Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 2)
Thursday, January 22, 2026 • Duration 45:44
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.
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Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 1)
Thursday, January 15, 2026 • Duration 29:13
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.
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We Live in Time: Riffing on the Enneagram of Temporality
Monday, July 28, 2025 • Duration 32:51
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The Sycophancy Bug proves that ChatGPT knows your Enneagram Number
Thursday, May 1, 2025 • Duration 13:00
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Security and the Self-Preservation Three
Tuesday, April 22, 2025 • Duration 46:10
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Attractiveness and the Sexual Three
Tuesday, April 1, 2025 • Duration 57:23
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.
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How the Enneagram bridges Eastern and Western conceptions of sin
Wednesday, March 5, 2025 • Duration 24:59
[Transcript] The Origin of Sin According to the Enneagram
Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Wednesday morning. Today I want to talk about sin and the Enneagram, particularly how the Enneagram explains the origin of sin.
We're going to go esoteric, but I hope this will be interesting. It's certainly a way of drawing the Enneagram that you probably haven't seen before. If you watched my previous video, you saw a more traditional rendering of the Enneagram where we talk about the thinking triad, the feeling triad, and the doing triad. This is going to be a completely different approach, one that's more grounded in the origin of sin.
Eastern and Western Approaches to Sin
Let's ground ourselves in what we mean by sin before we go any further. I'd like to reference Adyashanti, who has a book called "Healing the Core Wound of Unworthiness." In it, he makes a useful distinction between Eastern and Western approaches to sin.
As I describe this, I don't want to defend any kind of actual geographic claims about East and West—that's not my project. Think of this as a spectrum of how we relate to sin. A Westerner can certainly be anywhere on that spectrum, as can someone from the East.
According to Adyashanti, the Eastern approach to sin is a lighter approach. It takes the origin of sin as a kind of cosmic joke or forgetting, potentially even a game in which this sort of awake awareness—this original deity or creator or Buddha—is, to its own surprise, separated from itself. There's a forgetting that happens, and the project is simply one of remembering one's own true nature.
You can see this in the Greek tradition of the River Lethe, which the dying cross. When they cross it, they fall into oblivion and their previous life is forgotten. Forgetting and remembering is the focus for the Eastern approach.
The Western approach, in contrast, is more focused on a separation that has a wound associated with it. Adam and Eve is the root text here, but we see it played out in our religious institutions and culture. There's a feeling of brokenness to the human experience and a wish for healing and recovery that is more rooted in psychology, authority, and judgment. Feelings of shame, guilt, and terror are more natural reactions to this feeling of having fallen out of favor with God.
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Prestige and the Social Three
Thursday, February 6, 2025 • Duration 36:56
In this episode of the Barrcast, we meet the Social Three, a personality structure driven by prestige, the need to shine, and the relentless pursuit of social validation. This subtype, the most chameleonic of the Threes, is deeply tuned in to the gaze of others, shaping their identity around admiration, applause, and external markers of success.
Talking Points:
🔍 The Inner PR Machine: Performing for ApprovalThe Social Three operates as if it has an internal public relations department, constantly curating an image that garners admiration. This endless pursuit consumes an excessive amount of energy and inhibits genuine spontaneity.
💔 Breaking the Illusion: The Pain of Seeing the VoidWhen the Three begins to awaken, a deep existential nausea sets in. They realize that much of their life has been built on vanity—on performing rather than being. This moment of crisis is painful but necessary for true growth.
🛑 From Applause to Pause: Learning to Be Instead of DoGrowth for the Three involves stepping out of the performance loop, embracing uncertainty, and relinquishing the constant need for external validation. A crucial shift happens when they transition from seeking admiration to seeking presence—learning to value stillness, self-connection, and relationships beyond transactional gain.
🎭 The Jester’s Redemption: Laughing at the False SelfOne of the most powerful tools for the Three is self-awareness with humor. When they can see their own impulse toward falsehood and laugh at it, rather than being trapped by it, they gain true freedom.
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#Opentowork: Vanity and the Enneagram Three
Monday, February 3, 2025 • Duration 14:43
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Privilege and the Self Preservation Two
Tuesday, January 28, 2025 • Duration 40:15
In this episode of the Barrcast, we encounter the Self-Preservation Two, a personality structure deeply connected to privilege and the power of exhibiting childlike traits. This is a structure that seeks love and validation without the effort of achievement or responsibility. Transformation for this type involves embracing maturity, responsibility, and self-sufficiency, ultimately breaking free from the seductive, childlike persona.
Talking Points:
🔄 Egocentrism and the Need for LoveThe core desire for this type is to be loved simply for existing. Ichazo’s concept of “me the most important” reveals a neurotic longing for adoration, similar to a child’s instinctive egocentrism.
💔 Facing Rejection and the Pain of DependencyThe self-preservation Two’s fear of rejection is profound, often driving them to manipulate relationships to maintain a sense of security. Confronting the possibility of rejection and the lack of control in relationship is key to their transformation.
⚖️ Transformation: Growing Beyond the Golden ChildGrowth for the self-preservation Two involves “growing up”—accepting responsibility, breaking free from the compulsion to charm and seduce, and embracing discipline, accountability, and most importantly limits.
💡 Practical Tips for Growth
* Build routines and practice discipline to ground yourself in adult responsibilities.
* Face rejection and discomfort instead of avoiding them.
* Seek therapeutic relationships that challenge, rather than indulge, your childlike tendencies.
* Accept and nurture relationships as mutual and dynamic rather than controlling or transactional.
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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.
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.
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.
Adyashanti's point is that for many Westerners, the Eastern approach alone might be insufficient for spiritual awakening. There may have to be some sort of reckoning with spiritual healing that Eastern traditions may not naturally afford.
The Enneagram's Perspective on Sin
Where does the Enneagram sit in this account? It turns out that the Enneagram actually has quite a lot to say about the origin of sin, though this is the more mystical, esoteric side that you're not going to see in popular resources as much.
This comes from Claudio Naranjo and, presumably before him, Ichazo and Gurdjieff. As is the trademark of the Enneagram, it bridges East and West. Remember, the Enneagram itself has roots in this kind of cross-cultural mission. The Desert Fathers developed the Enneagram when they were working on missions with Egyptian tribes, trying to get them to convert. The Enneagram came out of these different cultures meeting and trying to have a shared language for describing spiritual matters.
The Triangle of Sin: Three Core Passions
I'm going to quote here from Naranjo in "Character and Neurosis":
"Inspection of the Enneagram of the passions shows that three of them at points 9, 6, and 3 occupy a position more central than the others. Because of the symbolism of the Enneagram, according to which the different points along it correspond to degrees and intervals in the musical scale, psychospiritual laziness at the top stands as the most basic of all, being, as it were, the 'do' of the passions."
What Naranjo is saying is that laziness, the passion of the nine—which we could also call forgetting or numbing—is the first note of the Enneagram, the first note of human fallenness. That's very consistent with the Eastern approach, that the first thing that happens from the perspective of non-dual awareness is some forgetting.
He continues:
"The interconnections shown between these three core points constitute what we may call psychodynamic connections, so that each may be said to underlie the next in a sequence mapped by arrows between them in a counterclockwise direction. If we read the psychodynamic sequence starting at the top, we may say that a lack of the sense of being, implicit in the psychological inertia or robotization of sloth, deprives the individual of a basis from which to act and thus leads to fear."
So what happens? In forgetting your true nature, you may arrive at a groundlessness to experience, a lack of basis from which to act. This contact with groundlessness initiates fear.
Naranjo goes on:
"Since we must act in the world, however, as much as we may fear it, we feel prompted to solve this contradiction by acting from a false self rather than courageously being who we are. We build, then, a mask between ourselves and the world, and with this mask we identify."
From forgetting to fear, we move to falsity or a cover-up. I come into contact with something completely surprising for which I have no basis to act. That triggers fear, but I have to act. So I invent a solution—I make something up. What I make up is a false other and simultaneously a false self, and I attribute things to that false self and false other.
But for that to actually work, Naranjo concludes:
"To the extent that while we do this, we forget who we truly are, however, we perpetuate the ontic obscuration that, in turn, supports fear, and so on, keeping us in a vicious circle."
In other words, the cover-up doesn't work unless I cover it up even to myself. To do that, I have to forget my true nature or further forget my true nature. Thus, the cycle continues: more forgetting leads to more groundlessness and fear, which leads to more falsity and covering up.
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Bridging East and West
This provides a dynamic system that contains both the Eastern and Western traditions. From the Buddhist perspective, it clarifies the dual meaning of ignorance in the East. There's small ignorance (the forgetting that happens in a moment, a divine mistake) and big ignorance (the willful perpetuation of obscuration, what Buddhism calls samsara—the whole world instantiated by efforts to maintain the obscuration).
So ignorance isn't just at point 9, though that's the starting place from the Eastern tradition. Ignorance is this dynamic system, this continuity of forgetting leading to groundless experience. Then, rather than awakening to groundlessness, we try to fix groundlessness through falsity and obscuration. To pull off that heist, we have to further blind ourselves.
Over time, we develop a massive evidence base that we're sure is real and solid, but it's completely groundless—just a huge knot built up from this circle repeating. That's ignorance, that's samsara. That's the Eastern story.
In the Western story, while I think the West ultimately has its home base in point three (the falsity and shame triad), it's not so simple. In the Adam and Eve story, you see them go through this cycle a few times. Eve already isn't quite able to repeat God's instructions verbatim—a little bit of forgetting. There's also the numbness of Adam, who is right there while the serpent is convincing Eve, yet seems asleep to the situation.
After they eat the fruit, their eyes are opened—there is this open-eyed quality to groundlessness, this fear. But what happens so fast is that rather than seeing the actual groundlessness, they see the threat. They quickly move to covering up and obscuration—both literally hiding from God and covering themselves with fig leaves.
The Three Home Bases
The Enneagram teaches that humans find a home base in one of these three energetic nodes:
* The Forgetting Node (Type 9): We're ultimately cut off in our gut, not connected, roboticized or numb to our true self. This is the gut triad or anger triad.
* The Fear Node (Type 6): Our home base is in the fear of groundlessness, so we experience continual panic or anxiety and see the world as threat. This is the thinking triad or fear triad.
* The Falsity Node (Type 3): We experience profound loneliness that is never remedied by our efforts to build up our image. We're fundamentally confused and self-deceiving. This is the heart triad, the shame or image triad.
This is an alternate way to construct the Enneagram. If you think about it as a laser beam that starts to go a few degrees off, that's when you get the other numbers. Naranjo actually has a similar way of constructing those other numbers, which is the origin of the "stretch and release" points.
Conclusion
One of my favorite things the Enneagram offers is this diversity of human experience that we can find a home in. The Eight Evil Thoughts, or later Seven Deadly Sins, seem to originate as a handy way of helping somebody discover their home base—their passion, their addiction, their default way of sinning—and give them a personalized trailhead for healing.
Whether it's the Doshas in the Ayurvedic tradition, the Elements, or the Realms, there's plenty of material to work with. That kind of personalization makes sense—when debugging your own personal ego structure, it makes sense to use language familiar to you.
I hope you enjoyed this dose of Enneagram wisdom, and I'll see you next time. Thanks.
Nick Barr is a founder-turned-coach helping mission-driven leaders navigate inner and outer transformation. Learn more at nsbarr.com.
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