort of, um, exactly. And don't, you know, I'm, I love you and I love you and I ignore you and I ignore you. So there,

21:25

there's sort of a meta abandonment there of sort of not sort of abandoning the contract in a way, whether it's sort of good or bad. I used to live in a chaotic way. She just, she adds, right. So that continues that sort of, that's literally living with abandon without, without abandon with abandon.

21:51

I think it's with abandon, right? If you say that someone does something with abandon, you mean they behave in a wild, uncontrolled way. I wonder if that's abandonica, muy abandonica. I often, I would say I lived with abandon and at the same time believed that I was being abandoned. It's maybe too creative.

22:20

I used to live in a chaotic way as a means to create situations of social rejection. I used to live in a chaotic way as a means to create situations of social rejection. That's really exactly what we're just exploring. It was typical of me not to be able to uphold any work commitment unless it was on

22:38

my manipulative terms, which involved displaying a very loving and pseudo-supportive style at times, only to later abandon the task with the feeling that my energy was draining. I couldn't maintain it over time. due to any minor event that occurred. And I recognize some of that in myself. It's like sometimes I create a situation where it's like,

22:58

look at everything I'm doing, but that situation is so fragile such that, you know, when my partner doesn't show up or something, then I say, see, like I tried so hard and you, so that's kind of the social four energy there. And again, like this is heavy stuff. This is just kind of just always connect with it.

23:25

Just, you know, you at your worst, you at your unhealthiest, just recognizing fixation. And hopefully we can connect. Richard Rohr says, you know, we can connect with all of these. Just we make one of them or some of them an art form. Right. So it shouldn't be alien behavior to us.

23:44

But the social for this is like their home base, home fixation. Thanks to this, I would fabricate the feeling of being rejected, of not being recognized, of others receiving more than me. Back then, I didn't realize all of this. I simply felt that I couldn't handle responsibilities,

24:00

nor could I be in a relationship because undoubtedly life had given me less than others. I remember a strong feeling whenever I found myself in exposed situations. My stomach would churn from the shame I felt. The immense anxiety these moments of exposure brought me was often alleviated by temporary disappearances. I would lock myself away, isolate,

24:21

and then indulge in eating, which led to significant weight gain issues. My self-degradation was obsessive and I found it impossible to be alone as tormenting thoughts constantly invaded my mind. Now I associate the sweet taste of self-degradation with the internalization of a negative maternal image. That's beautiful. I associate the sweet taste of self-degradation.

24:43

And self-degradation could be the keyword for the social four. with the internalization of a negative maternal image. It's the childish way perpetuated into adulthood of having a mother." I mean, that's That's kind of the beating heart of it. Looking back, I am left with a sense of superficiality,

25:11

even though I also believed I was deep due to my tangled thoughts and intense emotions masked by an appearance of gentleness and sweetness. So this is someone who has, to some extent, kind of renounced her love of feeling and being deep, at least in that stage. I could be very sweet, pleasant, and exceedingly kind in public,

25:34

but become aggressive and irate in private, pouring a lot of energy into it because of the emotions I'd suppressed in social situations and would release when alone with those I devalued. The suppression of socially frowned upon emotions like anger or hate were transformed into sadness and victimhood. due to the inability to confront them. And so speaking,

25:58

especially in the 20th century, but still today in terms of gender and sexuality, one does think about the social four as more feminine or female. Maybe more women fours would be social fours, precisely for the reason that Sonya is describing, that culture wanted her to be sweet, pleasant, and exceedingly kind in public.

26:21

she couldn't own her rage basically. Um, and so the social force strategy is a good strategy for those who can't, um, can't express rage. Right. And, uh, social is, is, so there's social, sexual and self-preservation. These are sort of instinctual subtypes, right. Of, uh, where we seek sort of safety, I would say.

26:43

Um, and so the social force seeks to preserve social relationships, right. They, if I'm, If I'm sweet, pleasant, and kind in public, then that's my ticket to survival. I'll do a little bit more investigation on the subtypes. I actually don't know their origin. The suppression of socially frowned upon emotions like anger or hate were

27:07

transformed into sadness and victimhood due to the inability to confront them. The love within a relationship. The love within a relationship was the central theme of my life. To have or not have a relationship was the purpose of existence. Life was melancholic and filled with impoverishing experiences in this sense. Four is love relationship.

27:31

It's sort of their number one thing. And I don't know if that ever changes for certainly You you want to grow out of that impoverished view that someone is describing, but. I would say relationship may may always be the central theme of a forest life. The fruits of labor. Or the fruits of my work.

28:02

Through my work with the Enneagram, individual and group therapy, and also thanks to my training as an actress and later as a theater teacher, I've been able to develop greater awareness. This is reflected in taking responsibility in the workplace and being able to uphold long-term commitments. All of this is accompanied by a more positive attitude toward difficulties,

28:18

which consists of seeking solutions for complex situations. I can also be more practical and slightly more efficient in specific tasks. my work and study objectives i have a greater capacity to pursue what interests me i'm more proactive can handle multiple matters simultaneously without succumbing to

28:33

despair or anxiety and often achieve the goals i set for myself it's kind of dipping into three energy there right like efficiency moving things forward capacity achieving goals so one way of exploring this development you know could be you could describe it as bringing in her three wing

28:55

From the difficulty I felt in finding my place in a group in society today, I can deeply experience the sense of belonging. At the same time, finding my place has given me a sense of being more independent in emotional relationships, where I can now set clearer boundaries.

29:08

I'm also less extreme and give a more relative value to life situations and the emotions that overwhelm me. Shame, my egoic passion, is greatly reduced in social and work situations. I'm more articulate and clear in what I wish to convey. In romantic relationships, I was able to remain alone for several years, having casual relationships,

29:27

enjoying the moment without committing to a stable relationship. I prized life in all its aspects over romantic love and remained consistent with this in my thoughts, emotions, and actions to this day. I learned to have astonishing, unfamiliar, positive, and reassuring thoughts about myself. I learned to encourage myself. Today,

29:45

self-degradation has disappeared and I feel capable of fulfilling my responsibilities, whether or not I have energy. I also feel more compassionate towards some of my egoic limitations. I don't punish myself as much for what I cannot let go of or transform. And I'm less ambitious about my personal transformation.

30:01

That's really beautiful to hear and I think that's something that a four needs to hear. Precisely because a four is so oriented toward lack, a four will really jump onto therapy or inner work or personal transformation because it's like, oh, goody, another thing that I suck at. Oh, goody, another area that I need to work on.

30:20

Fours love doing the work. And as Suzanne Stabile said, fours also have the most work to do. But here Sonia is saying she also just let go of needing to transform in some of these ways, accepting some of her own limitations. At the same time I have more faith in something higher and believe I can support my

30:39

internal processes without seeking external help, I feel an urgent need for more autonomy and I'm currently seeking it. I'm more satisfied with my present, I don't miss the past, and I feel happier and more fulfilled in the present moment. For this it has been crucial to relativize and idealize less what others say or do

30:55

and allow myself to sometimes rejoice in others' achievements. Also help to give more credit to my thoughts and beliefs instead of listening to so much well-intentioned advice even if it might be right or helpful. I want to live my own life experience and make mistakes if necessary, taking responsibility for my errors.

31:11

In my future process toward greater consciousness, evolution, and better health, I realized it would be good to develop my autonomy through work and study. Autonomy comes up a lot for her. And this maybe is part of the social four, right? So dependent on others, dependent on advice, dependent on what others say.

31:27

She's developed more self-trust, giving herself room to make errors as well. Without debasing herself. Debasement could be another keyword for the social four. Debasement is actually quite nice. To position myself in my relationships with others with a more generous attitude so I can give without speculation, move away from the old neurotic need to establish symbiotic relationships.

31:58

And that's so hard, I think. I kind of came into adulthood in an age where codependency was sort of this, that's the worst thing you can be, is codependent. But it's not so clear as I get older. It's more about how much codependency do you want and does the other person want and what's your awareness of it.

32:30

I think we do wanna be dependent on our life partners. We do want to be codependent. That's part of what keeps us together, but it can't be as unhealthy as the unhealthy social for that sort of, not just needing the other, but I need you to, I need you,

32:57

to be a canvas on which I can project my own hate and anger that I can't stomach so that I can feel like a victim and debased and degraded and ashamed and embarrassed so that in that feeling, that's my way of reconnecting with the mother figure. That's not great. In personal relationships,

33:30

a social four acts from competition and comparison, trying to find value in themselves. For me, health means finding my own recognition and satisfaction. In romantic relationships, what's healthy is positioning myself as an equal to my partner without being swayed by emotional tremors. Positioning myself as an equal, that's all. That's all.

33:46

You can be codependent, but are you codependent as an equal? It doesn't mean equal in all things, but just an I-thou relationship. two human beings worthy of the same good treatment. To achieve harmony and stability both internally and within the couple, it's fundamental to cultivate thought and the ability to cognitively process experiences. Um, it's interesting that for,

34:16

for Sonia, you know, thinking and thought and bringing in the, the, the thinking side is harder for her. And again, I would say that's not going to be characteristic of, especially let's say the self-preserving four or someone, a four with a stronger five wing, which is the thinking triad. Okay. What helps in working on the ego? Initially,

34:42

the main help I received was undergoing individual therapy where I transferred my dependence onto my therapist. Again, this is a psychoanalytic circle. However, it was a positive relationship that allowed me to experience internalizing a caring mother who gave me a favorable view of myself. Yeah, internalizing the caring mother is, you could maybe say the work,

35:01

certainly at the fore and maybe of other types as well. Developing an inner mother is, Who knows you, who loves you, who cares about you, who sees your good, sees your bad. Group therapy and the ability to share made me confront my feelings of envy, jealousy, hatred, and competitiveness. Participating in the SAT program, that's this circle,

35:24

and sharing these traits with others of my same Enneagram type alongside my group therapy was greatly helpful. Suddenly, I felt I had fellow seekers, and this feeling opened up the possibility of delving deeper into understanding my ego. Useful tasks for working on the ego theater has been an indisputable means of

35:39

opening up and channeling my emotions and creativity. Dance, singing, and artistic expressions that progressively expose one personally through creative language are very beneficial. For social four, enjoying a leading role for a certain period with external support is very important at first. It helps develop a positive self-image and de-dramatize life.

35:58

It also reduces the fear of shame in exposure situations. In theater, placing emotions in a situation or character is a way to avoid being overly exposed while still expressing oneself. Theater comes up a lot in this collection. And I love that. And I think that's still a little underutilized in our kind of healing language today. This way,

36:24

the shame that restrains the always intense emotions and tangles emotional thoughts can gradually give way to expression and integration of various aspects of oneself. Meditation is a valuable tool for every Enneagram type. In my journey, certain mantras such as you have to do what needs to be done have been very helpful,

36:40

especially when emotions threatened to impede action. You have to do what needs to be done. Let me see what the translation or the Spanish is there. Gotta do what you gotta do. Let me change that. I mean, that's maybe not. You've got to do what you've got to do. Gosh, translating is an honorable profession.

37:27

I just made it work better for me. You've got to do what you've got to do. I have been very helpful, especially when emotions threaten to impede action. Concrete actions, even if I don't feel like doing them, are also greatly beneficial. Examples include presenting a better personal image or dressing up even when not in the mood.

37:45

It's like theater. I seek the character outside so that it can later become ingrained inside me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Starting to give was very helpful concerning my poor self-image and the attitude of seeking attention. Starting to give. I wonder what she means by that. Yeah, just as M.P. said earlier.

38:30

Organizing my activities and keeping a simple agenda is also useful. Engaging in situations where it's necessary to develop the thinking muscle, like studying something theoretical has been beneficial. In interpersonal relationships, it's healthy to find a balance between contact and withdrawal. This aids in enjoying greater independence.

38:46

Becoming indispensable to someone or having someone be indispensable to you certainly feeds the ego. Some behavioral changes. And this is the last section for the social four. Each essayist has their own style. Some are long, some are short. This is actually one of the shorter ones. One of the most noticeable changes I've experienced is self-support.

39:13

I used to live in the shadows of others, doing things for them, whatever ego-driven reason, but not taking charge of my life. Later in my process, I began teaching on my own, first with 25 students, which has now grown to 100. I have four pedagogical assistants and a secretary.

39:30

My identity is present in my work, and people say I have a unique touch in what I do. I would have never dreamt of this. From the outside, I seem confident, committed, and solid. But the truth is I wake up every day eager to work on my insecurities.

39:42

It's part of my current journey and seems to be yielding good results. Today, I can support my home and children on my own. There's no longer a huge gap between my public reactions and private ones. My emotions flow more balanced. My relationship with my children is filled with love and communication.

40:01

Being at home is a joy and being alone is a pleasure. Reading, listening to music, praying, doing nothing. I'm also in a relationship where we both enjoy tremendous independence and abundant love. Sexuality is the best journey. There's no more repression or inhibition.

40:16

I validate everything that comes from me without tying it to torturous situations or feelings of guilt. I love my parents just as they are and see them as individuals with their own lives and missions. They do the best they can, just like we all do. I remember a time when I lived in a kind of pseudo spirituality.

40:33

Later, I went through years of disbelief, tied to letting go of all my dependencies. I see. Yeah. Later, I went through years of disbelief tied to letting go of all my dependencies. Tuvo que ver con el hecho de soltar toda mi dependencia. Then faith arrived, an absolute trust in something higher.

40:58

I experienced it through dreams and feelings that have nothing to do with the psychological and bring me immense peace and joy. That's how my search is today. I think it's so important, this point that maybe putting spirituality, like another way to talk about spirituality is like, you've got to, you've got to believe there are more,

41:16

there's more to the psychological, there's more to life than the psychological. Ironically enough, like that I think can unlock a deep love and fascination for the psychological. But if you're in a, I think for myself, like this project now of like looking at 27 Enneagram subtypes, which is going to be a pretty massive undertaking, like,

41:45

It is connected also to a lessening grip on psychology as sort of this total explanation of who we are. I experienced it through dreams and feelings that have nothing to do with the psychological and bring me immense peace and joy. That's how my search is today. Happier and more enthusiastic.

42:04

I feel God in my own way, not following anything or anyone. And I believe it will remain this way for at least several more years. So that's the social four and her developmental journey, Sonia Gainai. Really kind of beautiful, brief explanation. So, Yeah,

42:26

I think as we come back to vergüenza and the story that the four tells themselves, in my work, I like to do, sometimes I call this the inner mandate or sort of the internal logic, the story you tell yourself unconsciously, the unconscious story that animates you, animates your world.

42:51

And that's the project here, too, with Naranjo and the word vergüenza. And so I think we don't have to rewrite it. But I think shame is probably actually not the most illustrative in terms of the neurosis or the fixation. It's more about debasement. It's more about self-degradation. It's more about embarrassment. It's self-lowering. I must be less than.

43:26

I must be less than, I must be a victim. That's the only way that I'll be in contact with others. So again, the four strategies are really convoluted. But they all come back to lack. They all come back to envy. And the social four, in a way, is the most naked with that feeling.

44:10

They just show up as lacking. In order to preserve relationships. I need you. I'm nothing without you. Um, and then when you're with me, you don't love me enough or you don't really want to be with me or, you know, you've got your job and, um, you create situations in your workplace where you feel less than.

44:49

And for, um, I don't want to end yet because I don't feel that I've captured the essence yet. I think what's difficult about the inner mandate or kind of coming up with this I must or else statement is it's layered, right? So I think at the deepest one, it's exactly this.

45:54

I've got to preserve my relationship with my mother who has... in some ways, abandon me. And so if I take on that abandonment as yes, because I'm no good. You're right, mother, I'm no good, please stay with me. That's the core of the, that's the pre-verbal social force strategy. Their emotional dependency Why does that work?

47:13

This is what I'm getting stuck on. It works because what it produces in the other person is reassurance. No, no, no. Of course I love you. And in a really complicated way, it also gives them license to act out their rage through crying or through feelings of victimhood. So they do get to experience some temporary relief because...

48:03

Let's say I'm a social four. I plan a big picnic for my partner, for my loved one. I prepare some really special day. So first of all, I have to do something really special to earn my partner's love. It's already not enough for me to be me. I have to do something.

48:26

This is maybe a little bit of the threeness to do something really kind of elaborate and ornate for the person to come. Maybe I'm going to surprise them. And they come, you know, meet me at Central Park at 4 p.m. And then they come and they had a really bad day at work.

48:45

And so they're not delighted by my surprise. So first of all, I've gone the extra mile because of my neurosis of anxiety. self-degradation self-lowering shame um debasement bashfulness just feeling less than feeling lower so i have to compensate i do something really amazing then my

49:14

partner doesn't respond the way i wanted them to and i say aha that's just confirmation that you don't love me that i am i'm no good to you You could be with somebody else and I might start crying or get really sulky and sad and withdrawn.

49:42

And regardless of how the partner behaves, that's the kind of like loop of the social four. I must be the one to blame. It must be my fault. Because if I'm not to blame, I might lose the relationship. So that's an example of an I must or else statement that might be relevant for the social floor. OK.

50:58

I'm going to call it. I feel like we've dipped into the social floor. And next time, we'll do sexual floor. See you later.

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and reasonably cool Friday morning here in New York.

I want to do a podcast within a podcast. So I'm going to be doing a series of recordings about the Enneagram, in particular the types four and five, where I find my own personality sort of most at home.

And I want to explore these with a very deep and very close reading of Claudio Naranjo, who is considered one of the sort of fathers, of the modernization enneagram. He worked, in the 1970s, extensively on the Enneagram and produced a really wonderful book called 27 Personajes en busca del ser, or 27 personalities in search of being. As far as I know, this hasn't been translated into English. I've translated it using the help of modern AI tools, but I also speak Spanish reasonably well, understand Spanish reasonably well, so have been able to spot check it here and there.

And it's funny if you find some of my earliest podcasts. I started, a podcast called reading Spanish, where I was practicing my own spanish translation. So in some ways, this is a real throwback for me. I think Naranjo's work is very powerful and full of insight, so I'm excited to dive in. So this is going to be the first recording, and we're going to talk about Enneagram type four. And we're going to read Naranjo and discuss. So I, have here on the left, my translation, on the right, the source text.

So Enneagram type four has the sin or the passion of envy. So right away we're getting right into sin, which is such a fraught word for the Enneagram, and will immediately turn off two kinds of people. One is the religious or Christian type, who feels uncomfortable working with sin. because sin is so loaded, it evokes thoughts of hell. It might evoke cultural norms like, let's say, homosexuality being a sin according to some churches or some religious people. So it might be unbearably heavy for some people, and then for others, it just might feel, outmoded or sort of irrelevant. Sin is not real. Sin is a construct, etcetera.

But actually, I think you can't really take the sin out of the enneagram. So one of the origins of the enneagram dates back to Ponticus. We're on the Internet, so let's google it. It's the eight deadly thoughts. And so this is the precursor to the seven deadly sins, which are much more, well known. The evil thoughts, Evagrius ponticus. So you won't find the seven deadly sins or the eight evil thoughts in the Bible. Rather, they were sort of, written about by a very early christian named Evagrius Ponticus. So I think in the 300s, he was a mystic. He, grew up in Turkey, it says here. And in order to deal with his own sin, he retreated to the Egyptian desert and joined cenobitic community of desert fathers. So I love this. I mean, we're talking about desert monks now. So that's when you talk about the Enneagram and ancient spiritual wisdom. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about people, fasting and going to the desert to connect as powerfully as they can with God, with the Source. I need to look up what cenobitic means and how to pronounce it. Community life. Okay. So I as opposed to, you know, hermetic. Fine.

Anyway, the eight evil thoughts, then you're just one away from the Enneagram nine. And as it turns out, the one that's missing is fear. And Richard Rohr points out, I think, in a compelling way, that fear, in a way, wasn't listed because it's the most common of the deadly thoughts. It's almost too close to name, too close to see. So when you add fear, which is the sin of the six, and the six is the most common enneagram type, and you round it out to nine.

So what is sin? What is passion? That's a big question. And there's a lot of ways to dive into it. I don't think we need to talk too much about it now, but just to ground us before we get into envy and the four, you could think of it as sort of addiction. It's like, this is where passion comes in. It's like, what do you just keep coming back to? What's your vice? What's your home base in terms of unhealth? Your home base in terms of addiction, your home base, we all know that, right? When we have these patterns and these dynamics that we're like, ugh, I can't believe I did it again. That's your sin. So it's important, I think, for the enneagram, at least the way that I know it, it's important to be ready to feel that humility and humiliation of, like, ugh, God. Yeah, that's me. Envy, that's me.

So let's talk about it. Envy is the passion for controlling and calibrating one's own existence by comparing it with that of another. The meaning of existence largely depends on the level of lack and frustration concerning what is perceived as desirable in others. So it's a pretty dense introduction there. And actually, I want to go slow here because this is so important. And I want to start off by saying, as a four, I've had a lot of trouble connecting with envy as a sin, recognizing it as my sin. I'm getting there, though. The more I, understand what envy really is, the more I'm like, yes, that is a problem for me.

But all of these sins, they have that quality where they rarely mean exactly what they sound like. When we get to the five, we'll talk about the five and avarice and greed. It's the same thing. It's never quite the most obvious or most common understanding of these sins, but they're there. And so envy, immediately when I think about envy, I think about wanting what other people seem to have. And for some fours that might be more available than others. For instance, by the way, I should add here, I'm just assuming that you have deep familiarity with the enneagram, and so if you don't, some of this might go over your head. And that's fine. Come back anytime. I'm not going to do too much table setting here. So the four and envy. If I'm closer to three, my threeness, then my envy may be more common in the sense of, like, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm following entrepreneurs on twitter, and they all seem to be crushing it. And I'm like, oh, why can't I crush it? What's wrong with me such that I don't have what they have? Am I not smart enough? Am I not ambitious enough? Do I not have enough charisma or clarity? So the four’s envy may be actually quite available in that sense, but as a four with more of a five wing, I never really found myself wanting to be somebody else or comparing myself unfavorably.

But I do feel a sense of lack. So I think one of the entry points is this word lack itself. And, To get into lack further. Although lack is actually quite a lovely word too. And I don't know enough about its origins, maybe we'll do some searching. But let's go to the Spanish. El sentido de la existencia de­ pende en gran medida del nivel de carencia y frustración respecto de lo que se percibe como deseable en los demás. So it's the level of lack respective to what I think other people have. So I'm doing two things. I'm constructing a view of what others have. And I'm using that sort of, perceived level of the other to then locate my own level. In most cases, unfavorably. But sometimes we'll see the four sometimes does flip it and compare themselves favorably. But it's always comparison, and it's constructed comparison. In other words, I'm perceiving that which is desirable in others, and then noticing that I don't have it. Or again, sometimes perceiving that they don't have it. And I have tons of it. But in both cases, even when it seems to be flipped in my favor, it's still lack. We'll get into that at some point. But it's still comparison. It's still coming from a starved sense of self.

And carencia, I think, is a really beautiful word that we'll use to come back to lack. So cariño is a term of endearment in Spanish. It's kind of a form of, love. It's like, dear one, mi cariño, my dear one. And so I think of the word dear as I want to bring in the word dear. Because we talk about, you know, people being dear to us. But their dearness is so already caught up in how painful it is when they're not with us. And we still see that a little bit in English today when we might say, that cost me dearly or it was a dear loss. There's an economy, there's a way of evaluating the love in terms of the pain of not having that one. You're so dear to me. I, don't know if you can contact that pain. There's heartbreak in dearness. And I think cariño, maybe because of the Spanish culture, I think it's a sweeter feeling. But there's that connection. Carencia is lack, and cariño is dear, slightly nostalgic.

So, paradoxically, the loving is almost informed by I love you, because I feel the pain of not having you. And so even when you're here before me, you're dear, you're cariño. Because I know I'm half living in you not being here. And so we're starting already to move into the word that I use to describe the four. Sometimes the four is called The Individualist. And I think that's just a really poor descriptor. I prefer The Romantic. And The Romantic starts to speak to that same feeling of nostalgia and fantasy and not being in contact. Instead, the form of contact that one is in the story. If you have a romantic idea of your partner or romantic idea of what you're going to do with your life, you have a fantasy. And that fantasy is somehow sort of grounded in the past. You've sort of already imagined how wonderful it could be.

There's a story about Jim Carrey, and I think Jim Carrey is a three, or at least, certainly this story speaks to his threeness. I don't like typing celebrities, and, you know, actually, even with Jim Carrey, I googled it just to be, you know, out of curiosity. Everyone thinks he's a seven. But here's a three thing that Jim Carrey did when he was young. He wrote himself a check for a million dollars, maybe even $10 million, and said, one day a movie studio is going to write you this check for a million dollars. And he kept it in his wallet for 20 years and then made The Mask and got to cash that check. So there's that manifesting quality, that future-looking fantasy that a three might have, and a seven would also have that. I think it's more the way that Jim Carrey shapeshifts and becomes chameleonic and has this ambition, for me, speaks to more of a three energy. Regardless, we're talking about something very different when we talk about romance or fantasy of the four. The Jim Carrey as a four would have fantasies of being a famous movie star, and then would look at his life as it is now, struggling to make ends meet and feel the heartbreak of not having the career that he had fantasized. So are we starting to get the feel of envy again?

Fours, and Naranjo says this, fours have the most diversity of their subtypes. So we're going to talk about all three subtypes, the social four, the sexual four, and the self preservation four. And so accordingly, envy can take on very different forms for the four. But I want to spend some time here talking about the kinds of envy that might be less obvious than sort of common envy. And one of them would be envy of the life that you imagined you should have or could have had. And the other, it might be also envy of your own childhood, envy of a time when things seem to have been wonderful. That's also behind you. So when we talk about others, let's use others in the broadest sense. It doesn't have to be other real beings who are physically in the world now. It could be beings in our fantasy land, beings in our memory.

The desire to have what the other has is not a wish whose end is to obtain precisely what the other possesses, but rather the only possibility of being in relation with them. Really deep stuff. As long as I lack, I have the possibility of being with you. And in the world, being dependent on the other or their qualities gives the E4 the illusion that through lack, they can escape inevitable separation.

False lack is suffocating. It's interesting. It's suffocating. The word I'm looking in the Spanish is fijación. So I want to look into that a little bit more in a minute. But again, another super dense paragraph here. So I think if all we do in this episode is just introduce envy, we will be doing quite a lot. This kind of envy is not about achieving an end where I get what the other has. So this is not an envy that has ambition. Again, go back to the Jim Carrey story. I think he's instructive, because if you follow his journey, he now sort of is like, there is no Jim Carrey. And I don't know, he's going through his own spiritual journey, but he's been very public about his spiritual journey being like the journey of the three. He reached the top of the mountain and then realized, he didn't feel any better. Nothing, nothing really happened for him. So that's that three piece, right, of like, wait: I've achieved everything I wanted. I got it. But then how come I'm not satisfied? That's not the flavor of the floor's envy. Because the four’s desire won't really actually drive them to obtain what others have. Instead, the desire itself is the only way the four knows how to have contact with other people. As long as I don't have what you have, as long as I lack, then I have the possibility of being with you.

It's like I'm a puzzle piece. Blanks and tabs. Sockets, slots, holes. Males and females. Males and females is actually quite evocative because Richard Rohr says that the four is the most feminine number on the Enneagram. And maybe we'll have time to talk more about sexuality and the four. But for now, let's use sockets or holes. The puzzle piece divot. That's my affordance for contact. I want to be filled in by others, not so that I'll actually get what they have. It's just that's the only way that I can have contact. Please complete me. Or please fill me with you. Which is a, powerfully feminine longing. Maybe just go as archetypal as you can with me. So just think about the energy. Not necessarily like the sex organs or anything like that. So, my hole, my opening, my lack, is my possibility of being in contact with others. Compared to the eight, who is the masculine, who would probably feel the opposite. My tab, my phallus is my power, is my possibility of being in contact with you.

Being dependent on the other of their qualities gives the four the illusion that through lack, they can escape separation. So, what a horrible, horribly painful and convoluted way to attempt and ultimately fail to heal the wound, which is separation. The wound of the four is separation. That's the childhood wound. Naranjo is not going to, in this text, talk much about the childhood wound. But someone like a Beatrice Chestnut or Richard Rohrer would more. And so I find that very helpful. Maybe we'll just touch on it now. The four’s divine memory, before the wound, before the fall, is connection, union, non separateness. There's no me. There's no you. There's no I. There's no other. There's no self, there's no world. There's just connection, sacred union.

And then there's a rift. Very painful. And I think fours feel this pain very, very deeply. And I think it's very, very early for them. So it could even be something like birth. Separation at birth. That's why I think fours have a hard time sometimes getting their own stories sorted out, because I think a lot of this stuff can be preverbal. That's how I feel for myself. So let's just take birth trauma as an example. That pain of that separation. Well, I feel the pain of that separation, and I feel that longing for connection. I have that divine memory of sacred union, and the only way I know how to try to put things back together again, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, is by lacking so that I have the possibility of being with you again. So I'm trying to escape inevitable separation.

False lack is suffocating. So it is a false lack. This lack is a lack that I myself have invented. I had to create a false lack in order to try to put things back together again to restore sacred union. Now this false lack is suffocating. When I see fijación, I don't know that word, but I think fixation. Yeah, it's fixation. So I'm not quite sure why this was translated as, suffocating, you know? And here you can see it's just used in the same way as Freud. Fixation is a great synonym, for sin or passionate passion. Fixation is quite good. So if you wanted to take the Christianity and the fall metaphor out of the Enneagram and put in psychoanalytic language, fixation, I think, would be fine.

They're very in touch with their desire to be loved and recognized, and they idealize this fulfillment in such a totalizing way that nothing can satisfy them. This paradoxical search for unhappiness is like a home, always lit, waiting for the departed one to return. I think we've hit those beats pretty well. But, what we're adding here, which is very true for the four, is they they are very in touch with this desire. So they have this longing. They're full of longing. There is the tragic quality. Absolutely. But they're not, They are romantic. They want that, love, they want that recognition. But they've set it up such that they'll never have it.

Being passionately envious means, in a way, being eternal children with a demanding gaze directed at the other. But since envy is a neurotic need, the goal is to always maintain the state of waiting and lack. Yes, that makes sense. So again, we're talking about kind of early childhood. And they somehow need to stay a child. They need to stay crying for milk, crying for comfort. And they've, you know, that fixation. They've fixated on that state of lack and chosen that as their home. The home that's always lit.

It's quite common for an E4 in childhood to have had a real experience of frustration and loss. Typical events could be the loss of one of the parents, the presence of a sibling perceived as privileged. Or who held an important position due to the need for special care. Or a family situation which the ephor felt they had to step aside and renounce a paradise they had already tasted. Again, I think this maybe will resonate with some fours. And with other fours, it'll seem quite alien. It did to me when I first read it because had both my parents and my only child and don't remember or have a particular family situation in mind. But in a way I think I have an extraordinary sensitivity. And so I think that the “sibling,” the privileged sibling, the preferred sibling, is sort of me, my own early child with whom from an early age I seemed to be in competition with. And when I know, when I think about my family story, there's recognition there. Even some of my earliest childhood memories are already of nostalgia for me at a younger age.

In relationships with others they perceive themselves as inadequate, guilty and submit to abusive relationships in order to reconfirm their victim position. They are very emotional and empathetic to the suffering of others. Empathy whose function is to highlight their own suffering. So there are a few important things going on in this paragraph. They submit to abusive relationships in order to reconfirm their victim position. So there might be a there there in terms of choosing, choosing relationships and choosing life paths in which one feels at home in that victim, role.

Victim of what? Victim of not getting the love that they wanted. Right. So that they can be fixated on lack. So that there's a perceived non separateness. It's this sort of really kludgy, duct taped together idea of non separation. It's codependency, right? It's total codependency. But it's an unusual flavor of codependency. That means by being with you, I can always feel that pain of lack that you don't have. And so somehow we'll fit together in that.

The four both wants to be experienced as complicated and actually is complicated. So we're in hard mode with this particular neurotic fixation or passion of envy, but they are very emotional and empathetic to the suffering of others. Empathy, whose function is to highlight their own suffering. This is the first thing that I'm not sure about. That might be a little bit unkind, a little bit unfair to say that fours are empathetic so that they can highlight their own suffering. I don't think it's totally wrong. I get it. So, you, know, for instance, I do coaching, and I like working with other people. And there is some sense in which my empathy helps me connect to my own suffering, which somehow feels like home base for me. There's some way in which I have a role that feels like almost like a, steward or a keeper, a keeper of suffering. And so when I work with other people and have empathy for their suffering, there's a way that I am at home in this negative way. So I get that. And I also feel that my most transcendent and healing moments of real connection, of real non separation, those also are in compassion, being with another in their suffering.

And so I would say the unhealthy four likes to be empathetic to others so that they can kind of wallow in their suffering. And I think the healthy four likes to be with the suffering of others because they have tremendous capacity for it, and there's real compassion there and real healing for themselves. So I will make that proposed modification on Naranjo here.

They dedicate a lot to the relationship and are always ready to sacrifice. This dedication to the other does not aim to adapt to them, but to reclaim an omnipotent position as a sacrificial victim. I'm checking the Spanish just to complete it and make sure I understand. Yeah, Yeah, that resonates with me. And so in relationship, particularly in your closest relationships with your loved one, your mother or your father, maybe a boss, a four will find themselves in a sacrificial role. Kind of a bit of a martyr role. Potentially not actually in in contact with the other. Not actually because the other person is demanding or something. But so, again, so that I can feel at home in this victim role. So even if I have something, I will gladly throw it away and give it so that I can just get comfy.

There really is a coziness. There's a coziness to that lack. Naranjo called it earlier, home, always lit. And there's so much power in that too. Because when I lack something and it cannot be filled, that's the presence of an absence. It's the strength of a weakness which is invincible because nobody can fill me up most of the time.

The seductive call, especially in the social subtype, is that of the fascinating, whining siren that stimulates in the other the need for protection and to be narcissistically powerful. Quejumbrosa is whining. I want to look that up. I don't know that word at all. Quejumbrosa. Beautiful word. Yeah. Plaintive, maybe. I think of the siren as screeching or screaming or singing. But this is more plaintive, or querulous.

The fascinating wailing siren stimulates in the other the need for a protection and to be narcissistically powerful. I think we're just gonna keep, keep on keeping on. I don't have much to say about that.

Unexpressed aggressiveness, except in the sexual subtype where it is expressed, produces retroflection of the body level, even leading to self harm. The body itself is used as a channel to draw the other's attention, expressing deep needs through suffering or illnesses. Yeah. So retroflection has been a very powerful, kind of physical metaphor for me of drawing in and contracting and tightening. And also to basically be in getting injected with self hate, essentially, or self-flagellation. So because it's this aggression, Naranjo will later want to talk about biting and cannibalism. And again, going back to the mother and the baby, that eternal childhood of the four, it is a particular four quality. I think it does serve us to always hold the four as essentially in infancy, really quite young, potentially breastfeeding. So like, the biting, the oral wanting. Nourishment of the four. If they don't express that anger, that frustration, that wanting, they end up kind of introjecting or having that become self devouring, self biting. And then their needs only show up through the impact of all that self harm. Getting sick.

In the sexual subtype, the expression of envy takes on different characteristics. Crying is replaced by aggressive shouting and demanding. The demand to fill their lack is overpowering, reaching the point of destroying or hating the one they love when they show their human limits and therefore do not live up to their greatest idealizations. This is a good stopping place where Naranjo is starting to point to the social, the sexual and the self preserving as three different subtypes of how that envy, how that lack, how that romanticism is manifested. And this is exactly why the three subtypes are so different.

We'll just sneak a little bit into the social four to talk about this. Cuando explico este tema en espa­ñol, suelo decir que hay «sufridores, sufridos e insufribles». So it works better in Spanish. The, the three types are the sufferers, the crybabies, you could say, if you were being especially unkind, the ones most in their childhood of like waah, I need milk. So they just, they're crying, they're plaintive. That the wailing siren. Maybe wailing would be better than whining. So that's the social for the wailing siren. The sexual four is insufrible. They're insufferable, they are attacking, they are shouting and demanding and having tantrums. So actually I would say maybe in that sense the sexual fours a little bit, older in their childhood, when Penelope was 13 months, she would have these big tantrums. So she's moved on from crying into her anger, into her shouting, demanding. So the fours really then lean into the injustice or the hate, the anger of that lack. And then finally the self preservation force are the sufridos, the one who quietly suffers, who's done the most retroflection and has buried that inside of themselves. And might come off as stoic. So it's funny, I mean, we'll talk more about my own relationship with these three subtypes. But stoicism, I think, has never appealed to me precisely because I'm sort of born into a stoic mode that I'm sure that's not what the real stoics meant, but it's like a near, it's like a near twin of it. It's like an evil cousin of it. And so the idea of holding things in, it's like I can't possibly hold any more in. That's the self preservation four is the sufrido. So in English, I think they translated it as sufferers, endurers and insufferable or unbearable. We'll change that later.

Okay, well, this is difficult material, so if you made it this far, I hope that you take good care of yourself and be patient with yourself if these things click with you. The way that the Enneagram works, especially in the early stages when you are still on your path to discovering your number and your subtype and all these things, it is confronting. It is like seeing yourself in the mirror and not liking what you see. And so I think that's just part of the Enneagram journey. but it does get better from there because then you can do the work. This is not, this isn't about, you've got some goods and you got some bads, you got some pros, you got some cons. Like maybe the pros of the four will come up. But really the point is healing. The point is the healing journey. And for the four, I'm increasingly convinced that connecting, truly connecting with your envy is very, very important. And it took me probably five years or so to really start to see envy. Not to say she can't do great work before that, but yeah, it takes time. And we will continue in future sessions to explore the subtypes. Okay, see you next time.

Did you know The Barrcast is also on YouTube?

In celebration of the Oscars and my favorite film of the year, I’ve recorded a running commentary of Tár. The best way to experience this is to start the movie right when you click play on the podcast, and it will feel like we were hanging out on the couch together… and I’m talking the whole time.

Transcript:

(00:00:04) - Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of the Barrcast. I entitled this episode, TAR, Death of the Sun God, and we will be watching together the Oscar-nominated picture, TAR, commenting on it. Treat this episode like you're having a friend over and you're watching the movie. And if you haven't started the movie already, start it now, I'll synchronize with you momentarily. But I've started it, and I am at this moment 35 seconds in. And we start with this mysterious livestream or text thread of what's happening. 

(00:00:53) - We don't quite know who this character is. Almost by the end of the film we'll know who it is. And in some ways TAR is a horror film or a mystery or a whodunit. For me that's one of the least compelling ways to experience this film, but if that's your preferred way, more power to you. I do think that there are more fruitful ways to experience the film, and Todd Field shows us one right here. TAR is thrusting the microphone in front of a group of people speaking their language. We don't know who they are yet. 

(00:01:50) - And in comes this high-pitched female voice at the center of the first credit screen to the Shipibo-Konibo people. And so that's our grounding for this film and for this interpretation. The Shipibo people are most known, at least in the US, for ayahuasca ceremonies. And what we're listening to is an ikaro, a song sung in ayahuasca ceremonies. And so accompanying these credits is something like a spiritual introduction, a bridge into another way of being. And so we'll take the invitation and spend a couple minutes transitioning into that way of being. 

(00:04:55) - You know, it's coming up for me on the second time of experiencing the opening credits is the tremendous breadth of human experience. And now we cut to Tar who's sort of doing this highly neurotic, maybe sort of pregame ritual, but is also sort of haunted by something, chasing demons away from her. And you know, the film doesn't start with the Ikaro. The film starts with Tar thrusting the microphone in front of the Shipibo people's face and kind of like singing to the mic as if it weren't there. And so up front we have sort of these dual themes of source or God or inspiration as well as power extraction. 

(00:05:49) - And that will continue to explore that as the film goes on. So the experience I had in the theater was one of, you know, some discomfort with the credits scene. It just went on and on and I wasn't quite sure how to experience it. And then we move into this endless introduction. That is just a total send-up of kind of liberal intellectual culture. And so my experience watching this film in theaters was just really uncomfortable to start with. But I was also in, I mean, I recognize the Ikaro and and was kind of struck by the unorthodox introduction. 

(00:06:49) - So I was also in, I was uncomfortable and I was in. And where are you finding me now? I'm at home in Brooklyn. It's 11:12. That's 11 12 p.m. So it's late. I've had a few drinks with my dear friend Matt. Hi Matt, if you're listening and have a drink in front of me, so, you know, we'll see how the night proceeds. This film is so gorgeous and so on point. So now we see the redhead, the unnamed redhead, or I guess later we'll find out that's Krista. 

(00:08:05) - And in comes Francesca, sort of miming the words in the introduction, clearly telling us that Francesca has written them herself. So we're dealing with someone with a lot of ego. I didn't mention this, but if you saw Tare drink the water at the beginning that kind of evokes a memory of taking the medicine in Ayahuasca, and we'll see some vomiting later in the film as well, which is another sort of hallmark of an experience in Ayahuasca. 

(00:08:56) - Yeah, I mean tar on tar is why we go fully into parody as if we weren't there already and we just get to this stuffy, there's the Voss water, that kind of awkward laughter. We're in peak left-wing intellectual culture. And I mean, I do think a lot of, I mean, there was an article in the New Yorker that completely missed the point of this film, and I do think that some people were, you know, sort of triggered essentially by these earliest scenes. And there's something about this scene that is just so uncomfortable. 

(00:09:41) - The conversation is so contrived, but it's not bad. I mean, Lydia says some kind of really thoughtful things here and we'll point to them, but at the same time, there's just a mannered forced quality here that's very difficult to be with.

(00:10:02) - And of course, Tar does read reviews, as we'll see when she clips out every review. It's interesting because the first time I watched this, I found it to be sort of patter, although there was one scene that I kind of blanked on, and whenever I blank I think to myself, okay, there must have been something really important there that whenever I blank out I tend to think that there was something that I wasn't prepared to listen to, and I'll find that moment in a moment. Did I say I'll find that moment in a moment? Wow. Now here we go, translation. 

(00:11:31) - And this is what Tar says. Time is the thing. You do not start without me. You cannot start without me. And I mean, this is a whole detour, but there's something powerful about what Tar is saying here. Her power resides in her control over time. And as I've sort of hinted at the title of this video essay, and this struck me like halfway through my first viewing of the movie, this movie is about the death of the sun god. 

(00:12:28) - And I think that idea will unfold as we watch the film, but for now just notice the way that time is traditionally constructed around the sun, right, a sun clock. Now we'll see two words, the first, Kavvanah. Intent. And then here Gopnik makes the joke about the Supreme Court justice and I guess the film doesn't say more about Kavanaugh in this moment, but sort of plants it into our brains. And there's a lot of spiritual underpinnings in these first scenes, right? 

(00:13:23) - So if you want to say that this film doesn't have anything to say about spirituality, then you'll have to contend with the first scene of the opening credits being an ikaro from an ayahuasca ceremony, the Shipibo people, and the second scene referencing two profound Jewish mystical or spiritual ideas of kavvanah and we'll see in a moment, teshuva, which is atonement or return. And here Tara is going to share her perspective more explicitly. What gives her the right to be the timekeeper? What gives her the right to be the sun god? 

(00:14:24) - And she draws a distinction between her and Leonard Bernstein. He celebrated the joy of his discovery. That's her description of Bernstein, whereas she, in contrast, is a little bit more measured, right? There's no discovery in the performance. It's all in rehearsal. And her intention is to read the tea leaves of Mahler's intention. That is to say she wants to sort of meet Mahler exactly where he is or was when he composed it. It's funny, this film was produced or created before the Roe v. Wade decision or I should say reversal. 

(00:15:39) - But this is almost two Supreme Court justices arguing here, she and Leonard Bernstein. She's a, what do you call it, a literalist? She wants to, what does she say here? Here we go. Now we have the explicit reference to the Icaro. The singer has to meet the spirit in the spirit world for her. And so her understanding of teshuva is different than what I read on Wikipedia. I mean, the one I read on Wikipedia focuses more on atonement and hers is more about sort of transformation of the past, which is kind of an interesting flavor of defining atonement. 

(00:16:55) - But going back to the Supreme Court justice reference, you know, imagine two justices disagreeing and one is sort of saying, what was the intent of the forefather? Let's go back to that time and think about what they were thinking. And then the other is sort of what feels alive now? And she's a conservative in that way. She's a Samuel Alito in that way. 

(00:17:28) - And Leonard Bernstein to her has that, you know, and I mean, I think there's maybe something slightly stereotypical about this, but sort of that warm, warm Jewish quality, that earthy quality that rich quality that contrasts with tar sort of buttoned up whiteness. Tar is the sun god, tar is bleach, bleachy white. And warmth. It's interesting, the sun god radiates warmth, but somehow lacks it. So here we are flirting. 

(00:18:12) - And you know, we were already sort of, if you have a transcendent experience, and you start to describe it, sometimes it becomes dead in your language. And here, I'm struck by sort of the deadening effect of this flirtation, right? They're talking about, oh, these highs and takes hours to come down from. But there's something kind of dead about this conversation to me. And so I think we're, I think part of my discomfort when I watched this the first time and what I'm picking up on now is like, tar is kind of full of s**t in a way. 

(00:18:53) - Here she is admiring the bag, which I think she'll later acquire in the same color, maybe in a different color. More disembodied texting. And now we have the lunch. Kind of all monochrome here, black and white, very desaturated. And again, I felt when I first watched this, a kind of a continued attack on liberal elitism, right? It's like a reminder that the ultra wealthy can be on the left.

 (00:20:00) - well. And I definitely felt like Field was sort of going after liberal elites from as a liberal elite. You know, I mean, this is this is an attack from within the ranks, for sure. Otherwise, it wouldn't be so on point. Somehow incredibly, and I don't know if we know this guy's name is Elliot Kaplan yet, but somehow incredibly, I picked up on the reference to I get mixed up with her, who's real and who's fake. 

 (00:20:40) - I think Gabe Kaplan is the this is Elliot Kaplan and Gabe Kaplan, if you Wikipedia him, you'll see the striking similarity to Mark Strong with the hair in particular. Gabe Kaplan was this guy who had been a banker, I think like Elliot Kaplan, and then just sort of fell in love with Mahler and made it his his sort of second career to conduct Mahler and did so. And so it's sort of like a weird Easter egg here. And there are so many Easter eggs in this film. I mean, we'll talk about the Easter eggs in a minute. 

 (00:21:13) - And I think it's both Fields biggest strength and perhaps his biggest weakness is just the sheer number of Easter eggs in this. And so here's an Easter egg that seemingly has no significance. Elliot Kaplan is a nod to Gabe Kaplan. Here we get confirmation that she's a non Jew, I kind of forgotten about that. So you know, it's interesting, there's, there's a thread, Shipibo people to Hebrew, Jewish. And now we have sort of a Jew in the culture in Elliot Kaplan. 

 (00:22:16) - It's interesting because Elliot has money, he has power, and it is very quite, quite humble about, you know, his ability to translate that into musical virtuosity. Whereas Tarr has no doubts now, I mean, Tarr is brilliant, as we'll see. But somehow Kaplan's relation to power is more honest or more humble. He knows he's like, I'm only in this because I'm a rich banker. And that can only get you so far. 

 (00:23:19) - The dialogue was so, so sort of faithful in this film that I mean, when I watched this the first time, I just had no idea what these people were talking about. Here we have the first reference of Roboto. And I think roboticism is a hugely important theme in this film, right alongside power and spirit. Maybe that feels like the triad in this moment. Spirit, power and roboticism. We'll talk more about that as we continue the film. But notice in this scene, there'll be two references of roboticism. The first referencing Sebastian, Mr. Tempo Roboto. 

 (00:24:12) - And then here toward Kaplan himself.

 (00:25:09) - There she goes. There's no glory for a robot. What she's telling him is like, go your own way. Do your own thing, as she has done. And he takes it to heart. But to what extent is she a robot? We'll find out, judge for ourselves. So here we have the first piece of music and I remember thinking, okay, here we go. Settling in, getting excited, the tension is there, it's mounting, modern piece, and she just stops it. So this is something the film is going to do a painful number of times, but it really doesn't want us to have the payoff of musicality. 

 (00:25:53) - It wants us to stay in this nervous, tense, uncomfortable place for how many minutes are we? Almost 30 minutes in already. So this is an incredible scene. I mean, this is just a transcendent scene. So, I mean, she's coming in as sort of the... She's so in her element. This is one of her elements. It's not her only element, as we'll see when she's working with the orchestra. But she's just oozing charisma and confidence. Then we really see the student's leg shaking here. Again, I mean, just time after time, Field is wanting to make us uncomfortable. 

 (00:27:49) - But I think the trembling leg in particular, somehow to me has a very important role alongside the roboticism, the spirit, and the power. He's not being robotic. I mean, he's not just a Gen Z dipshit. If he was, he wouldn't be shaking the way he is. There's some way his spirit feels threatened by Tar. I think that's what the shaking leg tells us, that Tar and the way she wields power is somehow a threat to the spirit. She makes people uncomfortable. And so, I mean, this is an important lecture, in a way. Like this isn't just a scene. 

 (00:28:52) - What she's talking about is a continuation of what she started talking about in the interview, around intention and return, and her distinction between her own values and those of Bernstein. You interpret it for them. But the way you interpret them is what? Well, she's about to show us through Bach. If you want to drink what I'm drinking, I'm having a mezcal on the rocks. I kind of zoned out during that little bit, but that sounded like the heart of darkness there. This woman who went down the Congo or something like that.

(00:30:07) - We've got that that whiff of colonialism and and Heart of Darkness and Conrad, Joseph Conrad, will come into the picture in a big way toward the end of this film so it's an interesting kind of tease. I mean here Tara's in it, isn't she? I mean she's kind of winning us over. She's still got all that sort of teacher s**t going on but she's also in it. There's something true about what she's saying. And here I mean I find this scene incredible. And revealing about her philosophy. She's also the flirtiest she's ever been which is interesting. 

(00:32:25) - Flirty maybe that's not the right word because I mean she's so much flirty with the girl but like she's sort of the most magnetic she's ever been. That's a much better word for it. It's a question and an answer. And she says it's always the question never the answer. And that's how she feels about art. That's how she feels about music. She wants to meet the music. She wants to meet the composer on the other side. She wants her art to be like the art of the Shipibo people that is past and present converge when she meets the spirit. 

(00:33:20) - So for her there isn't an act of interpretation that feels heavy. There's an act of facing and receiving and meeting and asking. It's a practice of being there for her. But only a couple minutes later she will kind of riff on her own philosophy in a way that makes us move away from her. And what does she say here? I think here she's just giving some tough love. She likes turning gazes that's for sure. And the way that she turns everyone's gaze on Max is inappropriate. And that's what the sun god does. 

(00:35:17) - I mean the sun can turn its gaze and turn society's gaze anywhere it wants. And that heat is sometimes unbearable. And here she says robot again. So that's her third reference of robot already. So you know if you didn't pick up on that the first time I hope now you're convinced. And here she says you have to sublimate yourself. You must stand in front of God and obliterate yourself. And so there's this new flavor to her spirituality or her art which is not a mere act of being there or facing. It's also an act of annihilation. 

(00:35:59) - And that's what maybe Freud would kind of call it the death wish. Like there's some sense in which her ego her heavy heavy heavy ego she just wants to get rid of it. And she doesn't know how except through art. And so when she experiences art she experiences it as orgasmic as this big payoff in part because of the way it obliterates her identity. And she feels the violence of that or the annihilation of that and that's very pleasant for her in a way that as we'll see for others most significantly the cellist Olga you know doesn't have to be like that. 

(00:36:44) - That's characteristic of the sun god. The sun god's secret wish is to die. And she will be granted that wish in a structural way as we'll see. So I mean Charles Ives so many of these references are over my head. But I have talked about the movie with a few musicians and incredibly I mean the movie just delivers on so many fronts including you know those in the scene really find it resonant and I've heard two separate people say like this Todd must have you know must have studied this person. Tar must be based on this person and they didn't mention the same person so.

(00:40:01) - I mean the dialogue here is just, you know, it's sort of a throwaway scene that's just so, so strong. Crazy, the way that all these different relationships are unfolding. I mean, I didn't even notice that the first time, but there she says it explicitly, are any of Sharon's pills left? If there's any doubt about what happens later. And there we have her sealing Krista's fate. I didn't really track the Krista plot line that carefully. And so I'm aware that this can really be interpreted and experienced as a horror film. 

(00:41:30) - I think we've already seen Krista's head once. And there's sort of the who was stalking her who's texting about her those questions. Those never felt particularly alive for me, but I will do my best to speak to them as they come up. And they're coming up right now because there's this book called Challenge. And you know what, I didn't get a chance to read about this novel Challenge, but I think that's like, right now. Vito Sackville West. I guess it's kind of an LGBT classic. I don't know much about it. 

(00:42:29) - And here we're sort of, she's doing like wordle with Krista Taylor's name or anagrams with Krista Taylor's name, which of course invites one to do anagrams of one own. And we'll see them later of tar, of course, rat, but also noticing that Krista includes tar. And so you could say she's tar sick or she kissed tar. And I mean, this home is just like a brutalist nightmare. It looks like a prison. I laughed a couple times just at taking in the interior here. I guess it's probably somebody's idea of a warm home, but it's so bleak. 

(00:43:23) - And here we're looking for Sharon's pills. Oh, there they are in my pocket, which I don't even think they are. Like I think it sounded like she got sort of other pills. So she's just giving her some random pills. But I guess it is the right one. It is the bag. So I guess the implications she slept with that woman or maybe she just grabbed the bag. I'm not sure. And this for me is where Cate Blanchett won the Academy Award for Best Female Actor. And I mean, Best Whatever Actor for what it's worth. 

(00:44:25) - You know, in the spirit of this film and its questions about gender identity, because we've seen her be about five different people in the interview. But before the interview, sort of preparing for it, flirting with that woman, having lunch with Cate Kaplan and the teacher, Juilliard, the lover in the car. And now she's at home and she just sort of like sinks into this marriage. And they're both sort of old, old women in a way in this scene.

 (00:45:06) - There's just something about Cate Blanchett's face here that's so relaxed. I fell in love with her performance in this scene. And as much as I loved Michelle Yeoh in her career and in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, it just doesn't hold a candle to this performance. And I came in as kind of a Cate Blanchett skeptic in the sense of like, I like Cate Blanchett, but she's sort of like Cate Blanchett is blank. And so I thought this was going to be sort of Cate Blanchett is tar. 

 (00:45:40) - And she's just so versatile and embodies so many roles in these first five scenes that I just I was blown away. And I find that to be, you know, I mean, this is something that maybe is a central question about tar and maybe a place that I am more sympathetic to her than some of my friends have been. Because the prevailing sentiment is that tar is a monster. That's a word that more than a few people have sort of used to describe her. And you know, maybe she is. shifter. I'm not sure. But I tend to think that it's just it's just interesting the way she's showing up differently in role to role. I mean, this scene, you Lenny, Walter, MTT, like every chance the movie gets to convey its proficiency in the subject matter. It takes that. I mean, look at this bathroom. The mechanical Roboto toothbrush. The prison walls. So here's something crazy that while preparing for this commentary I discovered, because somewhere along the way when I watched this the first time I wrote down in my notes, the death of the sun god. 

 (00:47:56) - And here's this random scene. Who will bear the paw? Here's this poem that I wasn't familiar with. But after watching the second time, I googled, you know, this who will bear the paw? And it's a poem called who killed cock Robin? Now why would why would Todd field stick this in right like what is the job? And Wikipedia says this a number of theories have been advanced to explain the meaning of the rhyme. But point one, the rhyme records a mythological event such as the death of the god Baldr from Norse mythology. 

 (00:48:49) - And you Google Baldr and his name means both brave and bold. But also shows association with the meaning of day perhaps, perhaps, perhaps he's personified as a deity day day personified as a deity. The Baltic, Baltas, meaning shining one white one a god. So this is literally a poem about the death of the sun god, which is incredible as a coincidence. Given that that was sort of my take home note. 

 (00:49:33) - And I'll see if I can remember exactly the moment that I wrote this down my notes, I still have my notes, I watched it one of those movie theaters where they give you food and you can write down your menu order. And I love those because I just get these index cards that I can scribble scribble on. And so that's what I that's what I did. By the way, this scene where she's threatening Johanna. It was one of the two scenes in the film that got a big pop from the audience. And she says God watches us all. And of course, the implication is that she is God.

(00:50:07) - and she watches all just as the sun god watches all, at least during the daytime. By the way, there's another interpretation, according to Celtic traditions, which is that Lug, the sun god who dies as the night get longer after the summer stolus, is marked in the old Celtic pictographic calendar with a bow and arrow shape. Lug was the primary god representing the red sun and was also known in Welsh as Cócri Ben, anglicized to Cock Robin. 

(00:50:37) - The sparrow who kills him with my bow and arrow represents Bron the Blessed, the god of winter in the form of a raven. So the stage is set for this sun god to be taken down, and in the tradition that I mentioned earlier of the Norse god Baldr, he's taken down by his blind brother, whose name is what is it, Hodr? Yeah, Hodr, who is blind and Loki kind of directs him where to shoot, and he shoots with mistletoe. 

(00:51:17) - And the reason that mistletoe kills Baldr is because Baldr was made immune to or invincible to everything except for mistletoe, which his mother, I guess, apparently thought was sort of too harmless to even bother naming in her big list of what can't kill Baldr. So he's a bit like Achilles in that sense. And similarly, as we'll see, Tar is killed not by a mighty foe, but sort of by the people or by mistletoe. She sort of is felled by something small, and that's how the sun god has to go out. Nothing can defeat the sun god in holy battle. 

(00:51:57) - None is holy or none is higher. The sun god has to be sort of felled by his own, or in this case, her own arrogance hubris. And that's what will happen. We blew past sort of Tar peeking under the bathroom stall that that for me was a very Michael Haneke piano teacher moment. And I mean, this this film is so full of references. It's and indebted to influence. It's really, really interesting. And again, I mean, I find feel to be really enigmatic in this way. 

(00:52:48) - Like what is what is field beyond sort of this tapestry of brilliant filmmakers that influenced him. And maybe that's what he is. He's the most prismatic of them all. Who else could make a film this sort of neutral, this kind of cipher like this open to interpretation. And so these scenes with Andrus are the sun god lineage, right? I mean, he's the retired sun god and she's the rising sun god. There's there's this Apple series about the Asimov Foundation books, and it does something kind of wonderful, which is it creates an emperor. 

(00:53:38) - But in the movies are in the in the series on on Apple TV, and I think this is different than the book. It kind of creates this immortal emperor who is kind of breeding clones of himself. And so at any given time exists as dawn day and dusk, that is to say his childhood form, his adult form and his elder form. And so they all they all sort of consult with each other on key decisions. And it's just really, really clever. And something similar is happening here. where we have sort of the sun god in her heyday, and the sun god kind of at his sunset. 

(00:54:20) - But there is no dawning sun in this film, because this film is about the death of the sun god tar is in some meaningful way the last sun god. And already, like the human form in which the sun god can be reborn is already limited. There's no more Andrus is the sun god can never be reborn as a white man, just in the same way that this film can never exist if tar were a white man. tar, a powerful, brilliant, extractive, rational, perhaps monstrous being must reside in a marginalized soul, marginalized body in order to be permitted to exist. 

(00:55:05) - And soon there will be no more bodies that the sun god can inhabit. And at that point, the sun god will die. Now, whether we should mourn the sun god or just simply bury her is is perhaps the primary question that the film asks. And so here, they're sort of jokingly talking about Schopenhauer and inviting the question, is the private failing relevant to the work? And that is actually like not, I don't think that's what the film is asking. Certainly not what I'm asking about. That's a well trod question. 

(00:55:55) - This film is just sort of like a question about about the sun god about a kind of being that is so connected to source. I mean, this is a woman who spent serious time in Amazon learning from the Shipipo people, presumably. She clearly learned their language, learned their ways connected with that source. Sort of so that she could take it back to Berlin and convert it. The sun god is incredibly, batteries are good. Like, metaphor for how the sun god works, the sun god charges up and then uses his batteries. There's some sort of conversion of source. 

(00:56:59) - If you've played Final Fantasy VII, like Mako is a good, or Tiberian, if you've played Command & Conquer, Unobtainium, if you've watched the Avatar series, right, these are all references to soul, to source, to mystical spirit. And some gods are really good at connecting to that source and converting it into knowledge, power, art. The sun god is fundamentally extractive in some way, and then so is Tar. And we just saw Tar at home struggling to compose anything, because she's disconnected from source. 

(00:57:47) - And we'll see when her writer's block goes away, it's due to sort of her connection with the catholic underground that she moves into dream, into scenes like this, sirens, screaming. The only way for her to create is to reconnect with source. now we're back into music. And I mean, this is, I don't know Mahler, you know, I'm not a music, classical music guy, but this scene is dope. I'm sure composers have something to say about, you know, her mannerisms, but but again, the film provider sort of deprives us of fully enjoying the music. 

(00:59:45) - It's just, it's just teasing us with these interruptions. And look at how she's in her element, right? I mean, she she's got her German going just as she had the Shipibo-Konibo language going at the beginning.

 (01:00:01) - And like, for the first time, I think we really see her, like, in it. Which is again, an incredible accomplishment for the film. Like there's just so many versions of this woman that we've gotten to experience. And finally, it's taken this long. We've sort of had some hints, but you know, she's doing it. She's doing the thing here. What I mean is like, she's connected. And you get the feeling that every time she's saying, this is right, this is wrong, she's right. 

 (01:00:56) - And just as she was kind of connected to the microphone in the beginning, recording the Igoros, she's also, you know, she's talking to Harald. Harald has a big role to play back there. And in a moment, I think she'll go back there and talk to Harald. And I mean, the way the movie just hangs out here is just so cool. Somewhere in my original notes, I wrote, I had no idea they still make movies like this. Now for the first time we see Sharon kind of, her role, stepping in. She knows what tar means better than tar can communicate, especially in German. 

 (01:02:54) - There's something so athletic about her in these scenes, the way she's sort of coming into and out of rooms or striding. course, that area there she says, let's do something less considered, and it's the thing she's considered most, which is sort of a stealing. Again, this is like really insider. I mean, it's just incredible how insider this stuff is. But all these people are real. You know, this is, what's his name, Claudio Abbado, I think. Who was two generations back the composer for the same Philharmonic and now she wants to sort of take it over. 

 (01:04:43) - And again, now getting into this whole scene is just about orchestra politics. Just incredible stuff. And of course it's a metaphor. I mean, of course it's a metaphor for politicking or whatever, but it's also just like not a metaphor.

(01:05:00) - Like depiction of, you know, cycling out her, I guess, assistant composer. Let's watch this again, because I don't find it particularly interesting, but I can never really track who is Sebastian. He's the assistant composer, backup composer, and I guess the orchestra votes on it. Here we go, assistant conductor. Yeah, I mean, she would have been a great whip, and maybe she should have been a whip, a house majority whip. This film is an incredible takedown of mid-century modern. I don't think there's any going back after that scene. 

(01:06:18) - So here's the woman who never reads reviews, and the man who's so used to her looking for reviews of her work that he's already brought up the page, here you go, ma'am, no charge, and she's ripping it out. Which you know, the box is called Sundries. That's a great detail. Yeah, just the design here is just so sad. I don't know, there's something very lonely about mid-century modern in this film. And here she's changing major to minor, and exactly that's what the film is about to do. 

(01:07:08) - So things are going to get sort of increasingly dark from here, starting with this scene. This was the scene for me that like, Tar truly showed up as a monster, you know, I need someone to hold me. This isn't the place. And then of course news of Krista's death. You know, and so here let's apply our lens of like, is Tar a monster in every scene? Or is Tar a monster in some scenes? Does it matter? Why are we asking this question? These are two people who are processing this very differently. Tar doesn't give a s**t. 

(01:08:50) - Tar saw a threat to her stability, to her power, and irritation, and when she died, when she was gone. And the ukulele I guess presumably is in the Amazon, it certainly sounds Amazonian. So they all connected there. So I mean this ran deep. But Tar, we have to forget about her. The we, the charged we have to forget about her. You have to forget about her. Do you understand? And then the threatening. Do you understand? Can you follow orders? I mean she's a sergeant. She's a general. The military sun god. 

(01:09:51) - That's what she does in the, as a whip or as the conductor. She gets people to march to her time.

(01:10:03) - There's a smile. I mean that yeah that smile there. Not great stuff. I chatted with a friend about these emails and you know I don't know let's say this woman really was unstable and people are asking for recommendation and saying I can't give you a recommendation. It didn't seem that heinous to me. 

(01:10:35) - I mean okay the danger to your I mean clearly it's strongly worded but but what this person said it was like for these people you know a musical career is life and so if you're blackballed in the way that Tar blackballed her you are killing that person in some sense and I found that compelling. But I guess what I'm trying to fight against is the viewer who sort of said at this like this is the point what you know Breaking Bad that's when Walt broke bad. 

(01:11:06) - There's a there's a meme among modern art that is sort of the you know anything Breaking Bad is maybe the the modern OG of this is sort of like we'll watch this person's descent and the game is how far can they go before you know the Sopranos is the OG now that I think about it. 

(01:11:33) - But Breaking Bad revitalized the tradition and I just don't want Tar to belong in that tradition I think that's one of the weakest or least interesting ways to experience this movie but I also don't think that it's alternates like I don't think it's it's about well Tar is a good person or Tar is not a monster. 

(01:11:50) - I just think Tar's monstrosity itself as subject matter is missing the richest fruits that this film has to offer and so experiencing her not as a psychology not as a personality also not as a culture not experiencing this film as a commentary on cancel culture but examining this film as a formal inquiry into the structure and the downfall of a particular power model a model of power that had been in place for thousands of years namely the the model of the Sun God. 

(01:12:27) - There are many traditions that don't have a Sun God or that don't treat the Sun God as particularly higher than or certainly you know physically higher than but not necessarily spiritually higher than an Earth God or an underworld God. The you know at least many American traditions you know have the the Condor and the snake and what is a third one Condor snake I got my computer the Condor the Puma and the snake is kind of the Inca trilogy and the Condor the Sun God is not really superior to the snake at all. 

(01:13:30) - The heavens are not superior to the Earth or the underworld. You know who set off my metronome again not not particularly exciting for me to explore. I don't think it was Petra. Petra of course meaning rock after Peter. In some ways you know this young girl is her spiritual rock. It's another way for her to be connected the love that she feels for this daughter of hers. Although in this particular scene there's some suspicion there. More more interrupted music. I mean she's 

(01:15:24) - in it I mean I love these scenes you can just see she's so embodied she's so present and the orchestra gets it you know they're clicking with it. That's when she's in her element. She and she's a musical genius. I mean I don't know what movie has done a better job at communicating kind of genius not not alien genius but just sort of the everyday human genius that some people have. It's a very difficult thing to pull off and I think field pulls it off. 

(01:16:09) - I love the film whiplash but when I would share it with my musical friends they'd be like what the f**k like this movie sucks and it probably does suck too. You know it doesn't pass muster at some musical level but this one does. So we're about to encounter Olga finally the cellist. She's getting a little hot hot and bothered. But before she does we have to talk to Sebastian. Yeah look at this look at this mid-century modern I mean Berlin just gets such a other than other than Tars old home which is very charming. 

(01:17:14) - I mean it's just it just sucks in these interiors. And yeah I mean here here's a man who's extracted treasures he's like the Elgin's marbles kind of look at what I got from Kiev. Our only home is the podium we all live out of a suitcase. I think at the end of this I do want to read something from Lord Jim. Just made me remember that. So you know here for the first time Sebastian is naming it. You sleep with women and and you know grant favors. 

(01:19:18) - And the irony of course is that in this narrow case Tar had no real I mean Tar just was sick of Sebastian she didn't want to grant any favors to Francesca. Francesca's she's just taking her totally for granted. I love this scene. You're a misogynist. It's one of my favorite. You misogynist. You hate marriage because Andreas his lover is married. So here she comes home.

 (01:20:13) - And here we have the old robot again. So by the way, in what way or when is tar robotic? Tar is robotic when she's not connected to source and not, you know, when her batteries are low. So she's robotic much of the time. I mean, we have this sort of here's a smile. Let's look at the scene. She's certainly robotic in the interview with The New Yorker. 

 (01:20:55) - Just anytime she's sort of being highly manipulative and leaning on her accolades or leaning on her power or leaning on anything she's established rather than leaning on her connection to source, she's a robot. And so at this point, she's maybe 90% robot. Awkward. Where is the matcha? Brutal. In this office again. I mean, we'll see the reference to Hitler soon, but it does remind me a little bit of like kind of that bunker. There's a bunker quality to these interiors. So she asked for a matcha and then tar just went for a boxing class. 

 (01:22:37) - Just kept Francesca waiting. I made it very subtle, but yeah. This is a classic boomer thing, right? Like delete the emails, right? It's like, isn't that a Hillary Clinton thing? It's not that easy. That's a sun god reaction, right? Like delete the emails. Sun gods like to think that things can be. Sun gods want to deny the existence of the underworld. So they like to think that things can be eradicated and don't go anywhere when things, they just go to the underworld. And the sun god's death is equivalent to the nightfall. 

 (01:23:46) - And so here comes Olga, who is very endearing. What do we make of this character?

 (01:25:22) - I mean this way she grabs the bread here. But then of course she's not a savage. I mean, okay, she is a savage, but her uncle leads some other symphony. Let's see. I mean she's very cute. And I think that's one of the things that, again, I appreciate about this movie is like, we have this young woman who Tar breaks all the rules to get into the orchestra purely because she wears high heels, she gets some feeling of sensuality. But is that sensuality separate from her art? I'm not sure. 

 (01:26:35) - I mean, I think Tar is falling in love with her the way that you and I might fall in love with her. There's a purity to her and we're going to see soon a musicality to her. And here we watch it, this kind of horrible dress. And what did Sharon say? Like her facial posture is a bit much. Sure it's a bit much, but she's just going for it. And this is the first time that Field is letting us experience musical ecstasy. He wants us to fall in love with Olga. Just as Tar is falling in love with Olga. 

 (01:28:14) - It's our first hint of death and she will come back in a big way soon. Yeah, so being haunted by the refrigerator, being haunted by the clock, being haunted by screaming. Tara's in trouble. And part of what's haunting her is source. I mean, I think there's some sense in which she's being called out for her fraudulence. Completely apart from her abuse of power, completely apart from kind of conventional wrongdoings, she's also sort of done spirit wrong in some way. And if you want to connect those two, that's totally fine.

 (01:30:42) - So here's some drama that I haven't totally sorted out. Let's see if we can figure it out. She watched the YouTube clip of her playing Elgar's cello concerto. But is this woman Elgar? This is Elgar, no? Or is it not? No, okay. Elgar is a man. But this is Gosia. So maybe Gosia traditionally would have selected the musician, or would Gosia have been the musician? The thing I don't understand is, Gosia doesn't end up auditioning. So what is Gosia's role exactly? But again, more like politicking. Here's Britta, who I think we're meeting for the first time. 

 (01:32:56) - So I guess Britta can't be the person who's been streaming this whole time, but maybe she and Francesca are in it together. For good reason we have it. We have reason to believe that Britta could be the only person who's streaming later in the film. So I've been trying to analyze it from that whodunit perspective. I just don't think there's that much meat on those bones. I guess I'll take this moment to try to talk about the one maybe flaw in feel that I experience. But again, I don't even know. Why do we have to point out flaws? I don't. 

 (01:34:16) - But I mean, when I watch this movie, I think about Paul Verhoeven. I think about Martin Scorsese. I think about Michael Haneke. I think about David Lynch. And each of those directors, I feel like in that way Field is almost a little Tarantino-esque. He's pulling on influences in the way that a fan might pull on influences. And unlike what you can say about each of those directors, each of those directors has a DNA. Verhoeven has such strong DNA. Haneke has such strong DNA. Lynch has such a movie. A Lynch movie is a Lynch movie. 

 (01:35:11) - A Verhoeven movie is a Verhoeven movie. A Haneke movie is a Haneke movie. Each of these artists has an agenda that they can't help but advance in their films. And Field, he went 16 years without making a movie, which is incredible. And it sort of says something about how much or how little the practice meant to him somehow. He wasn't killing himself to make a movie. He found work in other ways and he was patient. And he's made this total f*****g masterpiece. But I don't know what Field's DNA is. 

 (01:35:55) - And I don't know if Field actually has DNA. And his DNA might be that he has no DNA. His style might be the style of no style or the style of many styles. And if there is a knock to be leveled here, it's that like, does he really need to afford so many interpretations to the movie? Does it need to be a horror movie and a psychosexual thriller and all of these different things? To what end does he want it to be so endlessly interpretable? I'm not sure. I mean, clearly, he's done something marvelous in terms of making it a sort of a cultural touchstone. 

 (01:36:45) - And so that's a huge accomplishment. Maybe he needed to be that open with it in order to make that possible. I don't know. So we're having another scene with Andrus and this one we're going to get a little bit more he's getting all worked up because he thinks he's being accused. And you know, here we're calling in the ghosts of hunted accused people. She's seeking counsel. Again, it's the Sun God talking to the Dusk God. 

 (01:37:42) - And now he's explicitly for the first time bringing in Berlin's history, war era conductors who who led their orchestra at the behest of Hitler. You know, here he's complaining sort of about these men who were in his eyes unjustly persecuted for their affiliation with Nazis, but you know, I mean, what were you supposed to do in 1945? He's saying like, I didn't I didn't I didn't even write Heil Hitler to Hitler himself. This is a significant phrase. He was playing corpses. 

 (01:38:43) - The art was so important to him that he played in the cemetery and of course, we'll see tar at the end doing something similar. And she's she's being really dismissive of this comparison. But from a formal from a structural perspective, we shouldn't right so while from a social perspective, certainly playing favorites with women that you're attracted to and sleep with is less bad than being a Nazi from a structural point of view. It's all it's all Sun God behavior. 

 (01:39:18) - I mean, the Sun God would have been probably sympathetic to to an ideology of sort of purity and brilliance and excellence, and sort of the obliteration of all that is dark and impure. So here's Gosha. This is what I don't understand.

(01:40:00) - What did Gosia want? Did Gosia want this guy to be the performer? Why was she so happy? I thought she was happy because she wanted to play it. But then if she wanted to play it, why is she not auditioning? And of course Elga crushes it. And everyone knows it's Elga at this point, but it's undeniable. She's a beautiful cellist. This is tough. We feel bad for Francesca. She's not a very sympathetic character. There's something about her that... Well, the scene in the car says it all, right? Like, there's only room for one a*****e. 

(01:42:12) - You knew the rules of the game. I just don't... you know, why did she stay with... why did Francesca stay with Tari that long? I'm not sure. Tari that long? Was it because of love? Was it because she wanted to be the conductor? I'm not sure. You feel for her when Krista dies. This apartment is great. This is the only nice apartment. You know, and here... this is a beautiful scene. Because what's happening, Tari's just listening. She's just there. She's following. Bleck. Strong. I take my coffee bleck. Strong. A little bit like... I don't know. 

(01:44:20) - I think this woman is acting for the first time. She's brilliant in every way that she needs to be. In terms of like... I don't think she's Russian for one thing. I could be wrong. But it sounds a bit like I'm doing a Russian accent. And then Todd Field doesn't really help her with dialogue. How do you like your coffee? Bleck. Strong. I think this is like one straight up weakness of this film. But it's such a hard role to do well because you need like a world-class cellist who has this beautiful appeal that you and Tar are gonna fall in love with and she needs to be a good actress. And then I just, yeah, I just don't think that they're doing any favors with writing for her. So, I mean, Tar has fully sprung at this point. This is one of my favorite comic relief moments. like, what is the point of this scene? I think maybe it's to re-soften Tar. Like, Tar is not Sharon's mom. Sharon's mom is the goddess of sort of order. This must be this way. Everything must be in its place. 

 (01:47:07) - Everything must be in order. That's not Tar. Tar is willing to make a mess. Tar is willing to sacrifice everything for source. It's just that Tar is fundamentally confused about the nature. Oh, let's wait here. Yeah, so this is one of the first scenes we get that really gets to, we get to bathe in the musicality of it. And so Tar earns that, like, love touch on Olga there. Yeah, I mean, Tar is exhilarated. And so that relates to what I want to say about the distinction between Tar and Sharon's mom. Tar is not like a freak of order. 

 (01:48:36) - She's just addicted to source. She's addicted to energy. And so when she has these peak experiences, she says to herself, how do I get more of that and convert more of that into power? So there's some fundamental confusion around scarcity, which is why in so many of these films, you know, power gets translated into something like oil or something like spice in Dune, right? It's like, that's what the sun god does. The sun god turns art into power. So things are starting to go downhill for Tar now. You know, it's been a long second half of the film. 

(01:49:52) - I've got a dumb phone like every robot. So, so, I mean, let me try to articulate this.

(01:49:59) - More clearly to myself and to you, we talked about these sort of three themes introduced very early on. Source, that is to say the Ikaro, the Shippibo, Konibbo people, music, connection, truth, God, that's one. The second is power, sovereignty, the conductor, the CEO, the boss, the resource manager, the dollar out of goods, the one who directs others to cast their gaze where one wants. So there's power, and then there's the robot, the protocol, the golem, the procedure, the AI, Elliot Kaplan, Sebastian, the old guard, the calcified one. 

(01:51:17) - And the sun god sort of sits between source and robot. And the reason that the sun god sits there is because the sun god can commune with source, can connect with source, but the sun god's fate is to turn that into technology. And once technologized, robots want to take over. We'll interrupt this exploration for this fantastic scene. You know, and we have to say something in Taurus favor here. There is sort of a sort of a fearlessness to her that we'll see show up over and over and over again. 

(01:52:01) - She's wandering into this room, covering her nose with her hand, presumably it smells awful. Her neighbor, just this, this old woman on the floor. This is our fate. She's like sores. And I mean, the fate is directly linked here where we see the exposed breasts of the old woman. And then, you know, of all of all the context, we could see Cate Blanchett's breasts, we see them in this context, an immediate follow on to. So I mean, you know, you she's trying to out out damn spot the specter of death. But of course, that's not something she can do. 

(01:53:18) - And what is death to the sun god death is being disconnected from source. The sun god doesn't die like you and I die. The sun god dies when there's no more resources, when there's no more, there's nothing left in source, when it's all just technology. And here's the antidote to death. This living breathing connection to source, there's something about Olga, that is so life giving. 

(01:53:49) - So that even if tar herself struggles these days to be creative to get unblocked, here, here's this wonderful young woman, totally natural, who seems to just live, live connectedly live live in connection, not try to turn it into anything. And that presents itself as another way of being that I don't think the film wants us to ignore. Like we'll talk about what happens after the death of the sun god, but Olga might be one possibility. The challenge with Olga is like, what is there to say about her other than her youthfulness? 

(01:54:44) - I mean, couldn't Olga in 20 years just turn into tar? And again, I mean, another sign that the film wants to support this kind of line of questioning is tar takes a chance to return the teddy bear to the child. Right? Like there's this there's something about Olga's innocence that produces an innocent gesture within tar at, you know, seemingly great cost. A beautiful Berlin courtyard here. And I know that there's sort of one interpretation going that tar dies here or something like that. 

(01:55:48) - There's sort of a Scorsese type, you know, I think both in both King of Comedy and in Taxi Driver, there's there are valid interpretations where sort of Act Three is all hallucination and Field chooses to provide us with the same option here. I personally don't find that as rich of an interpretation as just taking it at its word, particularly because I'm just not my preferred interpretation isn't that interested in like the facts of the situation for people and so and so these charged like sort of metaphorical situations are not metaphors at all. 

(01:56:27) - They're just literal statements about kind of the structural death of the Sun God. The Sun God dies when in its last incarnation as a U-Haul lesbian, she falls in love with, you know, innocence and is killed over a teddy bear and just like Baldur was killed over mistletoe. Of course as sort of near death as the scene is it's actually not that like, oof, I hate that sound. It's like not that central to her downfall. I mean it sort of marks her downfall but so how is she falling? 

(01:57:20) - She's simultaneously being destroyed by the people ie by the, you know, okay, so there's oil and there's the oil Baron and then there's the Vox Populi the town that sort of serves under the oil Baron at some point they rise up and destroy him. So that's what's happening in one sense. There's all these people who are outraged by her abuse of power in the past and finally things are adding up that it's like time to bring her down. And that's that's the tradition, right? 

(01:57:56) - Like I mean, I think as she's talking about with Andrus like that's been happening since the World War II. So I guess that begs the question like why is she the last Sun God? Why is now the Sun God ready to die? And I think that that is in that's probably why it's this isn't just about cancel culture. This is also about the Sun gods the depletion of resources, right? 

(01:58:23) - Like the destruction of the planet the destruction of the rainforest the the actual bottoming out of these resources that the way in which the Sun God extracts source were we're kind of running out. And how is that represented here? I suppose it's represented by her desperation to just sort of connect with those who are connected ie Olga. We'll pause that thought. And again the fearlessness here, right? I mean, she's she's a beast. 

(01:59:14) - I love when things start to go like like half the orchestras like that was funny and then the other half the orchestras like oh my God, what the hell is going on here? Of course, she wasn't attacked.

(02:00:34) - Yeah, so what makes this the death of the Sun God? It's not just cancel culture, although cancel culture has never been stronger. dangerous, you know, compellingly points to the tradition of cancel culture, all the way back to post-war Germany and denazification. So there's always been some cleansing. So there's a part there. There's a part in the sort of derivative nature, right, Beethoven copied Mozart, and then someone copied Beethoven. It's a copy of a copy of a copy and disconnection from source. That's a part of it. 

(02:01:17) - And I think there's something to be said about the way that the Sun God actually wants to be obliterated, just as tar wants to be obliterated by youth, by beauty. And then there's the rise of the robot. I think the robot is the rightful heir to the Sun God, because the robot doesn't need to commune with source. The robot is happy to work with the rich amount of data that's in the field. The robot like Elliot Kaplan is unobtrusive, unobscuming, unharmful, and unoriginal. And why do we need originality at this point? 

(02:02:09) - The Sun God has converted so much of the source into material, into technology for us to work with. So I think those are the contributors to the death of the Sun God. It's not one thing. It's maybe a thousand arrows. It's the wish for obliteration. It's the end of source. It's the rise of cancel culture, and it's the appearance of the robot. And so our question as we enter kind of the last few minutes of this film is like, how do we feel about that? Is it good riddance? Or is there something to mourn? 

(02:03:13) - By the way, I just had one glass of mezcal this whole time, and I'm going to pour myself a little bit now. Here comes death. She's next. This scene wants to say. But again, in a formal way, this isn't about the literal death of Lydia Tarr or the cancellation of Lydia Tarr. This is about the end of a kind of genius. And, you know, so just as we pointed to multiple things causing the Sun God's downfall, you know, here, that's when I said downfall. Isn't that the name of that, like, Hitler movie? Yeah, there's a narrative here. And it's not total fiction. 

(02:04:46) - I think in my conversations with people, I've come off as sort of pro tar. And so maybe I need to, like, do something to address that here.

 (02:05:06) - A few things. One is that I think Tara's monstrosity and the camp of she is or she isn't a monster is one of my least favorite ways to engage with this film. And so for people who sort of want to engage with me and say Tara is a monster, don't interpret my fighting back as to say, aha, Tara is not a monster. I'm just fighting back on the whole framing. And then on top of that, and aside from that, I do think the central question this film is not a meditation on power, merely I mean, that's part of what the film is doing. 

 (02:05:44) - But it's also a meditation on a particular kind of genius, the genius of the sun god. And it's asking the question, can we and do we want to survive outside of that genius that sort of tyrannical zero sum way of connecting to source? And I want to give that question space. And I don't think it's trivially clear that we say, you know, good riddance to Tara. Because she displays qualities that are wonderful. That fearlessness, that courage, that honesty. Now does the film give us other ways out? It does. It gives us Olga and it gives us the robot. 

 (02:06:42) - And the challenge with Olga is it's her condition is so seemingly linked to youth and innocence that it's not obvious or clear to me how one succeeds the sun god with Olga's. Olga's get old, Olga's get entrenched in power. Olga's get paid well, Olga's go on private flights, Olga's eat steak dinners, Olga's go to donor meetings. And then I think with the robot, it's more obviously a shame if we if we no longer want to talk about when someone is connected or when someone's not connected. 

 (02:07:27) - I mean, this film shows us Tara connected and shows us Tara disconnected. And robots don't, the idea of connection is not meaningful to a robot, to an Elliot Kaplan. He just wants to get the secrets, get the playbook. that says all you need to know about the tar stance to Kaplan. And it's cruel, but it's not wrong. Meanwhile, here's youthful Olga, who is pretty keen at this point to distance herself from tar. Here's a beautiful example of disconnection. The text here is sacred. Tar's reading of it is just totally disconnected. 

 (02:09:50) - And there's probably an alternate reading of this that maybe is touching. I'm not sure. But what a juxtaposition. I mean, we'll see Leonard Bernstein in a minute. And for me, this was a scene that made me cry from feeling. 

(02:10:09) - And we'll get to appreciate it soon. 

 (02:10:11) - But you know, what did that text say? Like, oh my God, she's moving on to allegory, right? 

(02:10:16) - The sort of pretentiousness. 

 (02:10:20) - I mean, I don't think we've maybe done enough in this commentary just to name it. 

(02:10:25) - The pretentiousness and the ego is just so, tar on tar, right, as that image comes up. 

 (02:10:37) - That's a big part of who she is. 

(02:10:39) - It's not great. 

 (02:10:41) - It's not necessary to genius. But it might be necessary to collaborative genius. 

(02:10:58) - It might be necessary for directing or for conducting, for getting a large group of people to march to your drumbeat. 

 (02:11:07) - Time is the thing, right? 

(02:11:10) - There's something so important about power and time that feels just out of reach to me, but very, very important. 

 (02:11:23) - Probably the central thing to say about this movie will be something to say about time. And maybe there's some way that tar hasn't faced up to her own death. And so all of her politicking and maneuvering is a response to that not facing death. 

(02:11:58) - For all of her touting of wanting to face the maker, she hasn't faced her own maker. Something like that, maybe a fuller interpretation than the one I'm prepared to make now. 

 (02:12:20) - It was Britta. I guess that's the indication that maybe that was the person who's been texting all this time or just texting some of the time. I don't know. So here's the dissolution of marriage. This mezcal that I'm looking at is called Granja Nomada. And I assume nomada means nomad, and there's kind of a nomadic looking farmer walking across a field on the label. And there's something to say about the impossibility of coming home for a character like tar. 

(02:13:57) - And we'll touch on that in a moment. 

 (02:14:07) - But I do wanna wait until we get to, I think it's the Philippines. Certainly Southeast Asia, we hear one scene in Thai and another scene in Tagalog. So I think it's the Philippines. And here Sharon says something explicit. Their relationship was born in politicking. 

(02:14:40) - They were kind of like the house of cards couple. I don't know what was so horrible about the place. 

 (02:14:53) - Was she with somebody else? 

(02:14:57) - How cruel of you to define our relationship as transactional? 

 (02:15:01) - And then to this Sharon says, there's only one relationship you've ever had that wasn't. 

(02:15:08) - And she's sleeping in the room next door. And it's true. 

 (02:15:14) - Because the sun god uses people. The sun god uses everything. I guess in this thinking the sun god isn't exactly the sun. 

(02:15:27) - Because the sun god can't be source. The sun god has to be a converter of source into energy. And this scene with the car rolling up and everyone turning to go. 

 (02:15:43) - We're about to get into, let's see how much. 

(02:15:46) - We've got 20 minutes left. 

 (02:15:50) - Just a lot of time. 

(02:15:51) - I don't know if I have that much more to say about this film. 

 (02:15:54) - But I do wanna, I do wanna, I do wanna introduce some Joseph Conrad. Because I've mentioned fields like cinematic influences. 

(02:16:14) - But he also I think explicitly at a couple points wants to pay tribute to Joseph Conrad. First with Heart of Darkness and also with, here's these scenes. 

 (02:16:30) - This is like a, what's that guy's name? Jonathan Glaser. Again, like every time I see these, like this sort of dreamy, watery sequence. 

(02:16:44) - She's imagining Krista kind of holding her. 

 (02:16:48) - Like I think of somebody else. And maybe that's me. I mean, maybe this is what Field does. Field lets me pour my influences into him. 

(02:16:57) - But I don't think so. 

 (02:16:58) - I think I wish someone, I hope someone who knows film better than I do can chime in. I find him very like derivative. It to put it like in the most unflattering way. In some of these scenes, I find him to be doing his best ex impression at times. Which is fine, because he does enough different impressions that he becomes completely his own artist. 

(02:17:25) - And I don't know his other work, but I'm really excited to watch it at some point. 

 (02:17:36) - Here we have the torn away from Petra scene. 

(02:17:39) - That's tough. 

 (02:17:40) - Please don't do this. 

(02:17:41) - You know, it's getting pretty dark. It's not great. And again, these scenes, you know, from the view of the car, but there's no payoff on the horror. Like there is no killer in the end, which I guess is not a knock against the film. Like I think the lack of the killer points to the true death of the sun god. 

 (02:18:09) - He would be sort of ridiculous in a way if she were taken down by, let's say Francesca, her assistant or by Krista, like that she can't be taken down by a mere mortal. There's something almost like, hey, Galyen, like she has to be sort of taken down by the times. And here we go. You know, this is another Protar moment, right? Like the move from ego, oh, I'm glad you enjoyed the music, to realizing that actually they just, you know, it's a noise issue. And so how does she respond? Beautifully. 

 (02:19:01) - Slamming the door in their face and then finding her accordion. I don't quite know the meaning of the accordion, the significance of the accordion. 

(02:19:11) - Also the name of her fellowship for young women. 

 (02:19:15) - Probably, again, if we really want to go hard on the time angle, time and accordions have something to say about each other. I mean, so you know, here she's fully creatively unblocked. 

(02:19:35) - She's, I think at this point she's composed her new piece. So she's in contact with that Catholic source. And here's of course the grand opening.

 (02:20:11) - There's Andrews and Sebastian sitting together, that's sweet. Beautiful concert hall. So her legs were up the whole time so she wouldn't be caught. There he is all the way in the back, I think as she had sort of wanted. And so this is the scene from the trailer which I hadn't seen because I like to come into these films cold. And I've listened to this mauler a couple times and the way this ends like this, yeah that. It's perfect, yeah, it's really great. So she's on full mental breakdown now. Give me some eyes, that's a classic sun god command. 

 (02:21:44) - Give me some eyes. And so it's... Here it is in the last 15 minutes. We explore another land. The film takes us to New York first. But it's interesting because the cab driver is speaking Tamil, so Amazon tells me I don't know Tamil. So even before she's left America, she's sort of left America. She's sort of engaged in this damage control team. We need a new story. And here she goes home. I love, I love this scene at home. And I'll talk about home and return and all that stuff in a moment.

(02:24:02) - once we get to the Philippines. I know I keep teasing it. I forget how long this last act is. And so there's one more, there's one more version of tar that we haven't seen yet. And it's the child. And so here she is at home with all her boxes and her VHS tapes. Is it the Youth Philharmonic Concerts? I don't know what YPC stands for, but these are real tapes, the one she's about to play here. You can find it on YouTube. I mean, listen to that. We don't need to know all this stuff about Sharpe. 

(02:25:53) - Think about how much stuff that Lydia Tar knows, that this movie knows about music. We don't have to know that stuff about music. Music is movement. And she's crying because she knows the truth in it and she knows that she's strayed so far from that truth. She's nodding her head like, I know you're right. I'm sorry. Wearing her medal. So there is some sense in which she's come home. Okay. We're here finally. Oh, my battery's about to go out. Hold on. Okay, battery's plugged in, and I just want to give a quick shout out to the fine folks at Apple for ensuring that QuickTime keeps the recording when there's an issue like the one I just experienced, so that I didn't lose two and a half hours of recording. Let me synchronize with you. Let's see. 

(02:28:20) - She's about to say, we've just entered the room with the Filipino family talking amongst themselves, and she says, I'm so sorry. Okay, so hopefully that helps you recalibrate if needed. So this last 20 minutes, this last 10 minutes, where are we at? This is what, you know, this. She's not going back to the Amazon. She's going to the East. She's going to the Philippines. And you know here she's being greeted and treated like a celebrity. Nobody here is challenging her on her sexual abuse. 

(02:29:17) - In fact, as we'll see shortly, there are industries built around it. It is also a simpler place, and so when she sees that young girl smiling, for instance, there's a purity here, and this river might as well be one going into the Amazon. And look at her, she wants to take a swim. And this guy's like, not in the river. Crocodiles. They escaped from a Marlon Brando movie, and of course that Marlon Brando movie is...

(02:29:59) - Heart of Darkness. And um... When I read Lord Jim in college, something happened to me. I want to read it again. But um... There have been a few pieces of art in my life that have like uh... kind of dismantled something inside me and Lord Jim was one of the first examples of that. And so as we close out this film, I want to just make the connection between Tar and Lord Jim explicit. 

(02:30:43) - So if you don't know the plot of Lord Jim, it's about this sort of idealistic, romantic adventurer Jim who's sort of charismatic and magnetic and has big dreams, a good looking tall white guy. But something happens to him. He's on sort of one of his first adventures. Maybe he's sort of finally gotten promoted to first mate or something like that. And he's on this ship that's carrying slaves I think or immigrants. A lot of people in sort of... Here's the fishbowl scene. And so what is the significance of this scene? 

(02:31:31) - Here she's empowered to be a predator. And of course she's going to um... Not... You know, she's confused. I don't think she wanted this. I think she wanted an actual massage. Of course, Muller's fifth, five, comes and looks at her. And I'm sure she's tempted. But the whole thing is maybe too much for her in some way and so she just vomits. There's something, there's some purging happening here. There's some cleansing happening here. That's how I interpret it. 

(02:32:14) - And I feel grounded in that interpretation because of the ayahuasca ceremony introduced at the beginning. I do think that there's a redemption story here at the end for Tar. Just as there is for Lord Jim. So Lord Jim makes this horrible mistake and basically jumps ship instead of taking over and steering. And it's this incredible disgrace. 

(02:32:42) - And maybe there would have been ways for him to handle it gracefully but he feels the shame of the abandonment and is sort of exiled and ends up going to this fictional land of Patusan where he kind of makes another go at it. Only again to fail when he ends up getting somebody killed. And so even in Patusan he can't quite make it. And I want to read just a section from Lord Jim as we close out. The wonderful movie, hopefully a movie that will be celebrated for many years to come, Tar. It was inconceivable. 

(02:33:37) - That was the distinctive quality of the part into which Stein and I had tumbled him unwittingly. Excuse me, unwittingly. All right, let me see if I can get through this because I'm tired a little bit. A little bit. Overserved. So let's get through this. This was the distinctive quality of the part into which Stein and I had tumbled him unwittingly with no other notion than to get him out of the way out of his own way, be it understood. They're talking about sending him to Patusan. That was our main purpose though. 

(02:34:09) - I own I might have had another motive which had influenced me a little. I was about to go home for a time and it may be I desired more than I was aware of myself to dispose of him. To dispose of him, you understand, before I left. I was going home and he had come to me from there. This is Marlow speaking. Marlow wants to go back to England after, you know, however many years abroad. He'd come to me from there with his miserable trouble and his shadowy claim like a man panting under a burden in a mist. 

(02:34:40) - I cannot say I'd ever seen him distinctly, not even to this day after I had my last view of him. But it seemed to me that the less I understood, the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our knowledge. I did not know so much more about myself and then, I repeat, I was going home, to that home distant enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone by which the humblest of us has the right to sit. 

(02:35:11) - We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, or only our crust of bread, but it seems to me that for each of us, going home must be like going to render an account. 

(02:35:27) - We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends, those whom we obey, and those whom we love, but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties, even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice, even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valley, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters, in its waters. waters, and in its trees, a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. 

(02:36:02) - Say what you like to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience. All this may seem to use sheer sentimentalism, and indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions. There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures, but the fact remains that you must touch a reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns in your grasp. 

(02:36:36) - I think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call their own, those who return not to a dwelling, but to the land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit. It is those who understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes, few of us understand, but we all feel it, though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. 

(02:37:06) - Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength, and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. I don't know how much Jim understood, but I know how he felt. He felt confusedly but powerfully the demand of some such truth or some such illusion. I don't care how you call it, there is so little difference, and the difference means so little. The thing is that in virtue of his feeling he mattered. He would never go home now. Not he, never. 

(02:37:38) - Had he been capable of picturesque manifestations, he would have shuddered at the thought and made you shudder too. But he was not of that sort, though he was expressive enough in his way. Before the idea of going home he would grow desperately stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and powdered lips, and with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown, as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting. There was imagination in that hard skull of his, over which the thick clustering hair fitted like a cap. 

(02:38:10) - As to me I have no imagination. I would be more certain about him today if I had, and I do not mean to imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I, returning with no bones broken, so to speak, had done with my very young brother. I could not make such a mistake. I knew very well he was of those about whom there is no inquiry. I had seen better men go out, disappear, vanish utterly, without provoking a sound of curiosity or sorrow. 

(02:38:42) - The spirit of the land, as becomes the ruler of great enterprises, is careless of innumerable lives. Woe to the stragglers! We exist only insofar as we hang together. He had straggled in a way, he had not hung on, but he was aware of it with an intensity that made him touching, just as a man's more intense life makes his death more touching than the death of a tree. I happened to be handy, and I happened to be touched. That's all there is to it. I was concerned as to the way he would go out. 

(02:39:15) - It would have hurt me if, for instance, he had taken to drink. The earth is so small that I was afraid of, some day, being waylaid by a bleer-eyed, swollen-faced, besmirched loafer with no soles to his canvas shoes and with a flutter of rags above the elbows who, on the strength of old acquaintance, would ask for a loan of five dollars. 

(02:39:36) - You know the awful jaunty bearing of those scarecrows coming to you from a decent past, the rasping, careless voice, the half-averted, impudent glances, those meetings more trying to a man who believes in the solidarity of our lives than the sight of an impenitent deathbed to a priest. That, to tell you the truth, was the only danger I could see for him and for me, but I also mistrusted my want of imagination.

(02:40:01) - It might even come to something worse. In some way it was beyond my powers of fancy to foresee. He wouldn't let me forget how imaginative he was, and your imaginative people swing farther in any direction, as if given a longer scope of cable in the uneasy anchorage of life. They do. They take to drink, too. It may be I was belittling him by such a fear. How could I tell? Even Stein could say no more than he was a romantic. I only knew he was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? 

(02:40:32) - I'm telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you. I've led him out by the hand. I've paraded him before you. Were my commonplace fears unjust? I won't say. Not even now. You may be able to tell better since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of the game. At any rate, they were superfluous. He did not go out. Not at all. 

(02:41:04) - On the contrary, he came on wonderfully, came on straight as a die and in excellent form, which showed that he could stay as well as spurt. I ought to be delighted, for it is a victory in which I had taken my part, but I am not so pleased as I would have expected to be. I ask myself whether his rush had really carried him out of that mist in which he loomed interesting, if not very big, with floating outlines, a straggler yearning inconsolably for his humble place in the ranks. And besides, the last word is not said, probably shall never be said. 

(02:41:37) - Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word, the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose, at least not by us who know so many truths about either. My last words about Jim shall be few. 

(02:42:13) - I affirm he had achieved greatness, but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust, but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive. It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable, and dull. 

(02:42:38) - Yet you too, in your time, must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone, and as short-lived, alas. I am going to close it there. I want to thank you for watching tar with me. And I hope that this brings some new illumination and some new questions to your experience of the film.

Video:

Episode highlights:

* Designing in nouns and verbs

* Inside-out vs outside-in design

* Alien technologies

* Cards as supernouns

* Progressive competition

Selected links:

* Azlen’s card prototype

* Bananagrams

* Metaphors We Live By

* Voyages in sentence space

Video here:

Episode highlights:

* Magic the Gathering: cards that left an impression

* Can managers use cards to understand and be understood by their teams?

* David’s prototype using whiteboard cards (!), label-makers, and dice

* What’s the opposite of cards?

Selected links:

* Amy Weber’s cards

* Melissa Benson’s website

* Erasable whiteboard cards

* Human Design

* Players who suit MUDs

Matt and I spend just about an hour waxing nostalgic on hyper-specific memories of the cards we bought, played, and traded. Featuring:

Check out The Immortal Game: Nick Bishop vs Joey Fianchetto on YouTube to see our match.

In this episode we behold COVID-19 as a hyperobject, drawing heavily from the book by Timothy Morton.

Last time we picked on elite universities but left open whether their business model was significantly different from or worse than other private schools. Continuing to pull from Paul Tough’s The Years that Matter Most, in this episode we do a deep dive into Trinity’s admissions process through the eyes of its enrollment manager, Angel Pérez.

Tough and Pérez shed light on the difficult math behind admissions. Who deserves a scholarship, and why? How do you ensure you hit your revenue goals? How do you know which 20% of students will accept their offer, and protect yourself against the 80% who won’t? How do you maintain favorable vanity metrics like low acceptance rates?

Ultimately, econometric modeling instructs Trinity to say no to many exceptional lower-income kids. And to say yes – and even offer financial aid – to less exceptional, higher-income kids. But this situation seems less grim than the one at Ivy League schools. Trinity needs to generate revenue from tuition, and therefore relies on people who can pay tuition. In contrast, Harvard needs to generate revenue from charitable giving, and therefore relies on the ultra-wealthy.

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast.

I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and breezy, April 1st.

April Fool's Day.

So, it's been a while since my last chapter, but if you'll remember, we're on the sexual 3, whose keyword is attractiveness.

So I actually recorded this one a few weeks ago and didn't feel great about the recording.

I rushed my way through it and I realized we're back to, we're at the final number, the three.

We started the four, because I'm a four, and it snuck up on me.

But, we're back in my neighborhood.

And the sexual subtype and the self preservation subtype, these are the subtypes that I find, myself connecting with more deeply.

So I realized, gosh, I think I probably breezed through this chapter in a way to avoid my own inner stuff.

So I'm gonna do another pass.

I'm gonna be a little bit more connected with what's happening inside me.

As I read is a super long chapter.

So that's.

That's part of the problem.

And so I'm gonna do my best to navigate this.

But let's hear what, Claudio Naranjo has to say about the sexual 3.

For the passion of the sexual 3, Ichaso used the words masculinity or femininity, depending on the case.

I used to explain it as an excessive attempt to conform to cultural images, perhaps Hollywood style, of what it means to be masculine or feminine nowadays.

He says, I believe that the fundamental pathology of these individuals lies in the fact that instead of acting from instinctive freedom, they invest all their passion into the thirst for love and the corresponding seduction, either through compliance or by projecting an image that is meant to be attractive and exciting.

The result of this is that a woman being overly focused on pleasing a man, loses her ability to enjoy herself. additionally, this personality type tends to have a certain passion for family, which, while it does not appear as a flaw, represents an exaggerated need to please others, perpetuating self alienation.

Among the three subtypes, the sexual three is the most dependent.

They do not usually display aggression and cannot tolerate rejection.

Their seduction is aimed at being embraced and validated, confusing their self worth with the attractiveness of their body.

So that's the introduction, and we have Lorena Garcia de las Bayonas beautiful name with the, transformation in the sexual type 3.

So before we dive into it, I really what Naranjo describes as his own evolution. when I think about his starting place for the sexual three.

Well, the, the person who comes to my mind is Don Draper from Mad Men.

And I'm reading, watching Mad Men now.

And so you have this masculine, attractive, mysterious type. he's, he himself has reinvented himself. ?

So there's that mask quality that we typically associate with the more available words for the three.

The three can be chameleonic, the three can be political.

The three can be focused, on success and progress.

So all that Don Draper energy is there. and Don Draper certainly conforms to the cultural images of what it means to be masculine.

But I how Naranjo gets even more specific, which is that their passion is to be what is desirable from the opposite sex.

So to make yourself into something that is pleasurable, pleasing, desirable to the opposite sex is the passion.

So it's not just Clint Eastwood, it's Clint Eastwood if and only if that is known to be what women want.

And we'll have a woman's perspective for the sexual three.

So we'll hear a lot more about that.

You can imagine that sexual threes will be different for men and women because men and women want different things.

And I just, I guess I'll say a little bit more before we get into the chapter, which is that the core types 3, 6 and 9 are for me the most difficult types to work with.

The energies of them.

And in part that's because they're more pure energies. we've talked about the six.

The six is the, the passion of fear.

And who can't relate to fear?

Fear is so basic of a human mechanism. nine is trickier in some ways.

I think nines are perhaps easier to type.

But the nine, passion of sloth or indolence or numbing, self forgetting.

Again, we all have profound amounts of self forgetting.

Very few of us are really in contact with what we want, what we're about, what we're on earth to do.

So self forgetting is this universal, human condition.

And then three desirability, mask, falsity, covering up, with deceit, A, profound emptiness.

Again, we all have that. we all look in the mirror every morning.

Many of us do and dress up according to some idea of what something somebody wants.

But I think the three in particular is hard for me as a four.

And this is something that is useful to know about Naranjo.

I don't think Naranjo really talked about the wings much.

Wings have taken off in the popular framing of the Enneagram.

But Naranjo really was concerned with the core types and then looked at the other types as stemming from the.

So you're basically a three, six, or nine.

And so a four is a three, a two is a three. you're just a three.

And so the three is continually preoccupied with image.

And the two has found a way to have a positive self image, and that comes with their own issues.

The four has found a way to have a negative self image, and that comes with their issues.

And so that would be a a brief way of Naranjo describing things.

So it's interesting.

One of the, names I played with when I was thinking about maybe starting, a publication just for this was Four Wing Five.

And there are a lot of people who identify as Four Wing Five. and Richard Rohr has talked about that chasm between the four and the five as the hardest to cross.

So there's a little bit of mystique around a four wing five. at the at the bottom, the 6:00 of the Enneagram.

But if Naranjo were here, he might say, that's not really a thing.

Four Wing Five, a four is much closer to three than they are to five.

And I think that's interesting to play with for myself and for other fours, potentially, because, nobody wants to be a three, really.

Threes get hard.

They get put through it a little bit in the.

In the Enneagram, again, because they have this fundamental almost universal human thing of having an image.

And so it's easier for a four, I think, to take their authenticity and their creativity into the five space of, this genius area.

It's in a way easier for us to hang out in that space.

I'm not just creative.

I'm also a hermit.

But.

And of course, there can be truth to that.

But, I think it's healthy for any four to explore their threeness.

And I think it's probably hard for a four to do that.

And it might be the same with fives.

Fives might, be drawn to the fourness.

I'm not just a hermit.

I'm also a creative artist.

But, for five to actually touch the fear underneath, that feeling of maybe emptiness or solitude.

Oh, yeah, there's fear there.

That.

That's probably juicy terrain for a five.

So I'm glad I didn't call this four ring five, because I would have at this point said I've made a terrible mistake.

Okay, let's get into the Transformation The Sexual Type 3 by Lorena Garcia de las Bayonas.

And we will try to breeze through this while hitting the key points.

So she thanks a bunch of individuals. she writes, as sexual three approaches character healing, they become free to be, to feel and to express themselves authentically without being imprisoned by the beautiful physical image, being able even to be ugly and show the ugliness of their life such as pain, anger, sadness, jealousy, envy, resentment, and everything they consider shameful or that makes them lose control.

So off the bat we're talking about freedom and spontaneity.

And threes are.

One of the easier ways to spot a three or differentiate a three from other types is threes are a little, held in.

It's a three has to pass through an image filter before doing something.

They're the most image conscious.

And so freedom, the freedom to be, to feel, to express isn't there for the three.

So as this is helpful for me was when I'm doing my self typing, Self Preservation 4 has always been the one that spoke most clearly to me.

But a self preservation four has that in common with the three, ?

The self preservation four has to be contained and containment, something that three and the four, the sexual three and the self preservation four share here.

Now the reasons for containment are different and we'll explore that as we get into it.

In this way, they're free to be able to make mistakes without the fear that they will stop being loved.

They also leave behind the dependence on approval and love from others, especially from a partner, which results from a lack of self love.

What remains is more real sense of self love through which they can feel a greater warmth inside after passing through the hell of breaking through the internal numbness and the inability to love.

So for the three, the self abandonment is profound, and prevalent here.

The three has made this bargain early on to treat the image of themselves as their real self.

And they don't know that they've made that bargain or it's not available to them.

So in contrast, the four has this unlovability.

The four has the presence of being unlovable.

The three has the absence of being lovable.

For the sexual three, if my partner isn't validating me, then that's terrifying.

And I think it's even more.

It's not that I'll feel bad.

It's I don't even.

I'm without ground.

Whereas the four might say, if my partner leaves me, I knew I was bad, I knew all along they would leave me, they don't me, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's for the four, the threat of separation is a confirmation of some deeply held negative belief.

For the three.

Then they touch emptiness.

They touch not knowing what I am, who I am, if I am not pleasing to this person, I understand how my ego is destroying me and preventing me from finding love.

Now at this stage of my life, love is about all the love I can feel for myself.

Truly knowing myself and considering myself.

That is where everything begins to be more real.

Love is not a goal, nor a task, nor an achievement, nor a conquest.

When a sexual three heals, they also appear more relaxed and carefree.

They let go of the compulsion to do things, to have everything under control and to be loved.

With their gaze turned inward rather than outward, they can see the difference between what they truly feel and need and self deception.

In this way, they become stronger and more mature and the sensation of fragility disappears.

The kind that makes people say, better not touch them, they might break.

They also become more independent, knowing they can survive sometimes even better without a partner, feeling loved and valued for who they are, not for what they do.

That might be a way to disambiguate between a sexual three and a self preservation four. the work that I'm doing in this document is.

I don't know if my gaze is that turned outward, to some extent.

It is, for sure.

I would say that, yeah, I think I'm much more inward focused.

I certainly do enact and feel and think ways that are according to, masculinity.

And when I think about masculinity, what, what does masculinity mean?

To me, it's super heterosexually motivated. being a man.

Being masculine to my structure is being the things that a woman needs, which is different. an 8.

Their masculinity can be about power and autonomy and strength.

Same thing with a six.

Potentially sexual six.

For me, my sense of masculinity is deeply tied in to, meeting the needs of, of the feminine, of the, of the, Of a fe.

Of a woman. that said, the conclusion there still feels a lot more a self preservation, for it still feels a lot more containment and self suppression rather than looking, feeling a certain way.

But there, opening doors, paying for dinner.

There's a whole set of things that I do automatically or did automatically when I was dating.

Now I just slammed the door in my wife's face.

No, that.

Yeah, those were, Those were image conscious.

I just don't know if they were.

That, I wasn't doing a lot of this outward gaze.

I don't think it's interesting to spend more time with that.

Healing also involves finding the freedom to enjoy sex without merely being an object for the other's pleasure.

Being able to let go of control and be less focused on their image, which does not allow them to feel pleasure and in many cases reach orgasm.

Yeah, so a sexual three, I'm going to speak from the man, heterosexual man's point of view. that's about my sense of worth is wrapped up in the woman's pleasure. my potency is the woman's orgasm.

In my own sexual experience, it's just not again.

Almost nine, ? just forgotten.

Remember the nine and the six of the three, that core triad, they have so much in common.

I think nine sixes and threes move into each other with a lot more fluidity than the other, connected types.

So the three, and being so preoccupied with image, of course forgets themselves.

The sexual three woman, in the process of healing, sees her, sees herself learning to live without the need for the gaze and recognition of a man.

And of course, for a woman, our culture is so much more conducive to threeness.

For a man, she adds, it would similarly involve the need for the gaze of a woman, a childish and narcissistic need for constant applause, which leaves him increasingly empty because his romantic relationships are based on doing things so that the other applauds him.

So much of these relational needs end up, becoming transactional.

So I need the love of a woman.

But in that need for reinforcement and confirmation, we both end up losing our true erotic connection.

On my end, I need.

I regress into a childish need for applause on her end.

She shuts down into, great job, honey, and nobody is actually getting what they want.

Many times, she adds, achieving that applause becomes very difficult, leading to great frustration that results in a permanent state of unhappiness in their romantic life.

So we're talking about, she says, becoming aware of self deception and falseness in romantic relationships.

Self deception and falsity being the core passions and fixations of the three.

Unmasking the image of being good and perfect in order to be loved.

And realizing their difficulty in truly loving represents one of the greatest shadows for the sexual three, as they have always believed they had a great capacity to love.

Yeah, that's painful.

That's really, that's really hard.

I'm going to skip over some of these quotations from a book she writes about entering the therapeutic process for the sexual three.

Remember, a lot of these writers are, psychotherapists.

So this is heavy on the therapy side here.

So, she talks about why might a three start therapy or a sexual three start therapy. she says if a sexual three looks inward even slightly, then they will realize they feel a sadness that has always been there.

Reminds me of the five.

If the five looks inward even slightly, they will realize an emptiness that has always been there.

And for a three, they'll feel a sadness that has always been there.

And for a four in the middle, you'll probably get a mix of sad and empty.

So there's that polarization between the three and the five.

I think that's another way to disambiguate. the three is a polarization between the two and the four.

So the three is bringing in more of that other centricity that a 2 has, that attunement to need.

The 4 really is a bit more self, self absorbed.

So the four is caught between the inner emptiness and the inner sadness. so what do they do with the sadness?

What happens is that by not expressing it and being constantly preoccupied with not showing it, they don't even reveal it to themselves.

So why might the three start therapy? someone they admire might.

That's snarky.

But she says, the motivation that a sexual three finds to begin therapy is initially related to the fact that someone they admire has spoken to them about the benefits of the process and has told them they might need it.

A sexual three might also come to realize they had a difficult life.

I say realize because perhaps they have been disconnected from their personal tragedy.

I think that I can connect to that.

There's, threes may not really be in touch with what they didn't get.

And then they share something about their life or childhood and someone reflects back to them the tragic nature of their experience. another reason, she says, is the trendiness of the therapeutic world.

Rarely.

Her point is the motivation comes from a true need for a feeling of true need for transformation that takes time to develop.

Because the three, or the sexual three specifically feels this deep disconnection to, their experience. they'd have to let the mask Slip, perhaps they might feel a very fragile and sad person, or they might not show that, or they might embellish it to use it as a seduction tool.

Where they may clearly feel the need for introspection is usually after a breakup.

In that case, they will connect with a primitive pain related to reliving an abandonment by their father or mother.

For sexual three, a breakup is their worst nightmare.

Better than die.

To separate, they seem to think, or they imagine that is the closest thing to death.

I, don't know how common that is, but I certainly relate to that. it took me a while to be able to accept the prospect of the end of a relationship, as a normal thing.

For me.

It was always existential, always a death and something that I almost couldn't look at. not so much because of fear.

Fear, of being abandoned or fear of being alone, but that primal fear of, what am I if not in a relationship?

Not even that conscious thought, but just almost, an incapacity.

And I certainly have had times in my life where alone, even if my partner is just away for a while, I just fall into this really crude way of being not taking care of myself, things that.

And again, I don't know how much of this, maybe that's men, I'm not sure.

But here in the sexual three, I think that feels that's part of the energy when facing a breakup.

They may even have suicidal thoughts, start using drugs to drown out their suffering.

They're terribly afraid of pain.

And when they enter it, it feels they will never come out, no matter how many times they've been in and out of it before.

That's tricky for the four, because the four is a friend of pain.

Although the four has turned pain into a story.

And so the four also, their pain, their drama sometimes is their protective device against even deeper pain.

It's one of the worst survival strategies in the Enneagram.

I think for the four, the four is let me, Let me feel a lot of pain so that I don't actually have to feel the real pain.

People quotations, point being life.

Life revolving around romantic relationships.

A sexual three feels and lives in a permanent prison.

The feel suffocated by vanity.

And this suffocation leads them to want to remain unnoticed and to be extremely shy, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing.

They need to free themselves from this is another motivation that might lead them to therapy.

So this prison is on the One hand, the need to always be, pleasing to the other. again, not pleasing in the supplement supplicatory way of the two.

Not submissive pleasing or sexual pleasing.

It's more a full identity complementing. it's a performance.

It's a.

It's masterful performance of I give you exactly what you need.

So there's power there. there's less of an insecurity or at least a conscious insecurity.

So that takes a huge amount of energy which is suffocating, which then wants They want to remain unnoticed and be extremely shy.

That's interesting.

We haven't really heard much about the shyness of the three, but it makes sense.

You would want to be almost in a place where you're completely alone, which is maybe familiar to the three.

That not being noticed.

Essentially.

I either I'm either on stage or I'm.

Nobody's noticing me.

That's an interesting polarity for the three to explore.

What is left behind in the process of transformation.

Emotional, sexual and physical disconnection is left behind.

The fear of real intimacy, the dependency on love.

The self deception around love.

The thirst for loving and being loved.

Superficiality.

Compulsion to put all energy into seduction, conquest and pleasing the other.

The dependence on recognition and applause in romantic relationship.

The fear of confrontation is also left behind as well as the self deception that comes with the stories one tells oneself to avoid confrontation.

You can hear the nine in that finally the sexual three dares to experience conflict and sustain it.

Something so feared and difficult for them.

Therapeutic recommendations.

Yeah, just stepping away from seduction, stepping away from image.

And the therapist.

These are, recommendations to a therapist that she's giving here is the therapist has to be aware of this seductive performance that the three will put on.

And with self deception and seduction, there's also the danger that the patient will end up taking control of the therapy and will not surrender to the process.

Seeing the same relational patterns, repeating feeling an object only seen for the term see.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. the three takes control.

That's the Mad Men Don Draper assertiveness piece, I think even, the feminine side of that, which may be more, submissive in some ways.

There's still a controlling.

That's very important for the three.

I control the experience.

And by controlling the experience, I feel I have power.

I feel I have freedom.

I feel I know what's really going on.

But in fact it's the opposite.

There's no freedom.

It's, a highly contained, experience.

There's no spontaneity.

There's not seeing what's really going on because there's disconnection from one's interior, and you're not in contact with the other.

So once they get past all this, she writes, the sexual three will connect with the void of not knowing who they are outside of another person.

That's huge.

Connect with the void of not knowing who you are outside of another person.

That's the basic work, I think, for the three Energy, threes, if you work with the three, getting, them to, to write about what they want in a way that's just for them.

Not a, Not a blog post, not an announcement.

It's very difficult.

A lot of things come out of the three, pr.

Once they pass through that emptiness, then they can begin to see the self deception they've lived in all their life.

So there's seduction and self deception moving through that.

Then there's this void of really not knowing what I am and then spending time in that void a, a baby learning to crawl. well, what do I want?

What do I care about?

What's real to me then?

But just by seeing how hard that is for themselves, then they come face to face with their self deception and how, how it's driven their, Their life.

And it's so hard for a three because the three is successful.

The three is good looking.

The three has it all.

The three has great relationships.

Typically.

I'm super generalizing, but contrast that to the four.

The neighbor four is come beating down the doors on therapy because they're really having a tough time.

So the four comes saying, I want to transform.

So interesting.

They're very different that way. and they have so much in common.

But the four, four are certainly more in contact with that emptiness.

But the four is tricky because the four can turn anything into a story really fast, including that emptiness.

The three is the same way the three has.

The four turns it into a story of art and of drama and of, its aesthetic.

Aesthetically beautiful.

That's how.

That's how the four stays.

I'm talking really subtle layers now.

But the four, even at the deepest levels of experiment, experience can turn that into art.

And it can be wonderful art.

But, that instinct oftentimes comes from a still a need to be authentic and need to be special to avoid, let's say, generic feelings of abandonment and hurt.

Anything but generic, ?

The three.

I, think as we'll see maybe later in this chapter, and I think we saw in the previous one, the three will touch that and then turn it into a success story, Turn it into a turnaround, turn it into a hero's journey.

Gosh, I hit bottom and then I made it great.

So they both have that fast reconstituting, structure, quality.

They may realize their entire life has been a great lie they constructed out of hunger for love and admiration. these are hard things to say, but this is from a three, and threes are, I think part of the reason the literature is hard on threes is because threes are hard on threes.

That's part of their transformation work, is threes are, brutally honest.

At the end.

They, they look at themselves in the mirror, but when they do, they can really can be stark.

So I take it when she's saying these things, I take it that she's speaking to herself.

Realizing that your entire life has been a great lie I constructed out of hunger for love and admiration.

You'd love to see someone be a little bit gentler there.

But I think for her and for maybe threes, there's actually some healing with that going to the depths of that, pain.

Quote.

I came to therapy with great internal confusion and physically exhausted.

Entangled in an abusive relationship without being able to leave or recognize it.

After 15 years, I woke up.

The idyllic dream had turned into a nightmare in a prison.

I saw that I didn't really my life, and I was enormously tired of sacrificing myself and feeling dead inside.

End quote.

To begin valuing their essence, the person first needs to know it.

And here the therapist has to be patient.

The sexual 3 may feel they've got nothing to say.

When they look inside, they only see emptiness.

That's where the healing begins. there are suggestions around seeing potentially a female, therapist for a woman so that the seduction is less present.

Recommended, exercises.

We've got the usual suspects here.

I'd love to see more differentiation, but I feel these are.

You hear them over and over again.

Reconnecting with the body theater. that's okay.

That's a great one for the three in particular. ?

Because of that spontaneity and learning to bypass the.

The image manager, as it were. meditation, daring to be authentic, expressing oneself, authenticity, authentically allowing oneself to express what one considers ugly also helps So I can really connect with that. probably one of the scariest ways that I could show myself would be ugly for me.

And yet as a four, I dwell in ugliness, so that's what's confusing.

Can I solve that puzzle in, In a minute for myself?

So for.

I'll just say this four deals with profound issues of being bad, ugly, toxic, etc, and deals with that in a bunch of ways. so the, the story there is available to me, but the actual, the actual experience, maybe this is just how things have shifted for me.

Maybe it would be a different story 10 years ago, but these days I see through that, story more how arbitrary it is and how, how and when and why I might have made up that story about myself, but still, being vulnerable, being sloppy, those feel ugly to me.

So I'm somebody else would be oh, I talk to a lot of people.

They have concerns about being too much. if I, If I tell you everything, then that that might overwhelm you.

I don't really have that.

I just feel that would be ugly.

That would be aesthetically unappealing.

And so I, Maybe that's just 3 energy there.

But it could also be told in a 4 framework, ?

Of that will.

They'll.

Then they'll see the real me, which is ugly, and, and leave me or something that.

But, but for.

For this four, at least, the, abandonment is less present than rejection.

And rejection is not so bad for being alone as for being unseen, unknown, unknown.

That feels a little more foreish.

You, know, these, These pro.

These primal things.

Abandonment, rejection, isolation, they're all very, very close to each other.

So you have to dig in there to figure out what is it specifically.

So rejection, of course is very painful for the four.

Not being known is very core for, I think a lot of fours for the three.

What is at the core? what's so bad about being rejected?

I know that I connect with.

With 3 energy.

I connect a lot with being discarded.

Very painful. the, the feeling of being thrown out, but that feeling is still an object feeling.

So that still.

That still is the feeling of a three who feels an object.

If I take off my mask and express myself as ugly or spontaneous or then what?

See, I think the three is.

Is it's.

It's more connected, I think, to they don't have necessarily another choice. what we're hearing in this chapter is threes have to connect with the emptiness.

They have to connect with how little they've developed their real self.

She's saying here, first it's necessary to connect with one's own needs in order to identify what one wants and does not want from others.

This allows the sexual three to set the necessary boundaries.

She's talking about boundaries.

So they no longer feel used. yeah, feeling used, that's used up, discarded.

So that's that wounding.

That's very familiar for the three. what the three doesn't know about is being loved for exactly who you are, just.

Just for who you are, what you are. the unconditional love.

But the three hasn't had that experience so much in their bodies, at least in their hearts.

So I think it's more of an annihilation, emptiness, destruction, void thing that I would say is that's what's so scary.

It's not, I'm afraid of being rejected, of course.

I'm afraid of being rejected, of course.

The feeling of being discarded is unbearable.

But I think even that feeling of being discarded is a layer on top of the core void, emptiness.

That is terrifying, sure, but is also simply just I don't know what I am.

Complete disorientation, complete not knowing, carrying on.

Humility is important for the three sense of humor.

And I find a lot of threes have this humility and humor about themselves.

Self deprecating humor in a way, but not in a.

In a really beautiful way.

The three is the most honest.

The healed three will tell you their journey.

And this is where the three stuff gets so tricky because it's threes can also turn that into a great business, And so it's gosh, as a three were, you've got to be so diligent about Am I turning this into marketing?

Has my marketing department taken over again?

Because threes will tell an amazing story about their transformation.

But if they're clowning around a little bit, if there's a sense of humor, that I think that's a really good sign.

What a sexual three must come to understand.

It is important for a sexual three to understand that nothing bad will happen if they emotionally surrender to another person, if they lose control, if they let go of their mask, and if they show themselves authentically, on the contrary, it can bring immense relief and allow them to build relationships that are deeply fulfilling ones where they can form a true bond with their partner.

Letting Go of.

The need for power in relationships is key.

The need for power and control comes from fear.

This is where threes and eights can get a little bit mixed up.

And I think it's Naran who says that, one of the easier ways is the eight has that spontaneity.

The eight will unleash their power and the three is more contained.

But power and controller are of primary concern for both. the sexual three must understand that refusing to commit to one person and constantly seducing others just in case something better comes along only leaves them feeling increasingly alone and empty.

Okay, so we've got some, Yeah, we still have a lot to do, so I'm going to try to breeze through some of these testimonies.

I love testimonies.

But here, here, listen to this self preservation4energy quote.

I confused love with the obligation to endure everything.

If I love my partner, I endure them.

And by enduring, I receive their love.

I think from that quote alone, you can't say whether That's a sexual 3 or a self preservation 4.

Endurance is key to both.

But the 4, the self preservation 4 will be more obviously beleaguered, drained.

A lot of fours wear their fourness on their face, I would say.

I, I think maybe that's taboo to talk about, faces, but you can definitely get, information.

I'm not talking about the.

What is it?

Phrenology.

It's just fours have.

Especially self preservation 4 can be eating themselves from the inside.

Whereas the 3's endurance, again, think about Don Draper.

There's that stoicism, that forbearance there, but he turns it into his mask.

Very tricky.

I think, for myself at least, I might have to try on sexual three as a, as a structure for a few weeks and see what I learn.

I felt such desperation for my husband's sexual and emotional rejection that my conclusion was if he no longer likes my body, it means he no longer likes who I am.

I was willing to do anything to win back his love. and in a state of complete disconnection and impulsivity, I went to a plastic surgeon to get breast reconstruction.

I was at the peak of my neurosis of the madness of vanity, where being and body are confused, where giving and receiving love is confused with image.

I was convinced that I could win back his love by becoming sexy again.

When I started my inner journey, I realized it had been an act of self harm and an attack on my own femininity.

You can see how different masculinity and femininity show up.

So it might be the same structure, but really different ways of being in the world.

My confidence has always depended on men.

I've never known true confidence in myself, only an illusion where for moments I could feel a superwoman.

If a man I was interested in, loved or cared about me, then I was valuable, someone worthy.

That way I could take care of myself and believe that I truly mattered.

If that person lost interest in me, it was a catastrophe.

My false sense of confidence would collapse and I would see the truth that, deep down I felt nothing but hatred and contempt for myself because I wasn't able to win or maintain their love.

Terry, my wife is a two and fours.

And twos have a lot of material that they collide with each other on.

We talked about positive self image, negative self image, and the three is where they meet. ?

But the three is also so hard to look cleanly at. so I'm just thinking about my relationship with her, how much my own confidence depends on how she sees me.

And again, some of this is normal.

I'm not saying healthy, I just mean normal. 3, 6 and 9 being the core triads. probably a lot of people feel that way. their sense of self worth, of course, is deeply wrapped up in how their life partner sees them.

But also a lot of people would probably say, if my partner stopped liking me, I'd look for another partner.

And then even more deeply than that is, my partner didn't me.

Then I would say, sucks for them.

I myself.

That's where we would to get to.

But whether you're two or four or three, it's dependence, it's codependence, it's the codependent triad.

Two, three, four, shame, triad, heart. triad, codependent triad.

Maybe that's not fair. because eights, nines, sixes, all experience codependency in some way.

But it's the home of this heart triad relationship.

Now I see the absolute necessity of strengthening what is mine.

My home, my work, my way of spending time.

That my desires are not just a way to pass the time while I wait for someone to love me for real.

I think it's really healthy for a three and for any number but a three to do things for themselves.

Cook for yourself, design a space for yourself, not for the other.

Many, many of these quotes are from women, which is helpful. but I don't want us to forget how different masculinity and femininity are.

Quote.

In my life, the gaze I have sought most is that of a man, and has come at the cost of losing myself in the presence of a man.

I have never given myself space to know who I am, what I desire, or what I need.

I simply merged with him.

I have sought out men who, from the beginning, showed signs of emotional absence, which require me to exert even more effort to be noticed, as if I were repeating over and over the endless search for my absent father.

I was trapped in the crazy fantasy that if I adjusted enough, the other would stay by my side.

So I took on the responsibility of making sure that the presence of the other depended on how well I could be and do things.

I sought men whom I idealized for what they represented in the world because through them, I could build a more solid identity for myself.

If I'm with someone who's important, maybe that means I am important too.

See, I think none of that really applies to the male sexual three, because what she's saying here is the gaze.

In order to attract the gaze of a man, I need to lose myself and merge with him and.

And reinforce him, applaud him, be by his side, etc.

That's.

That's the feminine.

That.

That.

That's.

That's the feminine idea of the masculine gaze or the male gaze.

I think the male idea of the female gaze.

There are many. certainly, attractiveness in terms of pure sexual appeal is.

Could be one.

But, safety. ?

Women want to feel safe.

So that's where I'll be macho.

I won't have needs.

I'll.

I'm not.

I'm going to be contained and I'm going to make her feel safe, make her feel treasured, make her feel a trophy.

Make her feel I worship her again.

Make her feel Not actually worship her, not actually have her be safe, not actually do these things, but make her feel that way.

That's the.

The, Same goes to make them feel that way.

I think Suzanne Stabile has written, that the three is feeling repressed, but they're also feeling centered, meaning that feelings are really primary for them.

And I think they're very conscious of how they want to make people feel, and they act from that place, even if unconsciously.

But what do they feel that's not.

That's blocked?

Reclaiming Authenticity.

Quote.

Let's talk childhood.

I always believed that I had a happy childhood, but later I realized that From a very young age, I was deeply disconnected from myself.

Although I perceived myself as a sensitive child, I quickly learned that if I expressed what I felt, I could upset others.

Mainly my parents who were always very busy.

My mother raising children, my father always tense and working.

So I learned not to express my emotions or my needs.

And I became very good at controlling myself.

I became self sufficient, A prudent, well behaved, responsible child with no major complications, but completely alone when it came to emotions.

Sometimes I went unnoticed.

Other times I achieved success and recognition at school or was chosen a leader in activities.

And I loved that, even though I was somewhat shy.

Now looking back, I see that my childhood was filled with difficulties in recognizing what I felt, what I wanted and what my needs were.

I struggled to trust my sensations and my intuition because.

Because they were always denied.

It was as if I had to feel what my parents wanted me to feel.

Which is why I grew up feeling immense confusion about what was real for me.

I gradually suppressed pleasure and spontaneity.

I learned to disconnect from my feelings easily, inappropriately, because I believed that expressing them would complicate things for others and I shouldn't be a bother.

I stopped validating when I felt and began hiding everything I consider not good.

I struggled to see the shadow side of things, of people, of situations, of myself.

I couldn't see the ways in which I was being mistreated.

The dark side of life.

I didn't even recognize my own fears. and reading that, I hear a lot for myself and self preservation for energy.

I also hear a lot there.

If I'm trying to disambiguate for a second the self preservation four, there's so much more inner turmoil.

I don't think the four loses so much their inner state.

They just learn that they have to not be that, that what that is is not okay.

But they struggle from that.

And so The Self Preservation 4 will explode in anger because this repressed, ignored, frustrated part is still there.

Saying somebody look at me and then we'll need that contact.

The three, it feels their spiral is toward numbness and emptiness.

They just disconnect from their feelings. so I'm feeling a certain way, I'm talking about childhood, as, as referenced in this quote. this doesn't feel I feel I'm being mistreated.

But if I were to feel that fully, then it would complicate things for others.

I would not.

I would no longer be pleasing and I want to be pleasing Again, the nine and the six.

I want to keep everybody together.

I want to preserve relationships.

I want this to be safe.

So very pure motivations there. and so I question my own intuitions.

I doubt my feelings.

And that confusion, it sounds the survival strategy for this person over the years goes from confusion to disconnection. better just to put it aside, put feelings aside.

The four doesn't really put feelings aside.

The four buries feeling the self preservation.

Four, sexual four. out with their feelings.

I think drama has to be present for the four.

Even if it's internal drama, even if it's private drama, the three doesn't have that drama.

The three has to be awoken to the drama.

Oh my gosh, I did have a tough childhood.

Oh my gosh, I didn't experience unconditional love.

I want to wrap.

I feel better about.

I'm not.

I wasn't super vulnerable, but I think I was in contact with some of the core questions I have at least about this.

And, yeah, there are a lot of quotes here, but in conclusion, she writes, sexual theories were children who were abandoned, mistreated, used, abused, beaten, or violated.

We were taught to be objects and our loved ones used us according to their needs.

They did not know how to love us for who we were, but only what we did.

We became the caretakers of our parents.

We were never taught the difference between good and evil, and we learned to disconnect from painful experiences by beautifying them so as not to betray our abusers.

We confused mistreatment with love and learned to take responsibility for their actions, transforming them into good people and idealizing them to preserve their image and by extension, our own.

All this left us with very low self esteem and a total lack of love.

We believed we deserved everything that happened to us and assumed the guilt.

Always keeping a pleasant demeanor, appearing sweet, being compliant, and hiding our strength through perfection, we sought moments when we could feel loved and adored, especially by ourselves.

Enamored with the idea of love and with being adored, we have drained our lovers and partners, suffocating them with our narcissistic love, demanding a level of attention that no one could possibly fulfill.

We sold perfection in order to be loved and demanded that same perfection return.

For much of our lives, we chose partners who despised or mistreated us in order to reinforce the deep sense of worthlessness we carried inside.

We endured unbearable situations that would eventually be followed by sweet reconciliations.

By tolerating mistreatment again and Again, we were willing to pay any price to relive the phase of conquest where we were again once.

Where we once again adored, where we once again became the center of the other's gaze.

And for that, it seemed worth it.

We continued to protect our original abusers and repeated the same pattern, enduring everything in the name of love.

When we began to connect with our inner world, we realized that in our partners, we'd been searching for what we never received as children.

And as we failed to find it, our frustration, resentment only grew.

Our vanity led us to believe that our false love could transform the monster into a prince.

Through our healing process, we came to see our vanity and arrogance.

How we tried to place ourselves above those who had hurt us in order to maintain our untouchable image of goodness, generosity, and purity.

By doing so, we denied them their responsibility.

When we finally handed their responsibility back to them, we experienced it as a liberation.

At that moment, we began to distinguish what was ours and what was not.

And then we were able to begin feeling our pain and our rage.

And that rage, in turn, transformed into strength.

A strength that allowed us to know what we want and what we do not want in our lives.

And in this way, as we begin to find our own power, we stopped handing it to others.

Beautiful ending.

And we'll finish this project with the, self Preservation three next time.

Summary

I thought that elite universities like Harvard made their money from high tuitions. I was wrong! Harvard and other top schools actually lose money on students – they spend $150,000 per student a year on core academics alone.

The business model of elite universities actually binds them to wealthy students more than simply being expensive would. I’m not sure whether this pattern is a positive feedback loop, spiraling out of control and into absurdity, or whether it’s concerning but fixable.

I’m also not sure whether a focus on elite universities is a distraction, because their students represent less than 1% of college-goers, or necessary, because those students are disproportionately wealthy and powerful.

Inputs

* The Years That Matter Most

* Is Meritocracy Making Everyone Miserable?

Now I want to…

* learn more about the business models at elite vs non-elite universities

* figure out whether elite universities could admit significantly poorer students without breaking their business model

* decide whether focusing on elite universities is constructive or a distraction

My mind's eye is blind! Matt's mind's eye has astigmatism! We're still not sure what aphantasia is but we talk about it a bunch in this ep.

Why doesn't the optimism of Steven Pinker and David Deutsch offer me any hope or relief? An initial investigation