New Insights into Enneagram Personality Types –
Your personality is shaped by your relationship with the essential qualities of peace, consciousness, compassion, strength, forgiveness, space, acceptance, joy and will.
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.
Enneagram as a map of the fabric of reality
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[i] 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.
Personality types tend to over-identify with an Essential Quality
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.
[i] Almaas, A.H., (1990) A Pearl Beyond Price, Integration of personality into Being: an Object Relations Approach, Berkeley, Diamond Books
Excerpt from: Essential Wholeness, Integral Psychotherapy, Spiritual Awakening and the Enneagram, by Eric Lyleson Click for more information about the book and links for purchase.
Are you a therapist or coach? Click here for information regarding in Essential Wholeness Therapy and Coaching Workshops
