The One You Feed - Eli Jaxon-Bear on Your True Self

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

Eli Jaxon-Bear founded and currently teaches through The Leela Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to world peace and freedom through universal self-realization. Eli is also the author of many books, including the one we discuss in this episode, An Outlaw Makes it Home: The Awakening of a Spiritual Revolutionary. In this episode, he talks to Eric about accessing and experiencing your true self and things that get in the way of that. Also, he hits on a perspective of the Enneagram that we bet you’ve never considered before. Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Eli Jaxon-Bear and I Discuss…His book, An Outlaw Makes it Home: The Awakening of a Spiritual RevolutionaryDiscovering who is feeding the wolves withinThat to know your true self you have to turn away from your false self – the self you construct in your mindNLP, the Enneagram and hypnosis integrated into his therapyHis lasting enlightenment Knowing what you really want and staying true to it in each momentThe journey from “me” to “I” Symptom cure and habit controlHis book, Sudden AwakeningHow your heart is already intelligent and aliveThat the Enneagram Personality Types is actually the Enneagram of Character FixationAsking, does this bring me freedom, true love, happiness? Go deeper than the character fixation and find your characterWaking up from the act, from the show, and stop taking it personally having to prove thingsThe character fixation of an Enneagram type 9The “Chief Feature”All of our experience has a Mental, Emotional and Physical component and the ego encapsulates all three of thoseThe history of the origins of the EnneagramHis book on the EnneagramEli Jaxon-Bear LinksHomepageFacebookTwitterThe Great Courses Plus thousands of courses in virtually any topic and you can listen on demand anywhere get a full month for FREE thegreatcoursesplus.com/wolfPhlur makes stunning, non-toxic perfumes, listing every ingredient and why it’s there. Visit www.phlur.com promo code WOLF to get 20% off first custom sampler setRobinhood is an investing app that allows you to buy and sell stocks, EFTs, Options and Cryptos all commission free at any level. All it takes to do so is 4 taps in the app on your smartphone so it makes investing easy for beginners and experienced people alike. For The One You Feed listeners, you can get a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you build your portfolio by going to  youfeed.robinhood.comIf you liked this episode, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Belinda GoreAmoda MaaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In that war for our soul, there were certain tests, certain markers along the way. And we said, what do you live for? What do you die for? What are you willing to sell out for? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life

worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. This January, join me for our third annual January Jumpstart series. Starting January 1st, we'll have inspiring conversations to give you a hand in kickstarting your personal growth. If you've been holding back or playing small,

this is your all-access pass to step fully into the possibilities of the new year. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Eli Jackson-Bear. Eli founded and currently teaches through the Lela Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to world peace and freedom through universal self-realization. Eli is the author of many books, including the one we discuss here, An Outlaw Makes It Home, The Awakening of a Spiritual Revolutionary. Hi, Eli. Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you, Eric. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to have you on. We're going to talk about your latest book, An Outlaw Makes at Home, The Awakening of a Spiritual Revolutionary, in more detail in a moment.

But let's start like we always do with the parable. There is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather. And he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I would say ultimately what it comes down to is the discovery of who's feeding. Once you know who you are that's feeding, you'll know what it is you want to feed. So generally, we subconsciously identify with both of the characters, both the good wolf and the bad wolf, and we go to war with ourselves. But in the end, when you find out who you really are, it's no contest of who you feed. There's no choice. It just becomes the obvious continuation of yourself. So as long as we see the good wolf and the bad wolf as both separate from ourselves and identified with both of them as ourselves, we have conflict.

But when we discover who we are and we disassociate from both wolves, find the truth in ourselves, then we see our true nature, which is compassion and love and conscious understanding. And then there's no question of feeding or not feeding. Then you simply are as you are. But as we begin, there is like a war for our soul. It's a war of the impulses of the animal versus the impulses of the divine, you could say. And so in that war for our soul, there were certain tests, certain markers along the way. And we said, what do you live for?

What do you die for? What are you willing to sell out for? What are you willing to stay true to? And those tests define us, define our character, and give us the capacity to be the good wolf, to be the compassionate, loving, kind being that we are. And to the degree that we sell out to our egotistical animal nature of selfishness, greed, and me and mine,

to that degree we lose our capacity to stay true to ourselves because we have sold ourselves to a price. That's wonderful. Tell me a little bit about when you say true self. I know that part of the answer is it can't be defined in the words that we're going to use. So understanding that, let's do your best. Okay. So to know your true self, you have to look away from your false self. And you could say, turn away from the bad wolf. So to turn away from what you believe you are already. So you can't find your true self as long as you believe you know who you are. And we all are born into an identity.

We are told our name. It gets repeated to us until we remember it and imprint it. We're told this is our body and these are our parents and this is our environment. And we get conditioned and trained to say, this is who I am. So you ask anybody in the world, who are you? They say, oh, I'm Eli. What does that mean? Well, that means that I'm this man with

this age and this family and these parents. And that's who we believe we are. That's what we call myself. When I say true self is to find what's behind the scenes. What's deeper than the name? What's deeper than the body? What's before your thoughts? What's before me and mine? Here for a moment, you just drop me and mine. What's left is your true self. One of the things that you talk about in your videos and your books that I've read is this real commitment to finding your true self and that that commitment has to come above everything else, that you have to be willing to give up everything to find your true self. And I'm asking this question from a very personal angle, right? So I have had several what you would consider sort of

classic awakening moments where the unity of consciousness and all that is presented to me and I see it and it's clear and they last for a period of time, then they fade. And I find myself saying, oh yes, I really want to go back to that. That's what's most important. And I head that direction. But then I get distracted. And I go a different direction. And then the the urge comes back, follow it. And I find this this back and forth dance. And so what I'm curious about is, what do we do in these moments where that's not the most important thing, where despite realizing on some level, maybe that I don't like the word should, but should be the most important thing,

or that's where the deepest lasting happiness, but where that desire, that, that urge goes a little bit more underground. And again, I'm asking that from a personal sense, because I seem to do this little bit of back and forth? Most people do. And so the issue then is to find out for yourself what it is that you're making more important and to tell the truth about that. Because everyone says, oh, I want freedom. I want enlightenment. I want love. And then they go off and get lost in their day to day.

I want love. And then they go off and get lost in their day-to-day. So to give yourself fully, you have to be willing to tell the truth about the places where you're not fully. And examine it for yourself. Is this really more important? And if it is, give yourself to that. And if it isn't, stop indulging. And then you get to the point where you see it's so obvious and clear.

And then you have a clear choice. I don't want to indulge anymore. I want to be myself. And then there has to be a great tolerance for whatever arises without taking it personally. Because the tendency will be to, when the next moment where you lose focus arises, to say, oh, I'm not good enough, or I didn't do it, or I should go back. But what if the spaciousness allows for that as well? If you are silence, silence has no problem with noise.

But as soon as noise appears, if you use that to justify, Oh, I've gone off and I should be doing something else. That's just more of my stuff. And so this leads me into one of the things that I really wanted to discuss with you. And in order to, to frame it up, we, I'm going to need to tell a little bit about your, your backstory. And again, your book, An Outlaw Makes It Home, is an absolutely fascinating read. You've led quite an interesting life. But what I'm really interested in is at one point, you began to incorporate NLP, neurolinguistic programming, the Enneagram, and hypnosis into a unique form of therapy that you were

delivering. And then after that, you had sort of, um, you met your, your final teacher, uh, Papaji and you had a, a true lasting awakening and, and you've rolled that into it also. And so what it brings up for me is this question of when does it make sense to work with the ego to deal with trauma and wounding and emotional deflation and all that stuff? None of that's true. I should be this way. I should have that. I should be different. Whatever it is, people have a whole variety of conditioned wants and desires. When you get it all boiled down to what you really want, then the real work begins. Then, if trauma arises, you deal with trauma.

If trauma doesn't arise, you don't deal with trauma. It's really dealing with what's presented. And what's presented will be determined by what it is that you want. That frames the discussion. And then, yes, sometimes it's appropriate to deal with trauma, and sometimes it's not. And it's really not a rule. It's really what is presenting. Because you have to realize what you're talking about is, you call it's not. And it's really not a rule. It's really what is presenting. Because you have to realize what you're talking about is, you call it a journey.

So where does the journey start? You said it starts in different places. It doesn't. It always starts with me. And where does it end? It ends with I. So how far a journey is it from me to I? None. That's it. That's the truth. And then if you stay true to that, you'll be tested. All of your secondary needs and wants and desires will come up to tempt you to say, oh, what about this? Oh, what about that? And if you then, instead of

following that, you stay true, you'll deepen. If you do follow that, you'll learn, oh, this is what I'm putting in front of it. Is this more important? Do I want to follow this? And then you learn from that. So either way, it's all a learning experience. And you guys talk about these three levels of therapeutic intervention. And the first you describe as symptom cure and habit control as the first level. Is it necessary to, I'm just going to use this word because no better one comes to mind, master each level in order to go to the next level? Not at all. Not at all. We teach those three levels because you only have a whole variety of people showing up who want help. And some people just want to help because they want to stop smoking

or they want to change some part of the behavior. So you can deal with them at that level. Others show up and they're wounded, emotionally, psychically wounded. And so you deal with them at that level. Others show up and they have already seen through that or they're already penetrated into something deeper and more fundamental. So there's no need to ever give yourself any steps along the way. But if steps appear, you take them.

But you just go straight home. And then, if you go home, you go from me to I, and you are as you are, then if something arises, you deal with it. If trauma comes up, beautiful, deal with it. It doesn't matter. It still doesn't stop you from being yourself. You don't recommend spiritual practices, meditation, necessarily. Everything's useful.

I meditate. I love meditating. I was in a Zen monastery. I mean, I loved it. I spent years with my Chinese teacher doing Taoist yoga. I love it. It's all useful for training the mind and body, but it's not useful for waking up. Because if you look at the ones

who woke up, you look at the Buddha, he didn't have a practice. You look at any of the enlightened Zen masters, they didn't have a practice. The practice is always trying to teach someone else to do what you've done differently. Buddha sits under a tree and says, I'm not getting up until I get it. Whatever it takes, come and get me. I am sitting here until I get it. It's that willingness, that immovable willingness is all that's required. Then people after him say, oh, I'll sit for 20 minutes a day, and then I'll get enlightened. Or I'll sit for an hour. I'll go on a sesshin for a week.

The Buddha didn't say, I'm going to sit for an hour. I'm going to sit for a week. He said, I'm sitting until I get it. That's what's required. But the rest is very useful. I love sitting. I love sitting until I get it. That's what's required. But the rest is very useful. I love sitting. I love meditating. I love yoga.

So it's not that I would say anything negative about them, except that don't use it to wake up. Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls, and I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair

you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready.

Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really.

Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If we look at the Buddha's life, he had a long history of following any spiritual practice he could find and going to great lengths. And so maybe all those were just useful for him realizing what didn't work. Right. That's what he said. Yeah. I guess

the challenge here, and I'll lump you into this category fairly or unfairly, right? Sort of a direct path, right? Like you want to wake up, wake up, right? Yes. One of my books is called Sudden Awakening. Yes. Yes. I read a fair portion of it. I think that the challenge for a lot of people is, and I get, I get the fundamental challenge of, oh, I'm going to do something to find myself. I'm going to take a step towards myself. How do you take a step towards yourself? You're already yourself. There's nowhere to go. So I get that. And I guess this is just sort of an ongoing debate that happens between a gradual awakening and a sudden awakening. And it's gradual until it's sudden. I guess it's the mind that's trying to accomplish. It's looking for some steps. Tell me what to do. Exactly. And that's the ego.

Yep. So as long as you know, it's the ego that's searching for a thing to do. the ego. So as long as you know it's the ego that's searching for a thing to do, the only answer is don't do anything. So right now you stop all you're doing the ego doesn't have a job. You can rest.

Then your mind stops. And everything opens. Then there's a clarity and a stillness. It's always been here. It's just been covered by the noise and the chatter of the internal dialogue. So that settles down

right now and everything stops. The truth of yourself reveals effortlessly, silently, without words. I'm trying to tap into that while also running a podcast that relies on dialogue. So in that moment, there's a moment of silence and stillness and truth.

And then the mind comes back in, oh, I've got a job to do. I've got to keep the podcast going. I've got to keep talking. Okay, so it's possible that we can continue speaking without that happening. that we can continue speaking without that happening. That actually, you don't need to be in control. That your heart is already intelligent and alive, and it speaks when it needs to.

And sometimes, even though it's heresy in the online world, silence can be transmitted. People feel it and they taste it and everyone loves it. It's so beautiful. That was one of the biggest moments for me. I've been to several retreats with Adyashanti and when he sort of pointed out that like silence is always there was a total like bam moment for me when i went i'll be damned it sure is even with all the noise that's going on i don't have to make silence i don't have to somehow create it or shut everything down for it to be there that is a pretty profound moment yes that's papaji's transmission yeah yeah he shot the gun from transmission. Yeah. Yeah. Who is your wife? Yeah. I'm so lucky married to a goddess. Yeah, you are. So let's talk about the Enneagram for a minute because you sort of turn the Enneagram

on its head. Essentially you say that we use the Enneagram to tell us who we are and then use that to sort of drive our egoic personalities. And you say that the Enneagram can be used exactly the opposite, as a way of showing how we're obscuring our true self. I think, is that an accurate statement? Yes. Let's say the Enneagram describes the bad wolf. Let's talk a little bit more about that elaborate on that because in the enneagram study i've done it shows here's like take your type uh a nine here's a a nine who's thriving here's a nine who's doing poorly and so i would you know in my traditional understanding it would say well here's a here's a nine who's to use the analogy to show feeding their good wolf here's a nine who's feeding their bad wolf. But I think you're driving it something deeper. I am. Because all of that is based on a misunderstanding of the

Enneagram. It's called, the way you learned it, the Enneagram of personality. As long as it's the Enneagram of personality, it's egoic. So you can have a good nine or a bad nine, a functional nine or dysfunctional nine, a spiritual nine or a sleepwalking nine, but it's still a nine. And as long as you have an identity as a nine, that's a number. It's a robot. You're identifying yourself as a robot. Whether you call it a functional robot or a dysfunctional robot, it's still a robot. It's robot number nine. It's still a robot. It's robot number nine. It's mechanical, habitual, predictable.

And it has its repressions and its suppressions and it has its projections and it has its lifestyle. And it's an animal robot. It's our conditioning. It's conditioning plus genetics. Conditioning plus genetics. Because you're genetically predisposed to your fixation. And so as long as you identify yourself as a nine or any number, you're identifying yourself as an ego.

The possibility is to see that, in fact, it's not the enneagram of personality. It's the enneagram of character fixation. And when you identify the character fixation as a number nine, you can start to see, is this who I really am? Is this really true? And you start to question yourself. You start self-inquiry to discover, is this real? Is this making me happy and fulfilled? As functional as I am as a nine, does that bring me complete fulfillment? Does it bring me freedom? Does it bring me true love?

If it does, no problem. Stay a fulfilled nine. If it doesn't, be willing to see deeper than the fixation. When you go deeper than the character fixation, you get to true character. That's where you get to the good wolf. The good wolf is the true character underlying the basis of personality and the animal manifestation. So your true self is the good wolf. Your bad wolf self is the fixation.

As long as you've identified yourself as the bad wolf, you try to be good. You try to be better. You try to be more compassionate, more loving, more caring, more understanding. But it's always from the background of being the bad wolf. Because you believe you're in a nine, you believe you're an eight, you believe you're a four. And you're trying to be a better one of those. And as good as you get at it, it's never enough. That's the point. If it worked, no problem. I'm totally a functional kind of guy. If it works, no problem. If it doesn't work, find out.

Check it out. Go deeper. Then you see, well, is it enough to be a functional nine? Is it enough to be a spiritual seven? Is that really satisfying? Is it really fulfilling? If it isn't, then you start to see, well, maybe that's the act. Maybe that's the animal act. And I'm acting as if I'm the animal trainer, but actually you're acting

as an animal in the act, as the act. So the possibility is to wake up from the whole act, wake up from the show. Then the show continues. It's not like it stops. But you're not identified with it. You're not taking it personally. You show up as a character in the play without having a stake in it.

Without having to prove that you're good enough. Prove that you're lovable. Prove that you're smart enough. Prove that you're good enough. Prove that you're more functional. Allve that you're smart enough. Prove that you're good enough. Prove that you're more functional. All of that is like finished. Then you have free form. You can actually show up in the play and be creative, be spontaneous, be alive, be free. Hey, y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls.

And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty, it's so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves, and who we know ourselves to be

and who we can be. It's a little bit of past present, and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It can be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you.

And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to me about how recognizing our character fixation. So, as a nine, what is the character fixation of a nine? Sleepwalking. The best way to describe a nine is you think of our cousins, the gorillas. Gorillas are nice. They basically sit

around and eat all day. They're very social. They hang out. They don't get into fights. And even when there is a challenge to the harem, another male comes along. They don't fight to the death. They don't kill each other. They do postures. They puff themselves up. They grunt. They run at each other. They charge a couple. They puff themselves up, they grunt, they run at each other, they charge a couple times until it becomes quite obvious who the bigger one is and the other one leaves. It's basically a very social, peaceful society because rage has been so deeply avoided that they're not going to kill each other. So the nine fixation avoids rage and is feeling angry all the time and sublimating. So the nine, in order to be friendly and kind and

good and helpful, will say yes and mean no. Every time anybody asks you anything and you say yes, every time anybody asks you anything and you say yes, there's always a no behind it. And the no is no. Don't tell me what to do. Leave me alone. I just want to sit on my couch and drink a beer, have some fun, whatever it is, be by myself, be in control. I'm angry when someone else is in control.

I'm angry when I have to do what I don't want to do. But I can't let anybody know that because I want to be a loving, nice guy. And so you sleepwalk on top of that. Make believe that's not there. And to make believe it's not there, you have to go numb to yourself. And to go numb to yourself, you have to be ignorant of what's already there. That's ignoring the truth. That's the first ignorance that we all fall into

as you enter this Enneagram. Nine is the core of it all. We all are these big gorillas, angry, I mean, believe it or not, wanting to be ruined and yet being social, saying yes when we mean no. And then all the other fixations

really just come out of that first core one. So the first step is to start to tell the truth to yourself. When you say yes and you mean no, what's really going on? I've had nine say to me, you know, I never realized I am pissed at everything all the time.

It's a shocking revelation. So then when you start to notice it, you start to own it. Then you start to be able to have the integrity to say yes when you mean it and to say no when you mean it. Then this brings up this enormous possibility of rage. And rage, don't want to feel rage, I could kill somebody. You don't want to kill somebody. You're a good guy.

You're nonviolent. But there's this animal rage that has to be met. And if it's not met, it's ignored. And if it's ignored, you're living in ignorance. When you actually are meeting the passion of your animal nature, which is what fires up and lives this life. You become more alive. You become more present.

You become more capable of being in the moment because you're not having to say yes when you mean no. You're not having to ignore. That's the start of life. That sounds like becoming a more functional nine, though, saying no when I mean no. Becoming a functional human being. Right, right.

Functional human being is good. We like that. Well, that's what I find interesting about your work is the potentially working at multiple layers. Yes. It's not a functional nine because the nine fixation in its nature avoids rage. That's the bottom of it. Nine fixation, the idealization is I am comfortable. To say yes when you mean yes and no when you mean no is not comfortable.

So it's actually going against the fixation. It's not being a functional nine. It's being a dysfunctional nine. But being a functional human being and so in your view the enneagram always points us to i don't know if you'd use this word or not but it came to mind our fatal flaw sure well gergiev calls it the chief feature the chief feature yes so the first person to teach the enneagram in the west is gerff, who was a mystic philosopher from Armenia, right? He was teaching Russia before the revolution there. And he said, everybody has a chief feature. And he said,

the Russians he was working with, if they ever knew their chief feature, they would die of shock. They are so deluded into who they think themselves to be compared to their actual way they are in the world. So, there's a, the flaw is this first ignorance. It's the first falling asleep and ignoring the truth. You often talk about that all of our experience and you pull this in lots of different places, but you talk about how all of our experience has a mental, emotional, and a physical component. And then the ego encapsulates all three of those. Could you talk a little bit about that? You know, it's interesting. That first starts with Aristotle. Aristotle said that we humans

have three spirits or three souls, three body minds. He said, first, there's a vegetative. pre-body minds. He said, first, there's a vegetative. So we each have a vegetative body. And Aristotle says the vegetative is the foundation and necessary. And out of that comes what he called the animal spirit. And out of that, it comes the human spirit. By the animal spirit, we're talking about emotions. We all have the animal emotions. All animals have rage, and all animals can feel hurt. All animals feel sad. We have an emotional animal body. And then what he called the human, he said, was the rational thinking.

And so human rational thinking is beyond emotions. It needs the animal body just as the animal body needs the vegetative body. And when you think about vegetative intelligence, just consider it for yourself. Imagine we had this stack of chemicals that we call a body that we were carrying around with us that we had to keep at an exact temperature all the time. No matter where we were, we could take the stack of chemicals up onto a mountain or under the ocean or flying or into the snow or into the tropical jungle. And if it goes off by just a few degrees, it dies. Too hot, too cold, it dies.

That's our level of our vegetative intelligence that keeps us functional and alive. It's remarkable. That we could never do. Right. functional and alive. It's remarkable. That we could never do. Right. If we had to count our heartbeats or think about our breathing or worry about what our blood pressure or our body temperature, impossible. Or digest. Digestion. Exactly. And extract nutrients. So this is such intelligence that we have. Vegetative. Then we have this animal intelligence, which is the emotional body. Very, very strong. And then we have this mental intelligence, which is the emotional body. Very, very strong. And then we

have this mental intelligence, which is the rational thinking mind. And all of that gets encapsulated into me. So this idea of me says, it's my body, and these are my feelings, these are my thoughts. This is my life. And these are my parents. And this is my partner or my future. And this idea of me and mine becomes this bubble. And we then project our universe around the walls of this bubble. And the way you know you're projecting is that it's all about me. No matter where you are or what's going on, it's always about me. We are always the center of the universe.

So this me-centric view of reality, that it's my world and my work and my life and my creativity and my art and my problems, my money, is all a projection, an egoic projection of me and mine. And it's a bubble. And the amazing thing is the first person to pop this bubble was Pythagoras. Pythagoras is the root of the Enneagram. Pythagoras is where the Enneagram comes from. And Pythagoras is the first one who called the universe the cosmos. Cosmos is a Greek word, and it means both harmony and interconnectedness. And by calling the universe a cosmos, he suddenly took it from being me-centric or person-centric or earth-centric to being universally-centric, to being universe-centric. That was brilliant. That's 2,500 years ago that Pythagoras has this insight. And then he sees that all of it is based on mathematics and harmonics. And the Enneagram was his model for how you integrate mathematics and harmonics

to describe the motion of materialization in the universe. And then, I can never say his name, Gurdjieff? Yeah, Gurdjieff. materialization in the universe and then i can never say his name gierdiff was the gierdiff was the one who did the modern version of what we know as the enneagram well he's the first one who presented it in the west and the best if you were interested you read uh in search of the miraculous which is a book by one of his students of spensky that russian mathematician who took copious notes and puts the whole system in place. But what I've discovered is everything that Guru Jeff is teaching there, he got from Pythagoras,

from the mystery schools that still carry the Pythagorean teaching. But really, the modern incarnation comes from Oscar Chazo. Oscar Chazo was a Chilean, started his mystery school in Chile, in the Eureka, Eure Rica, Chile, called the Rica Institute. And he's the first one who teaches the Enneagram of Personality, which is what you learned. And so Oscar taught it to Claudio Narajo, who was a Chilean psychotherapist living in Berkeley. And I learned from Claudio and Claudio's students, Kathy Spieth and others. So Claudio took it to Berkeley where it became fleshed out with psychological depth and insight. And then it was taught as the Enneagram Personality. Helen Palmer and I both had our first Enneagram books going to the same publisher. They took

hers, not mine. Hers was more practical. Mine was more spiritual. And that's how it spread. So it spreads from Helen Palmer, really, her Enneagram Personality And that's how it's written. So it's written from Helen Palmer, really, her Enneagram of Personality, who got it from Claudio, who got it from Chile, from Oscar Chazo. Very interesting. And your book on the Enneagram was written some time ago, but was it re-released recently? Well, I wrote it first in 1987. And at that point, it came out first in Germany. But then I did a new version, and now we're... I've just updated the recent one

from Fixation to Freedom, and added this part about Pythagoras, which I've just recently discovered. I've been searching for this now for 30 years, and I finally found the link. Well, we are at the end of our time for the main part of the interview. You and I are going to do a brief post-show conversation afterwards where I'm going to ask you to tell a couple of the stories from the book,

An Outlaw Makes It Home, which are just fascinating. You're sort of like a cultural history of the U.S. and the spiritual movement to me. I mean, there's just so many touchstones in there that we all see that you were right in the middle of. So I'm looking forward to that. Listeners, if you're interested in the post show, you can get those by becoming a supporter of the show, oneufeed.net slash support. Eli, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. I've really enjoyed talking with you. Oh, it's been fun, Eric. Thank you so much for having me on. Okay. Bye.

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