(-900 words; a ten-minute read)

Not ‘typing’ in the sense of my fingers tapping across this keyboard. Something else is conveyed, here: the idea that although we are each a unique example of walking, talking protoplasm, we exhibit patterns of behaviour that are so strong they can be ‘collected’ into groups – ‘types’.

Astrology is good example with which to explore the idea.

The notion that there is some ‘pattern and purpose’ to us as tiny beings living on a giant, partly-cooled volcano full of comet-donated life-giving water and rocks ground to soil over billions of years, and that this life is bound tightly to cycles that encompass behaviour as well as biology is a foreign one to science…

Its stance is that until it can understand the mathematical ‘nature’ of the mysterious vibrations that link us to the ‘stars’ (sun and planets), it will continue to pronounce it as nonsense…

Civilisation has a history of studying human behaviour for good reason. From saints to tyrants, it’s rather important that we comprehend the pattern of events exhibited by ‘types’ of people who might drastically affect our lives. We wouldn’t to hand a nuclear trigger to a child. Yet, I can think of a few world ‘leaders’ who have or are aspiring to that power, and have less emotional intelligence than your average nine year old.

We all know how a dictator behaves. We can chart the rise of his or her bullying and subsequent crushing of more gentle – and usually more intelligent, opponents. It begins and ends in violence, which is an obscene wound on the human soul. 

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke knew exactly what they were portraying when the triumphant giant ape held up the bloody bone – the ‘first weapon – in the groundbreaking film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’.

I went to see it nine times…

Thankfully, the public continues to believe in types and find them educational – as in popular astrology, which is oversimplified but continues to be looked on favourably. We like the suggestion that all Geminis are having a bad Monday; it reduces our isolation.

Most people don’t take astrology seriously, but in general it is considered fun and benign – leaving the professional astrologer as ‘wise counsel’ if something complex is happening in our lives. The key is that astrology on the fun level is not threatening, whereas other tools, such as psychological profiling, can be so, especially if their use is linked to our employment, as often occurs with tools like the Myer-Briggs ‘test’. The latter, and its derivatives, is often employed for the recruitment of key executives to deliver a reliable profile of who we are beyond any clever interviewing skills we may possess.

I vividly remember taking several such tests in my professional career, they were not relaxing events; and there’s food for thought in that, alone. How are we to truly measure a person’s suitability to ‘fit in’ (to a key team in a business organisation, for example) without seeing them at play? True, major corporates will have sophisticated ‘selection boards’ whose process includes social profiling as well as professional considerations, but these are expensive and only operate at the ‘top of the market’.

Typing may seem to be a modern concern, but if we extend our definition of it, we will find a very familiar example that has been with with us for nearly two thousand years.

When what was left of the Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the fourth century CE, the much more ‘mystical’ sects of the Christian Gnostics were persecuted and eventually driven out. Fleeing, some of them came to settle in the deserts of Northern Egypt in an ascetic monastic culture that we know, today, as the Desert Fathers. 

The word Gnostic is derived from ‘gnosis’, a Greek word that means a higher form of knowing. To ‘gnow’ is to literally be at one with what is being contemplated. Truth is felt, not reasoned towards. The heart, which knows truth, becomes the organ of knowing. The gnostics practiced this, experiencing Christ as the ‘Christos’ or living presence within themselves. Their role was to perfect this presence as a lived and felt reality. In the form of the Desert Fathers, they devoted themselves to identifying the barriers to this inner love, a sentiment that exactly mirrors the famous Sufi mystic, Rumi.

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.“Rumi

The leader of the Desert Fathers was Evagrius Ponticus, referred to as a saintly man and teacher. His crowning work was to identify and categorise the behaviours that stand in the way of such inner harmony and union.

He described these behaviours as ‘eight evil thoughts’. They were gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory and pride. 

Evagrius wasn’t writing for a general audience; he was instructing monks whose daily life was what we would now call ‘deep meditation’. 

We have lost the context of ‘evil’ as used then. He was having a practical discussion with those dwelling in the inner realms of their consciousness about technique. These eight – whose exact number and nature has changed little over the centuries – became, under Pope Gregory in the sixty century, the Seven Deadly Sins.

And the typical modern reaction to that shows how far we have drifted from its initial intentions.

Really, these ‘evil thoughts’ were the known world’s first classification of psycho-spiritual types, and were, much later, to profoundly influence the journey of spiritual psychology into its modern and far-reaching forms.

In the next post, Part 5, we will examine how these ‘deadly sins’ actually describe the psychological kernel of a typing system that describes the modern spiritual journey; and look at how a miracle of discovery in the desert brought us a lost Gospel directly influenced by the mystical monks of that era.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” C.G. Jung

To be continued in Part 4.

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Other parts of this series:

This is Part Three

Part One

Part Two

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©Stephen Tanham 2024

Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer, mystical teacher and Director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.