The Barrcast

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host Nick Barr coming to you on a Tuesday afternoon. We're trucking along here with the five and we're on to the sexual five today. The keyword for the sexual five is confianza which is translated here as trust. If you also hear confidence in Confianza, I think that's a connection.

But in the deeper sense, maybe like the confidence man. I guess that's where con man originates from. Should we just start with a quick etymological investigation of the word confidence? Because there's something about contract and trust here that I don't think I fully understand so let's look at the etymology of confidence.

Of course, right we have confide, confiding having full trust. Let's see what else we have to say here. Assurance or belief in the goodwill veracity of another is the original meaning of confidence. Firmly trusting, fully trusting, full reliance. So there's a, the origin of confidence is relational. Assurance or belief in the goodwill of another. And so I think that's where, you know, it can connect with trust.

And then Con, Con Man. Confidence with a sense of assurance based on insufficient grounds dates from the 1590s. Con Artist is attested by 1910, but Confidence Man is a Melville book. So obviously, yeah, 1840s, I would guess.

So let's just invite in all of that association, trust, contract, fully trusting another in sort of a formal way that sort of establishes reliance on the other. And I'm going to, once again, I'm not going to read the whole chapter, although this is actually the shortest chapter I've seen yet after the social five, which was quite long. And the keyword there was totem.

And the points made multiple times that fives have, as it says here, is if one tries to find the difference between the sexual five and the other type of five, it will not be easy. But if one engages in conversation with them, they will hear them say that they're very passionate about a person, generally about a person they cannot find in their lives.

So we've got the four who I call the romantic because I think the individualist leads one astray and too far away from how fundamentally dependent on relationship the four is. And the sexual five is also a romantic type here, very passionate about a relationship that seems not to exist in the ordinary world. It's a relationship that would finally give them the security that they never had.

Here occurs a case similar to the extraordinary search of the social five. The extraordinary would be what is at the top of the totem pole. The sexual five seeks a very high specimen. The same happens to them in love. This subtype is on a quest for absolute love. And their search is so strong that if you are the one being sought, it's very difficult to pass the test.

If someone is looking for the absolute, it is very easy for them to feel disappointed. We must understand this passionate search in the sense of trust, of being able to trust the other. The sexual five is looking for that person who will be there for them and with them no matter how or what, far beyond the normal vows of a commitment or marriage.

The thought of the sexual five is that they must be able to present themselves to you with the worst of their inner world, and that you, as their partner, should maintain complete equanimity in front of their inner monsters, since they love you so much. So they live the love of a couple as a kind of ideal, but it is an ideal that does not exist in the human world.

Excuse me. They go on to mention Chopin as kind of an example of a sort of romantic person who's not generally open to intimacy, doesn't have many friends, doesn't have many relationships, and is sort of saving all their trust for the one. Not the type one, but the soulmate.

So I think this is a pretty understandable passion here. So again, we're all of the subtypes of the five return to avarice or stinginess, which is I have so little. I have so little, so I need to be very, very deliberate about what I give. Why do I have so little? It's because the world is threatening. Relationship is threatening. Emotions are threatening.

And so to need and be needed are pretty frightening for the five. And so the five seeks ways to avoid being needed or needing. And really becomes very stingy with the few interactions or the few relationships where they allow themselves to be needed or allow themselves to need others.

So that's the basis. And we covered totem already. Let's just hit a couple of the beats from the essay by Mireya Dardar.

We isolate ourselves, we do not expect anything from others, and we do not trust life. So there's that word trust. So as someone said in the last chapter, this feeling of like locking your heart in a box, and so the sexual five is saving. In a way, there's almost sort of a virginity there, that they're saving themselves. They're saving their trust for that special somebody.

We do not trust life. Both people and life itself constitute a cosmos situated behind a glass that separates us from everything. And it's the five who, in early, early childhood or even infancy, created that glass separation. Or we talked about muffling before.

On one hand, we live any relationship with the outside world as threatening, which at best will cause us pain. At the same time, deep down, we perceive ourselves as guilty when interacting with others because we feel we may hinder them. We believe that if we do not need and are self-sufficient, we can survive, and thus they will not hurt us and we will not hurt them.

We live the emotional world as threatening and complicated, as something we can do without since it causes displeasure. Therefore, we prefer not to get emotionally involved and stay in the role of observers of life, the investigator, the observer. The same non-involvement gives us a certain emotional infantilism and, at the same time, an inhibited hypersensitivity, since we do not put our own emotions into practice.

And I think that's true of the five is sort of emotionally frozen potentially at a really early age. And so the path for the five to recover that can be really rocky. And for the sexual five maybe in particular, they're going to be putting a lot of pressure on that relationship to sort of like birth their emotional life, birth their maturation that is set up for disappointment, right? Because that's too much to put on another human being.

And by putting that much on the relationship, you're also setting yourself up to be disappointed, thereby saying, see, I knew I couldn't trust, right? And so all these words, we just have to remember with the totem or trust, these words are always just keywords meant to point to a self-perpetuating or what Naranjo calls elsewhere, a deficiency motivation. A motivation that comes from some sense of lack and when acted out, reinforces that sense of lack.

So I must not trust the world or relationships until I find that special somebody. And then when that special somebody inevitably disappoints me or is nowhere to be found, then that just reinforces my sense of distrust, which all reinforces this stinginess, stinginess of energy, stinginess of love.

It does seem that for fours and fives, these wounds are really early. I know that's been the case for myself, that working with some of this material tends to be pre-verbal. It's really deep in the body.

Here, the author says, the wound in the bond usually occurs in the first months of life, when the baby has not yet established the differentiation between the world and themselves through the maternal bond. So there's a disconnection that runs very deep. A splitting is sometimes used as the word, a splitting.

The sexual five has locked themselves in, creating a safe inner world filled with ideations, theories, romantic fantasies, and utopias about the search for unconditional love. And that totem would be there too. So it's detachment. It's detachment.

Again, that detachment comes with many gifts of neutrality, of intellectual rigor…

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

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the BarrCast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Sunday evening here in New York, a little muggy. I've had some recording issues and I lost the audio for some reason. It dropped in the last couple of attempts. So I'm just going to try something a little different, mix it up. And rather than go through the translation... We're just going to try to make meaning out of and make sense out of the keyword for the social five, which is Totem.

And so remembering that the passion for the five overall is avarice. And like all the passions, really, it's not quite what you'd expect. So take avarice at face value and you're thinking about greed and wanting more. And that's a really odd word to describe the five who is oftentimes the least materialistic, least interested in monetary gain. They might be a minimalist.

So what kind of avarice are we talking about here? The five and we're moving into the head triad from the four so we're talking about um people who kind of uh their head their thinking and their mental simulating is sort of their uh control tower from which they're experiencing a lot of the world um

And there's a lot... The five in general is really out to protect themselves from kind of sensory overload, you know, is one way to start talking about it. And... I think the five is probably the most important type to understand from a cultural perspective right now, because I think the five was probably in most of history was very rare and would sort of be the absent-minded professor, brilliant researcher, scientist type who used to be a rarity, but culturally we're living more and more in a five space in the sense that there's more withdrawn

Were more withdrawn from the frictions of human interactions. And that's what the fives organized their life to sort of avoid is friction and just sort of unpredictability in human interactions. That is to say, sometimes people are going to be too much and they're going to be kind of invading your space. And that's going to be overwhelming for a five and the five is going to want to retreat. But also the five may have wounding around not getting enough interaction. And so then sort of building a sort of buffer around not needing other human interactions.

And so the five becomes really essentially obsessed with knowledge and obsessed with perceiving, obsessed with understanding, and really underlying this fascination with the world and fascination with knowing things is a fear that if I don't know, then I will be subject to the bewildering messiness of human interaction and will either be invaded or not helped or whatever. And so just better to know.

Naranjo writes, you know, in the introduction to the five, about the five early on replaced mother's milk with books. And that's a simplification. And, you know, fives have all sorts of different life stories, but that's not a bad handle on the five. So fives are also going to be pretty skeptical oftentimes of the Enneagram, and that's maybe touching to their six wings. They might get really interested in the Enneagram, but they're also going to say, oh, this isn't quite right, or it's not like that. And that's fine. The five can do that. Just the wise five will recognize in their own critiquing of... these descriptions, that is their own passion, their own fixation at work. This need to perceive, this need to understand, this need to know. Because if somebody knows, excuse me, somebody knows better than me, then that's not safe.

So the totem is the social five. And, you know, the way I think about it is like, there's sort of this dramatization of and sort of kind of the social five turns the world into a heaven and a hell and so at you know to the left there is heaven that's where we want to be that's the totem you could call that the ivory tower and ivory towers are uh A great metaphor for fives and I think a lot of fives have some connection to the ivory tower and that's where they want to be in in a world of facts and ideas and ideals.

It's a totem totem both speaks to kind of an academic ivory tower image, but it also speaks to that as a as an idea of worship and so a social five might might, for instance, have as their hero, let's say, like a Richard Feynman or a John von Neumann or even a religious figure or it could be a regular person, but just somebody who lives and breathes the ideals of brilliance, of genius, of that kind of pursuit. And they want to be up there.

I must strive for these ideals. I must strive to accomplish what my God-given rights are. Fives oftentimes are really gifted intellectually. So they really want to be there and at the great cost of basically the ordinary world is like, this is like an octopus, you know, kind of a chthonic monster down there. It's hell. It's basically the ordinary world is hell and to be avoided. And then, you know, the really clever five will be like, how can I turn... How can I take every opportunity to convert the ordinary into the sublime?

So the social five is always kind of trying to make lemonade out of lemons of the ordinary world, which is interesting, but usually fails. So if we're kind of trying to create a provisional story for the social five, it must be something like, you know, I must strive to be among the greats or else I will be

In my image here, there's a fear of being pulled in and under. The five's fear can be around overwhelm and annihilation in the mundane needs of people and the world. The world is a little bit threatening for the five. Yeah.

There's a lot of overlap, I think, between the social five and the four, particularly the self-preservation four. I know those are very different instincts, but I think we'll see that. And the four, of course, also sort of despises the mundane. But for the five, the mundane is sort of a threat to their would-be greatness. Sort of else I will be annihilated by the ordinary.

And I'm just sort of still playing with this I must X or else Y. I'm really interested in seeing people create their own stories that resonate for them. I don't think that there's like one for the five in general or one for the social five specifically. But let's bring up the book and see what it has to say here.

The passion of the social five is somewhat akin to a need for the essential, the sublime, we could say, instead of the need for what exists. Totem simultaneously suggests height and the character of being a constructed object rather than a human being. The height of a totem evokes a tendency in these individuals to look upward toward the ideal and to relate to the most outstanding and remarkable among people, somehow like how Midas wanted everything he touched to turn into gold.

And yeah, you know, I think for the spiritually curious among us, for Buddhists, I mean, having poked around Substack a little bit more since I'm publishing some of these videos to Substack, I'm just, there's so much spiritual talk. It's really interesting. And for me, it feels kind of unfamiliar and fresh and new. And, you know, for sure, I have like one foot in it.

But... I'm not, I don't want to like type anybody, but I think the, the four and the five are very prevalent types among like Western, especially Buddhists and, um, there's a lot this there's a lot that's like catnip for that type and so let's just read this paragraph the tragedy is in their quest for a super value the social five implicitly scorns ordinary life and common people they're only interested in the quintessence of life the elixir of existence the ultimate meaning

However, in this orientation toward the stars, they become someone who is not very interested in life down here. They become overly spiritual because emotional impoverishment, which distances them from compassion, is contrary to spiritual achievement. We're going to go back to that. Thus, in this character, a polarity is established between the extraordinary and what makes no sense. So nothing makes sense until the extraordinary or magical is at…

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

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the BarCast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Wednesday evening. I am taking off for a few days, flying out to Miami tomorrow, but I thought before I do that, I want to carry on this project and record another session. So we're doing the sexual floor today, which...

0:31

which is closer to home for me than the social four. I think I'm still yet closer to the self-preservation four, but we'll get to that. So the sexual four is classified by Ichazo as odio, hatred. So it's an intense keyword. And the sexual four is an intense person. So we're going to learn about it.

0:58

And before we dive in more, just a word on sexual as a subtype. So the subtypes, the instinctual subtypes, social, sexual, and self-preservation really are a somewhat distinct invention specific to the Enneagram. In a way, that's kind of a bummer. You would like the vocabulary to be common across other paradigms, but

1:26

It has a little bit to do with attachment, right? It has a little bit to do with survival. And the idea is a pretty simple one. As a child, we quickly develop not just survival strategies, but strategies on whom our survival depends. So if our survival depends on a close relationship with a caregiver,

1:55

then we might develop a sexual, or sometimes it's called one-on-one subtype. So this is someone where the intensity and depth of one relationship becomes of utmost importance for the survival strategy. I don't know enough about why it's called sexual. It certainly can show up as sexual in terms of sort of seducing the partner or

2:25

seducing the other person in relationship. But of course, it would have its roots in caregivers, a mother or a father. Then there's the social subtype where survival is to be found in belonging, in fitting in. in not standing out, maybe you've got a large family or, um, or your family of origin, you know,

2:56

wasn't where you were safe, but school or, uh, you moved around a lot. So you needed to sort of blend in. So, so the social subtype is going to be much more focused on fitting in and belonging. Um, there might be more chameleonic able to sort of, um, work with a lot of different personalities. And then finally,

3:19

the self-preservation subtype is somebody who ultimately relies on themselves and security of the situation. So this type might be avoidant of risk. They may seek out safety in terms of resources, wealth, security, housing. So security, you know, security, belonging and intimacy could be three synonyms for self-preservation, social and sexual subtypes. So today is the sexual four.

3:55

And let's get right into it. If the E4 social subtype suffers more than the other subtypes feeling guilty about any desire, the sexual four turns against shame by becoming shameless to satisfy their intense desires. Therefore, even if it's shameful, they will bang on every possible door.

4:17

They become insistent even against frustrations as if thinking that the loudest baby gets the most milk. The more I complain, the more I'll get, they seem to think. Only the strategy works, which works well in childhood doesn't work so well in adulthood. People who are too insistent, demanding and exacting tend to be annoying and get rejected.

4:37

And thus the vicious circle emerges where rejection leads to protest and protest leads to rejection. So it's. These are all flavors of envy, which is the core keyword for the four, the passion for the four, the fixation for the four. And this is a different vicious circle than the social four who I ended up going

5:04

with the word abasement. Kind of like abasement, even though it's obscure, because it literally has the word basement in it. And I think that that's evocative for us. If you ever watch a film, you know, who's in the basement, right? That person who has been rejected, who is sort of unloved, who is less than, who's lower, right?

5:26

So the social four puts themselves in the basement. And then they say, they lament, nobody loves me. That's why I'm in the basement. But then, of course, their vicious circle is, well, you're in the basement. That's right. Come come in the kitchen and we'd love to hang out with you.

5:39

But this person wants to stay in the basement. So that's their vicious circle. The sexual four, it's more aggressive and it's less of a victim mindset and more of a argumentative, insistent, as I said, or frustrated mindset. Stop rejecting me. Stop it. You need to accept me.

6:07

Well, I would like to accept you if you weren't so aggressive and demanding. And so that's the vicious circle that Naranjo's introducing here. Continues, the name Ichaso, again, that's Naranjo's teacher, gave to the characteristic passion of the sexual four was hatred, which is descriptively appropriate for these people who are very expressive about their anger. However,

6:36

this might not sufficiently explain their motivation. So it seems better to talk about competition or competitiveness. I really like this point that I think Naranjo is pretty rigorous about seeking a word that describes not the behavior, but the motivation. The fixation has to have an I must or else logic to it. It has to have this

7:04

engine behind it. And so hate doesn't really point to an engine, whereas competition starts to point to an engine or a fixation or a vicious circle. I've been thinking about the sexual four in anticipation of doing this recording. And I'd like to tentatively introduce another keyword closer to competition, which would be rivalry. Rivalry.

7:30

And we'll explore rivalry in more detail as we go on. But I have to do an etymology thing here. I wondered what the etymology of rivalry was, and it's a really good one. So if you hear river in it, that's right. Rivalry is an ancient word to describe.

7:50

I think it's old French to describe one who drinks from the same stream as another, one who drinks from the same stream. And so it both denotes or connotes proximity, right? We might be in neighboring towns that share a stream, but it also connotes

8:13

a competition and what we would call today a zero-sum game or a scarcity mindset, i.e., when you drink, I am thirsty, and when I drink, you're thirsty. So it's a zero-sum game that the four is stuck in, in all subtypes. But the sexual four is in the most of kind of a war-like state. And so rivalry is

8:40

is the keyword that I'm tentatively going with as we continue. We could characterize the envy of the sexual subtype as an aggressive oral envy, one that bites. Psychoanalysis speaks of cannibalistic impulses. It's not just about wanting, but wanting with anger. This is the sin of Cain, our ancestor. I envy you, so I kill you.

9:04

I envy the rich and start a revolution. I envy your intellectual superiority, so I'll cut off your head and then I'll seem taller. And when talking about beheading, we're discussing invalidation, contempt, and the aggression expressed in devaluing what's enviable. Like the fox claiming the grapes it can't reach are probably sour.

9:23

Okay, so that's a good introduction to the the motivation or the fixation or the passion of the sexual four. And I think we'll go deeper as we get into the essay. This is Transformation of the Sexual Four by Annie Chevreau. Again, this collection, which is so beautifully assembled, each subtype after being introduced by Naranjo,

9:50

somebody who identifies with that subtype or writes their own sort of journey, psycho-spiritual journey. So this is Chevreau. The major obstacle for the sexual four in deeply working with its character is to recognize itself as sick, to surrender to the evidence, to step off the stubbornness that assumes that most of the time,

10:12

what it considers sincere and authentic in its way of expressing is actually pure hatred and competitiveness. I'm glad we're starting with the four, both because that's me and I can connect with it. So the four is hard and the four has work to do.

10:30

And I think it's good to start with my own work and to confront how brutal some of the feedback…

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

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a lovely Monday morning here in Brooklyn, New York. We're going to continue on with our Enneagram journey, our close reading of Claudio Naranjo's 27 Personalities in Search of Being.

0:19

We are on the four, and today we're going to be looking at the social four. Quick housekeeping notes. For some reason, last time, the screen recording didn't scroll when I scrolled, so I apologize for that. Hopefully that's fixed this time. And if you're a longtime listener to the Barrcast,

0:37

you may be interested to know that I post these on YouTube as well as Substack. You can check out polytrope.substack.com. So if you're getting this on the feed, that's great, and I'll make this listenable. But if you do want to see the visuals, they're up on YouTube. Okay, so...

1:01

We're in the four and we're gonna talk about the social four first. And so maybe a little bit of context here. So Naranjo's book is a collection of essays. He does some framing, but then the essays are largely written by psychotherapists in this community, in this circle.

1:29

So each person writes about their own psycho-spiritual development for their type. So we'll get into that. And each subtype has a kind of a keyword. So for the social four, the keyword is shame or vergüenza. I think vergüenza is... pretty straight ahead shame, but let's just quickly see if there's nuance to that.

2:02

Maybe it doesn't come through in English. It's maybe a bit lighter. I don't know if that's just my own imagination. It maybe is a little bit closer to embarrassment than shame is. One of the tricky things with shame is that shame is also used to describe the whole heart triad.

2:38

Two threes and fours all have their core emotion as shame as opposed to fear for the head triad and anger for the gut triad. So shame is being used elsewhere in the Enneagram. And let's get into it. Naranjo is going to point out another limitation of the word shame.

3:02

The contrasts between the character types of the four are the most striking as their different subtypes seem more differentiated than in the other passions. When I explain this topic in Spanish, we talked about this last time, I usually say there are sufferers, let's call it sufferers, endurers, and the insufferable. Sufridores, sufridos, e insufribles,

3:29

which I'm going to translate as sufferers, endurers, and the insufferable. It would be nice if we could make endurer maybe suffering. But suffering, it's sort of the suffered. if we choose to translate this, you know, really fully later, we can come back. Maybe I'll actually even since, you know,

3:55

so part of this is I'm tempted to turn this into a translation project and that's kind of the background here. So I'm just going to even give this a slightly different highlighting color so that I can come back to it. So the social E4 is a person who complains too much.

4:11

They are very tearful, and often play the victim role. In the DSM-IV, a category of person given to self-sabotage is suggested. The characteristic indicated by Ichazo for this character, Ichazo being Naranjo's teacher, is shame, vergüenza, which descriptively seems accurate but doesn't fully describe a neurotic need. So this is an important point.

4:37

Indeed, these are people who undervalue themselves and therefore feel less than others. But how can we explain that these people are so prone to self-blaming and unfavorably comparing themselves to others? So what I love about Naranjo and take from this is each each types or subtypes keyword needs to be a shortcut for

5:02

the story that they tell themselves, the story that they're fixated on. And it has to have some internal logic. I mean, that logic will be fatally flawed, but it has to sort of make some sense. So we can't just sort of say, oh, yep, they have shame.

5:16

Vergüenza has to be doing some job for the social four, for their neuroses. So what is the job that it's doing for their neuroses? And let's find out. The answer, it seems to me, is found in what Melanie Klein calls the depressive position, through which the child prefers to blame themselves rather than vent their anger against the mother whom they desperately need similarly we can consider that the social four prefers to swallow their own poison rather than express it towards their loved ones they've learned to internalize their aggression due to an exaggerated emotional dependency. So as we explore the subtypes, we're going to keep all of this in mind,

6:09

which is these are sort of three different ways of coping with the same wound, which is separation and rejection from the mother figure, from the parent figure, from the caregiving figure, from the sort of first external object. Melanie Klein is a really important figure in, I think, modern psychology around kind of object relations.

6:39

So the social four has chosen to lower themselves. They've chosen to blame themselves rather than express anger. And let's talk about more about the way they do that. And I'm not sure. We'll maybe have to come back to it and really make sure we understand as it's meant.

7:05

So this is, now we move into the essay from, this woman's name is Sonia Gajnaj. That's how maybe you pronounce it. It's a very interesting last name. G-A-J-N-A-J. The Transformation of the Social Four by Sonia Gainai. In the past, I didn't recognize the chained thoughts of envy or the envious emotion.

7:30

The world was against me, and nobody gave me what I wanted or needed. I didn't push away. I was pushed away. So that's that victim, victim orientation. This way, I often set up situations where I was the victim and others were my perpetrators. I projected my own hatred onto others. and didn't take responsibility for my envy.

7:54

It's a pretty direct articulation of that shame. And so that's also maybe why vergüenza, embarrassment, is maybe actually, it's like, Shame is so primordial. And I think it can be different for different people. But if you have that dream where you're in class and you're in your underwear, do you feel shame or do you feel embarrassed?

8:32

I feel more connected to embarrassment in that moment because shame... Shame feels to me more connected to I've done something bad, so I'm bad. I'm bad. Embarrassment is like I'm in a... I'm... And of course, embarrassment, we'll have to do some etymology work on that, but... It's more... Oh, this is embarrassing. It's like... It's closer to victimhood.

9:13

I think that's the key point. Shame, I don't think neighbors victimhood in the same way. Shame feels more identifying as the perpetrator. Embarrassment feels more identifying with the victim, sort of a victim of the circumstance, a victim of the situation. Even if you've done something bad, you still feel victim-y. So I think that's really important.

9:39

So I'm hanging on to embarrassment here. And in fact, I do want to, let's take our etymological detour right now. So vergüenza etymologia. I don't know if it's still online. Oh, here it is. Is this it? The Castellano in linea. There's a nice... etymological dictionary for Spanish. Oh, here it is.

10:52

Humiliation, humility.

11:06

Yeah, so the more I get into Vergüenza, the less adequate shame is. It's certainly not sufficient. I don't think it's wrong. But I do want to look at the Latin. Yeah, so its root is the Latin vericundus. feeling shame, shame-faced, bashful, shy, modest. And so actually veracundia can be seen as a virtue, knowing one's place, coyness, modesty,

12:07

shyness, bashfulness, shame, awe. So there is, I think bashful is also really nice. That's one of the seven doors. What does he look like? That's kind of the aw shucks one. So there's, so now we're starting to move into the aw shucks, not me. That's that lowering.

12:44

That's that self lowering that I think is core to the social four. And by the way, bashful is just such a fun word. That's from abashed. I think abashed, bashful. I just want to invite some of these words in because that …

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 reasonably cool Friday morning here in New York.

I want to do a podcast within a podcast. So I'm going to be doing a series of recordings about the Enneagram, in particular the types four and five, where I find my own personality sort of most at home.

And I want to explore these with a very deep and very close reading of Claudio Naranjo, who is considered one of the sort of fathers, of the modernization enneagram. He worked, in the 1970s, extensively on the Enneagram and produced a really wonderful book called 27 Personajes en busca del ser, or 27 personalities in search of being. As far as I know, this hasn't been translated into English. I've translated it using the help of modern AI tools, but I also speak Spanish reasonably well, understand Spanish reasonably well, so have been able to spot check it here and there.

And it's funny if you find some of my earliest podcasts. I started, a podcast called reading Spanish, where I was practicing my own spanish translation. So in some ways, this is a real throwback for me. I think Naranjo's work is very powerful and full of insight, so I'm excited to dive in. So this is going to be the first recording, and we're going to talk about Enneagram type four. And we're going to read Naranjo and discuss. So I, have here on the left, my translation, on the right, the source text.

So Enneagram type four has the sin or the passion of envy. So right away we're getting right into sin, which is such a fraught word for the Enneagram, and will immediately turn off two kinds of people. One is the religious or Christian type, who feels uncomfortable working with sin. because sin is so loaded, it evokes thoughts of hell. It might evoke cultural norms like, let's say, homosexuality being a sin according to some churches or some religious people. So it might be unbearably heavy for some people, and then for others, it just might feel, outmoded or sort of irrelevant. Sin is not real. Sin is a construct, etcetera.

But actually, I think you can't really take the sin out of the enneagram. So one of the origins of the enneagram dates back to Ponticus. We're on the Internet, so let's google it. It's the eight deadly thoughts. And so this is the precursor to the seven deadly sins, which are much more, well known. The evil thoughts, Evagrius ponticus. So you won't find the seven deadly sins or the eight evil thoughts in the Bible. Rather, they were sort of, written about by a very early christian named Evagrius Ponticus. So I think in the 300s, he was a mystic. He, grew up in Turkey, it says here. And in order to deal with his own sin, he retreated to the Egyptian desert and joined cenobitic community of desert fathers. So I love this. I mean, we're talking about desert monks now. So that's when you talk about the Enneagram and ancient spiritual wisdom. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about people, fasting and going to the desert to connect as powerfully as they can with God, with the Source. I need to look up what cenobitic means and how to pronounce it. Community life. Okay. So I as opposed to, you know, hermetic. Fine.

Anyway, the eight evil thoughts, then you're just one away from the Enneagram nine. And as it turns out, the one that's missing is fear. And Richard Rohr points out, I think, in a compelling way, that fear, in a way, wasn't listed because it's the most common of the deadly thoughts. It's almost too close to name, too close to see. So when you add fear, which is the sin of the six, and the six is the most common enneagram type, and you round it out to nine.

So what is sin? What is passion? That's a big question. And there's a lot of ways to dive into it. I don't think we need to talk too much about it now, but just to ground us before we get into envy and the four, you could think of it as sort of addiction. It's like, this is where passion comes in. It's like, what do you just keep coming back to? What's your vice? What's your home base in terms of unhealth? Your home base in terms of addiction, your home base, we all know that, right? When we have these patterns and these dynamics that we're like, ugh, I can't believe I did it again. That's your sin. So it's important, I think, for the enneagram, at least the way that I know it, it's important to be ready to feel that humility and humiliation of, like, ugh, God. Yeah, that's me. Envy, that's me.

So let's talk about it. Envy is the passion for controlling and calibrating one's own existence by comparing it with that of another. The meaning of existence largely depends on the level of lack and frustration concerning what is perceived as desirable in others. So it's a pretty dense introduction there. And actually, I want to go slow here because this is so important. And I want to start off by saying, as a four, I've had a lot of trouble connecting with envy as a sin, recognizing it as my sin. I'm getting there, though. The more I, understand what envy really is, the more I'm like, yes, that is a problem for me.

But all of these sins, they have that quality where they rarely mean exactly what they sound like. When we get to the five, we'll talk about the five and avarice and greed. It's the same thing. It's never quite the most obvious or most common understanding of these sins, but they're there. And so envy, immediately when I think about envy, I think about wanting what other people seem to have. And for some fours that might be more available than others. For instance, by the way, I should add here, I'm just assuming that you have deep familiarity with the enneagram, and so if you don't, some of this might go over your head. And that's fine. Come back anytime. I'm not going to do too much table setting here. So the four and envy. If I'm closer to three, my threeness, then my envy may be more common in the sense of, like, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm following entrepreneurs on twitter, and they all seem to be crushing it. And I'm like, oh, why can't I crush it? What's wrong with me such that I don't have what they have? Am I not smart enough? Am I not ambitious enough? Do I not have enough charisma or clarity? So the four’s envy may be actually quite available in that sense, but as a four with more of a five wing, I never really found myself wanting to be somebody else or comparing myself unfavorably.

But I do feel a sense of lack. So I think one of the entry points is this word lack itself. And, To get into lack further. Although lack is actually quite a lovely word too. And I don't know enough about its origins, maybe we'll do some searching. But let's go to the Spanish. El sentido de la existencia de­ pende en gran medida del nivel de carencia y frustración respecto de lo que se percibe como deseable en los demás. So it's the level of lack respective to what I think other people have. So I'm doing two things. I'm constructing a view of what others have. And I'm using that sort of, perceived level of the other to then locate my own level. In most cases, unfavorably. But sometimes we'll see the four sometimes does flip it and compare themselves favorably. But it's always comparison, and it's constructed comparison. In other words, I'm perceiving that which is desirable in others, and then noticing that I don't have it. Or again, sometimes perceiving that they don't have it. And I have tons of it. But in both cases, even when it seems to be flipped in my favor, it's still lack. We'll get into that at some point. But it's still comparison. It's still coming from a starved sense of self.

And carencia, I think, is a really beautiful word that we'll use to come back to lack. So cariño is a term of endearment in Spanish. It's kind of a form of, love. It's like, dear one, mi cariño, my dear one. And so I think of the word dear as I want to bring in the word dear. Because we talk about, you know, people being dear to us. But their dearness is so already caught up i…

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

Did you know The Barrcast is also on YouTube?

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

In celebration of the Oscars and my favorite film of the year, I’ve recorded a running commentary of Tár. The best way to experience this is to start the movie right when you click play on the podcast, and it will feel like we were hanging out on the couch together… and I’m talking the whole time.

Transcript:

(00:00:04) - Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of the Barrcast. I entitled this episode, TAR, Death of the Sun God, and we will be watching together the Oscar-nominated picture, TAR, commenting on it. Treat this episode like you're having a friend over and you're watching the movie. And if you haven't started the movie already, start it now, I'll synchronize with you momentarily. But I've started it, and I am at this moment 35 seconds in. And we start with this mysterious livestream or text thread of what's happening. 

(00:00:53) - We don't quite know who this character is. Almost by the end of the film we'll know who it is. And in some ways TAR is a horror film or a mystery or a whodunit. For me that's one of the least compelling ways to experience this film, but if that's your preferred way, more power to you. I do think that there are more fruitful ways to experience the film, and Todd Field shows us one right here. TAR is thrusting the microphone in front of a group of people speaking their language. We don't know who they are yet. 

(00:01:50) - And in comes this high-pitched female voice at the center of the first credit screen to the Shipibo-Konibo people. And so that's our grounding for this film and for this interpretation. The Shipibo people are most known, at least in the US, for ayahuasca ceremonies. And what we're listening to is an ikaro, a song sung in ayahuasca ceremonies. And so accompanying these credits is something like a spiritual introduction, a bridge into another way of being. And so we'll take the invitation and spend a couple minutes transitioning into that way of being. 

(00:04:55) - You know, it's coming up for me on the second time of experiencing the opening credits is the tremendous breadth of human experience. And now we cut to Tar who's sort of doing this highly neurotic, maybe sort of pregame ritual, but is also sort of haunted by something, chasing demons away from her. And you know, the film doesn't start with the Ikaro. The film starts with Tar thrusting the microphone in front of the Shipibo people's face and kind of like singing to the mic as if it weren't there. And so up front we have sort of these dual themes of source or God or inspiration as well as power extraction. 

(00:05:49) - And that will continue to explore that as the film goes on. So the experience I had in the theater was one of, you know, some discomfort with the credits scene. It just went on and on and I wasn't quite sure how to experience it. And then we move into this endless introduction. That is just a total send-up of kind of liberal intellectual culture. And so my experience watching this film in theaters was just really uncomfortable to start with. But I was also in, I mean, I recognize the Ikaro and and was kind of struck by the unorthodox introduction. 

(00:06:49) - So I was also in, I was uncomfortable and I was in. And where are you finding me now? I'm at home in Brooklyn. It's 11:12. That's 11 12 p.m. So it's late. I've had a few drinks with my dear friend Matt. Hi Matt, if you're listening and have a drink in front of me, so, you know, we'll see how the night proceeds. This film is so gorgeous and so on point. So now we see the redhead, the unnamed redhead, or I guess later we'll find out that's Krista. 

(00:08:05) - And in comes Francesca, sort of miming the words in the introduction, clearly telling us that Francesca has written them herself. So we're dealing with someone with a lot of ego. I didn't mention this, but if you saw Tare drink the water at the beginning that kind of evokes a memory of taking the medicine in Ayahuasca, and we'll see some vomiting later in the film as well, which is another sort of hallmark of an experience in Ayahuasca. 

(00:08:56) - Yeah, I mean tar on tar is why we go fully into parody as if we weren't there already and we just get to this stuffy, there's the Voss water, that kind of awkward laughter. We're in peak left-wing intellectual culture. And I mean, I do think a lot of, I mean, there was an article in the New Yorker that completely missed the point of this film, and I do think that some people were, you know, sort of triggered essentially by these earliest scenes. And there's something about this scene that is just so uncomfortable. 

(00:09:41) - The conversation is so contrived, but it's not bad. I mean, Lydia says some kind of really thoughtful things here and we'll point to them, but at the same time, there's just a mannered forced quality here that's very difficult to be with.

(00:10:02) - And of course, Tar does read reviews, as we'll see when she clips out every review. It's interesting because the first time I watched this, I found it to be sort of patter, although there was one scene that I kind of blanked on, and whenever I blank I think to myself, okay, there must have been something really important there that whenever I blank out I tend to think that there was something that I wasn't prepared to listen to, and I'll find that moment in a moment. Did I say I'll find that moment in a moment? Wow. Now here we go, translation. 

(00:11:31) - And this is what Tar says. Time is the thing. You do not start without me. You cannot start without me. And I mean, this is a whole detour, but there's something powerful about what Tar is saying here. Her power resides in her control over time. And as I've sort of hinted at the title of this video essay, and this struck me like halfway through my first viewing of the movie, this movie is about the death of the sun god. 

(00:12:28) - And I think that idea will unfold as we watch the film, but for now just notice the way that time is traditionally constructed around the sun, right, a sun clock. Now we'll see two words, the first, Kavvanah. Intent. And then here Gopnik makes the joke about the Supreme Court justice and I guess the film doesn't say more about Kavanaugh in this moment, but sort of plants it into our brains. And there's a lot of spiritual underpinnings in these first scenes, right? 

(00:13:23) - So if you want to say that this film doesn't have anything to say about spirituality, then you'll have to contend with the first scene of the opening credits being an ikaro from an ayahuasca ceremony, the Shipibo people, and the second scene referencing two profound Jewish mystical or spiritual ideas of kavvanah and we'll see in a moment, teshuva, which is atonement or return. And here Tara is going to share her perspective more explicitly. What gives her the right to be the timekeeper? What gives her the right to be the sun god? 

(00:14:24) - And she draws a distinction between her and Leonard Bernstein. He celebrated the joy of his discovery. That's her description of Bernstein, whereas she, in contrast, is a little bit more measured, right? There's no discovery in the performance. It's all in rehearsal. And her intention is to read the tea leaves of Mahler's intention. That is to say she wants to sort of meet Mahler exactly where he is or was when he composed it. It's funny, this film was produced or created before the Roe v. Wade decision or I should say reversal. 

(00:15:39) - But this is almost two Supreme Court justices arguing here, she and Leonard Bernstein. She's a, what do you call it, a literalist? She wants to, what does she say here? Here we go. Now we have the explicit reference to the Icaro. The singer has to meet the spirit in the spirit world for her. And so her understanding of teshuva is different than what I read on Wikipedia. I mean, the one I read on Wikipedia focuses more on atonement and hers is more about sort of transformation of the past, which is kind of an interesting flavor of defining atonement. 

(00:16:55) - But…

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

Video:

Episode highlights:

* Designing in nouns and verbs

* Inside-out vs outside-in design

* Alien technologies

* Cards as supernouns

* Progressive competition

Selected links:

* Azlen’s card prototype

* Bananagrams

* Metaphors We Live By

* Voyages in sentence space

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

Video here:

Episode highlights:

* Magic the Gathering: cards that left an impression

* Can managers use cards to understand and be understood by their teams?

* David’s prototype using whiteboard cards (!), label-makers, and dice

* What’s the opposite of cards?

Selected links:

* Amy Weber’s cards

* Melissa Benson’s website

* Erasable whiteboard cards

* Human Design

* Players who suit MUDs

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