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Nick Barr
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Subscribe to my podcast for musings on the Enneagram, IFS, the structure of care, the mystery of faith, and lots more. barrcast.substack.com

  1. 20 hr ago

    The 5 as Atmosphere: Melancholy, Suspicion, Fascination, Sadism, and Strictness in the Enneagram

    Description: Before we proceed to Naranjo’s traits of the 5, we work through the diagram that opens the chapter. * Why know the whole system: your number isn’t much use without the others. Plus, a case against wings and for subtypes. * 4 vs. 6: the 5 as a polarization between a melancholic aching to be known and a bright terror of being seen. R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self calls it a life torn between revealing and concealing. * The 8 line: under the bank-teller-behind-glass coolness, a punitive streak. * The 7 line: escaping isolation by falling in love with a model of the world (John Nash, formulas on the wall). * The 1: strictness, along the anal axis. * Five words: melancholy, suspicion, fascination, sadism, strictness. Less traits than an atmosphere the 5 is porous to, and often on the receiving end of. * The takeaway: everyone can touch 5 energy. The 5 just made it into an art form. Referenced: Claudio Naranjo, 27 Personalities in Search of Being; R.D. Laing, The Divided Self; Richard Rohr. Referenced: Claudio Naranjo, 27 Personalities in Search of Being; R.D. Laing, The Divided Self; Richard Rohr. 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

    The 5 as Atmosphere: Melancholy, Suspicion, Fascination, Sadism, and Strictness in the Enneagram

  2. 6 days ago

    Exploring the Clinical Antecedents for the Enneagram Five: Autism, the Schizoid Personality, and the Highly Sensitive Person

    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

    Exploring the Clinical Antecedents for the Enneagram Five: Autism, the Schizoid Personality, and the Highly Sensitive Person

  3. 25 Jun

    The Four Devils: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on Severance

    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 depart

    The Four Devils: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on Severance

  4. 22 Jan

    Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 2)

    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

    Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 2)

  5. 15 Jan

    Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 1)

    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 tempti

    Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 1)

  6. 28/07/2025

    We Live in Time: Riffing on the Enneagram of Temporality

    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

    We Live in Time: Riffing on the Enneagram of Temporality

  7. 01/05/2025

    The Sycophancy Bug proves that ChatGPT knows your Enneagram Number

    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

    The Sycophancy Bug proves that ChatGPT knows your Enneagram Number

  8. 22/04/2025

    Security and the Self-Preservation Three

    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

    Security and the Self-Preservation Three
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    Nick Barr
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