Essential Wholeness Enneagram – an Integration
Astrophysicists tell us the universe has been expanding at an accelerating pace ever since the Big Bang. Biologists tell a long and convoluted story of the evolution of life in which humans finally enter the scene on the last page of the last chapter. Buddhists say that although our essential nature is eternal, our relative nature is impermanent. Change in modern society is faster than ever before and it is accelerating. Never before has it been so imperative for people to know how to ride the waves of change.
As a psychotherapist, I see my role as an agent of change, as much of human suffering comes from the inability to cope with change. My aim is to help those suffering to cope with change and proactively make the changes they are ready for. When I began teaching psychotherapy a little over twenty years ago, I sensed that in order for psychotherapists to be effective agents of transformation, it was vital to be able to describe how people change. Yet what were the steps those wanting help needed to take to achieve change, and how could we guide people through those steps?
Deeper dimensions of the Enneagram
My initial strategies included a four-phase model, but it became obvious it was inadequate; that is, until I went to a weekend seminar on a modality called the Enneagram. The teacher was giving a brief overview of the nine personality types, elaborating number by number around a circle, when I realized the essential qualities of each type were the qualities universally utilized in nine phases of a cycle of change.
Since humanity is a mere thread in the web of life, the validity of this pattern depends on it accurately describing not only how humans change, but all living systems. I had some background in living systems models from my training in family therapy and Systems Theory. However, these new insights led to more extensive research into the theories of evolutionary biology. In addition to the modern powerful scientific stories of evolution and development, it struck me that people have been telling stories of transformation since the advent of language.
Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and beyond
The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell collated many myths from cultures around the globe in his seminal work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I knew I was on to something big when the phases of personal transformation that he refers to as the Hero’s Journey had a direct correlation with how biologists describe the evolution of life from the most simple to the most complex organisms.
Essential Wholeness offers a unique perspective on the Enneagram. I present the Enneagram symbol as a model of the underlying patterns that connect our knowledge of psychology, biology, physics, mythology and spirituality. Unlike other books that show the Enneagram in a static two-dimensional way, this book will broaden your perspective into an expanding multidimensional model, much like a three-dimensional spiral. With the right mathematics, it might be represented as a fractal.
This new perspective starts with an explanation of my understanding of what it is to be a healthy, whole human being; a being with a full spectrum of resources to draw upon. It shows how our personal experiences are inextricably woven into the evolving web of life. I illuminate how the compulsions of personality, those areas where we get stuck in maladaptive patterns, occur simply when we aren’t embracing our essentially whole true nature.
Compulsions of Personality
The life of a psychologically healthy person can be seen as a journey down a river from the headwaters to the sea. Getting caught in the compulsions of a personality type is like being stuck in an eddy, even a whirlpool somewhere along the way. For whatever reasons, people get stuck in vicious cycles that keep them from the natural flow of growth and change.
I don’t spend much time describing the whirlpool-like compulsions of personality, covered eloquently in other books; rather, I describe the universal patterns of the river of life and provide strategies and guides for how to honor them more fully.
“Science without religion is lame,” said Albert Einstein. And then added, “Religion without science is blind.” This book draws together several major disciplines and articulates the nine developmental phases that all living systems go through. It draws on cutting-edge insights from evolutionary biology, as well as chaos, self-organization and living systems theories, whilst interweaving them with modern psychology and non-dualistic spirituality, such as Buddhism.
Ecological and Evolutionary Psychology
Like ecology in the natural world, which recognizes the value of diversity within a cooperative system, this new psychological paradigm helps us integrate the vast inner diversity of perspectives and motivations that make us human. We learn to appreciate not only the deep ecology of nature to which we belong, but also how the threads of understanding from various perspectives weave together in an evolving deep ecological tapestry of human consciousness. With the massive environmental challenges that face us, such as climate change and mass extinction of species, we can’t afford to ignore the inter-connected circular laws of cause and effect.
The cyclical model of the Enneagram described in this book helps us realize the environmental, sociological, psychological and spiritual ramifications of our decisions and actions. The clear guidelines can help people from many different walks of life learn how to live more harmoniously with one another, themselves, and all creatures.
Essential Wholeness explores human development from biological, psychological, sociological, narrative, mythological and spiritual perspectives and reveals the deep underlying patterns that connect these diverse disciplines. My approach draws on the method illuminated in the classic Indian fable of six blind men and an elephant. When each blind man is asked to describe a different part of the object they are near, they have only their sense of touch with which to paint a picture. As each describes accurately what they are feeling: a tree trunk, a rope, and so on, we gain a fuller understanding of the ’elephant’ from the composite picture. Similarly, as we describe the process of life and what it is to be human from these various perspectives, we can gain a fuller understanding of the process of being human.
To the untrained eye, computer generated pictures may look like one-dimensional images. However, when we focus on these images differently, they expand into three-dimensional landscapes. If we look at the Enneagram as a map of evolution, it allows us to see both the ecological niche of each personality type within humanity, as well as understanding our ego-identity and other aspects of our psyche within the wholeness of our Being.
The qualities that describe each of the personality types explained in the Enneagram are not just the domain of individual type, or the types that are related in some way, but together describe what it is to be a whole person. We will discover that it is through embracing our essential wholeness, that we embrace our holiness and more fully experience our oneness with all of creation.
Enneagram gaining acceptance
Currently the Enneagram has yet to be accepted by the academic establishment. However, there are some eminent scholars who have been integral to my understanding and fascination with the system. Professor David Daniels, MD Clinical Professor at Stanford Medical School, has spent much of his career studying and teaching it, and more recently Daniel Siegel the renowned Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA has been pressing for more research to be done on what millions of readers of the popular literature have been benefitting from since the 1960s. I hope this book can help bring the Enneagram more into the mainstream of psychology.
I am confident that after reading this book, you will gain a deeper trust in your essential wholeness and your natural inclination to evolve over time.
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