Arica School

The Arica School, also known as the Arica Institute (which is its incorporated educational organization) or simply as Arica, is a human potential movement group founded in 1968 by Bolivian-born philosopher Oscar Ichazo (born 1931). The school is named after the city of Arica, Chile, where Ichazo once lived and where he led an intensive months-long training in 1970 and 1971 before settling in the United States where the Arica Institute (incorporated in 1971) has since been headquartered.

The Arica School can be considered, as Ramparts magazine put it in 1973, "A body of techniques for cosmic consciousness-raising and an ideology to relate to the world in an awakened way."

The Arica School's origins began in 1956 when groups of people formed in major cities in South America to study the theory and method that Ichazo was proposing. For fourteen years these different groups studied his teachings. In 1968 Ichazo presented lectures on his theories of Protoanalysis and the ego-fixations at the Institute of Applied Psychology in Santiago, Chile.

Ichazo's theories are based upon such traditional metaphysical questions such as: "What is humankind?"; "What is the supreme good of humanity?"; and "What is the truth that gives meaning and value to human life?"

Ichazo refined the ancient concept that a human soul has components by approaching the issue through three instinctual questions that he considered basic to human existence: "How am I?", "Who am I with?", "What am I doing?" Ichazo labeled these conservation, relations, and syntony (later modified to adaptation). Recognizing interactions among the three, he developed a 3 x 3 = 9 component system, which he correlated with several schemas that have long existed in diverse fields: spectrum of light, chakras, physiological systems, the enneagram, etc.

For example, each component of the psyche was assigned a corresponding color, which was reinforced through a wide variety of self-development exercises. The Hypergnostic meditation utilized the ancient notion of vertically arranged chakras, expanding the seven chakra system widely used in Hindu meditation into nine by adding the sacrum and the nape of the neck. Modern biology was incorporated into the theory by associating the hypergnostic rings (chakras) with anatomy rather than energy centers.

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