Pre-Conference Event | Wed Oct 27 4:30pm | AET 2010 KEYNOTE PRESENTATION | Thurs OCT 28 | “The Evolving Enneagram” — Author and internationally renown retreat leader, Cynthia Bourgeault divides her time between solitude on Eagle Island, Maine, and making appearances that include retreat and conference leader, teacher of contemplation, writer, and Episcopal priest. Cynthia serves as Principal Teacher for the Contemplative Society, is an adjunct faculty member at the Vancouver School of Theology, and spent seven years studying the Gurdjieff work in Canada (1987- 94). The author of six books, Cynthia will introduce us to teachings from the universal Wisdom tradition and the transformational practices that soften our heart, inviting us to conscious awareness. Her work on bringing the whole of our being into balance, not just our minds, is engaging and provocative. As she often says, "...Perhaps the problem is not that our vision has grown too small, but that we are using too little of ourselves to see." She demonstrates the necessity of bringing our heart, mind and body into balance so that we can awaken and "see" the roadmaps of sacred wholeness that exist. Cynthia will introduce us to Gurdjeff's late 19th Century search to recover the tradition that lies at the basis for the Enneagram work we will be engaging during the conference.
JEANINE (AET 2010 CONFERENCE COMMITTEE MEMBER): So, just generally, how did you get started on your personal, spiritual path? Just a little bit about that for folks to get a sense of your journey…
CYNTHIA: I was born.
JEANINE: You were born! (laughter). Anything more you would say about that?
CYNTHIA: Well, it depends on where you really want to start the idea of the path. You know, the early influences in my life were the Quaker school I was sent to where I was introduced to the intimacy of silence and then gradually, in high school and through the Episcopal Church, I began to understand the beauty of the cultural tradition and the artistic and the liturgy and so from that I began to gravitate very early to mystical Christianity. I had good mentors along the way. And so, in the course of time that led to ordination in the Episcopal Church. But right from the start, I had always been bothered by the discrepancy between why was it that in a religion whose teachings are so filled with compassion and love and whose central teacher certainly was a highly evolved being, why did so many churches develop as narrow and rigid and exclusive and judgmental? That is what I wanted to know and that led me to begin to articulate that there had to be some sort of middle ground between the lofty ideals and the actual practical path from beginning to transform consciousness. So I went looking for that and not finding it in official Christian places, I bumped into the Gurdjieff work and had worked actively in a group from 1987 to about 1994.
JEANINE: And the Gurdjieff work, which the Enneagram folks refer to, just based on what you are saying in this wisdom school, it has a very practical intersection with the spiritual journey. The Work can illuminate where the personal egoic mind meets or interacts with the spirit or the essence. Can you say a bit more about that?
CYNTHIA: Yeah, yeah. Well, in Gurdjieff it is ironic in a way, and I hope to talk about this, that while in Gurdjieff was certainly the first one we know in the west to talk and make extensive use of the Enneagram and really to, in some sense, introduce it to the west. He did not use the piece that it is now a days widely known for, which is personality typing. According to Gurdjieff there were three types of people whom he called Man #1, Man #2, and Man #3. Man #1 was the physical, instinctive kinesthetic, moving center type, Man #2 is the emotional center type, and Man #3 was the intellectual, it basically corresponds to those three divisions that nowadays Enneagram language uses between sort of gut types and feeling types and head types. It is not quite gut types in Gurdjieff, it’s the person that has basically moved by the wisdom of the body, both the autonomic nervous system but basically feels his way. The closest thing today would be a kinesthetic type.
JEANINE: And so for the three centers…
CYNTHIA: Basically, the Gurdjieff’s idea was that the unevolved person will identify with and operate out of that center that he or she most gravitates to and that we will have a chief feature that grows up around there that is a characteristic, soft of a master tuning fork, to all their coping mechanisms, but that most of us are completely unaware of chief feature.
JEANINE: So that would be the blind spot?
CYNTHIA: Yes, that’s the blind spot. And we operated out of it all of the time. Others can see it, but it takes a long time for a person to see it and there is actually a good deal of inner resistance to seeing it because it feels so devastating when you finally see the master switch controlling all of your sort of neurotic and dysfunctional behavior. So, in Gurdjieff’s work, that all three of these people were unconscious and that the essence of his work was in creating what he called Man #4 or a conscious human being who was balanced in all three centers, which means beholden to none and what that implies of course is that you have a certain detachment or perspective on your program.
JEANINE: So when you think about the heart, or in the wisdom literature, talking about the heart being the place where all three come together, not the heart in terms of the emotional center, but the tuning…
CYNTHIA: You know it was not so much that all three come together for Gurdjieff, it was that you have to begin from what he called “real eye.” That you begin to get to, by learning a process of dawn identification and stepping back and struggling with your chief feature and a lot of the work that you did in Gurdjieff intensive works was in trying to become aware, through bumping into oneself and others restrictions of where your chief feature was so that with consciousness and with the increasing capacity for awareness, you broke loose of automatic behavior. So that is the basic program and the Man #4 was not the end point of evolution in the Gurdjieff system, it was actually only the beginning point.
JEANINE: And is that what you were talking about today in terms of the magnetic center?
CYNTHIA: Well, magnetic center grows up in a person…it has a lot to do, at least in some of Gurdjieff’s teaching, in each center, as he looked about it, you have a negative side that is always dragging you down. The centers are not in and of themselves positive or negative, they are just what is. But that when the negative part of the emotional center is somehow or another healed and purged, it tends to become a focal point for a magnetic center and then a person begins to really be able to listen and to discriminate the influences we talked about. But, as in so much of the great wisdom teaching of the world, he saw very clearly that in conscious moving forward it is impossible for a person until they have learned to tame their negative emotional energy. And taming, in Gurdjieff’s sense, means recognizing it because you tame anything by the power of observation. So that is the basic kind of pedagogy of evolution in Gurdjieff and for Man #4 you go on up and Man #5, #6, #7, look a lot more like they do in classic kind of Sufism and Islamic configurations where the person is more and more completely under the dominion of and the sway of what Gurdjieff called the higher emotional center and the higher intellectual center and responding from greater centers of resonance and integrity. So the Man #4 might correspond to what we would consider today high egoic functioning, in tune with, in touch with, so that you are not basically being shanghaied by your blind spots, but that you had to reach that point before you were really able to buckle down and get to the work of what being a human being needs.
JEANINE: Right. It is interesting. Helen Palmer, I think a lot of what she is doing right now, is really using the passion from the desert mothers and fathers, in each type, being aware of what is the blind energy and harnessing that energy, which at first looks like it is creating a stronger ego but with the idea of moving into more observation and then transformation by not harnessing but, well, the Welcoming Prayer. Standing with or being in the sensation of what is arising.
CYNTHIA: Right. Yes. And Gurdjieff certainly brought to the mix the idea of self-observation, as you called it, as the key to getting free from blind spots and a lot of our work and the Work was learning to make a complete observation and learning to recognize what you see so that the whole impact of it hits you and you do not just inventory it and move on.
JEANINE: Right. The body piece, the sensation, the complete observation is not moving too quickly.
CYNTHIA: Yeah. It is not glossing over so that you learn to see with increasing depth and breadth into your blind spot because most of us see all around it but we do not see the master switch and he was very good at setting up situations where in group work, just the friction of working with yourself and with other people in a group would force you to see, habitual patterns and blind spots so you snuck up on it gradually. But in the Gurdjieff work, the Enneagram was used in a different way. So there is this very interesting sort of relationship and non-relationship between the two groups. Because the Enneagram is really a combination of the two fundamental cosmic laws, the Law of 3 and the Law of 7, and it depicts, you know, how the Law of 7 moves and then how the Law of 3 works within that, instead of semi-autonomously. The way that these things were principally used in the Gurdjieff work was in movement and that what Gurdjieff was, actually his most beautiful art form was the sacred movements or dances in which you learned essentially people would…you know there are seven files across and seven rows back and you learn how to move your whole vertical row to different positions on the Enneagram essentially. So what you are basically doing is working into your body and working into your understanding of movement. The laws and directions have changed. And Gurdjieff was much more interested in the directions of change than he was interested in the point. So, the Law of 7 describes, in a really wonderful way, how process works in temporal time and that it is a very important law to know and work with because almost everybody will overstep a key point between the 3rd step and the 4th step and so winding up with the thing they are aiming for, bending around in an opposite direction.
JEANINE: Interesting.
CYNTHIA: So there was a real teaching on how to work with the steps on things so that you kept things going in a straight line and you anticipated the points where more energy and less motion was needed and it is really amazing how the Law of 7 so profoundly describes the life cycle of most unconscious institutions, relationships, anything like that.
JEANINE: And so when just thinking about all of your work with that, I think this narrative tradition conference can be brought back to some of the basics of what this symbol can give us. I think this group of people is not so interested in the point, or staying with the categories but the movement.
CYNTHIA: I thought I would like to teach them a little bit more about those laws and a little bit about how the Enneagram was used and understood in the Gurdjieff work and what uses they put it to. It is still very amazing to me, and mysterious, where this idea of the points representing so powerfully personality types, works, and how they overlay so well, and how what a wickedly good organizer and predictor of types it is. It is a very good map. I am not sure where the synchronicity is. At this point I have skimmed Helen’s paper that she was gracious enough to send me. You know linking it to. Say “Oh look, Evagrius is talking about the passions.” My own take on it, and I am willing to be persuaded otherwise here, I think he is talking about the passions because he is talking about the passions. Because the passions will fit with the Enneagram. I do not think it means that he actually had been initiated into the Enneagram.
JEANINE: I wonder if just the seeds of it…I do not know exactly if Helen is making the connection there, but definitely the seeds, the blocks are so similar, they match exactly.
CYNTHIA: It works. It works in a wonderful way and actually, when I look at the whole thing, the image that comes to my mind, is the image of those mysterious crop circles that are around and, particularly in England, that just sort of show up in the field in this marvelously intricate sacred geometry. I find that the way the Enneagram overlays personality types overlays passions is sort of a sacred geometry and who knows where it came from, that it may not be working that way because it existed as an esoteric body of information at some point back in history, it may work that way because the patterns naturally, at some different level of reality, naturally overlapped.
JEANINE: Right. And I find that my interest, personally, and I do not know if I would speak for all the teachers, would be to spend less time necessarily figuring where it came from, but it is such a great map for transformation. It is a way in to really listening to what blocks us or where we get stuck. At least for me it has been.
CYNTHIA: I think that what is interesting is to have watched Enneagram studies evolve over the course of time. I remember when the first people got all enthused about the Enneagram and started teaching it in Aspen, which is the home of all buzz groups, I saw an advertisement in the Classified section, the week after the first conference, that people were forming a Six support group. So in the early stages it was this kind of embarrassing, “Well this is another thing about me that I can just revel in.”
JEANINE: Another characteristic, another identification.
CYNTHIA: Another merit badge… And then people began to move it along, and began to find their way to the idea that the real thing was that it was not a map for classification, it was not just another DSM or Myers-Briggs thing, but it was essentially a dynamic tool because it had, and simply because its roots are in movement, it had a capacity to teach movement.
JEANINE: Say a little bit more about that. Because I think this group is very primed for engaging the body, sensation, and movement much more freely and so I think that is a real place where this is a good fit for you to be coming now.
CYNTHIA: Well when I use the word movement I mean it in two senses; I mean both in body and physical, which was certainly going on in the Gurdjieff rendition of it and also movement in the sense of how things flow and how things go from one plate to another; which is, I think, what Gurdjieff first discovered in the Enneagram, at least as far as his bringing it to as an esoteric tool, that it was not just a nonagram, it wasn’t just a picture of what happens when you connect nine dots, that it had in it, an implicit and unbreakable law that replicated a cosmic law of how things take place in time, or essentially two cosmic laws, the Law of 3 and the Law of 7; so it is essentially a dynamic symbol, not a static one; which means that its utility is not for classification but for transformation. So that is implicit in it and I think it is another wonderful piece to see that people starting with classification have now, I think, because of working with the dynamism of this tool, have evolved rapidly towards seeing that there is a lot more in it and that some of the schools of Enneagram work have been really leading the pack in the movement from personal psychology to transpersonal in exactly this way and I have watched with pleasure as the whole language of talk and personality and transformation in types gets increasingly more kind of mystical in unit, so I think this is all interesting in entertainment and true to form.
JEANINE: Well, and it is really happening that way for me, personally, I would say the Enneagram brought me to mystical Christianity because Helen’s invitation to me early on was go deeply into my own tradition. She said, “you have everything you need there," and it was such a lovely invitation then for me to pursue what I am pursuing now in terms of meditation and centering prayer. I’m grateful.
CYNTHIA: I think it is a very interesting convergence.
JEANINE: It is.
CYNTHIA: As I say, what really fascinates me is that I like it better in a way if it didn’t have some originally established, primeval archetypal meaning that people have just discovered but is just now showing up in time, and whoever — Ichazo, Naranjo, or whoever— first received the inspiration that these points represented personality types. That could have been a cosmic download into our time and space right now. And that actually, is for me, the most comfortable explanation for how it goes and in light of that tool being present now, we can look back on things, we can look at Evargrius, we can look at all the patterns, and think “OH yeah, that’s right.” Because the way things work in the synchronous world is things flow out in concentric circles from a center meaning. So all these things that may have had a different point in historical origin are brought together in a powerful new tool. I see it evolving that way.
JEANINE: So, let me shift gears a little bit and speak (this is a very eclectic group spiritually), and so speak a little bit, if you would, about your religious tradition. You are very grounded in the Christian tradition. Obviously, an Episcopalian priest and all of that, and then very much drawing from other traditions. Could you speak to that a little bit in terms of what that is for you, or how you would define yourself. Here we are with categories again.
CYNTHIA: Well I work extensively in interspiritual work. I am on the faculty at the Spiritual Paths Graduate Institute and have drawn extensively, in own search, again from Gurdjieff, who was one of my early teachers, and when he went seeking for schools of ancient wisdom, which he believed had dropped out of the consciousness of our planet but had once existed and still existed; he searched in a variety of religions and at least four traditions that I know of claim him as their own, “It is really Buddhism that he is teaching, or it is really …” And what this all comments on is the fact that it is remarkable that while the great religious traditions of the world have radical different theologies and mystical takes on things, their transformative practices are similar. Essentially you are going to go through the same eye of the needle, no matter what path you are on. And this may in fact, some have said, be tokens of common origin of the great traditions. It may or may not, but one thing, that is really clear to a lot of people today, and I am not the only one, is that people at a certain level of development, in different traditions, are closer to one another in their understanding than people at really radically different levels of development in the same tradition. In other words, I will find a lot more common ground in what I am doing with a Buddhist contemplative or a Sufi dervish than I am likely to find with a Christian fundamentalist, even though the fundamentalist and I are in the same line of tradition. But you cut the pie in two directions at all times. There is your line, and then there is the level. This is Ken Wilber terminology. So I am very deeply grounded in Christian tradition, but I work at it at a place where there are relatively few Christians, it is not the common language of the Christian world yet. I am somewhat a maverick in it that way, and I have drawn tremendous support and companionship and insight from some of the other traditions.
JEANINE: What would it mean to you right now to connect with this community, with the Enneagram community, just in terms of where you are and in your own work, and your interest in doing that, or willingness? In other words, why did you say yes? What is your curiosity about being a part of this particular conference?
CYNTHIA: It is funny because I have been watching Enneagram work develop for 15 years or so, when I was around the monastery in Snowmass, when the first waves of people coming home, excitedly carrying Helen Palmer’s book broke, and then there was that Riso school and then some of our gang in Colorado went off and trained in yet another school, was there a Dougherty?
JEANINE: Hurley Dodson.
CYNTHIA: Yeah, Hurley Dodson, yeah. So we had all of these people training in these different Enneagram schools and I sat back and watched the whole thing. Then a friend of mine, who had done a doctoral dissertation working with, was early Naranjo and came back and was typing people in completely different ways and that was very interesting. One of the fascinating things is nobody has yet pinned down my type. There have been radically different disagreements amongst schools and amongst different people. So I watched, but I watched the Enneagram movement kind of grow up and move beyond a kind of fixation on the personality, and then move beyond even fixation on the true self into an increasing fascination with the dance itself and it seemed at this point it was converging more and more with the Gurdjieff work. So I guess one of my interests is that, you know I have watched how the Gurdjieff work in many ways planted seeds all over what became 20th century consciousness and the seeds have developed in different ways and I am passionately interested myself in having some of the ideas that he put out there get into wider circulation. Partly because of the nature of the times that he was writing in, and working in, but the Gurdjieff work developed in a kind of secretive way, under the table, you couldn’t go to the Yellow Pages and find the Gurdjieff groups listed. It was a hidden organization and there was a lot of investment in the first couple of generations at least of teachers of the work in the states in maintaining that hidden-ness and just sort of filtering ideas out in different kinds of ways so that people would never know that ideas were the Gurdjieff work, but at this point, that spawned a lot of wonderful things, but there are some ideas that are in that work that are so powerful and so profound, and whose time has come. Like, I really believe, in the environmental crisis. Some of his ideas, such as the laws of reciprocal feeding are desperately needed back in the culture. His understanding of the Law of 3 makes sense of the Christian doctrine of the trinity in a major way. There is a whole bunch of other things out there that are needed and so I was very interested in a group that has cut its teeth in Enneagram and is familiar with it and has developed it to a different way, to see if the time is right, that we might be able to break with a group into dialog with some of the core ideas as Gurdjieff developed them to the mutual enrichment of both the Enneagram people can perhaps, in this ideal win/win situation I am imputing, that what is in it for the Enneagram folks is to have yet another piece of the puzzle and I would say that I am certainly not an elder in any Gurdjieff work, nor am I a member of a group anymore so I do not speak as an expert, but I do speak as an experienced insider. I have participated materially in groups for a long time and worked with the material and love the material.
JEANINE: It seems so formative for you.
CYNTHIA: It is really formative on my own and I was quite lucky that back 15 years ago the next person that I met on my journey was a Roman-Catholic Trappist monk who had also been formed on his own in the Gurdjieff work and showed me how to fit together the Gurdjieff mechanics of practical transformation with the Christian mystical vision. So that is where I am really working from. I think that the ideas are beautiful and that the Enneagram groups, as they come of age, may be ready to look at how these ideas fit.
JEANINE: I think very much so, just the practical piece, at least the folks that I am working with just are really wanting the Enneagram as to be used in this daily way around likes and dislikes and reactivity and attaching and all of this that you are talking about, I feel like it is very much the language.
CYNTHIA: So if it provides a gateway into that kind of work. I think, like anything, you have to be careful that the Enneagram is the symbol and it was the thing that called you all together, and that it becomes your icon and I think it is really really important to hold it as an icon rather than as a scientific map of reality, because it is a very elusive and powerful attractive entry into a field that can be accessed by other routes. But it is a very powerful one. So if you’re going as an icon that leads you into the work of inner observation and transformation, it becomes great and it really is important to not let it become an idolatry or a religion.
JEANINE: Yeah, I appreciate that.
CYNTHIA: It is hard because we have, in a way in which Christianity and Judaism and some of the religions have fallen so short in the past 100 years or so, at least in really forming people in the transformation that they yearn for. It is very easy, because people are not hungry for theologies, they are hungry for transformation and if the church ain’t gonna give it to them, then they will find it where they find it. So it is very easy for tools that work to become religions in themselves; which is, incidentally, a predictable step on the Law of 7.
JEANINE: Where?
CYNTHIA: Basically it would be from Mi to Fa, from the 3rd step to the 4th.
JEANINE: Okay.
CYNTHIA: And, what happens at that step, is that people, a new idea has just gotten rolling, and what is really needed at that step, is a tiny microstep where one consolidates and keeps going in a direction but what everybody always says is “Lets form an institution! Lets get the banners, get the logos!”
JEANINE: Right. It gets very big.
CYNTHIA: It gets very very big and you watch it over and over and over again and at that step it begins to go off in the opposite direction, it veers away from what its original life was. And it takes a huge amount of consciousness to understand what is needed in that passage.
JEANINE: That’s wonderful. Because for me, I do not know Mi-Fa, but I have to go 1-4-2-8 and so that 8 energy, if I am understanding this correctly, what is the energy that is sort of embodied in that type and how is that needed or not needed at that step in the process.
CYNTHIA: That can be a really interesting dialog because once again, as I said, that Gurdjieff never developed it in that fashion and that when he looked at how things moved on these processes, it would be always against the basic 7 steps of the scale.
JEANINE: Right and in the Enneagram, it is around the circle. You can walk the Law of 7 (1-4-2-8-5-7-1) and at different points on the circle it is powerful to feel the energy of each type.
CYNTHIA: Well there you are in the Gurdjieff work, dancing the Enneagram. So I mean, I think there is an interesting overlay and if you could ever get the Gurdjieffians involved in this dialog, because it is an evolution of Gurdjieff’s thought too, because he would never in his wildest imagination have dreamed of assigning a personality type to each of these things and then using them for how the energy of those types goes. But if this seems to work, then the thing to do, obviously, is to go back and look at it with the Law of 7 and what happens at these two half-step passages, as Gurdjieff says, and see how that corresponds to those passages in the 7 and where it goes. So, anyway, it is all very good work to do as we continue together to download the symbol. I think Gurdjieff had a piece of the puzzle and what has come nowadays, Helen Palmer and Riso have a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle is needed because it really teaches us how to live.
JEANINE: Wonderful. One other question. Then I know we will need to stop. This was off of your website, you are called a hermit priest. What is meant by that?
CYNTHIA: Well I spend a lot of time in solitude as a vocational obligation.
JEANINE: Thank you. In terms of the conference, our theme is "Re-sourcing Three-Centered Knowing," and our focus is to try and do something around Three-Centered Knowing that would bring in the Law of 3 and Law of 7 naturally.
CYNTHIA: Let's really get down and roll up our sleeves. People should know that what I am going to be doing is talking about the Enneagram as its experienced in the Gurdjieff work as a point of departure in explaining some of the things we have talked about. Let's take a look at the "Evolving Enneagram…"
JEANINE: The Evolving Enneagram! nice!
CYNTHIA: We will see what you do with it. I am interested. When you work with these, you’re in a sense when you are looking at those directions flowing, it still is the Law of 7 as the 1 – 4…
JEANINE: 1-4-2-8-5-7 ….
CYNTHIA: And then the 3-6-9 is its own separate….
JEANINE: 3-6-9 being the inner triangle and then the hexagon essentially is the 1-4-2-8-5-7 and it just keeps going round and round.
CYNTHIA: The way Gurdjieff tended to use the things was really as a heptagram and a triangle and not as a nonagram.
JEANINE: So, help me understand, not as a nonagram…
CYNTHIA: Visually it is a nonagram. That’s what it looks like. But the nonagram, what he saw was made up of the heptagram and the triangle and they had their own integrity and so you do not. So they sort of co-exist.
JEANINE: Right. And I think that is true in the symbol as it is used now. They are seen separately but within the whole, the unity.
CYNTHIA: Exactly. That’s reassuring to me because that is exactly how it was in Gurdjieff’s work and that the 3-6-9 points evolve and talk among each other. They do not jump out and break out of it and start going into the…
JEANINE: They don’t.
CYNTHIA: So it does preserve that essential purity that Gurdjieff saw and it was probably his original take on an ancient symbol, is that it did demonstrate those lines.
JEANINE: Right, right.
CYNTHIA: And so, we can work with that and so what the Enneagram work that you guys have been up to and have been adding, is to, as you move from the 1-4-2-8-5-7. I swear I am going to put that on my courtesy tag on my license plate someday!
JEANINE: 1-4-2-8-5-7 (laughing)
CYNTHIA: Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty cool. But to attach that to energies or passions of types, and see how that moves is not…
JEANINE: In the narrative tradition, you learn by panels of people who self-identify as that type and talk about how they are working with it in their own transformation, and so you get an energetic feel of the different types, which I think feels more useful to me than a list of characteristics. There is some of that, but it is more an energy feel for it.
CYNTHIA: Yeah, the flow of it. Well it will be interesting to see how these things go. The Law of 7, I am going to have to go back and look at how the Law of 7 and the movement within the Enneagram in your life because I think as Gurdjieff was talking about it, the Law of 7 does not specify 1-4-2-8-5-7, it specifies the steps and half steps and what happens but if you overlaid that and saw what happened, and put the Mis, the Fas, and the Sos, and the Dos, it is going to be very interesting stuff to see where that comes out. So I think there is wide open dialog and to tell you frankly, you are asking me why I am interested, I do not see that a lot of this is going to be carried on in Gurdjieff groups anymore because the Gurdjieff groups are going through a major evolution. The first generation is pretty much dying off at this point. The people that actually knew Gurdjieff and brought it to the states and established the sort-of secret of why, of where, etc. and the people that are remaining in the work, the most interesting people, are going public in ways that still shocks the elders, but is very interesting to bring to light, the ones that are allowing movements to be more generally available to the public. I have yet to see, and I have not been following it meticulously, but I have been following it with some interest. I have not seen any ongoing intellectual evolution coming out of the Gurdjieff work.
JEANINE: Hmm…..
CYNTHIA: I think that nobody is really daring in a way to go beyond the founding master, but I think a dialog with what the Enneagram people have been coming up with, could create a vastly interesting growth experience for both parties.
JEANINE: That’s exciting. Thank you so much for your time! We are very much looking forward to your participation in our upcoming conference.
Join us Wednesday October 27the for a special pre-conference event with Cynthia. Booksigning and reception begins at 4:30, followed by dinner (optional), and Cynthia's presentation begins at 7:15pm.
Cynthia's keynote presentation begins at 7:00pm, Thursday, October 28.
