The Essential Qualities of Being are the ways the soul enlightens our day-to-day challenges and the opportunities to realize our essential wholeness; and the underlying science of the Enneagram confirms this.
Something traveling at light speed through space will have no speed left for motion through time. Thus light does not get old; a photon that emerged from the big bang is the same age today as it was then. There is no passage of time at light speed.[i] Brian Green
Timeless Light
Have you ever noticed that when you open your eyes in the morning, the consciousness that looks out through your eyes never changes? When some of us look in the mirror, we’re shocked to see someone that looks more like our mother or father than the person we sense ourselves to be. But no matter what we see reflected there is a sense of being that supersedes our physicality.
When describing being or true nature, Buddhists sometimes referred to it as timeless light or luminescent spaciousness. This idea of our selves as light is not uncommon. Often, people’s presence is described as radiant, or bright; we say, she was absolutely beaming, he is glowing, she has an aura of kindness, he is very clear, and she has a luminescent presence. We use light as the metaphor when we are talking about essential qualities of being: he has a peaceful glow, it’s an illuminating state of consciousness, her eyes sparkle with joy, she’s blessed by the light of forgiveness, she has an aura of acceptance. Also, we call people who excel stars.
The references to light to go hand-in-hand with the way we describe hearing something true: that was very enlightening, I feel clearer about that, that’s illuminating, it was a brilliant insight, the truth came shining through, the truth was brought to light.
Similarly, when we hear the terms: dull, dark mood, gloomy, in the dark, dim-witted, has a dark cloud hanging over her, shady character, murky past, foggy headed and the future looks bleak, we identify this with various states of psychological unwellness. When trapped in suffering we are out of touch with the light of being and overly preoccupied with the gross physical level of existence.
Overly Identified with Instincts
People tend to get overly preoccupied with any one of the three basic instincts of: self-preservation (survival of the body), social (survival of the group) and sexual (survival of the gene pool). Out of touch with their essential peaceful loving nature they go searching for fulfillment in temporary fixes that because it is not what we really need, leave us always needing more. When this happens simple survival needs get exaggerated with people needing too much food and material stuff, sacrificing too much of their time and individuality to belong and being preoccupied with sex, romance and altered states. In other words all the ways people get addicted or give the power away trying to find happiness and safety. These addictions are fed by and maintained by what the Enneagram literature refers to as the vices: anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust and sloth. Which are all versions or manifestations of what Buddhism calls the Three Poisons — ignorance, attachment and aversion.
At the purely physical level our consciousness is preoccupied with survival; not just survival of body, community and gene pool, but also survival of egoic identity and our attachment, aversion and ignorance in the way we relate to the three instincts. People can get so identified with their ego and their attachments that it can even override their need to survive physically. At the extreme end of this reaction, some people choose suicide — it may be as a response to losing their standing in the community, losing their security or money or being rejected by their sexual partner. These processes of getting caught in cycles of suffering are what the Enneagram describes as compulsions of personality.
Spiritual Impulse
In addition to the three mammalian instinctual drives, people are also motivated by what could called the spiritual impulse, what Buddhism would describe as the impulse towards enlightenment or what Adyashanti refers to as “existence becoming conscious of itself through the human experience”. This impulse towards a more soulful life, the spiritual impulse, is the movement towards what is unborn, unchanging undying –– the clear light of being. For those who can be completely absorbed in this comes the ability, like many spiritual leaders can, to sit in a cave like Ramana Maharshi or Milarepa for years with almost no concern for their human life. Shaktamuni Buddha had this impulse, but then was moved by compassion to return home and to teach what he had learned.
Soul’s Awakening
It is the work of the soul to bring spirit to our human life and bring our human life to spirit. At the level of soul we are not just interested in survival, in fact we may be willing to sacrifice our life for a greater cause. At the level of soul we are interested in the quality of life. Soul is interested in making life beautiful, joyous, loving and meaningful. Soul wants to make love, not just have sex. Soul wants to play, dance, create art, tell stories, joke around, laugh and sing. Soul needs vehicles like ceremony, ritual, trance and psychotherapy to find expression and create a sense of sacredness and be irreverent. Soul speaks through the imagination; it is expressed through intuitive phenomena like gut feelings, and creativity. In bringing spirit to the physical world we co-create the world and bring the unconditional love of our spirit into life.
Essential Qualities
When we shift our awareness from the gross realm of the survival of the body, community and gene pool to the subtle and causal realms we begin to experience the essential qualities of our light-like nature. The more soulful our engagement in life, the more fully the essential qualities of consciousness, compassion, strength, forgiveness, spaciousness, acceptance, joy, will and peace inform our experience.
Congruency
With those qualities in evidence, we begin living as the Sufi master recommends: “Be in the world, but not of it.” It’s what can be thought of as spirit realizing itself as a soul in human form. We realize our essential wholeness when there is congruency within the human, soul and spiritual spectrums of experience; coinciding with an ecological balance in the way the spectrum of essential qualities informs our lives.
Differentiation
The circle of the Enneagram represents the unified field of creation and like white light –– when filtered through a prism separates into the colors of the rainbow –– can be divided into its essential qualities. Each segment on the continuum around the circle represents an essential quality. These qualities are essential for a soulful life and, like a light shining through a stained-glass window; they bring beauty and meaning to the undifferentiated white light shining into the lives of humans.
Neuroscience
The interconnectedness of these essential qualities forms an ecosystem of human consciousness and informs the way we relate to our emerging experience. Neuroscientist Francisco Varela describes mental states as transitory and have a feeling tone that colors the experience. Each cognitive experience is a unified, transient and yet coherent ensemble of oscillating neurons related to sensory perception, emotions, memory, bodily movements, etcetera. “According to Varela, the primary conscious experience, common to all higher vertebrates, is not located in a specific part of the brain, nor can it be identified in terms of specific neural structures. It is the manifestation of a particular cognitive process –– a transient synchronization of diverse, rhythmically oscillating neural circuits.” [i]
The Enneagram provides us with a visual representation of the ‘diverse oscillating neural circuits’ upon which we can map our cognitive processes. Each number represents the frequency band of the specific neural circuitry our consciousness is attuning itself to at any given time. All our learning to survive and thrive is an interplay between our humanness struggling to learn from experience at the gross level (selection) and essential qualities at the subtle level (self-organization) informing how we learn to realize emergent capabilities.
The frequency bands of essential qualities blend from one to the other just as in a rainbow there is a continuum of color in which each color blends into the next. Consciousness blends into compassion, which blends into strength and so on. So as the full spectrum of colors reflected by the vast diversity of creation enables us to visually experience the world, so the full spectrum of essential qualities brings richness to how we experience day-to-day existence.
Unconditional, but Conditions Call them Forth
Our essential qualities are not transient, however our awareness of them is. Just as red light is always present within white light, but is only reflected by particular objects. Essential qualities are not dependent on conditions, but conditions call them forth. Forgiveness, an essential quality, is not, for example, dependent on conditions of our life going a particular way, however difficult life experiences that lead us to feeling resentful call forth the need for forgiveness. Connecting or reconnecting to essential qualities brings us back to our essential wholeness when our gross humanness has become dissociated from the white light of our spiritual nature.
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[i] Capra, Fritjof (1996) The Web of Life, A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: HarperCollins (p.261)
[i] Green, Brian, (1999) The Elegant Universe, Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage Books (p.50–51)
Excerpt from: Essential Wholeness, Integral Psychotherapy, Spiritual Awakening and the Enneagram, by Eric Lyleson CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION OR LINKS TO PURCHASE BOOK
