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The Lost Psychedelic History of the Enneagram

How consciousness-expanding substances secretly shaped your favorite personality tool (and why that changes everything)

The history of the Enneagram is hard to trace because it isn't like some ancient scroll discovered in a dusty temple. It's more like humanity's collective understanding of the psyche, pieced together over millennia like an epic jigsaw puzzle where half the pieces were hidden under the couch cushions of history. You can find traces of it sprinkled throughout the ages - in Ancient Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism, early Christian writings, and Sufi teachings. The basic patterns of human consciousness that the Enneagram describes are as universal as mathematics. Trying to pin down who "invented" it is like trying to credit someone with discovering that 2+2=4.

The modern Enneagram, however, owes a huge debt to two pioneering minds: Oscar Ichazo, a Bolivian philosopher, and Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist. Their combined efforts to map the territory of human consciousness were like Galileo and Newton teaming up to explain the laws of physics - except instead of dropping apples, they were dropping ego defenses. Ichazo laid the groundwork by identifying the core patterns and structure, while Naranjo expanded it into the powerful psychological and spiritual tool we use today. Together, they turned ancient wisdom into practical insight that helps us understand why we keep making the same silly mistakes over and over.

The Elephant in the Room (Or Should I Say, the Mushroom?)

Before Timothy Leary turned psychedelics into a cultural hand grenade in the '60s, they were actually a serious tool in psychiatric research, particularly for understanding consciousness and ego formation. What often gets glossed over in polite Enneagram conversations - like that awkward family secret nobody mentions at Thanksgiving dinner - is that psychedelics played a significant role in its modern development.

Ichazo spent considerable time exploring consciousness through traditional shamanic practices in South America, including working with mescaline, psilocybin, peyote, Ayahuasca, as well as LSD. His first Ayahuasca experience occurred at the age of thirteen. These experiences helped shape his understanding of the nine personality types and their core motivations. Think of it as using a powerful microscope to study the human psyche - just not the kind you'd find in a typical research lab.

Naranjo, however, took this research to a whole new level. While running a groundbreaking psychedelic therapy clinic in Chile, he partnered with Alexander Shulgin - the "godfather of psychedelics" - to develop and test over a hundred psychoactive compounds. Naranjo even became the first Westerner to document ibogaine's effects and earned recognition as a shaman from the indigenous Taitas tribe. Claudio Naranjo personally experimented with psilocybin, marijuana, mescaline, TMA-1, TMA-2, LSD, MDA, MDMA, MMDA, MMDA-3A, DMMDA, harmaline, Iboga, Ayahuasca, ketamine, 10-MEO-Harmalan, and 5-MEO-DMT. Talk about credentials you can't get from LinkedIn Learning.

Unlike many explorers and researchers who kept their psychedelic insights locked away like state secrets, Naranjo was remarkably transparent about his work. In books like The Healing Journey and My Psychedelic Explorations, he explicitly connected his understanding of the Enneagram to his psychedelic research, detailing how these experiences helped him map the territory of human consciousness with the precision of a cartographer on cosmic steroids.

Given that the Enneagram's introduction to the US came through the Jesuits and my fellow Catholics, who were already performing theological gymnastics to help this ancient wisdom gain mainstream acceptance in Christian circles, it’s understandable why they would suppress parts of its history. Adding "and by the way, it was developed with psychedelics" to their elevator pitch would have been like trying to sell fire insurance to dragons - technically accurate, but strategically questionable.

The Ripple Effect: From Underground to Mainstream

Life has a funny way of connecting dots we never saw coming, like a cosmic game of six degrees of separation. Take The Healing Journey, Naranjo's groundbreaking book, which landed in the hands of a teenager named Rick Doblin. That book lit a fire under young Rick that's still burning today - he went on to found MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), which has become to psychedelic research what NASA is to space exploration.

Fast forward to 2023, and MAPS hosted a conference in Denver that looked more like a United Nations assembly than a fringe science meeting. We're talking 12,000 attendees and keynote speeches from both Republican and Democratic governors - Rick Perry from Texas and Jarid Polis from Colorado. These weren't exactly the usual suspects you'd expect to find championing psychedelic therapy, but there they were, advocating for new treatments for veterans and first responders. The times, they are a-changin', as Bob Dylan might say.

The research backing all this up isn't coming from some tie-dye lab in someone's basement. We're talking heavyweight institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts General Hospital, and NYU.¹ When you've got both sides of Congress agreeing on anything - in this case, studying psychedelics for PTSD treatment in the military - you know something significant is shifting in our cultural consciousness.

My Own Journey Through the Looking Glass

My first use of psychedelics began in 2017, at age 43, when I left the monastery broken, lost, and traumatized from decades of abuse I'd experienced. I was stuck in The Dark Night of the Soul and couldn't find a way out - like being trapped in a spiritual escape room designed by Kafka. Much to my surprise, psychedelics helped me face my trauma forthrightly, grieve more efficiently, and find room in my heart for forgiveness and compassion. I also gained more spiritual insight from my first deep psychedelic journey than I did from twenty years of living in a monastery, because it finally allowed me to break open my ego and expand my consciousness, like cracking the world's most stubborn walnut with a cosmic nutcracker.

Forgiving and healing my trauma required many more years of therapy, journey work, and integration, but my PTSD symptoms are significantly alleviated, though I still have some dark days. Think of it like financial recovery - the major crisis is over, but you still need to check your bank balance regularly and resist the urge to impulse-buy stupid stuff. Most importantly, I now have close friends, an intimate spiritual community, and a deep connection with a loving family while pursuing a successful career.

The Enneagram as Psychedelic GPS

Like Ichazo and Naranjo, many of the big ideas I've discovered about the Enneagram can be traced back to various psychedelic experiences, but I only recently uncovered the true origins of the Enneagram while researching my book Taming Your Money Monsters: Nine Paths to Money Mastery with the Enneagram. Before knowing about its psychedelic roots, I discovered that the Enneagram is a powerful tool for predicting the general tone and trajectory of many psychedelic experiences.

It can help anticipate, in broad strokes, the type or flavor of issues that are likely to surface on a psychedelic journey, making it an excellent diagnostic tool for journey work and essential for integrating those experiences. I've consistently found that the most difficult psychedelic experiences involve a confrontation with one's greatest fear, and positive ones with the fulfillment of one's greatest hope as defined by one's Enneagram type, with a complex range of possibilities between those two poles.

Think of it like this: during a positive psychedelic experience, practitioners often describe being filled with a sense of the Divine, which is infinite and unconditional love. But here's the fascinating part - we notice that love rushing in to fill the specific empty spaces where we're most broken, and the Enneagram can predict exactly where those spaces are.

It's like the Divine has a GPS that navigates straight to your Sacred Wound. A Type Four might experience that love healing their deep sense of not being unique or having a place in the world, while a Type Eight feels it healing their fear of being harmed or controlled. Same infinite love, different healing destinations - and that's what gives each type's psychedelic experience its unique flavor, like spiritual comfort food perfectly seasoned for your particular brand of brokenness.

This discovery is what demonstrated the Enneagram's utility to my satisfaction, giving me the confidence to embark on writing my new book, which is the first formal attempt to explain why the Enneagram works the way it does, not just how. My astonishment and delight to later learn about the psychedelic roots of the Enneagram is, therefore, hard to overstate.

The Bridge Between Knowing and Doing

After reading Taming Your Money Monsters (which releases on July 8th, 2025), you likely know the changes you want to make in your life but might struggle to implement them - like knowing you should eat more vegetables but still gravitating toward pizza for emotional comfort. In addition to meditation, contemplative prayer, and professional therapy, for some, psychedelics may help bridge the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. They can be a tool to reveal our unconscious motivations and provide a unique opportunity for critical interior exploration. While never a stand-alone solution, they can accelerate personal growth when used in addition to a robust spiritual or psychological practice.

As a broad generalization, psychedelics provide a conscious experience of your unconscious mind, where your greatest fear and hope reside. However, some things are hidden in your unconscious mind for a reason - like how your brain protects you from remembering every embarrassing thing you did in middle school. Venturing into this unexplored territory should not be taken lightly.

If used prudently and with deep reverence, psychedelics have healing potential because they can bring our unprocessed traumas to the surface and provide an experience of conscious unity that we can integrate back into our daily lives. Even a brief taste of conscious unity is worth more than a thousand sermons or therapy sessions, no matter how you get there.

Psychedelics are not for everyone and carry significant risks.

The physical and psychological dangers of using these substances can be high, and psychedelics should never be used without careful preparation and supervision, and only where legal. But for those called to them, they can be accelerants for personal and spiritual development.

The Ferry vs. the Levitation Academy

Some people may object and view psychedelics as a spiritual shortcut, but many of us need all the help we can get. A joke told by Terence McKenna illustrates this point perfectly:

A man moved near a river and, wanting to find a way to travel across the water, spent ten years developing a type of levitation that would allow him to float across it. Buddha, who was preaching in town, was confronted by this man, who said, "Look master, look what I have achieved. I can walk across the water."

And Buddha said, "Yeah, but the ferry only costs a nickel..."

Some spiritual folks are like the man living near the river who, convinced of the virtue of their chosen path, want to burn down the ferry for those who don't have ten years to learn how to levitate. Or worse, they're still sitting on the riverbank, trying to levitate with little success, and refuse to use the ferry.

Energy Meets Container: The Future of Transformation

Like Claudio Naranjo, I'm increasingly convinced that the prudent use of psychedelics could revivify modern society if used within a healthy container with strong boundaries. A core problem with modernity is that many religious institutions have become calcified, arthritic, and rigid containers devoid of any authentic spiritual energy, like beautiful cathedrals that forgot they were supposed to have meaningful services inside them. The problem with the psychedelic movement is that it has infinite spiritual energy but no container to hold it, which led to the Bacchanalian excesses of the 1960s and a subsequent backlash through the war on drugs.

Our racist and immoral war on drugs then took mental health in America down a dark road because we indiscriminately villainized psychedelics and put them in the same DEA Schedule 1 category as heroin, depriving researchers, clinicians, and clergy of the tools necessary to accelerate psychological and spiritual healing.

A solution is to put the tremendous energy of psychedelics inside our religious containers that are strong enough to hold and guide it, with the Enneagram as the technology to facilitate that union. Think of it as spiritual engineering - combining ancient wisdom with modern insights to create something both transformative and safe.

The Enneagram is an ecumenical, non-sectarian spiritual tool that can map cleanly onto all faiths, and if we simultaneously combine the power of the Enneagram, the healing potential of psychedelics, and the wisdom of our ancestors, we have a chance of revivifying the spiritual adventure for the next generation and generations to come. We can then use our abundant wealth to make our money a force for good and help heal our fractured world, because nothing says "spiritual awakening" quite like getting your financial house in order and using your resources to lift others up.

After all, the goal isn't just personal transformation - it's planetary healing. And sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is become financially responsible while maintaining an open heart. Who knows? Maybe that's the real secret the Enneagram has been trying to teach us all along.

1: https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/altering-perceptions-psychedelics; https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/psychiatry/research/psychedelics-research; https://www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/treatments-and-services/center-for-the-neuroscience-of-psychedelics; https://med.nyu.edu/departments-institutes/psychiatry/research/center-psychedelic-medicine; https://maps.org/our-research/

ABOUT DOUG
A marine, a monk, and a money manager walk into a bar... and it turns out they're all the same guy. Doug Lynam's unconventional journey from Marine Corps Officer Candidate School to twenty years as a Benedictine monk to financial advisor has given him a unique perspective on wealth and meaning. Now an author, speaker, coach, and psychedelic guide exploring consciousness and money, Doug helps people heal their relationship with finances so they can live more abundant lives. Author of From Monk to Money Manager and Tame Your Money Monster: Nine Paths To Money Mastery With The Enneagram, he's been featured in The New York Times and CNBC, and even attended a private audience with Pope Francis. 

Contact Doug Lynam at: doug@douglynam.com or visit my website douglynam.com