Three essayettes to think on.

do we like "essayettes"? i'm not sure...

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Some short essays on a few interesting topics…

Last week I confessed I was going to grad school and then promised to write something I’ve been taking notes on, the ways that I’m already seeing interesting (and evocative) parallels between the role of tradition within the Catholic church and the role of tradition within astrology. I still want to write that essay, but life got in the way! So today I’m doing something arguably a lot more fun and I’m going to share with y’all a few very short meditations on some varied things that I have thought through just enough to be dangerous but not enough to warrant a full blog. Buyer beware.

in honor of my next trip to the mountains

Can I learn about myself from the machine?

It took me surprisingly long into this AI craze to consider what must have been on the agendas of all the corporate development and leadership training companies’ annual summits for at least the past few years: will AI replace the Enneagram test?

First I should repeat myself when I say that I’ve been against using tests to find your Enneagram number since at least 2019. It was a few years into working with the system and a few years into seeing upward of half the people I witnessed encounter the system mis-type themselves using a test. The pattern is familiar and not altogether bad, but is surely annoying.

1. You take an Enneagram test.

2. You answer the questions erratically, maybe aspirationally, maybe self-critically, maybe honestly.

3. You receive a result that validates a lot of the things you like about yourself, some of the things you suspect are wrong with you, and you compare with friends.

4. If you’re actually interested in using the system, you eventually realize that number doesn’t carry so much depth for you. You go back to the drawing board, read some more books, discuss, reflect, bang your head against the wall, and, eventually, magically, figure it out.

5. You’ve got your Enneagram number right and it’s a lot less fun and a lot more useful.

You can of course circumvent a lot of this pattern by having a session with someone who’s trained in these systems or at least spent significant time steeped in them. That can really narrow it down and sometimes even just answer the question for you. But, even then, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ll be doing some version of Step #4 above. Reading, reflecting, discussing, banging your head against the wall, and figuring it out. I would call this a feature rather than a bug.

But, of course, while I was naively not thinking about the potential that AI might come for the Enneagram just like it has for everything else, ChatGPT was improving its models and generally seeping into all areas of culture. By the time it occurred to me that this Internet behemoth might have something to say about a personal development system that I’ve held close for almost a decade now, by the time I realized it might be able to “type” someone, I should have been able to predict the outcome.

Once it occurred to me, a little guiltily, I logged into ChatGPT and gave it the prompt: ignore anything you might know about me. can you ask me ten questions, one at a time, and tell me what my enneagram type and likely subtype are?

I don’t remember what it said or what its questions were, but within a short 20-30 minutes, I received my diagnosis. According to the machine, I was a Type 5, “the observer” and was likely a self-preservation or, perhaps, social leading Type 5. From my almost decade of self-work and study with the Enneagram, I concur.

The easy answer here is to say that it’s still a waste of your time and energy and certainly a waste of the planet’s time and energy to use ChatGPT to identify your Enneagram number. As I said earlier, the journey is worth more than the destination, although the destination is useful too. I do believe this to be the case, that “getting” your type is only so meaningful and that the nuance you bring to your self-understanding by figuring it out yourself is worth not using AI.

I don’t see that belief changing, but I can also recognize how frustrating it’s been for people I know who really are trying to use the Enneagram to grow, but haven’t been able to find themselves in the system. I believe in its accuracy and usefulness, but it’s inherently limited by whatever language we have access to for these nuanced concepts of ego and personality. I might argue that if you haven’t been able to work through that nuance yourself then there’s still plenty to learn and to gain, that AI will undercut that value, but that feels a little too neat of an answer.

I also am not sure that it’s actually accurate. My one experience does not prove anything. It didn’t completely clock my instinctual subtype correctly (though that’s an even murkier area of the Enneagram, so I give it a pass). I also was able to answer its questions as someone who has learned a lot about himself by working directly with the Enneagram for so long, so my answers were likely laden with especially 5-leaning language. Without seeing the outcomes of a much larger sample size of people trying this, some who already know their type and some who don’t, and then confirming with those who don’t whether or not their type is accurate through their own ongoing work, it’s not something I’d stake much money on.

And anyway, to undermine all of the above, it is obvious to me that this is a part of life where we do not benefit from efficiency overall. The Enneagram was never a system that was meant to be leveraged for diagnosis purposes. The journey really is the prize and using the knowledge that comes with your type meaningfully is its own skill, one that AI as it stands has no incentive or mechanism to require of us. Still, I had to ask, can I learn about myself from the machine?

What do we do with a baby’s birth chart? Part 2…

About a year ago, I wrote a little about the use and purpose of looking at a newborn baby’s birth chart. My thoughts have definitely evolved since then, though most of what I said then still holds. I got to meet a new baby this week and toward the end of my day with her and her mom, my friend, it was like we both remembered at the same time that I was an astrologer and we could play that little game, the one where we ooh and ah over what this new life has in store.

Without getting into the baby’s chart, it was fun for several reasons. She was born with her Ascendant right on the edge of two signs, solidly a Capricorn rising, but evocative of the significant chance that comes with these things. You can plan all you want, but everything can change in a moment.

It was also fun to see a brand new chart, which, as I’ve continued to study and learn the history that comes with this tradition, feels more and more like something to be grateful for. Whether or not we put any stock in the cosmology or implications for fate that come with astrology, I think we can appreciate the central metaphor, the idea that this child is a product of all that came before and also “began” in a discrete moment. Everything together and also completely individual. A drop in the ocean has no boundaries between itself and the rest, but it still flows through the water cycle on its own.

I am feeling myself more and more leaning toward a mentality that I first encountered from a friend and mentor, Larry Arrington. She mentioned offhandedly once that she almost never looks at the charts of her nieces, that she doesn’t want to possibly perceive something about their lives or their futures. She’s showing a respect for their selfhood there, but also a respect for herself, I think. A decision to let life unfold without your looking over its shoulder, which is a decision that doesn’t come easily to most of us astrologers or, really, most adults who care about a child. You want to be able to monitor pretty much all the time, I think, and I say that as an uncle, not a parent.

So, we ask ourselves, what’s the use of a baby’s birth chart? I think, mostly, it’s a beautiful metaphor, an acknowledgement of the position from which you emerged into the world, an individual and central to your life, but not alone and certainly not without witness. Even if you feel ignored or neglected there is the Sun, there is the Moon, there is the horizon, and there are the stars, made of you and watching you.

Do you really want to be told what you want to be told?

My previously mentioned friend with the baby, Sara, wrote this week about a funny phenomenon that kind of bridges both of the prior “essayettes” in this email. In her blog, Holly Scrollers, she writes about the ways that religion and belief play out online, and this week she described a trend that has been unfolding on TikTok and, I assume, elsewhere. I haven’t seen it, being a recently converted luddite, but it’s unsurprising. Apparently, people have been going to ChatGPT to learn what is wrong about them, what’s right about them, and what they need to know to really get the most out of life. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT isn’t giving them the obvious answer which is: “get off the internet, go read a book”.

No, they’re getting a lot of generic and loosely customized drivel that tells them what they want to hear, flattering them into feeling special and heard, two things that not enough people seem to feel in a real and deep way these days.

This reflects some well-known principles of psychology that Sara describes in her piece, some of which can be seen in the world of astrology and its woo woo compatriots like Tarot, psychic readings, and past life regressions. For the record, I see these as pretty separate things, but I’m not one to pick an argument I’m guaranteed to lose. In our world, especially in the online part of it, all these things are ripe for intuitive grifters to set up businesses where they will do exactly what ChatGPT offers and tell you what you want to hear for the fair price of $200/hour.

What’s funny is that this is not rooted in the history of astrology or the history of the Enneagram at all. I’m doing very little research here today, so forgive me my lack of well cited sources, but in each of these traditions there is a precedent and an expectation for practitioners to prioritize the theory and the technique over what the client wants you to say. Granted, that’s never stopped a grifter from grifting, but there are grifters in every profession. Just look at the United States government.

In the case of the Enneagram, we know that even in its pre-numeric recent history, the teachers most associated with the system like Gurdjieff were certainly not catering to anyone’s egos (except maybe his own). While his methods were suspect to say the least (getting people drunk and insulting them until they had a breakthrough), he believed firmly that no progress could be made until you faced your own personal “idiot,” that is, your own personal pattern of error. Whatever lies you told yourself about your best intentions weren’t of interest to him and certainly had no business coming into a room where you were working with the Enneagram.

Astrologers on the other hand, that group that, today especially, are famous for vague horoscopes and supportive girlboss affirmations, were anything but flattering in the beginning of the tradition.

It’s true that there’s a temptation to edit whatever it is you’re seeing in a chart. I’d guess there’s not an astrologer in practice who hasn’t at one point or another hedged their language in response to their client’s reaction to the statement: “Yeah, no, I don’t see you with a new boyfriend in the next year.” But for those of us who are interested in working with the traditional techniques, its hammered home time and time again that there’s no benefit in lying about the chart. As early as the 9th Century BCE, astrologers were acknowledging that it was as important to understand the person for which they were reading and to be honest about who they were as it was to understand the theory of astrology.

In On the Revolutions of the Years of Nativities, Abu Ma’shar says: “And likewise if an astrologer had seen, in the revolution of the year of a dead man, the positions of the planets in a condition indicating various things of the good or bad, it would not be possible to judge a single thing of that for him, because a corpse will not take that on from their indications.” Essentially he’s saying that it doesn’t matter how much you say the chart says good or bad things, if the client is dead, that takes precedence. Maybe more interestingly, he also names class, gender, age, and other social factors as things that an astrologer needs to know about their client if they want to read well for them.

An astrologer who hews to vague statements that could apply to anyone and rejects the real complications that come with life is not doing you a service. The same goes for anyone (or anything) that just tells you what you want to hear. Yes, lots of astrologers will tell you what you want to hear, but that’s not inherent to astrology. It’s maybe even less inherent to astrologers than it is in the tradition of ChatGPT which has as much incentive to keep you online as any astrologer has to keep you coming back.

When you’re trying to figure out something about yourself, whether with the Enneagram, with astrology, in prayer, with a therapist, or with a machine on the Internet, it’s worth wondering: Do you really want to be told what you want to be told? Or do you want to be told what you need to hear?

Thanks for reading this slightly wonky collection of thoughts today. I imagine these might turn into longer blogs at some point, so if you really like or dislike anything I said today, let it be heard! I would love to improve my thoughts before I spend more time writing about these ideas and it’s so much easier to do that in conversation than alone.

Some things to read:

1. This short blog from the New Yorker about that mess from the Coldplay concert. In a lot of ways I find this viral moment not that interesting (yes, we are all being watched), but something about it does feel different from other public trials.

2. The newsletter that my friend Sara wrote that I mentioned above. Highly recommend subscribing.

3. Two poems that I enjoyed reading by Jim Cory, this one and this one.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.