The Enneagram of Society: Healing the Soul to Heal the World [Anglais] [Broché]

"The reason for the misery of the world lies in the misery of the soul." This is the basic premise of Claudio Naranjo's fundamental work on mapping out personality types according to the Enneagram and its application for the study of the individual and collective consciousness. Dr. Naranjo, a pioneer of the Human Potential Movement and of transpersonal psychology analyzes in these pages the correspondence between disorders of personality and social pathologies, between cardinal sins of the individual--pride, anger, envy, vanity...--and those of humanity--authoritarianism, repression, corruption, violence.... The miseries of the world and our incapacity to maintain healthy relationships can only be resolved if we know and understand that the miseries of the soul have to be remedied first in order to remedy the illnesses of society. "If we consider it to be difficult for a healthy society to be able to exist without the underlying fundament of healthy individuals, it becomes imperative to recognize the political value of individual transformation..."

I read recently that when he was young, with the desire to contribute with struggles, not just with words, to the progress of humanity, Wittgenstein left the city, moved to a small mining village, and founded a primary school there for adults. "What I want is to improve," said one of his pupils. "So start by improving yourself," the philosopher replied. Dr. Claudio Naranjo says the same on the last page of his book: "If we consider it difficult for a healthy society to exist without the foundation of healthy individuals, it becomes imperative to recognize the political value of individual transformation." Even though this, he adds, is so badly aided in so many cases by official institutions. With great intellectual finesse, exquisite sensitivity, and an extensive display of knowledge, such is the aim the author seeks in this book. He very clearly tells us: "...think about all that will be added unto us if we first of all occupy the kingdom that is to be found within our heart." I sincerely join him in his wish.

--Pedro Laín Entralgo, Member, Spanish Royal Academy

Dr. Claudio Naranjo has put all his erudition, his sensitivity, his therapeutic competence, and his energy into perfecting an effective antidote.... The Enneagram of Society is the recent fruit of an entire lifetime dedicated to what is, without doubt, the greatest and most perennial of adventures: inner conquest; knowledge and mastery of oneself. The Enneagram of Society, rather than material for active speculation, presents us with an invitation to rebuild the world, starting with our own transformation into beings capable of assuming responsibility for our own acts, both outer and inner, a condition essential to any leap into self-transcendence, and thus crucial to the search for the ideal of a full life.--Arno Vogel, Director, Latin American Faculty for Sociology (FLACO)

E.J. Gold has been called a teacher's teacher and a gifted Upaya master--expert at skillful means--since rising to prominence in the West Coast Human Development movement of the 1960's and 1970's. He has written over 100 books, including the widely read Practical Work on Self and American Book of the Dead, and is also internationally known as a gifted painter, experimental composer, and interactive "spiritual video gaming" designer. He has been associated with authors and teachers Claudio Naranjo, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, Heather Valencia, and many others since the 1970's.

Foreword to the 1995 Spanish edition, Temas de Hoy publishing house

The publishers Temas de Hoy have put me right on the spot by asking me to prologue this book by Doctor Claudio Naranjo, an eminent psychiatrist and professor who moves like a pendulum between Chile and California. How could I, totally ignorant in the doctrine of Christian esoterics and the Enneagram, write something presentable about a book that has this doctrine as its nerve center? Without knowing what I was doing, I took on the commitment. But, morally obliged by my ignorance, I would have not doubted to go back on the commitment if I had not discovered in its pages a thesis to whose resolution I have dedicated some attention and a goal with which I feel intimately comfortable. The thesis: that during our century humanity has lived and continues to live in the midst of a profound historical crisis. A thesis that is, otherwise, more than obvious: "The fact that we are in planetary crisis is self-evident," says Dr. Naranjo's first words in the prologue to his book. In a recent book of mine, entitled Hope in a Time of Crisis, I have attempted to sketch the general outlines of this prolonged crisis, and I have shown how nine prominent European thinkers have meanwhile conserved their historical hope, and each one, according to his or her own way of seeing and understanding, has put forth guidelines for individual life and collective life to reorder the world, if not as a paradise, an intrinsically utopian goal, but rather in a more satisfactory way than this to and fro progress from one hot war to another, and then another cold war, and at the end of that, with the living memory of millions of dead, genocides, concentration camps, and the crushing of the adversary, we find ourselves as needy of historical tranquility in the present and of reasonable faith in what is to come as we did before such a long, atrocious experience. What do we do then? Definitively despair? Throw in the towel, and, if one has one's own plot of land, lock oneself up in it and just cultivate it? The nine thinkers I contemplated died with the clear awareness that their respective proposals, all noble and reasonable, many of which are frankly attractive, had failed. Some, it is true, accepted them, but the world did not; which did not prevent those with hope from preserving their faith in man until the end of their days. They did not see human existence--betraying its own truth is how one of them proposed defining it--as a useless passion. Many other names could have figured among them. One of these, that of Dr. Naranjo. The goal: to get everyone from work itself, each one according to his or her possibilities, to contribute to the universal task of building a more acceptable historical world than the present one. How does the author of this book do this? Claudio Naranjo is a psychiatrist and a fervent devotee of the "Christian esoterics" that he discovered one day: "I can say," he states, "that [with this discovery] I was truly born and I entered into a new phase of my life, inspired and directed from beyond what I had known until then about myself." From there, he derives his desire to help others and to contribute to correcting what he calls "ills of the world." His starting point is the description of the nine enneatypes that may be distinguished in the ethical aberrations of the individual psyche. He then goes on to sketch the corresponding nine individual characters that are to be observed in our species and presents the nine modalities that can be distinguished in the substance of human love. Finally, on the basis of these three series of anthropological analyses, he presents the nine "ills of the world" to us, the most important social ailments that nowadays corrupt collective life. In short, he shows the ethical disturbances of individual life, makes us see how they are all realized socially, and invites each individual to try to better the world by knowing and by improving him or herself. To put it another way: with not merely cognitive, but also practical and uplifting intention, to aspire, in a present-day way, to fulfilling the nosce te ipsum of the ancient Greco-Latin world.

I read recently that when he was young, with the desire to contribute with struggles, not just with words, to the progress of humanity, Wittgenstein left the city, moved to a small mining village, and founded a primary school there for adults. "What I want is to improve," said one of his pupils. "So start by improving yourself," the philosopher replied. Dr. Claudio Naranjo says the same on the last page of his book: "If we consider it difficult for a healthy society to exist without the foundation of healthy individuals, it becomes imperative to recognize the political value of individual transformation." Even though this, he adds, is so badly aided in so many cases by official institutions. With great intellectual finesse, exquisite sensitivity, and an extensive display of knowledge, such is the aim the author seeks in this book. He very clearly tells us: "...think about all that will be added unto us if we first of all occupy the kingdom that is to be found within our heart." I sincerely join him in his wish.

Pedro Laín Entralgo Member, Spanish Royal Academy