Point Reyes Light - August 19, 1999
Spiritual for-profit group buys building in Bolinas
Several members of a group who preach that a geometric pattern of personality types, the Enneagram, can lead to self-awareness, have begun buying and renting property in Bolinas.
They are "students" of the Leela Foundation, which teaches that a nine-pointed Enneagram can help show the way to "awareness."
The for-profit foundation was started two years ago by Eli Jaxon-Bear of Stinson Beach.
"By giving us a detailed map of our character, as well as specific paths towards enlightenment and transcendence for each of the character types, the Enneagram of 'character fixation' gives us an invaluable gift for self-work," claims Jaxon-Bear.
Even before Leela student started moving into Bolinas and setting up offices this year, Jaxon-Bear had begun holding "Leela Saturdays," consisting of "meditation and direct personal contact," in Stinson Beach. The cost of the two-hour sessions is $50.
Jaxon-Bear was born with the name Norman Brown, and in his writings says he changed his name in 1973 during a "Mescalero Apache" ceremony.
Leela publicity encourages students of the Enneagram to become increasingly involved in the foundation, although this comes at the cost of time and money. In striving for "open awareness" students pay for a series of ever-longer retreats which, says Leela publicity, are held "all over the world" from West Marin to Spain and Germany.
A five-day retreat for beginners held last month at the Marconi Conference Center in Marshall cost $1,355 food and lodging included.
In Bolinas, however, the Leela Foundation is best known for having rented the "Waterhouse Building" at 24 Brighton Ave. The former Bolinas Hardware Store site has now been remodeled into five offices, a reception area, and a kitchenette.
In the offices, three paid employees and a number of volunteer writers and other trainees publish and sell spiritual books, as well as organize retreats.
Elsewhere downtown, Ken Plumlee, executive director of the Leela Foundation, earlier this year bought the little purple house at 15 Wharf Rd. for $305,000 and began remodeling it. Other Leela employees have found rental space on the Big Mesa.
As Newsweek noted in 1994, the concept of Enneagrams had been "lurking on the fringes of mysticism and pop psychology for more than 20 years," but it began to achieve a degree of respectability in the mid-1990s when government and academics showed an interest in it.
In a 1987 manuscript called Healing the Heart of Suffering, Jaxon-Bear wrote that the Enneagram is a valuable tool to understanding human nature. "Once this system is learned," he claimed, "other systems as diverse as astrology and Freudian psychology begin to make more sense."
The origins of the Enneagram are disputed, but in any case the symbol was popularized in Europe by the Greek-Armenian theologian Georges Gurdjieff (1877-1949).
Jaxon-Bear, who was born and raised in New York, told The Light he spent much of the 1960s and 70s working in the civil-rights and anti-war movements and was living in Berkeley when met his second wife, Toni Varmar, who later changed her name to Gangaji.
In April 1976, Jaxon-Bear moved to Bolinas to be with Gangaji, and the couple began teaching classes on Taoism in the Bolinas Community Center. They later moved the classes to a home they rented in Bolinas. There they incorporated Tai Chi, Taoist stretching, calligraphy, and painting into their teaching.
It was hardly a conventional classroom, however. "You had to walk through my marijuana patch to get to it," Jaxon-Bear recalled last month.
The couple subsequently moved to Mill Valley, and Jaxon-Bear said he began looking into clinical hypnosis and neural linguists while Gangaji studied acupuncture. The couple then opened a practice in Sacramento.
Although they had become successful by the end of the 1980s, said Jaxon-Bear, the couple sold their house, and "following my heart, I went to India to find my teacher."
It was then, Jaxon-Bear said, that he met his guru HWL Poonja, or Papaji. After three days with Papaji, they agreed to "go to the Ganges River together."
Jaxon-Bear then returned to California to bring back Varmar. "When I brought Toni to [Papaji], he called her Gangaji," and she has been called Gangaji ever since.
As it happened, an heiress to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune became interested in meetings in which Gangaji addresses groups and leads discussions. As a result, the "31 Flavors" beneficiary established the nonprofit Satsang Foundation and Press in Boulder, Colorado.
The Satsang Foundation was later moved to Novato and re-christened the Gangaji Foundation.
Although the foundation's first projects involved book publishing and organizing retreats, the group has begun working with other spiritual groups in helping prison inmates improve themselves through meditation and discussion of disseminated reading materials.