Ichazo's Fifth Way, Taught in the Desert

Oscar Ichazo had studied and taught in Chile and Argentina through the 1960s, developing a system he presented as a synthesis of the world's major esoteric and psychological traditions rather than as an original invention of his own: elements drawn from Sufi practice, from the Fourth Way teaching of George Gurdjieff and P. D. Ouspensky, from Kabbalistic cosmology, from yoga and Buddhist meditation technique, and from Western psychology, organized around a small set of diagrams, chief among them the Enneagram, a nine pointed figure Ichazo used both as a map of cosmic and psychological structure and as a practical tool for diagnosing an individual's characteristic pattern of ego fixation.

In 1971 Ichazo brought a group of around fifty Americans, most of them already active in the American human potential and psychotherapy scene, to the town of Arica in northern Chile for an intensive residential training of some ten months by most accounts, though later publicity often compressed it to three. The training combined physical exercises, meditation, group process work and Ichazo's theoretical system into a single intensive program, and participants who returned to the United States afterward became the core of the Institute Ichazo went on to found and lead from New York.