Be lazy like a mountain
by Eric Lyleson, author of Essential Wholeness, Integral Psychotherapy, Spiritual Awakening and the Enneagram
Understanding the Enneagram of Essential Wholeness will not help us achieve awakening or enlightenment. Instead it will helps us see how we unconsciously unenlighten ourselves through the maintenance of our ego fixations that obscure our enlightened nature.
The Enneagram is commonly used to describe a system of nine personality types. From an Essential Wholeness perspective the Enneagram firstly describes what it is to be a whole human and spiritual being. Secondly it describes how different personality types tend lose touch with their true nature and get overly identified and fixated on one-ninth of their wholeness. In doing so, people get stuck in repeating patterns of thinking, feeling, perceiving and acting that perpetuate their own suffering and mistakenly define who they think they are.
The compulsions of our Enneagram type ego fixation are like addictions. And like freeing ourselves from addictions, it’s really about what we don’t do rather than what we do. When helping people give up cigarettes I like to suggest that they take the lazy person’s approach.
- Be too lazy to go the shop where they sell cigarettes.
- If you are at the shop, be too lazy to ask the cashier for cigarettes.
- Be too lazy to spend your hard earned money.
- If you happen to buy a pack, be too lazy to open the pack.
- If you open the pack be too lazy to take one out and too lazy to light it.
- If you light one up be too lazy to draw on it and too lazy to inhale.
- Be too lazy to have deal with ashtrays and stinky clothes.
When it comes to the Enneagram ego fixations that keep us unenlightened:
- Be too lazy to judge yourself and others and give up on trying to make things perfect.
- Be too lazy to try to prove how worthy you are by giving others what you think they want.
- Be too lazy to seek status and recognition through activity and achievement
- Be too lazy to replay scenarios in your mind that leave you feeling your familiar misery that makes you feel special.
- Be too lazy to try to figure everything out cognitively before you engage in life.
- Be too lazy to analyze everything that could go wrong by running worse case scenarios in your mind that scare you.
- Be too lazy to rush from one idea or experience to another looking for happiness.
- Be too lazy try to control everything in order to get things to go your way.
- Be too lazy to suppress your preferences and emotions in order to avoid conflict and discomfort.
Instead of trying so hard trying to be the person we are trying to be, just relax and let ourselves be what we are. Only do what comes naturally to our good heart, inner peace and common sense.
The difficulty with even the lazy approach to giving up addictions and fixations is dealing withdrawal symptoms and whatever we have neglected or harmed in the process, and the temptation to pick up the bad habit again. When the smoker stops he becomes aware of:
- The damage to his lungs and general health
- The emotions and needs he is no longer suppressing
- Needing to find other ways to take a break
- In other words everything needed for healing and growth as a human being
When Buddha sat down under the Bodhi Tree to find freedom from his ego fixations what he encountered were his withdrawal symptoms and temptations. However what his experience shows us is to take the lazy approach to dealing with the torment that tries to drag us back into the fixation––do nothing. Like Buddha we can touch the earth as a reminder of what is real and what are the illusions of an addicted unenlightened mindset. While doing nothing it can feel like we are burning up inside. Take the lazy approach to burning up inside. Let it happen. It is the process of our mistaken identity’s habits of mind, body, emotion and perception disintegrating and it needs no help from us other than letting it happen.
As we refrain from unenlightening ourselves over time, like Buddha we are increasingly left with our common sense, good heart, and inner peace that help us to live wisely with purpose and in harmony with our deepest nature.
