The Barrcast

Transcript Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a rainy summer Monday afternoon here in Brooklyn, New York. If you’ve been following along with the Barrcast, you know that we ran a series of posts on Evagrius Ponticus, the Christian desert father, who wrote really influential teachings on the eight evil thoughts, or logismoi . These were later turned into the seven deadly sins, as well as becoming the basis of the Enneagram. But in Evagrius’s telling, these eight thoughts, these logismoi , are like little imperceptible devils sent to the human mind to attack it, to impassion it, to inflame it and turn it further away from God. So we’re now turning to a different religious tradition, that of Tibetan Buddhism. And I have in front of me Jamgön Kongtrül’s compilation on Chöd, or severance. This is a tradition that dates back to the 11th century, when a woman, Machig Labdrön, began teaching a new tradition. It says here that she taught what we’re about to read — this great bundle of precepts — in a single day to a large crowd that included three Indians who arrived instantly in Tibet by means of the practice called Swift Foot, to investigate the authenticity of Machig and her increasingly popular teachings. So she was a bit of a maverick, and as a woman, probably the target of a lot of suspicion. And at the same time, her teaching is very traditional. There are a lot of reasons why I’m excited to read it today, but as we’ll see, one of them is that we’re going to be firmly in the demonology realm — so, continuing Evagrius’s work with demons. And I think it maybe will surprise some that Buddhism is going to be using this word devil . But as we’ll see, the Buddhist conception of the devil is really different than Evagrius’s, even though a lot of the practice instruction is the same. So we’ll read the text — it’s short — and then explore a little bit about what her project is here. There are four devils in her classification. We’re not going to get into the actual practice of Chöd much; this is going to be more of an investigation of the text itself. I’ll just say, by way of preface, that this tradition on severance grew and grew and grew after Machig. There’s a story in the introduction of this compilation that says a monk visited a man who was in a huge room — a four-pillared room — surrounded with books stacked from the floor to the ceiling. He asked him, “What are all the books?” And the man said they’re all about severance, all commentaries on Machig. So this is an original teaching that spawned a lot of additional teachings and practices. So with that out of the way, let’s hear from Machig herself. [Reads the The Great Bundle of Precepts on Severance ] Why Devils? I just wanted to talk a little bit about the use of this devil classification system. Why is it that Machig chooses to talk about evil? This is severance of evil objects — devils. It maybe sounds a little un-Buddhist; it maybe sounds a little Christian. And that’s what I was really interested in digging into. If you’ve been following the Barcast, you know we’ve been talking about devils in the tradition of early Christianity, as represented by Evagrius. So we’ll do a little bit of comparison there. Machig is extremely clear up front about what devils are. She writes: the root devilry is one’s own mind. The devil lays hold through clinging and attachment in the cognition of whatever objects appear. Grasping mind as an object is corruption. Extremely clear. That’s really the beginning and the end of the system. So even though we’re going to dive into a fairly elaborate classification, the devil is one’s own mind. And this couldn’t be more different from Evagrius’s framework, where there is an external adversary. Here the adversary is internal. However — there is an adversary. And this is a place where Machig and Evagrius would agree: there is an opponent who seems to actively work against one’s own wishes for enlightenment, awakening, coming to God. The attitude to take up regarding it is not enmity, not hate — although Evagrius will say indignation, thumos , this heart center. In his framework there’s a “no,” a saying no, “get back.” So there is a boundary, a No. And we’ll see whether there’s something similar with Buddhism, or not — because this particular tradition confuses me at times. On the one hand, you’ll hear about Milarepa or some other great master inviting the demons to tea, welcoming them, inviting them in: a sort of boundarylessness, a porousness, a yes. And at other times this is a severance tradition, a cutting tradition, a No tradition. We’ll talk in a minute about the syllable phat — that plosive, to me the act of cutting and casting up into space for feasting. So how can it be both? I actually think there’s an answer, and it’s a classically Buddhist answer. But let’s get into that in a second. Why do we even need to talk about devils at all, if the devil is one’s own mind? Keep in mind Machig is writing in the 11th century, so she has access to all the sutras. We see in the tradition words like obscuration, hindrance, ignorance, confusion — to name a few. These are all traditional ways of describing exactly what Machig is talking about: the process of clinging and attachment, aversion and attraction, passion and aggression, and confusion as the third, right at the beating heart of the samsaric wheel. But never really called devils. Well — okay, there’s Mara. Maybe Mara really is the tradition’s way of talking about the devil. But still: why do we need this word? I think each word, each framework, affords its own understanding. If I think about darkness or ignorance or obscuration — words that indicate a kind of blindness — what that evokes for me is the opportunity for light to instantly resolve it. If I’m in a dark room, hopelessly probing around for the chair, and somebody turns the light on, I’m flooded instantly with understanding. And even if they turn the light off again, I’d probably still find the chair. So obscuration is effective at reinforcing a nondual point of view — by which I mean that light and dark are not two forces opposed to each other; there’s just light, and then the absence or occlusion of light, the sun behind the clouds. That’s helpful in not reifying, not grasping at difficulty. I once was blind and now I see. There’s a hopeful quality to the word obscuration, and I think that’s what’s foregrounded. Then there are words like poisons, hindrances, obstacles. These are more practical ways of talking about things that happen to us on the path — pride, but also ill health, jealousy. And good health can be its own obstacle. Anything can arise as an obstacle. The way forward that this language affords is transmutation, transformation. Transformation is always tricky, because for those of us drawn to the wizard or alchemist archetype, there’s a feeling of “I’m going to change my jealousy into action, my grief into joy.” We can’t really bring that agenda in so successfully. Whenever the tradition talks about transmutation, it’s talking about that as the result of seeing sufficiently into what the grief is made of, what the jealousy is made of. So if obscuration points to light, obstacle points to transformation — going into the thing itself and seeing what it’s made of. And then devil, I think, points to a third approach: instant opposition. Instant No. Instant cutting. It’s not gradual. It’s not really even a practice. It’s victorious. When I hear Machig talk about devils, I picture the haunted place with ghosts all around. It’s that they’re incessant — always arising, always attacking — but defeating them is effortless. Effortless, except for the incessance. When we work with devils, we acknowledge that there certainly seem to be forces working hard against our awakening. If there weren’t, there’d be a lot more peace and contentment in the world. There aren’t just a few hurdles to step over; there seems to be a real adversarial force. And yet we recognize the emptiness of them — that the devil is one’s own mind. So it’s fighting the opponent within a larger understanding of the non-separateness of person and adverse condition. The adverse condition is my mind, and so it’s a constant opportunity for integration, for digestion. So, why devils? Because cutting is only possible through that word. We don’t cut through obscuration; we don’t cut through darkness. We don’t really cut through poison or hindrance either. We cut through illusion. Things come at us and we cut through them. So there is absolutely a sense of warfare here. But the war being fought is, first of all, one-sided — not a fair fight. We have Arthur’s blade, we have the vajra, the indestructible weapon. There’s no enmity, no hostility, and the lack of hostility comes from the awareness that our opponent is our own mind. But there is scheming, complexity. The enemy does seem to have a strategy, a cunning. When we talk about a devil, we’re talking about an agent — to use everyone’s favorite word these days. There’s a perceived agency, which makes sense, because we’re acknowledging the devil is one’s own mind; what it’s made of is mind. So of course it has a certain cunning, a survival skill. And that’s where Evagrius and Machig are on the same page. Even though Evagrius isn’t ultimately saying the devils are one’s own mind, the devils are made of mind. In that Christian tradition, devils, angels, and humans are all cut from the same cloth, which is God. If I tried to pull the two together, I might say in Evagrian language that devils and humans are ultimately both made of God-material — because in Evagrius, as in Origen before him, Satan himself and the devils are nothing but souls that departed from God through drift. So here, when we sit and do this practice — when we say phat — we’re taking on the God-seat. A lot of this practice is done as Great Mother, as Dharmakaya, from basic space. We’re taking up a pretty victorious attitude. The Four Devils as Scaffolding The other reason we benefit from the devil framework is that it affords the classification of the four devils: tangible, intangible, the devil of exaltation, and the devil of inflation. For me this feels like a Mahamudra move — creating scaffolding, a ladder, that ultimately gets kicked out. We always remember this is a provisional system that exists only to help practitioners overcome confusion in the short term. That provisional nature is baked in, because each devil belongs to the next class: the tangible devil is an instance of the intangible devil, which is an instance of the devil of exaltation, which is an instance of the devil of inflation. In the end there is just one devil to cut through. Once you see that, you have no use for the classification. But if you’re new to this work — if you haven’t yet spent months in haunted places calling all demons to feast on you — then you might benefit from it. So I’ll go through it quickly. It’s simple and quite traditional, despite some unfamiliar language. The tangible devil is just objects — external objects. Even here Machig says tangible devils are numerous; i.e., objects are everywhere. But the tangible devil is the judging of appearances as desirable or undesirable: objects of negation or affirmation, objects of desire and aggression. Desire and aggression are my preferred words here, and they bring us back to Evagrius: desire, epithumia ; aggression, thumos — these primordial human faculties. Evagrius makes a nice move. Desire, epithumia — longing — in its corrupted form is impassioned, inflamed, aggravated longing, and that becomes the basis for lust and avarice. Wanting, needing, not getting, wanting more — all that’s in the belly. But in its pure form, epithumia is a longing to be with God, to know God. It’s one of the Ten Commandments — do not covet your neighbor’s donkey or wife — that’s the same word. But Jesus in Luke also says, “I have longed to eat with you,” speaking to his disciples about Passover — the same word. So longing, appetite, is not something that goes away. It’s something the devils — Evagrius calls them logismoi — attack as thought. There’s a wispy, air-like quality, a prana quality; images appear as fluttering fantasies that try to hook the epithumia , inflame it, and then the devils are off to the races. That’s how the devils win — through hooking. And when we cut, what we cut is that stream, that continuity of illusion and fantasy. Then aggression, which Evagrius calls indignation — same thing, a human faculty that gets corrupted. He’s so precise about this, and I find it to be true: the thumos , the heart center, can even smell the devils coming, so it’s already pissed off when they arrive. If I start to get a longing — I want some nachos with extra cheese — I also get disgust simultaneously at my longing. His point is that’s often exactly what the devils are after. Even when they spike your longing, what they may really be trying to do is turn your indignation into ire, anger, wrath, self-directed. Once the devils have your desire and your aggression talking to each other, you’re really in trouble. You get polarized: I really want this, but shame on me, I shouldn’t, but I deserve it, and why does everyone keep me from getting what I want — okay, now we’re really lost. So that’s the tangible devil: any fixation on an external object, on sense perceptions. And emptiness and impermanence are the classic remedy — Buddhism 101. Machig cites the Heart Sutra here: form is empty of the essence of form; do not attach to form; meditate on it as empty. Very clear instructions, if you’re being attacked by the external devil — that’s your place to work. Evagrius, in his Praktikos , is writing for monks, and what he says again and again is that you’re probably past that point; you’re onto the much more difficult devil. The Intangible Devil: Hope and Fear The intangible devil is mentation — thinking, thoughts and feelings. Machig makes an important technical point: the external devils are just thought-forms that pass through sense consciousness, whereas thoughts and feelings can ultimately go through sense consciousness but are upstream of it, in mental consciousness. So moving on from desire and aggression, we’re now talking about hopes and fears. I like that a lot — these two pairs: desire and aggression, hope and fear. Now we’re arriving at an attitude of hopelessness and fearlessness. Later, Machig brings up the realms, which she connects to the five poisons and the five Buddha families. She has to remove a realm to make the numbers work — I believe she takes away the god realm; there are a lot of ways to make it work, and we don’t need the technicalities. Her treatment runs: afflictive emotions such as the five poisons, fears about invisible demons, hopes regarding unreal gods — all similar hopes and fears about mental objects — arise from inflation. (She says inflation because she’s making her final point, but this is the intangible devil.) Aggression is liberated on its own ground, but it comes from cutting the root of inflation; released from the boiling and burning of the hell devil, mirror-like timeless awareness is obtained. Aggression, desire, stupidity, jealousy, pride — these are the five poisons associated with the realms, combining the titan and god realms to describe pride. They’re like moods, atmospheres. Just as there are many tangible devils, but cutting the tangible devil cuts the one who desires or is aggressive — you cut that clinging — so too with intangible devils: there are many thoughts and feelings, but at the end of the day the intangible devil is hope or fear. What’s the difference between desire/aggression and hope/fear? To me, hope and fear feel more like long-term, ongoing projects, which is why I can think of them as moods or atmospheres. I can be in a mood of hope for a while: if I do this, then something’s going to happen, I really hope I get that job offer, and if I do, all these great things will follow. Or fear: I’m worried I’ll get fired, everyone around me wants to get me in trouble — an air of suspicion, paranoia. So the intangible devil is the realm, the mood, the vibe, the quality of the atmosphere, and how I cut through it, recognizing it as one of the five poisons. Desire and aggression feel very immediate; hope and fear feel more moody. The Devil of Exaltation If you’re this far along, you’re in great shape — but you’re not done, because you may now be sitting, as she says, in the haunted places. “In haunted places, when demons do not affect you, arrogance arises and becomes the devil of exaltation.” She spends the most time here, and even has a sub-classification: common devils and supreme devils. The common devils are the hindrances — wealth, fame, friends and foes are the devil of delight; gods and demons bestow spiritual powers. Remember these are concentric circles, so exaltation includes the intangible devil. This one feels to me like pride. I’m in conversation with Evagrius throughout. In the Christian tradition I don’t think he gives pride special treatment, but we all know the folk understanding: pride is the original sin, the sin of Satan. It’s pride that caused the cooling — that’s the word Origen and Evagrius use — the cooling of the relationship with God as one drifts and thinks, “I did it, I am the one.” It becomes much more subject than object: not me/mine but I — I did it, I made this. You fall out of awareness, you’re thrown into something unfamiliar, and the I asserts itself. The reason these hindrances come up — wealth, fame, friends (they mention foes, but stick with wealth, fame, friends): who wouldn’t want those? The reason it’s such a disaster from the Buddhist perspective is that, as we get closer to the root of inflation, these are all opportunities to feel exalted, to feel bigger — some way that my external circumstances reflect on me, that I had something to do with it. And the answer Machig gives — she does such a great job clarifying this — is not that I had nothing to do with it. Rather: “as with the objects in dreams, engage without attachment to their nature. Like the beauty produced by a lovely face, self-occurrence adorns itself. There is no cause for arrogance.” You look ridiculous, from Machig’s perspective, if you’re exalted because of these things. Let’s get more out of the common and into the supreme. Beyond ordinary, tangible exaltations — wealth, external things — let’s talk about supreme view. About awakening, realizing emptiness, experiencing grace or divine intervention. There are so many ways our path can be affirmed to us, shown that we’re doing the right thing, on the right way. What’s the right attitude toward that? Everything is an expression of mind — self-liberation, self-occurrence, self-adornment. If you do a deity practice and picture your deity in incredible garments, perfume, jewelry — imagine the attitude that deity has toward its ornaments. There’s a pride, a nobility; the ornaments work as signs of innate, inherent elegance, beauty, nobility, wealth. And there’s absolutely no fixation on them. One’s nobility isn’t reduced by taking off the earrings. If your deity removes any of its garments or jewels, is its nobility reduced at all? No. But if Elon Musk’s wealth goes down, or if I feel on top of my spiritual practice and then have a crisis, it starts to feel like the stock market — ups and downs. That’s all pointing at exaltation. I love how much time Machig spends, in various ways, cautioning against exaltation. I really think her audience, in a way, is practitioners somewhere in the exaltation stage — just based on how much time she gives it. And she uses the word stupidity a lot, which I love. Take this passage: “Non-cognizant stupidity in the realm of phenomena, cognized as objective, is deluded by grasping. Cognition other than that of single inseparability is to cycle in the places o

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

Transcript Welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and cold winter morning here in New York. We are going to start reading the Praktikos today. So this is 100 chapters. It’s not long, but I expect this to take two episodes. Why are we reading the Praktikos? This is a work by Evagrius Ponticus. If you’ve followed previous videos, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work on the Enneagram and reading through Claudio Naranjo’s contributions. If Naranjo is sort of the father of the Enneagram of personality, then Evagrius is the grandfather. He’s a desert father, a Christian mystic from the three hundreds who lived in Egypt and led a nomadic life. And so we’re going to dive into the Praktikos. And I think the only piece of context that I want to lay out now is I’m just getting started on Evagrius’s work. But what I know about the Praktikos is it’s sort of considered groundwork on his end. So what we’re going to be reading here could be thought of as sort of foundational or training material or groundwork. If you practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, you maybe have heard of the word ngondro. This is kind of like training material. And so it’s written for someone still very much working on the foundations of practice. That doesn’t mean exactly that it’s like junior varsity material. But there’s a kind of a tone and approach to groundwork spiritual training that pervades here. And I think basically we’re going to be talking a lot about fighting demons and resisting demons. And it’s written for a spiritual practitioner who’s at a stage of practice where that’s really central in their practice is this kind of combat with temptation. And let’s get started. I love the way he starts it. So it’s a letter to Anatolius. And he begins, since you recently wrote to me in Scetis from the holy mountain, dear Brother Anatolius, demanding that I explain to you the symbolic habit of the Egyptian monks, for you believe it to be neither accidental nor superfluous that the habit is so different from what other people wear. I will therefore tell you what we have learned concerning this from the Holy Fathers. So he’s going to describe his habit, the clothes he wears. The hood is a symbol of the grace of our Savior and God. It shelters their mind and nurses their childlike relationship with Christ in the face of those who are always attempting to beat and wound it. Anyone who bears this hood on his head is truly chanting the inner meaning of the psalm quote, “Unless the Lord builds the house and guards the city, in vain did the builder and watchman labor.” Recitations like these produce humility and uproot the primordial vice of pride that cast down to the earth Lucifer the dawn rising star. The nakedness of their hands manifests the absence of hypocrisy in their way of life. Vainglory is terribly clever at covering and darkening virtues, always hunting for the esteem that comes from men and chasing faith away. “For how is it possible for you to believe,” it says, “when you receive glory from one another and the glory that comes only from God, you do not seek?” For the good ought to be chosen for no other reason than itself. Apart from this, anything that moves us to do good will appear far more precious than the good itself. And nothing could be more absurd than to consider and assert that something is better than God. And again, the scapular that wraps around the shoulders in the form of a cross is a symbol of the faith in Christ that supports the gentle and always, despite obstacles, permits them to work unimpeded. The belt tied around their loins repels all impurity and declares it is good for a man not to touch a woman. They wear the sheepskin, those always carrying around in their bodies the death of Jesus and muzzling all the body’s irrational passions, cutting back the wickedness of the soul by their communion in the good and loving poverty, but fleeing from avarice as the mother of idolatry. The staff is a tree of life to all who hold it reliable, for those who lean on it, just as they lean on the Lord. The habit, then, is like a symbol that summarizes these things. And these are the words the fathers always say to them. “Faith, oh, my child, is steadied by the fear of God. And this fear in turn is strengthened by continence. The latter virtue is made unshakable by patient endurance and hope. From these is born apatheia, or dispassion, which brings into being love. Love is the door to knowledge of nature, which leads to theology and the supreme blessedness.” So that’s the conclusion of this first part, which is the description of the habit. And I find it very beautiful. I don’t know yet enough about sort of this system that we’re approaching, but you can hear certainly the hood as a symbol of protection from pride. The naked hands as a protection from vanity or vainglory. I think I need to make sure I understand what vainglory exactly means to Evagrius. And check if vainglory is another word for pride or is for vanity. And then other adornments there. And so he mentions apatheia. So, you know, you maybe hear apathy, but it’s dispassion or non attachment. Or you could maybe try equanimity out. This is freedom from the passions. And this is the purpose of the groundwork of the Praktikos is to birth dispassion, birth apatheia. And so these qualities here—continence, endurance, hope, humility—these are the qualities that will birth dispassion, which brings into being, he says, love. Love is the door to knowledge of nature which leads to theology. And so that’s his progression: the Praktikos to the knowledge of nature to theology. And so we’re just focused on the Praktikos for now. He concludes the prologue by saying, and so, concerning the holy habit and the teaching of the elders, these things we have said should suffice for now. But concerning the life of the ascetic and the knower, I now propose to describe in detail not only what we have seen or heard, but also what I’ve been taught by the elders to say to others. I have compactly divided ascetical matters into a hundred chapters and matters of knowledge into 50 plus 600. So we’re going to be reading the hundred chapters on ascetical matters here. And some things I’ve concealed and shadowed over so that we do not throw holy things to the dogs, nor cast pearls before swine. But this will be clear to those who have embarked on the same quest. So I think he’s hinting here that there’s going to be some twilight language, some secret language here, that we can keep our eyes out for as we go without totally rabbit holing on it. So here we are. The treatise on the Praktikos. 100 chapters. And these first chapters are incredibly dense, sort of deceivingly so. So let’s see how we go. Christianity is the teaching of our Savior Christ, consisting of ascetical practice, the contemplation of nature and theology. This is this trifold progression. The kingdom of heaven is apatheia, dispassion of the soul together with true knowledge of beings. The kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the capacity of the nous, mind or intellect, but surpassing it in incorruptibility. So he’s just sort of outlined the whole project here and hinted that the kingdom of heaven is what we can hope to achieve, or become through this practice of dispassion, the ascetic practice. If you want to make a Buddhist connection, you could call this renunciation, that plus true knowledge of beings that will come later in his contemplation of nature. But even then, if you have this sort of practice of equanimity, that is dispassion combined with some sort of seeing into the true nature of things, that is exceeded still by the kingdom of God, which he says is direct knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the structure of the nous, structure of the mind, but surpassing it in incorruptibility. We can just leave that aside for now. Just knowing that that’s there. For whatever person ardently loves, he uses eros here. Loves he will want completely and what he wants, he will struggle to acquire. Now, every pleasure is preceded by desire, epithumia. And desire is born of sensation. Thus, that which is not subject to sensation is also free from passion. Against the hermits, the demons engage in naked combat. Against those laboring at virtue in monasteries or communities, they armed the more careless of the brethren. For the second battle is much lighter than the first. Since there cannot be found on earth men more bitter than the demons, or able to undertake all their evil doings at once. So where are we here? He’s making a general statement about what it’s like to be a being. You know, a person on Earth, a human being. For humans, we love things. And what we love we want. And what we want, we struggle to acquire. Again, you know, you could map this into a Buddhist framework pretty easily. So every pleasure that we experience is preceded by desire born of sensation. And so, you know, putting two and two together, I think part of what he’s trying to say here is that pleasure seeking is incompatible with dispassion. Because when we seek and experience pleasure, it’s because we’ve given into desire born of sensation to some extent. And what we’re looking for in dispassion is something that’s not born from sensation. It’s not contingent on sensation. So he continues. There are eight principal kinds of tempting thoughts. So here I think, and I don’t have the Greek available, but it’s on this website. All you have to do is just search Ev Ponticus, Praktikos. So, if you’re a scholar here, you can do more tracing than I can. But I think for the first time he’s introducing this word, logismoi, the singular being, logismos. These are like tempting thoughts. I think they’re tempting thoughts that are born of sensation. So these eight kinds of tempting thoughts, he says, contain within themselves every tempting thought. And this is the origin of the Enneagram. First, that of gluttony. And with that of sexual immorality. Third, that of love of money. Fourth, that of sadness. Fifth, that of anger. Six, that of acedia or sloth or torpor. Seventh, that of vain glory. Eighth, that of pride. I just want to check. Yeah, I guess vanity would be an acceptable translation of vainglory. It’s not the same as pride, although they’re certainly related. He says we cannot control whether these tempting thoughts can agitate the soul or not. But whether they remain in us or not and whether they move the passions or not, that we can control. So the basic framework, as far as I can tell that Evagrius is laying out is this soul or, I think he would use that interchangeably with nous, Mind. This mind of ours is assailed by logismoi, tempting thoughts. And it is outside of our control whether these thoughts agitate us or not. The mind has sort of wounds in it that date back to the fall of man and before that the fall of the angels and Satan. So we are already subject to agitation. We are already subject to passions. So agitation is part of life. Though what we can control is whether they move the passions or not. So the passions you could think of as sort of grooves in the mind that if animated or moved by these tempting thoughts, if captured or captivated, then those actually move the mind. That’s where our responsibility begins. * The tempting thought of gluttony suggests to the monk the sudden rejection of his asceticism. And it’s interesting he starts here. Naranjo also starts with gluttony. He says something interesting about gluttony, that in a way gluttony is the door to all the other passions, in the sense that, you know, here if you give up your asceticism, everything will fall from there. Right? So it’s interesting that Evagrius starts with gluttony. The stomach, liver, spleen and resultant congestive heart failure are depicted along with long sickness, lack of necessities and unavailability of physicians. It often leads him to recall those of the brethren who have suffered these things. Sometimes it even deceives those who have suffered from this kind of thing to go and visit others who are practicing self control to tell them all about their misfortunes and how this resulted from their asceticism. Super interesting depiction of gluttony here, where what’s being presented to the mind, to the nous in this logismos is not a banquet table full of delicious things. It’s actually the possibility of sickness, of destitution. You know, you’ve got no access to health care. We could say as a monk, you think about all of your brethren who died or suffered from ailments. You might even go out and tell people about misfortunes. So it’s basically gluttony is getting people off the ascetic path through fear. Although, you know, fear interestingly, is sort of the great missing element in the these eight evil thoughts. So fear is the, you know, if Enneagram is nine and the eight evil thoughts here are eight, fear is the one that’s missing. So anyway, that maybe contributes to why gluttony goes first. * The demon of sexual immorality, that’s porneia, compels desiring for different bodies. Especially violently does it attack those who practice self control so that they will cease as if achieving nothing, contaminating the soul. It bends it down toward these sorts of deeds. It makes it speak certain words and then hear them as if the thing were actually there to be seen. So these are these sort of temptations off the ascetic path—gluttony on the one hand and immorality on the other. * Love of money. Avarice suggests a long old age, hands powerless to work, hunger and disease yet to come the bitterness of poverty and the disgrace of receiving the necessities of life from others. So again, the presentation of the logismos is not abundance, is not, wouldn’t it be great if I had wealth. It’s the presentation of poverty. So stinginess is my preferred translation of avarice rather than greed. And here again the mind is being presented or assaulted with things that are basically undesirable fears, things that we want to avoid. And if we’re just keeping track of the numbers here, you know, avarice is the five, sexual immorality is the eight, is lust. And gluttony is the seven. So we kind of have, while that’s not a traditional triad of the Enneagram, and it skips over the six, that is a pocket of the Enneagram. And which is interesting to think about. And they are in some ways all in relationship to threat. I think you could safely say, 5 and 7 are in the fear triads, more explicitly avoidant or fearing types. The eight being a neighbor that sort of responds to fear in that kind of aggressive way of lust. Again, we don’t need to map these perfectly onto the Enneagram. That’s not really the point here. He continues. Gloominess sometimes arises from frustrated desires, but sometimes it is the result of anger. When desires are frustrated, it arises thus, certain tempting thoughts first seize the soul and remind it of home and parents and its former course of life. So there’s that nostalgia and the melancholy of the four. When they see the soul following them without resistance and dissipating itself in mental pleasures, they take and dunk, literally baptize it in gloom. Since it is the case that these earlier things are gone and cannot be recovered due to the monk’s present way of life, then the miserable soul, having been dissipated by the first tempting thought, is humiliated all the more by the second. So some subtleties around how gloominess or melancholy can arise. Sometimes it’s frustrated desire, but sometimes it’s anger at the course of life that one has taken. Anger or orge, is the sharpest passion. It is said to be a boiling and movement of indignation thumos against a wrongdoer or person, presumed wrongdoer. So now we’re in the one. It causes the soul to be savage all day long, but especially in prayers. It seizes the nous, reflecting back the face of the distressing person. Then sometimes it is lingering and is changed into rancor, menace or menos. And thus it causes disturbances at night, bodily weakness and pallor, and attacks from poisonous beasts. These four things associated with rancor may be found to have been summoned up by many other tempting thoughts. So you can see how relational and interdependent all these thoughts are here. That anger can arise from other thoughts, gloominess can arise from anger and so on. * The demon of Acedia, which is also called the Noonday demon, is the most burdensome of all the demons. So he’s using demon and logismos or logismoi interchangeably. I don’t know if in Evagrius’s system, all thoughts, all logismoi are demons. I think he’s using them interchangeably now. And that’s how we’ll do it. But certainly not all thoughts have to be demonic, I would think. And we’ll learn more about that I think later in the Praktikos. It, that’s Acedia, besets the monk at about the fourth hour, which is 10am of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eighth hour, 2pm. First it makes the sun appear to slow down or stop, so the day seems to be 50 hours long. Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell to observe the sun in order to see how much longer it is to the 9th hour, i.e. 3:00pm. And to look about in every direction, in case any of the brothers are there. Then it assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life and the work of his hands. That love has departed from his brethren and there is no one to console him. If anyone has recently caused the monk grief, the demon adds this as well to amplify his hatred of these things. It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier and more convenient craft. After all, pleasing the Lord is not dependent on geography. The demon adds, God is to be worshipped everywhere. It combines this with remembrance of his relatives and his former way of life, and depicts to him a long life, placing before his eyes a vision of the burdens of the ascetic life. So it employs, as they say, every possible means to move the monk to leave his cell and flee the race course. No other demon comes immediately after this one. Rather, after the struggle, the soul receives in turn a peaceful state and unspeakable joy. Very interesting. So, he has a lot to say about the nine, sloth, laziness, torpor, acedia. And again, it’s so interesting that, you know, you can really hear the sequencing of demons. So this particular demon is not followed by another demon. Actually after this one, there’s a peaceful state and an unspeakable joy. Evagrius seems to have the deepest relationship with this one. This is quite a long description of how the demon operates. Quite detailed. Yeah, very interesting. Continuing. 13. The tempting thought of vainglory is especially subtle and easily sneaks into those whose lives are going well, wanting to publish their efforts and go hunting for glory among men. And it imagines demons shouting and women being healed and a crowd wanting to touch his clothes. It prophesies his ordination to the priesthood with people seeking him at his door. And even if he resists being carried off to be ordained by force. So really fantasy of fame. And having raised him up with these empty hopes, it suddenly leaps off, leaving and abandoning him to be tempted by the demon of pride or the demon of gloominess. So quickly there, you know, we have the three, which is the temptation of vanity. And then in the departure of the three, one either goes up to pride or down to gloominess, up to the two or down to the four, bringing on tempting thoughts, the opposite of his earlier hopes. Sometimes it also hands him over to the demon of sexual immorality, the man who shortly before was being carried off to be made a holy priest by force. That’s interesting. There’s kind of something a little sexual about that phrase, being carried off to be made a holy priest by force. So the

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

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Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and breezy, April 1st. April Fool's Day. So, it's been a while since my last chapter, but if you'll remember, we're on the sexual 3, whose keyword is attractiveness. So I actually recorded this one a few weeks ago and didn't feel great about the recording. I rushed my way through it and I realized we're back to, we're at the final number, the three. We started the four, because I'm a four, and it snuck up on me. But, we're back in my neighborhood. And the sexual subtype and the self preservation subtype, these are the subtypes that I find, myself connecting with more deeply. So I realized, gosh, I think I probably breezed through this chapter in a way to avoid my own inner stuff. So I'm gonna do another pass. I'm gonna be a little bit more connected with what's happening inside me. As I read is a super long chapter. So that's. That's part of the problem. And so I'm gonna do my best to navigate this. But let's hear what, Claudio Naranjo has to say about the sexual 3. For the passion of the sexual 3, Ichaso used the words masculinity or femininity, depending on the case. I used to explain it as an excessive attempt to conform to cultural images, perhaps Hollywood style, of what it means to be masculine or feminine nowadays. He says, I believe that the fundamental pathology of these individuals lies in the fact that instead of acting from instinctive freedom, they invest all their passion into the thirst for love and the corresponding seduction, either through compliance or by projecting an image that is meant to be attractive and exciting. The result of this is that a woman being overly focused on pleasing a man, loses her ability to enjoy herself. additionally, this personality type tends to have a certain passion for family, which, while it does not appear as a flaw, represents an exaggerated need to please others, perpetuating self alienation. Among the three subtypes, the sexual three is the most dependent. They do not usually display aggression and cannot tolerate rejection. Their seduction is aimed at being embraced and validated, confusing their self worth with the attractiveness of their body. So that's the introduction, and we have Lorena Garcia de las Bayonas beautiful name with the, transformation in the sexual type 3. So before we dive into it, I really what Naranjo describes as his own evolution. when I think about his starting place for the sexual three. Well, the, the person who comes to my mind is Don Draper from Mad Men. And I'm reading, watching Mad Men now. And so you have this masculine, attractive, mysterious type. he's, he himself has reinvented himself. ? So there's that mask quality that we typically associate with the more available words for the three. The three can be chameleonic, the three can be political. The three can be focused, on success and progress. So all that Don Draper energy is there. and Don Draper certainly conforms to the cultural images of what it means to be masculine. But I how Naranjo gets even more specific, which is that their passion is to be what is desirable from the opposite sex. So to make yourself into something that is pleasurable, pleasing, desirable to the opposite sex is the passion. So it's not just Clint Eastwood, it's Clint Eastwood if and only if that is known to be what women want. And we'll have a woman's perspective for the sexual three. So we'll hear a lot more about that. You can imagine that sexual threes will be different for men and women because men and women want different things. And I just, I guess I'll say a little bit more before we get into the chapter, which is that the core types 3, 6 and 9 are for me the most difficult types to work with. The energies of them. And in part that's because they're more pure energies. we've talked about the six. The six is the, the passion of fear. And who can't relate to fear? Fear is so basic of a human mechanism. nine is trickier in some ways. I think nines are perhaps easier to type. But the nine, passion of sloth or indolence or numbing, self forgetting. Again, we all have profound amounts of self forgetting. Very few of us are really in contact with what we want, what we're about, what we're on earth to do. So self forgetting is this universal, human condition. And then three desirability, mask, falsity, covering up, with deceit, A, profound emptiness. Again, we all have that. we all look in the mirror every morning. Many of us do and dress up according to some idea of what something somebody wants. But I think the three in particular is hard for me as a four. And this is something that is useful to know about Naranjo. I don't think Naranjo really talked about the wings much. Wings have taken off in the popular framing of the Enneagram. But Naranjo really was concerned with the core types and then looked at the other types as stemming from the. So you're basically a three, six, or nine. And so a four is a three, a two is a three. you're just a three. And so the three is continually preoccupied with image. And the two has found a way to have a positive self image, and that comes with their own issues. The four has found a way to have a negative self image, and that comes with their issues. And so that would be a a brief way of Naranjo describing things. So it's interesting. One of the, names I played with when I was thinking about maybe starting, a publication just for this was Four Wing Five. And there are a lot of people who identify as Four Wing Five. and Richard Rohr has talked about that chasm between the four and the five as the hardest to cross. So there's a little bit of mystique around a four wing five. at the at the bottom, the 6:00 of the Enneagram. But if Naranjo were here, he might say, that's not really a thing. Four Wing Five, a four is much closer to three than they are to five. And I think that's interesting to play with for myself and for other fours, potentially, because, nobody wants to be a three, really. Threes get hard. They get put through it a little bit in the. In the Enneagram, again, because they have this fundamental almost universal human thing of having an image. And so it's easier for a four, I think, to take their authenticity and their creativity into the five space of, this genius area. It's in a way easier for us to hang out in that space. I'm not just creative. I'm also a hermit. But. And of course, there can be truth to that. But, I think it's healthy for any four to explore their threeness. And I think it's probably hard for a four to do that. And it might be the same with fives. Fives might, be drawn to the fourness. I'm not just a hermit. I'm also a creative artist. But, for five to actually touch the fear underneath, that feeling of maybe emptiness or solitude. Oh, yeah, there's fear there. That. That's probably juicy terrain for a five. So I'm glad I didn't call this four ring five, because I would have at this point said I've made a terrible mistake. Okay, let's get into the Transformation The Sexual Type 3 by Lorena Garcia de las Bayonas. And we will try to breeze through this while hitting the key points. So she thanks a bunch of individuals. she writes, as sexual three approaches character healing, they become free to be, to feel and to express themselves authentically without being imprisoned by the beautiful physical image, being able even to be ugly and show the ugliness of their life such as pain, anger, sadness, jealousy, envy, resentment, and everything they consider shameful or that makes them lose control. So off the bat we're talking about freedom and spontaneity. And threes are. One of the easier ways to spot a three or differentiate a three from other types is threes are a little, held in. It's a three has to pass through an image filter before doing something. They're the most image conscious. And so freedom, the freedom to be, to feel, to express isn't there for the three. So as this is helpful for me was when I'm doing my self typing, Self Preservation 4 has always been the one that spoke most clearly to me. But a self preservation four has that in common with the three, ? The self preservation four has to be contained and containment, something that three and the four, the sexual three and the self preservation four share here. Now the reasons for containment are different and we'll explore that as we get into it. In this way, they're free to be able to make mistakes without the fear that they will stop being loved. They also leave behind the dependence on approval and love from others, especially from a partner, which results from a lack of self love. What remains is more real sense of self love through which they can feel a greater warmth inside after passing through the hell of breaking through the internal numbness and the inability to love. So for the three, the self abandonment is profound, and prevalent here. The three has made this bargain early on to treat the image of themselves as their real self. And they don't know that they've made that bargain or it's not available to them. So in contrast, the four has this unlovability. The four has the presence of being unlovable. The three has the absence of being lovable. For the sexual three, if my partner isn't validating me, then that's terrifying. And I think it's even more. It's not that I'll feel bad. It's I don't even. I'm without ground. Whereas the four might say, if my partner leaves me, I knew I was bad, I knew all along they would leave me, they don't me, et cetera, et cetera. So it's for the four, the threat of separation is a confirmation of some deeply held negative belief. For the three. Then they touch emptiness. They touch not knowing what I am, who I am, if I am not pleasing to this person, I understand how my ego is destroying me and preventing me from finding love. Now at this stage of my life, love is about all the love I can feel for myself. Truly knowing myself and considering myself. That is where everything begins to be more real. Love is not a goal, nor a task, nor an achievement, nor a conquest. When a sexual three heals, they also appear more relaxed and carefree. They let go of the compulsion to do things, to have everything under control and to be loved. With their gaze turned inward rather than outward, they can see the difference between what they truly feel and need and self deception. In this way, they become stronger and more mature and the sensation of fragility disappears. The kind that makes people say, better not touch them, they might break. They also become more independent, knowing they can survive sometimes even better without a partner, feeling loved and valued for who they are, not for what they do. That might be a way to disambiguate between a sexual three and a self preservation four. the work that I'm doing in this document is. I don't know if my gaze is that turned outward, to some extent. It is, for sure. I would say that, yeah, I think I'm much more inward focused. I certainly do enact and feel and think ways that are according to, masculinity. And when I think about masculinity, what, what does masculinity mean? To me, it's super heterosexually motivated. being a man. Being masculine to my structure is being the things that a woman needs, which is different. an 8. Their masculinity can be about power and autonomy and strength. Same thing with a six. Potentially sexual six. For me, my sense of masculinity is deeply tied in to, meeting the needs of, of the feminine, of the, of the, Of a fe. Of a woman. that said, the conclusion there still feels a lot more a self preservation, for it still feels a lot more containment and self suppression rather than looking, feeling a certain way. But there, opening doors, paying for dinner. There's a whole set of things that I do automatically or did automatically when I was dating. Now I just slammed the door in my wife's face. No, that. Yeah, those were, Those were image conscious. I just don't know if they were. That, I wasn't doing a lot of this outward gaze. I don't think it's interesting to spend more time with that. Healing also involves finding the freedom to enjoy sex without merely being an object for the other's pleasure. Being able to let go of control and be less focused on their image, which does not allow them to feel pleasure and in many cases reach orgasm. Yeah, so a sexual three, I'm going to speak from the man, heterosexual man's point of view. that's about my sense of worth is wrapped up in the woman's pleasure. my potency is the woman's orgasm. In my own sexual experience, it's just not again. Almost nine, ? just forgotten. Remember the nine and the six of the three, that core triad, they have so much in common. I think nine sixes and threes move into each other with a lot more fluidity than the other, connected types. So the three, and being so preoccupied with image, of course forgets themselves. The sexual three woman, in the process of healing, sees her, sees herself learning to live without the need for the gaze and recognition of a man. And of course, for a woman, our culture is so much more conducive to threeness. For a man, she adds, it would similarly involve the need for the gaze of a woman, a childish and narcissistic need for constant applause, which leaves him increasingly empty because his romantic relationships are based on doing things so that the other applauds him. So much of these relational needs end up, becoming transactional. So I need the love of a woman. But in that need for reinforcement and confirmation, we both end up losing our true erotic connection. On my end, I need. I regress into a childish need for applause on her end. She shuts down into, great job, honey, and nobody is actually getting what they want. Many times, she adds, achieving that applause becomes very difficult, leading to great frustration that results in a permanent state of unhappiness in their romantic life. So we're talking about, she says, becoming aware of self deception and falseness in romantic relationships. Self deception and falsity being the core passions and fixations of the three. Unmasking the image of being good and perfect in order to be loved. And realizing their difficulty in truly loving represents one of the greatest shadows for the sexual three, as they have always believed they had a great capacity to love. Yeah, that's painful. That's really, that's really hard. I'm going to skip over some of these quotations from a book she writes about entering the therapeutic process for the sexual three. Remember, a lot of these writers are, psychotherapists. So this is heavy on the therapy side here. So, she talks about why might a three start therapy or a sexual three start therapy. she says if a sexual three looks inward even slightly, then they will realize they feel a sadness that has always been there. Reminds me of the five. If the five looks inward even slightly, they will realize an emptiness that has always been there. And for a three, they'll feel a sadness that has always been there. And for a four in the middle, you'll probably get a mix of sad and empty. So there's that polarization between the three and the five. I think that's another way to disambiguate. the three is a polarization between the two and the four. So the three is bringing in more of that other centricity that a 2 has, that attunement to need. The 4 really is a bit more self, self absorbed. So the four is caught between the inner emptiness and the inner sadness. so what do they do with the sadness? What happens is that by not expressing it and being constantly preoccupied with not showing it, they don't even reveal it to themselves. So why might the three start therapy? someone they admire might. That's snarky. But she says, the motivation that a sexual three finds to begin therapy is initially related to the fact that someone they admire has spoken to them about the benefits of the process and has told them they might need it. A sexual three might also come to realize they had a difficult life. I say realize because perhaps they have been disconnected from their personal tragedy. I think that I can connect to that. There's, threes may not really be in touch with what they didn't get. And then they share something about their life or childhood and someone reflects back to them the tragic nature of their experience. another reason, she says, is the trendiness of the therapeutic world. Rarely. Her point is the motivation comes from a true need for a feeling of true need for transformation that takes time to develop. Because the three, or the sexual three specifically feels this deep disconnection to, their experience. they'd have to let the mask Slip, perhaps they might feel a very fragile and sad person, or they might not show that, or they might embellish it to use it as a seduction tool. Where they may clearly feel the need for introspection is usually after a breakup. In that case, they will connect with a primitive pain related to reliving an abandonment by their father or mother. For sexual three, a breakup is their worst nightmare. Better than die. To separate, they seem to think, or they imagine that is the closest thing to death. I, don't know how common that is, but I certainly relate to that. it took me a while to be able to accept the prospect of the end of a relationship, as a normal thing. For me. It was always existential, always a death and something that I almost couldn't look at. not so much because of fear. Fear, of being abandoned or fear of being alone, but that primal fear of, what am I if not in a relationship? Not even that conscious thought, but just almost, an incapacity. And I certainly have had times in my life where alone, even if my partner is just away for a while, I just fall into this really crude way of being not taking care of myself, things that. And again, I don't know how much of this, maybe that's men, I'm not sure. But here in the sexual three, I think that feels that's part of the energy when facing a breakup. They may even have suicidal thoughts, start using drugs to drown out their suffering. They're terribly afraid of pain. And when they enter it, it feels they will never come out, no matter how many times they've been in and out of it before. That's tricky for the four, because the four is a friend of pain. Although the four has turned pain into a story. And so the four also, their pain, their drama sometimes is their protective device against even deeper pain. It's one of the worst survival strategies in the Enneagram. I think for the four, the four is let me, Let me feel a lot of pain so that I don't actually have to feel the real pain. People quotations, point being life. Life revolving around romantic relationships. A sexual three feels and lives in a permanent prison. The feel suffocated by vanity. And this suffocation leads them to want to remain unnoticed and to be extremely shy, afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. They need to free themselves from this is another motivation that might lead them to therapy. So this prison is on the One hand, the need to always be, pleasing to the other. again, not pleasing in the supplement supplicatory way of the two. Not submissive pleasing or sexual pleasing. It's more a full identity complementing. it's a performance. It's a. It's masterful performance of I give you exactly what you need. So there's power there. there's less of an insecurity or at least a conscious insecurity. So that takes a huge amount of energy which is suffocating, which then wants They want to remain unnoticed and be extremely shy. That's interesting. We haven't really heard much about the shyness of the three, but it makes sense. You would want to be almost in a place where you're completely alone, which is maybe familiar to the three. That not being noticed. Essentially. I either I'm either on stage or I'm. Nobody's noticing me. That's an interest

[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. 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. Thanks for reading The Barrcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. 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 . Thanks for reading The Barrcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

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 Approval The 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 Void When 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 Do Growth 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 Self One 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

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 Love The 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 Dependency The 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 Child Growth 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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of the Barrcast, we get to know the Sexual Two, whose keyword is conquest. Unlike the Social Two's ambition to impress groups, the Sexual Two channels their energy into one-on-one relationships, employing seduction as a tool for eliciting affection, loyalty, and recognition. Transformation for the Sexual Two involves dismantling pride and embracing humility, vulnerability, and authentic connection. Talking Points: 🌱 From Pride to Humility Transformation begins when the Sexual Two acknowledges their limitations and relinquishes the need to be seen as perfect or irreplaceable. This journey includes learning to ask for help, accepting their shadow, and discovering the beauty in ordinary, unadorned love. 💔 The Wound of Abandonment At the heart of the Sexual Two's psyche is a fear of abandonment. This fear often leads to patterns of manipulation or preemptive withdrawal to avoid being left behind. True growth requires facing and feeling abandonment fully, allowing it to dissolve their false sense of invulnerability. ✨ Revisiting Sexuality For the Sexual Two, sexuality can often be a means of control or conquest. Healing involves reframing intimacy as an experience of mutual surrender, sensitivity, and connection, moving away from performance-driven interaction toward tenderness and trust. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of the Barrcast, we get to know the Social Two, a personality structure driven by the need for ambition and recognition in the social sphere. The Social Two’s pride fuels their desire to be "above," leading them to craft an image of importance and seduction to win admiration from groups. The Social Two’s transformation work moves them from leadership to equality, in which they embrace humility, vulnerability, and genuine relational intimacy. Talking Points: 🔗 Superiority vs. Ambition Echoes of the Social One (Superiority/Inadaptability) are here for the Social Two, but the Two’s need to be above is ultimately more about relationship than it is about getting things right – a reflection of the Two’s position in the feeling triad. 💰 Confessing criminality The journey of the Social Two includes confronting their own "criminality"—the covertly selfish motivations behind their actions—and replacing these with empathy and accountability. The practice of giving and receiving genuine feedback helps dissolve pride and deepen their relational authenticity. 🐆 Reconnecting with the mammalian Self At the heart of transformation lies the reconnection to one's emotional and relational needs. By emerging from the "reptilian" mindset of conquest and control, the Social Two can embrace the humility and humanity that allow for true intimacy and belonging. 🌱 From Leadership to Equality Growth for the Social Two involves moving from a position of dominance to one of humility and equality. This transformation entails relinquishing the "golden child" role, acknowledging personal vulnerabilities, and embracing the needs of others without an agenda for self-glorification. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of The Barrcast , we wrap up the One with the Self-Preservation One, whose keyword is concern , a constant worrying. Unlike the other subtypes, the SP One accesses perfectionism through being painfully attuned to their own imperfections. Talking Points: 🫵 The Inner Critic Unlike the Social or Sexual Ones, the Self-Preservation One internalizes their imperfections acutely. This fuels an obsessive cycle of self-improvement that masks their anger with benevolence and service, often at great personal cost. 🎭 Acceptance and pleasure The path to growth includes reconnecting with instinctual life and allowing space for pleasure. This involves letting go of guilt and embracing moments of silence, leisure, and sensory enjoyment—freeing themselves from the grip of self-denial. 💡 Perfection as a gift, not an attainment Ultimately, perfection is revealed not as a result of effort but as a gift that arises when one accepts life as it is. In the words of St. John of the Cross, "I no longer tend my flock… my only practice is love." This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of The Barrcast , we explore the Sexual One, whose keywords are vehemence and zeal. Unlike the other One subtypes, the Sexual One channels their anger into a passionate pursuit of justice and righteousness. The result is a personality whose trust in the instincts of their body overrides other inputs. Talking Points: ⚔ The Crusader The Sexual One feels a fiery, embodied urge to address injustices and “make things right.” Their instincts become a vehicle for justice, resulting in a confident and determined approach to life. 🛡️ The Warrior's Pact From an early age, the Sexual One may forge an inner pact with their “warrior self,” prioritizing confrontation and strength over vulnerability. While this leads to a commanding presence, it can come at the cost of spontaneity and playfulness. ⚖️ Between Aggression and Benevolence The Sexual One oscillates between passionate anger and genuine warmth. As they soften and transform, their vehemence gives way to serenity, and their perfectionism shifts to a tender acceptance of life as it is. 🎭 Pleasure and Play For the Sexual One, a significant part of growth involves accessing sensuality, spontaneity, and play—experiencing pleasure for its own sake rather than tying it to ideals of justice or righteousness. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of The Barrcast , we learn aboutthe Social One, whose keywords are inadaptability and superiority. Unlike the other subtypes, the Social One asserts their correctness and moral high ground through a subtler, more withdrawn approach. Talking Points: 🧍 Sitting at the grownups table From a young age, the Social One often assumes a grown-up role, gravitating toward adults rather than peers. This early sense of responsibility reflects their drive to distinguish themselves and avoid the perceived mess of childhood. 🏔️ Moral High Ground as Refuge The Social One’s need for superiority often manifests as a retreat to their “moral high ground.” Maintaining this ground, and separating it from the rest of the environment, requires constant effort – resulting in rigidity, isolation, and tension in relationships. 🔥 Anger Beneath the Surface Unlike other subtypes, the Social One rarely displays anger outwardly. Instead, their frustration transforms into a quiet demand for perfection—both from themselves and others. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of The Barrcast , we introduce the Enneagram One, known as the Reformer. As part of the doing triad, the One is characterized by the passion of anger— not the fighting instinct, but something more primordial, rooted in the frustration caused by the friction between what is and what ought to be. The result is an internal, fiery drive to correct what is perceived as wrong or imperfect. Talking Points: 🎄 The Divine Memory of Perfection Richard Rohr’s account of experiencing perfection as a child—a perfectly trimmed Christmas tree—illustrates the One’s simultaneous longing for and burden of enforcing perfection. 🫸 Pushing the River The phrase highlights the One’s tendency to impose their will on the world, striving to reform external contexts rather than adapt to what is. 🧹 Occasional Peace Unlike other types, Ones sometimes achieve the perfection they seek, but this fleeting success only reinforces their belief in their “special access” to what is right. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

In this episode of The Barrcast we wrap up the Nine with the self-preservation subtype, a character shaped by “appetite.” Unlike the overt hunger of other types, the Nine’s appetite is a more instinctual desire for comfort, stability, and numbing pacification. We discuss how this appetite manifests not just physically but as an unconscious strategy to avoid the deeper question of being. Talking Points: 🍽️ I Eat, Therefore I Am The unique Cartesian expression of the self-preservation Nine reflects a substitution of being with physical satiation. We explore how this subtype’s appetite goes beyond food, encompassing a craving for the mundane comforts of everyday life—sleep, routine, and possession—that mask a deeper existential void. 📺 Life on Standby: The Remote Control Metaphor Emilia Ligi’s metaphor of living life like a TV on standby mode captures the essence of the self-preservation Nine’s strategy. This subtype often hands over their metaphorical remote control to others, allowing external influences to dictate their experience while they remain passive and disconnected from their true desires. 🪞 The Elusiveness of Presence Despite their grounded, physical presence, the self-preservation Nine often lacks a metaphysical depth, presenting as elusive or hard to pin down. We explore how this subtype’s tendency to retreat into comfort leads to a life lived on the surface, with little engagement in the deeper currents of self-awareness or transformation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com

(This is an edited transcript of the video) I’m going to do something a bit self-indulgent here and just riff for a few minutes. I’ve been asking myself: what is this project I’ve been working on for the past 18 months? It started with implementing Internal Family Systems (IFS) in ChatGPT, and now I’m translating Naranjo’s book on the Enneagram subtypes. What connects all this? It’s not like I have a tidy answer. I’ve been doing the work without naming the project, which is the beauty of independent work—you just do stuff and figure out why later. But it feels like it’s time to start naming it. I think it begins with describing the moment we’re in and the energy behind it. Dreyfus is my guide here, specifically his book What Computers Still Can’t Do the follow-up to his first critique of AI. Dreyfus isn’t around anymore to comment on the current state of affairs, but two quotes from his work frame the urgency I feel right now. The first quote: If we are on the threshold of creating artificial intelligence, then we are about to see the triumph of a very special conception of reason. If reason can be programmed into a computer, this will confirm an understanding of man as object, an idea Western thinkers have been moving toward for 2,000 years. But if AI turns out to be impossible, we will have to distinguish human from artificial reason, changing our view of ourselves. Thus, the moment has come either to face the truth of the tradition's deepest intuition or to abandon the mechanical account of man's nature. The point here is that things are coming to a head. We’re either about to prove that reason – the supposed essence of human nature – is mechanical, or we’re going to have to throw that intuition away. This is 2,000 years of Western philosophy culminating in this moment. It’s a big deal. But Dreyfus goes further. He argues that this isn’t just a spectator sport where we wait to see who wins. He highlights the deeper issue: our nature is malleable. This malleability, according to Dreyfus, is in fact more core to our nature than pure reason. Here’s the second quote: Man’s nature is indeed so malleable that it may be on the point of changing again. If the computer paradigm becomes so strong that people begin to think of themselves as digital devices on the model of artificial intelligence, then, since machines cannot be like human beings, human beings may progressively become like machines. The risk is not the advent of superintelligent computers, but of sub-intelligent human beings. So this isn’t a spectator sport where we observe the outcome from a safe distance. The stakes are existential. We could end up reshaping our own being to fit the machine model, essentially lobotomizing our human faculties to commune better with AI. This self-fulfilling prophecy could have us saying, “Look, machines can reason just like us,” when really we’ve just reduced ourselves to fit their capacities. I’ve long wanted to play some role in refuting the notion that human nature is mechanistic. But the irony is, I’ve also seen just how mechanistic we already are. So much of our behavior runs on automatic patterning. This is something I’ve encountered thanks to my training in Buddhism, initially through Ken McLeod’s Wake Up to Your Life , and also through working with the Enneagram. In IFS, we talk about parts—sub-personalities that act like little machines, each with their own job. They have a kind of programmed logic: if they don’t do their job, something terrible will happen. They work tirelessly, often in conflict with each other, like subroutines in a computer program. Despite their human-like qualities, they’re built on stories and instructions. There probably aren’t even that many of them—maybe 200 possible parts, give or take. Through their combinations, we get the full spectrum of human behavior. It’s super programmable. The Enneagram offers another lens. It’s an architecture of the psyche that lays out nine core ego patterns—or 27 if you include subtypes. Each represents a distinct “pattern imperative,” a kind of automatic rule we live by. For example: Must fit in, can’t stand out . These imperatives drive our thinking, feeling, and doing, and they operate in a mechanistic way. Human reason can’t be pulled out and dropped into a computer program, but much of our reasoning is automatically produced by these stories. And yet, there’s a non-mechanistic element—the awareness piece, what IFS calls the Self. This is the spacious, loving capacity within us that isn’t ruled by any part. The work in IFS is to become increasingly self-led, to identify more with this capacity than with any single part, no matter how urgent its job feels. When awareness touches a part, something shifts. It’s this non-mechanistic awareness that brings me back to the Enneagram’s spiritual dimension, the upward motion that points to a non-mechanical, mysterious, embodied reality. We’re at a psycho-spiritual crossroads. Freud’s model of a libido-driven psyche gave way to attachment theory and object relations, focusing on the early templates set by our primary caregivers. But there’s a third stage emerging, one that the Enneagram speaks to more directly. It acknowledges that our character structures—these patterned imperatives—are built on flimsy, ungrounded stories. They persist because part of us maintains the illusion that they’re real, that they stand on solid ground. This is what Naranjo calls the ontic vacuum—a kind of emptiness or void at the core of our character structure. The inner work is about dismantling this, facing the void, and discovering that there’s more to us than these stories. It’s scary, sure—it feels like looking into the abyss. But both IFS and the Enneagram create a framework for this exploration, helping us see that there’s an abiding presence capable of being with and holding the most intense experiences. So what’s the project? It’s about creating an architecture of the psyche that can be mirrored by machines in a way that helps us see our own automatic processes. By holding up this mirror, we can reclaim our true, non-mechanistic nature. The goal isn’t to program humanity into machines but to use the reflection to help us break free from our conditioned behaviors and stories. “Buddha nature is what remains when the confusion of samsara is cleared away.” -KM This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit barrcast.substack.com