Enneagram as a Fractal
Essential Wholeness offers here a unique perspective on the Enneagram. The Enneagram symbol is seen as a model of the underlying patterns that
connect our knowledge of psychology, biology, physics, mythology and spirituality. Unlike other theories that show the Enneagram in a static two-dimensional way, this Essential Wholeness 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. And I illuminate how, from this perspective, 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.
Chaos Theory
Chaos Theory can flesh out our understanding of the Self-Organization Cycle. In Chaos Theory strange attractors define processes that are stable, confined and yet never do the same thing twice, in other words, living or life-like systems. Computer generated fractal patterns are simulations of strange attractors generated from three non-linear equation solutions. Each solution curve generated by the equations tends to occur in a particular area (the attractor area), cycling around randomly, no set number of times, never crossing itself, staying in the same phase space, and displaying similarity at any scale.
Given these qualities, fractals are of the one the best models available to us as simulations of living systems. Fractals demonstrate clearly how attractors act on the system by collecting the responses systems make to internal and external events (trajectories of perturbation) within a pattern with boundaries. Attractors act as the determinants of patterns of self-organization. A gene is an example of an attractor that determines patterns of how an organism self-organizes. The social sciences recognize that certain ideas or beliefs serve as attractors around which society organizes, which are referred to as memes.
Attractors are themes the universe self-organizes itself around and within, in other words they are another name for Platonic forms or morphic fields. These themes operate the same the way jazz musicians begin with a particular chord progression combined with melody and rhythm. Once the groove is set, the musicians are then free, within inter-woven and overlapping musical patterns, to improvise upon those themes. Nations are organized within and around attractors defined by their unique environmental context, sets of ideals, principles, values, beliefs and capabilities to relate to one another and other things in the environment in a way that reflects a national and/or cultural identity. Individual human beings, as subsystems within the larger cultural or familial systems, are self-organized in the same way. Systems, regardless of their size, can organize themselves around attractors that naturally promote growth and evolution, or around attractors that simply lock a system into vicious cycles and entropy.
Attractors describe the long-term behavior of dynamically changing systems in biology and the depths of the human psyche as well as social and cultural institutions.[i] Ernest Rossi
To promote healthy systems it is helpful to understand the different types of attractors. Periodic regimes are characterized by fixed-point attractors, which at least for a while regulate a steady state or limited cycle of interaction within a larger system. Chaotic regimes (evolving systems) are characterized by strange attractors, which typically demonstrate a high dimension of complexity. Strange attractors are self-generative and are calculated by using the output of the initial step as the input for the following step. They also have a self-reflective quality in which patterns form on infinitely large and small scales.
Living and Nonliving Systems
The macrocosm reflects the microcosm; organizational patterns of family systems are similar to the organizational patterns of one-celled organisms, which have similarities to the organizational patterns of ecosystems. To maintain homeostasis, a system will organize itself for a period of time around a fixed-point attractor. The longer a system remains organized around a fixed-point attractor, the more it will resemble a nonliving system such as our solar system or a whirlpool. Whereas non-living systems will remain in stable patterns for relatively long periods of time with relatively little change, living systems are characterized by ongoing cycles of change punctuated by periods of relative stability. To be most alive and healthy, then, we need regular periods of stability punctuated with breakdowns in the stability that lead to breakthroughs into more evolved patterns of organization.
Evolution is the process by which a system develops within the basin of one attractor until it has more or less exhausted the creative range of possibilities of that region of perception and capability. The system having reached the peak of fitness at the boundary of that attractor spills over into a higher dimensional phase space — the basin of a higher-dimensional attractor. Ernest Rossi says, “a process that gives evolutionary significance
to the phrase out of the frying pan and into the fire!” When our level of frustration reaches breaking point and we must make a change, we must leap out of our realm of known possibilities into the chaotic fire of infinite possibilities, before finding a frying pan of higher dimension to accustom ourselves to.
Our lives are most likely to resemble a nonliving system when operating from ideas that tend to concretize our perceptions of life. When our lives are organized too long around a fixed-point attractor, symptoms will arise that make it increasingly difficult to continue to act in predictable ways. Rigid beliefs (fixed-point attractor) tend to nominalize the evolving processes of life into static objects. Our patterns of language reflect this when we speak of a relationship (concrete and static) instead of ways of relating. Rigid beliefs keep us locked into a world we think we know and blind us to the creative potential of the unknown.
We could say that an unhealthy self-concept (ego) is where a fixed-point attractor has enough gravity to overcome the influence of strange attractors (our soul’s agenda) then our lives become more similar to nonliving systems, repetitive and predictable. Thereby increasing the likelihood of psychological and physical disease, premature aging and even death.
Nine Phases of the Developmental Cycle
Drawing on these theories enables us to expand our understanding of the four phases of the self-organization cycle of approaching order, destabilization, approaching chaos, and re-organization, to nine:
- In homeostasis the system is operates in relative stability and approximates a non-living system.
- Perturbation of the homeostasis raises awareness of the limitations of the current level of organization (attractor basin).
- The system attempts to make the necessary adaptations by doing more or different combinations, of what it already is doing.
- The system climbs to the rim (fitness peak) of the basin of that particular attractor –– pushing the current mode of functioning to the limit.
- At this point it moves into the transitional phase –– between levels of organization –– in which the inadequacies of the system’s ability to relate become more apparent and boundaries begin breaking down, opening the system to creative potentials.
- Boundaries become increasingly diffuse, allowing a greater flow of information into the system and it sorts for what is vital for survival.
- The system maintains its integrity around essential structures or patterns, while others disintegrate and are eliminated.
- Balance shifts away from the previous level of organization towards chaos.
- On the boundary of order and chaos the system seeks out possible new attractors to organize itself around.
- New attractors are selected, organized and integrated with existing essential structures.
- The changes become consolidated into a new level of homeostatic functioning.
We can map these nine phases onto the Enneagram to help us understand how to help people mbrace the natural process of change. Problems set in (as we know from Enneagram of Personality) when people become overly identified with the qualities of their Personality Type to the exclusion of
the rest of the qualities that make us a whole person. Those qualities are useful at the associated phase of change, but if clung to inhibit our ability to move around the circle through all the phases of the developmental cycle.
[i] Rossi, Ernest edited by Rossi Kathryn Lane (1996) The Symptom Path to Enlightenment, The New Dynamics of Self-Organization in Hypnotherapy: An Advanced Manual for Beginners. Pacific Palisades, California: Palisades Gateway (p. 43)
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