(Ichazo’s 1971 New York Times call; the metasociety that never arrived)
SEPTEMBER 28, 1971. A FULL PAGE AD BEARING THE ZEN HEADLINE “THE MOSQUITO THAT BITES THE IRON BULL” APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. IT WAS A CALL TO SAVE THE WORLD FROM IMMINENT DESTRUCTION BY THE CREATION OF A METASOCIETY IN 10 YEARS TIME WHICH WOULD AWAKEN HUMAN BEINGS TO NEW LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND UNITY THROUGH THE TEACHINGS OF OSCAR ICHAZO, THE SELF-PROCLAIMED “ROOT OF A NEW TRADITION.” THE AD CAUGHT THE CREST OF THE “HUMAN POTENTIAL MOVEMENT,” LATER KNOWN AS THE “NEW AGE,” AND SOON ICHAZO’S TRAININGS WERE GIVEN WORLDWIDE, MANY THOUSANDS TAKING THE TRAININGS. BUT ICHAZO’S PROJECTED METASOCIETY NEVER MATERIALIZED, AND THE TEACHING TODAY IS ONLY A SHADOW OF ITS FORMER SELF.
“When you are in your Astral body,” he now reflects, “both fear and ecstasy can be multiplied to infinite proportions because there are no limits within pure consciousness.”
Ichazo gives an apocryphal story of the group’s initiation. For three days, he was required to sit in a lotus position on a post. When the group returned, his body was so rigid he had to be lifted off the post. The experience caused Ichazo’s personality structure to break down completely. Transformed, he was now allowed to join the group as a full member. That’s one version.
Lilly found four Americans at Arica already immersed in training. With Ichazo’s permission, they informed Lilly about the training. The program was rigorous, beginning at 8 a.m. and finishing at near midnight; it included special physical exercises as well as chants and mantras. Lilly, though still holding doubts, decided to return for the full 10-month training. Naranjo, convinced as to the depth of Ichazo’s knowledge, as well as his ability to directly transmit energy, also decided to return for the 10-month training.
(The Arica training regimen: gym, chants, desert pampas, enneagrams)
The training began with “physical exercises called the ‘Gym’ for two hours a day, five to six days a week … auditions for an hour, chanting for another hour and various meditations … for an hour or two and finally in the evening group exercises.” On Sunday there was a rigorous set of exercises called the “pampas” in the desert; these took two to three hours to complete and involved walking in special ways, carrying rocks and praying.
Using Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation and vibrational numbers as a model, Ichazo developed a scale of what he termed “Satoris” for ascending and descending states of consciousness.
Both drugs, at low doses, were at times used in conjunction with exercises that were given after the trainings. (Later, sometime after the Arica Institute was established, all drugs were banned.)
For this, Ichazo developed seven basic enneagrams to be used to help analyze and classify both the individual student and the general psychological condition of all people.
By April 1971, 44 of the 54 people who had begun the 10-month training completed it.
girlfriend. She did attend the New York training and reported: The type of training I experienced during the three months was a combination of Gurdjieffian, yoga, high school gym and some tantric yoga … we sat in front of the school symbol for 20 minutes a day, with a strobe light impressing the symbol … focusing approximately 14 hours a day, six days a week for three months, on the training.
The training ended, within a few months Lilly published his The Center of the Cyclone, which, without Ichazo’s permission, gave a general view of his teaching at the time.
Regarding the specific New York training, Doughty said: The training was very well structured and contained all the elements in the ad. We worked full days, with Saturday off and Sunday had special exercises. There was a 300-page photocopied manual with a full schedule. Many of the exercises worked fantastically. But the aim, Permanent 24 (basic satori) wasn’t reached. People got high, some stayed high for a long time and some went in and out, but the awakened State (which I presume most everyone got at least for a while in the training) was not a permanent state.
(The vision of unity; a metasociety beyond relations and conflict)
incarnation of humanity as a whole.” Ichazo’s larger aim of saving humanity by creating a new man and a metasociety first within his school and then expanding throughout the world he believed would take about 10 years. His idea was that the Aricans would be catalyzers whose vibrations would affect those they came in contact with, thus affecting humanity in general and ultimately creating a metasociety on the Earth.
“I call it a metasociety because … it is really beyond what we know now … a point where there are no longer relations, but there is unity… . A society of relations is a society of fighting … of battle and of contradictions … that is its level.”
People would know their psyche so well that “they could read each other completely.”
“If that unity doesn’t exist,” he said, “then the defense mechanisms of that organism, the body of Arica are instantaneously produced… . If someone is not in unity with another, the other person reduces him, reduces his ego … his personal position.”
impact of his teaching to come to fruition. Ichazo’s teachings are complex, intellectualized and presented as the first “scientific approach to mysticism.” It purports to have completely mapped the human psyche, which is said to consist of nine levels.
Of all who took the trainings — Arica’s numbers vary from 200,000 to 500,000, but according to Doughty, who took the trainings until 1975 and ever after has been an observer, it was 10,000 — very few trainees had any direct contact with Ichazo. From 1976 until 1981 he gave no public lectures and as early as 1983 Ichazo was spending a great deal of time at his compound on Maui where in the late 1980s he eventually settled.
(The enneagram’s lineage, Almaas, and Ichazo’s contested origins)
One of Korman’s pupils was the Kuwaiti A. H. Almaas (aka Hamid Ali) who later, taking acid and seeing the world as diamonds, created his “Diamond Approach,” a synthesis of ersatz Gurdjieff, transpersonal psychology and Sufism. Another student was Basarab Nicolescu. For her part, Speeth began to see “the potential for harm” in the enneagram personality fixations, as people’s shadow sides would use it in destructive ways. “I can no longer take the karmic burden of passing this on,” she said. “There’s a lot of reasons to teach it. There is a lot money to be made, a lot of prestige to be had, but it cannot be used for transcendence. Truly, I must say I have never seen anyone develop using the enneagram of personality.”
published some enneagram material in Charles Tart’s anthology, Transpersonal Psychologies.
The letters are essentially a defense of Ichazo’s system of 108 enneagons, as well as the general Arica system.
Ichazo asserts, in all seriousness, that the use of the enneagram, as a slew of enneagram teachers present it, is a partial and dangerous teaching and taken without the entirety of the Arica teaching is at best worthless.
Clearly, renaming the enneagram as the “enneagon” was not enough to claim originality, and seemed ridiculous to most observers. He needed a definitive separation from the man he once called “Master Gurdjieff.”
When in Egypt, Gurdjieff says he was initiated four times into the ancient Egyptian mysteries. The origin of the teaching is not the Hellenic period, as Ichazo thinks, but, as Gurdjieff said, “esoteric Christianity” [original emphasis]. Gurdjieff is not referring to contemporary Christianity but to “a Christianity before Christ,” one which existed not in the Egypt we know, but the Egypt before its religion degenerated into animal worship, when there existed a religion and science of being.