The Barrcast

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a brisk fall Wednesday morning here in New York.

So a lot of you have been messaging me saying, “Nick, when is your review of You Can See Everything going to come out?” And I resisted for some time, but I’m relenting. And so this will be not exactly a review of You Can See Everything, but an analysis of the film through the lens of this larger project that I’m working on.

So if you’ve been following along with the Barrcast, you know we’re doing a lot of work on the Enneagram number 5. We are reading R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self. We are exploring what Naranjo calls the clinical antecedents of the Enneagram 5, which is the schizoid personality, the autistic personality, the highly sensitive personality, because I think there’s something really important about understanding this personality. Particularly right now.

And Nathan Fielder has gifted us with a film that does exactly that. This is a film directed by someone who, you know, in Nathan Fielder, we recognize the personality type, and its subject is, in Elizabeth Holmes, someone who at least potentially has this personality type. And more importantly, this is ultimately a character study. This film is really about understanding. It is based on Nathan Fielder’s wish to understand Elizabeth Holmes’s way of being.

And this film is coming at the perfect time in his career, because he’s matured so much that he’s at a stage where he recognizes that understanding is also never neutral. And so his need to understand itself comes under examination.

So this is really all about understanding, and the Enneagram 5 is all about understanding, the need to understand, the need to know. But knowing is never complete. There’s always more understanding that can be achieved. There is a totemic (and I use that word because one of the keywords for the social 5 is totem), there’s sort of this longed-for vantage point. You know what Wallace Stevens says: the position that would be right, the position from which one will fully understand. And so this is a film all about trying to find that position, and really get to the bottom of Elizabeth Holmes, her way of being, how she ticks, and also why her story is so meaningful to us in society when there are plenty of grifters in Silicon Valley, right?

In preparing for this Barrcast, I was revisiting Ricky Jay, the magician, because I think to understand this film you have to understand magic, you have to understand magicians.

And the beating heart of this movie, or the aboutness of this movie, is (I think Nathan himself says this; this both comes up in the film and also in interviews he’s done) that before they’d even agreed to do it, he visited Elizabeth, you know, at their bungalow, and he told her the story about David Blaine.

And David Blaine is this magician who’s got a whole bunch of tricks, and one of his tricks is he sticks an ice pick into his hand. And you can watch it up close, and you can see this on YouTube. He sticks the ice pick into his hand, and you can actually watch the ice pick go through his hand and out the other side.

And what Fielder posits to Holmes (and this has been posited by other people who follow magic closely) is that this is actually not a trick, in the sense that there’s not manipulation happening here. David Blaine, the theory goes, practiced sticking an ice pick through his hand, or a needle through his hand, probably when he was practicing, and over time built up enough scar tissue. And if you can get, you know, the point right, it’s just sort of a fleshy part of the hand. And, you know, with sufficient practice and wound care, you can get scar tissue all the way through the hand, such that you can then stick an ice pick through your hand without experiencing pain. And so the effect is achieved through non-manipulation. The deception is non-deception.

And Fielder tells this to Holmes and basically says, this is what I think you’ve done. And this is in their very first meeting. And he says in the film, something magical happened. She was just completely taken with (I think was his phrase), she was taken with this idea. But when he describes it, it’s so funny, because he almost sounds bemused or nonplussed by her reaction. But he’s done a stroke of genius to make this connection, because this is, I think, a very good theory about Elizabeth Holmes’s way of being.

And interestingly, just because of the timeline, we can see that it’s his starting place, and I think it’s his ending place too with her. And I think he finds her ultimately compelling. But of course, I’ve read a little bit of the discourse, and you’ll just read every single kind of review. There is no consensus about this film. And so I’ve read people say that Nathan was too soft on her. That he got basically swept up, taken in. Then I’ve read other reviews that say he was much too hard.

So, I mean, what you have to say is that he’s been successful in creating a kind of portal. This film is a portal, and one can’t help but go into the portal by engaging with it. So not only is the director not neutral, but the filmgoer, their neutrality is clearly impossible too. He’s done something really remarkable. He’s done his own magic act. And, you know, if you’re a fan of Nathan, you’ll know that he’s trained in magic a bit, and certainly interested in magic.

So we have two magicians, in Nathan Fielder and Holmes.

And so the question can’t be, has deception happened? The question is, what kind of deception is this, right? What kind of effect is this? What kind of magic is this? And that’s really the question that Fielder starts with. And as we’ll discuss, the Enneagram Type 5, or the divided self, also performs a kind of magic act, a disappearing act.

So I do think that the experiential... how would I put this? I think this film is much... not the film necessarily, but the interactions between Nathan and Elizabeth Holmes are much deeper than almost anyone realizes, because I do think that there is a language being spoken between them.

And we see Holmes cry a few times. And again, every act (and this is characteristic of the divided self), every act is seen by an outsider as suspect, you know, unreal. There’s something unreal about it, not fake. Not fake, but unreal about it. So her crying has an unreal quality to it. But I found myself feeling a few times, particularly something on this Abbott and Costello scene, and there maybe was one other scene, where I think she really felt seen by him. I think she really did feel seen, and I really do think that there were tears of, you could say, catharsis or intensity. Not sure how you describe it, but of being seen, of being caught, but also being known.

And this is the paradox for the Type 5. There is a deep longing to be known and a deep terror of being exposed. And so being known is both simultaneously kind of erotic and also terrifying. There’s also a threat of death there.

I didn’t publish it on the Barrcast, but it’s on my YouTube, and I’ll recapitulate some of the themes here. But R.D. Laing talks about the three false self systems. And I think it’s gonna be really helpful for us to bring that into the film analysis, because, again, the question is sort of what kind of falsity are we talking about here? And so sort of telling the truth is out of the picture, right? It’s just, what kind of unreality are we in? And Laing has these three false self systems that we’ll get into.

But before we do any of that, I did mention Ricky Jay. And I was watching this BBC documentary in preparation for this discussion, and the woman being interviewed here is May Castleberry. May Castleberry, and she’s a curator at the Whitney. I don’t know why she’s in the film. I was kind of, you know, speeding through it, but she says: “A magician is somebody who often wants to gain an advantage, and sometimes that’s pretentious, and sometimes it comes from a great hurt in their background, a great hurt, so that you…

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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.

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

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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. An…

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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 listless…

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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 er…

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

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

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

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

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 …

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