The Barrcast

Nick Barr
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  1. Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 2)

    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

    46 min
  2. Evagrius Ponticus: Grandfather of the Enneagram (pt 1)

    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

    29 min
  3. We Live in Time: Riffing on the Enneagram of Temporality

    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

    33 min
  4. The Sycophancy Bug proves that ChatGPT knows your Enneagram Number

    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

    13 min
  5. Security and the Self-Preservation Three

    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

    46 min
  6. Attractiveness and the Sexual Three

    01/04/2025

    Attractiveness and the Sexual Three

    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 consider

    57 min
  7. How the Enneagram bridges Eastern and Western conceptions of sin

    05/03/2025

    How the Enneagram bridges Eastern and Western conceptions of sin

    [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 episod

    25 min
  8. Prestige and the Social Three

    06/02/2025

    Prestige and the Social Three

    In this episode of the Barrcast, we meet the Social Three, a personality structure driven by prestige, the need to shine, and the relentless pursuit of social validation. This subtype, the most chameleonic of the Threes, is deeply tuned in to the gaze of others, shaping their identity around admiration, applause, and external markers of success. Talking Points: 🔍 The Inner PR Machine: Performing for ApprovalThe Social Three operates as if it has an internal public relations department, constantly curating an image that garners admiration. This endless pursuit consumes an excessive amount of energy and inhibits genuine spontaneity. 💔 Breaking the Illusion: The Pain of Seeing the VoidWhen the Three begins to awaken, a deep existential nausea sets in. They realize that much of their life has been built on vanity—on performing rather than being. This moment of crisis is painful but necessary for true growth. 🛑 From Applause to Pause: Learning to Be Instead of DoGrowth for the Three involves stepping out of the performance loop, embracing uncertainty, and relinquishing the constant need for external validation. A crucial shift happens when they transition from seeking admiration to seeking presence—learning to value stillness, self-connection, and relationships beyond transactional gain. 🎭 The Jester’s Redemption: Laughing at the False SelfOne of the most powerful tools for the Three is self-awareness with humor. When they can see their own impulse toward falsehood and laugh at it, rather than being trapped by it, they gain true freedom. 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

    37 min
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  • Creator
    Nick Barr
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2026
  • Episodes
    99
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    © Nick Barr
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