Essential Wholeness Perspective on the Enneagram
The anxieties, frustrations, insecurities, resentments or even the simple discontent that drives most people’s lives, are caused by the separation from our essential nature that occurs by the holding onto a solid, permanent sense of self.
This sense of an isolated me is created and maintained by beliefs that create perceptions that leave me feeling incomplete and the world, not as it should be. There seems to be a separation from one’s essential wholeness and the rest of reality. To cope with this sense of incompleteness, we identify with a particular set of internal and external conditions. For example, if I am a confident successful businessman and happily married husband, then as long as business is good and the marriage appears good enough, then everything seems okay. However, seeing myself as confident and successful can have the tendency to blind me to my weaknesses and failings. The same occurs in my marriage, so in order to maintain a fixed notion of myself as a happily married husband, I need to ignore any signs of unhappiness in my marriage. Having to hold onto and try to validate a positive self-concept is only necessary if we have a negative self-concept. When resting in the ground of being, there is an unconditional acceptance of the way things are. There is no need to define oneself in a static way, rather we are free to respond to life in whatever way is most useful. With no self-concept we are free. Negative concepts of one’s self appear to be part of living in a world that believes that love and happiness are things that are earned rather than what we are.
Developing a self-concept is a normal part of human development. As children we are taught that we should know who we are. Given that most people are acting like they know who they are, we seek to define ourselves in specific ways. However, when we look within to find ourselves, there is nothing permanent there. In the backdrop of ever-changing thoughts and images is the silent emptiness of being. To a mind looking for some permanent sense of self, this emptiness is frightening and becomes the basis of thinking “I’m nothing and nobody”. Within the frame of mind that I have to earn love and happiness, the sense of nothingness is interpreted as not being deserving of love and happiness. This drives me to try and create a self-image that I think is deserving of love and happiness.
As Dan Siegel says, “People do have neural propensities––called temperament––that may be somewhat but not fully changeable.”[i] He goes onto to say, “No system of adult personality description that exists (except the Enneagram popular version) has an internally focused organization––that is, a view of how the internal architecture of mental functioning, not just behavior, is organized across developmental periods.”[ii] Let’s look at some ways this architecture is organized in the Enneagram of personality types.
It describes nine basic ways (temperaments) people try to create and hold onto a sense of self that is deserving of love and happiness; this starts early in childhood.
Type ONEs try to prove what perfect and responsible people they are.
Type TWOs try to prove what indispensible and caring people they are.
Type THREEs try to prove what capable and charming people they are.
Type FOURs try to prove what unique and deep feeling people they are.
Type FIVEs try to prove what intelligent and self-sufficient people they are.
Type SIXes try to prove what loyal and nonthreatening people they are.
Type SEVENs try to prove what happy and positive people they are.
Type EIGHTs try to prove what powerful and masterful people they are.
Type NINEs try to prove what peaceful and selfless people they are.
Essential Qualities of Being
People only need to prove themselves when they lose touch with their essential wholeness. The ground of our essential wholeness is what Buddhism refers to as emptiness. The emptiness of being is not nothing; it is just not a thing. All things come and go and being is the ground within which all objects of perception, including states of mind, come and go. It only seems like nothingness when our consciousness has separated itself from it and is trapped in the conceptual mind, emotional states or fixated on the objects of our senses. That emptiness is actually fullness of being, which is essentially loving and wise.
Tibetan Buddhist art visually represent the qualities of being with the array of Buddha and other deity images, whether they are peaceful, wrathful or compassionate. In Buddhist terms, Buddha is another name for our true nature. The arrays of Buddhist deities are symbolic representations of how our true nature can manifest. Many meditations in the various Buddhist traditions involve visualizing the deity and either receiving blessing of these qualities or becoming the deity for a period of time. However, in the completion phase, the meditator and the visualization all dissolve into the infinite emptiness that contains everything.
The Enneagram figure can also be thought of as a representation of the way things are. The circle represents wholeness and it is essentially empty or can be called clear light. The wholeness is then divided into nine aspects. If the whole of being is clear light, then, when form manifests out of emptiness, it can be seen in nine different hues. This is similar to white light being divided up along a continuum into seven colors after passing through a prism.
In his book Pearl Beyond Price, an integration of spirituality and psychotherapy, A.H. Almaas[iii] delineates nine essential qualities of being: Consciousness, Compassion, Strength, Forgiveness, Space, Acceptance, Joy, Will, and Peace. These qualities are merely different faces of love and what are sometimes referred to as qualities of soul. Although not spoken about anywhere in the Enneagram literature, these qualities correlate with the Enneagram personality types. Each type favors and overly identifies with an idea of the essential quality, which separates them from the actual experience of the wholeness and emptiness of being. Only our ego, with its concepts of itself as separate from the wholeness of being needs to search for, or grasp at that which we are imagining ourselves separate from.
People with type ONE personality identify with consciousness. To prove they are conscious, this type develops a super ego that is overly self-conscious and critical; trying too hard to do things right and, in that effort, losing touch with the wholeness that can do things more effortlessly in flow.
People with type TWO personality identify with compassion. To prove they are compassionate, Type TWO people take pride in thinking they know what others need better than others know for themselves. They lose touch with the oneness that connects us all.
People with type THREE personality identify with strength. To prove they are strong they constantly try to achieve things that exhibit their strengths, not recognizing that the unconditional strength of being needs no proving.
People with type FOUR personality identify with forgiveness. Instead of being forgiving, they attempt to prove they are forgivable by reliving past wounding and so justifying why their inadequacies should be forgiven. Being is eternal and unchanging and cannot be hurt. True forgiveness is the realization that there is nothing to forgive.
People with type FIVE personality identify with space or wisdom. To prove how wise they are and to protect their personal space, they withdraw physically and emotionally from life and study it from a distance. The space-like nature of consciousness is inherently wise because it contains everything and we are spontaneously guided when fully immersed in the moment.
People with type SIX personality identify with acceptance. To try and prove they are acceptable they attempt to guess what is expected of them. They either conform, in search of approval, or rebel against, to prove they don’t need approval. Unconditional acceptance needs no approval and recognition from others.
People with type SEVEN personality identify with joy. To prove they are joyful they constantly seek out enjoyable experiences, not realizing that the looking can never really make them completely happy. Essential joy loves everything and doesn’t get lost in seeking.
People with type EIGHT personality identify with will. To prove the power of their will, they try to shape their world to meet their desires. Essential will, which is that worth striving for, is the willingness to surrender one’s personal agenda to serve love and live in harmony.
People with type NINE personality identify with peace. To prove they are peaceful, they compromise their own preferences to keep a façade of peace at any price to maintain the status quo. Essential peace accepts the diverse and ever-changing nature of creation —things must die or be destroyed, so what is new can emerge.
The Illusion of a Separate Self
The attempt at maintaining a permanent sense of self is empty of substance, and is merely a habitual pattern of thinking, feeling and acting in predictable ways. It exists only in our mind. It is in a sense a hallucination or a dreamlike trance. The problem is there is an ever-changing reality of our own body–mind and the world around us and this dreamed up sense of self is living in a separate reality from what is actually happening. This separation is described in Buddhism as a type of affliction. There are three afflictions that perpetuate this separation and cause suffering: ignorance, attachment and aversion.
Ignorance is another way of describing the failure to recognize things as they are. We are ignorant because we ignore reality. We ignore reality in favor of believing in myths. The myths are encoded in trance-like internal processes. It is the way we maintain our subjective reality. These myths are the maps we follow hoping to find happiness and protect us from misery. We believe that if we can hold onto the things that bring us pleasure and we can avoid those things that bring us pain, we will be happy.
Difficulty arises, however, when pleasurable and painful things come and go whether we want them to or not. Trying to be the kind of person that can keep the good, while avoiding the bad requires that we ignore the truth of how things actually are. So instead of managing the pleasurable and painful things of life skilfully, we resist letting go of the pleasure and indulge or addict ourselves to those things. At the same time we avoid painful things, which invariably mean they build up and become unmanageable.
The myth of a separate self starts with judgments of what is good and bad. This leads to feelings of anger about what is judged bad in the world or guilt about what is judged bad in us. If we believe anger is bad we end up feeling guilty about that too. With guilt there is a sense of indebtedness, usually towards our parents and we begin trying to earn love and happiness. Because whatever we do seems never good enough to be loved by our parents, we might try and create an image of what we think will be loved. Because we inherently know we are presenting a false front, we feel inadequate and try to find something in our story, or the way we present it, that makes it seem more unique and authentic.
Because separation and feeling inadequate is so painful, we dissociate from it and create beliefs and concepts to explain different aspects of ourselves that allows us to compartmentalize them. In the attempt to find some sense of certainty we begin following a set of rules based on our beliefs and assumptions. Disconnected from direct experience, we feel uncertain and begin looking for others to validate our beliefs. Then, based on those assumptions we seek for what we think will make us happy and avoid what we think will make us unhappy. This endless seeking and avoiding leaves us feeling empty, so we become more determined to get and protect what we desire, and defend against whatever threatens our fragile veneer of happiness. To whatever degree we succeed, we do our best to identify with what we have been able to manifest and dis-identify with whatever we have been able to avoid. At this point we have become asleep to our true nature and tend to go into an automatic set of routines that minimize our chances of noticing how false, empty and meaningless our lives have become. We fall asleep; into the dream of who we think we are within a world that we are convinced is predictable and under our control.
Coincidently, people with the different Enneagram personality types tend to identify more strongly with the associated steps leading into this sense of a solid separate self, unconscious of its true nature.
People with type ONE personality identify with judging that leads to feeling anger or guilt.
People with type TWO personality identify with feeling guilty and the sense of indebtedness that leads to trying to earn love and happiness.
People with type THREE personality identify with “never good enough” and the self-created image of what they think will be admired and loved.
People with type FOUR personality identify with feeling inauthentic and inadequate and so try to present themselves in a more unique and authentic manner.
People with type FIVE personality identify with dissociation from whatever might cause pain and the beliefs and concepts that keep their experience of life compartmentalized.
People with type SIX personality identify with seeking a sense of certainty by following a set of rules and looking for others to validate their beliefs.
People with type SEVEN personality identify with seeking for what they think will make them happy and avoiding what they perceive will make them unhappy.
People with type EIGHT personality identify with being determined to get and protect what they desire to possess, which defines them.
People with type NINE personalities identify with the automatic routines that minimize their awareness of how empty and meaningless their lives are and the false sense of security with thinking life is predictable and under their control.
[i] Siegel, Daniel J., (2010) The Mindful Therapist, A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration, W. W. Norton & Co, New York kindle (p. 286)
[ii] Siegel, Daniel J., (2010) The Mindful Therapist, A Clinician’s Guide to Mindsight and Neural Integration, New York: W. W. Norton & Co kindle (pp. 271 -72)
[iii] Almaas, A.H., (1990) A Pearl Beyond Price, Integration of personality into Being: an Object Relations Approach, Berkeley, Diamond Books
[iv] Schucman, Helen, (1985) A Course in Miracles, New York: Viking, Foundation for Inner Peace (p. 54)
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“A ground-breaking book based on the enneagram. After 40 years of work with the Enneagram system of personality types I am always happy to see new books arriving. But I don’t necessarily find much new material in them. This book goes way beyond the personality types to talk about human development in a holistic sense. Maybe not for everyone, but I found it wonderfully interesting and also challenging (which I like). It’s full of connections to many knowledge traditions while showing how we can all move around the Enneagram, whatever our personality type, using it as a map of change and development. Enneagram charts of the developmental tasks and the hero’s journey lay it out clearly. Although I am a fan of the Gurdjieff work and literature I find Eric’s book to be a significant further contribution (and more accessible) to this area. He demonstrates that yes, the Enneagram diagram can hold and organize knowledge in a powerful way.” Peter O’Hanrahan, a core faculty member along with Helen Palmer of The Narrative Enneagram Tradition
