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The issues of negativity, reactivity, hatred, and particularly the devil-like structures we are discussing here, are often neglected in spiritual paths that involve an emphasis on love.
As the ego develops, a self-image associated with a sense of identity takes shape. This sense of self forms relative to, and in conjunction with, your internalized images of your parents—of the most important people in your life—and your image of the world. You know yourself and the world around you through your internal representations.
Your unconscious image of God determines how you relate to the intelligence of the universe, that which is beyond you as an individual and beyond your parents as individuals.
To have a correct relationship with what actually exists, with the Intelligence beyond all appearance, you have to rend the veils that obscure your vision of it. One of these veils is your projected images, and the primary one is your unconscious God representation.
Your relationship with God is particularly affected by your relationship with your parents, since in the beginning they were gods to you in the sense that they took total care of your life.
Many people, especially those who come into the Work, have experiences as children that they later understand were direct experiences of God. These experiences, for the most part, do not affect our beliefs about the intelligence we call God, nor does what our rational, conscious mind tells us about Him. It is the concept about Him that we hold in our unconscious and deeply believe in emotionally, that we project onto the objective, universal force that exists.
The world, ourselves, and God are not different things, but they become separated out from each other in our minds as we grow and develop.
In a predominantly Christian culture like ours, one of the main divisions is the separation of God from the world. There is the kingdom of heaven and there is the earth. There is the spiritual and there is the physical. So when we embark on a spiritual path, we unconsciously believe that we are setting out for heaven.
This split in which heaven and earth are two different things is not the fault of Western culture but rather, a reflection of a characteristic of the development of ego itself: its loss of contact with reality. As we develop, the environment inevitably fails to hold us completely.
If we see the whole spectrum of what exists, we see things as they are; but if part of our vision is blocked, if we have this blindness, we see only one part of what is but assume that what we see is all that there is. So when we are essence-blind, the world is only physical to us, and we assume that if there is a spiritual reality, it is somewhere else. This belief is supported by our God representation since, with rare exceptions, God is seen as separate from the world. This is one of the things that disturbs our basic trust and in some sense destroys it: How can you have basic trust when
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In actuality, your image of yourself is closely related to your image of the world, since they form out of your experience of yourself in your early childhood environment.
This is related to the well-known psychological phenomenon of transference, in which we project images of people from our early childhood onto people in our present lives. We unconsciously see this person as mother and that person as father, with the corresponding image of ourselves in relation to them, recreating these early relationships.
Because of our essential blindness, our world representation is almost inevitably that of a world devoid of depth, devoid of consciousness, devoid of presence, devoid of God, devoid of truth. It is an empty shell, a projection of mother’s empty breast.
It is the perception that the intrinsic nature of everything is a loving, conscious quality, whether we’re talking about physical objects, human beings, actions of a human being, or physical phenomena. All are seen as manifestations of that loving, conscious presence. If we really see this, we are already in heaven. Wherever you turn, there is harmony, beauty, and love. Regardless of whether something looks ugly or beautiful, its intrinsic loving quality transcends all appearances. This is the most fundamental mystical experience.
If you really recognize the inner nature of reality—that it is loving, that it is joyous, that it is abundant—you will live from that recognition and you will act so as to bring about in others the same recognition. This is why spiritual teachers rarely get involved with social reform. They aren’t against it, but they recognize that it will not solve the world’s problems since those problems are based on cognitive distortions.
Basic trust is nonconceptual, as we have said. The Holy Ideas are in the conceptual realm, discriminated enough for us to put basic trust into language. Another way of putting it is that the Holy Ideas are nine different perceptions or views of God, if you are speaking theistically, or of our fundamental nature, if you are speaking non-theistically.
The perspective of the Holy Ideas is the view that arises when there is freedom from any fixed position. This is what we mean when we speak of liberation and enlightenment. Enlightenment is not seen as a specific experience, but rather as an experience and understanding of how things are.
The view of the enlightened mind also does not imply being in any particular state; rather, it is what is perceived when one is free from the need to be in any particular state. It is the perspective of what is sometimes called the “natural condition”—how reality appears before the ego clouds one’s perception.
Holy Ideas, then, are nine different facets of the enlightened view of reality, nine different explicit perceptions that can be discriminated when basic trust is predominant. The fixations described in the Enneagram of Personality are nine different facets of the distorted view of the ego.
One’s fixation is not one’s ego structure, so we are not looking at a particular psychic structure. Rather, we are focusing on a particular twist that the whole of the ego has, a particular distortion that affects all of its parts.
The distorted view of the ego twists the state of consciousness of the soul in a way that gives it a certain posture, a certain outlook that affects the totality of the consciousness, giving the identity of the ego its particular support and flavor.
To truly understand the Holy Ideas is to look at reality with unobstructed eyes, to experience and live and act without distortion.
The fruit of the path is the capacity to live in objective reality. With the understanding of the view of objective reality, you can discriminate how each of your experiences is a reflection of this reality, a distortion of it, or an approximation of it.
In fact, the methodology and actual practices of the various spiritual paths are determined by the particular understanding of reality out of which they arose.
The Holy Ideas, then, are objective views of reality, reality seen through the eyes of our natural condition. We call them Ideas because they are the perspective of the awakened center in the head, the higher intellectual center. They are nine different perspectives of reality seen without the subjective filter of the ego, and these views are only possible if basic trust is deeply integrated in one’s soul.
Here we will discuss each Holy Idea briefly, focusing particularly on its relationship to basic trust. We will explore each in depth in Part Three. We will begin with the Holy Idea for Point Eight, Holy Truth.
So Holy Truth is the perception that God exists as the totality of existence—that He is what exists and the existence of what exists—and God is not something separate from the universe.
The next Idea is that of Point Nine, Holy Love. This is the perception and the understanding that this true reality is the existence of love, it is love, and its action is loving.
Holy Perfection, the Holy Idea of Point One. Not only is existence seen to be perfect, not only is everything in it seen to be just right, but whatever happens is also seen as right.
Holy Will, the Idea of Point Two, is the perception that whatever happens is the functioning of this true consciousness. Out of this perception follows an acceptance of what transpires, an acceptance of the will of the universe, which leads to Holy Freedom, another name for this point’s Holy Idea.
The Holy Idea for Point Three is Holy Hope, Holy Law, or Holy Harmony. Holy Hope is the perception that because all that happens is the functioning of a benevolent reality, things naturally move in the right direction.
Holy Origin is the Holy Idea for Point Four. This is the perception that we as individual souls, as well as all that exists, come from and are part of the loving presence of Being.
Holy Omniscience, sometimes called Holy Transparency, the Holy Idea for Point Five, again deals with the relationship of the soul to reality. Omniscient means all-knowing, so the perspective here is that in the presence of basic trust, the soul knows reality—but it knows it specifically as a oneness. This is the perception, the realization, the understanding that everything that exists is interconnected and makes up one thing.
The view of Holy Omniscience is the perception that you cannot truly separate yourself since we are all one thing, and any sense of boundaries between ourselves and anything that exists in the universe is not ultimate.
The next Idea, that of Point Six, is Holy Faith or Holy Strength. It tells us that implicit in basic trust is the faith or confidence that reality or God will come through, will support us, is fundamentally there for us. Holy Faith is the closest Idea to basic trust itself; it is a differentiated perception of basic trust.
Holy Wisdom, Holy Work, or Holy Plan is the Idea for Point Seven. When there is basic trust in reality, we not only perceive that things are fine the way they are and that what happens is optimal, but we also get a sense of how things are unfolding.
A human being becomes complete when God is fully replicated in that human life, when the macrocosm is replicated in the microcosm. This is what is meant in some spiritual traditions by man becoming the image of God.
In the language of the transmitted knowledge of the Enneagram, when the belly center is open and connected with the center of the earth, the head opens in heaven amongst the stars and you then perceive the world through the nine Ideas.
One’s fixation, then, is due to an incorrectness or a distortion in how reality is perceived. According to the transmitted teaching of the Enneagram, this incorrect view will be corrected if you understand and experience reality through the undistorted perspective of the Holy Idea associated with your ennea-type.
From the perspective of the Diamond Approach, however, we see that basic trust needs to be re-established through contact with the quality of Living Daylight, and resulting from that, we will spontaneously experience the Holy Ideas and, therefore, see reality objectively.
Basic trust opens the higher intellectual center, allowing us the view of the Holy Ideas, which liberates us from the delusions of ego and helps us to establish our consciousness in the unity of Being.
A delusion is something which you take to be true but which is not true. It is a twist in your mind that distorts your perceptions. Its resolution is not a particular state of consciousness, but rather, a corrected view of reality through which all states are experienced.
working with is the view of reality that arises when the head center is open, active, and functioning. When this center is closed, one’s perspective on reality is filtered through the nine delusions of the fixations. Getting a taste of how reality objectively looks confronts the delusions in a systematic way.
On an experiential level, the delusions are certain manifestations in the personality that don’t seem to change, regardless of how much you have worked on them,
For instance, you might believe that there is something wrong with you. This belief can’t be relieved by the presence of any essential aspect because it is not the result of an inner lack of contact with Being. It is, rather, a delusion that arises from not understanding the Idea of Holy Perfection,
The Enneagram is a map or design to help you understand and attune yourself to reality. It is like a prism, separating out nine different objective perspectives on reality with their nine corresponding deluded perspectives.
particular Holy Idea that is lost, and it is then experienced as a specific painful, deficient, and difficult state we call the specific difficulty for that ennea-type. The specific delusion, the distorted view of reality resulting from the loss of the Holy Idea particular to each ennea-type, shapes the specific sense of deficiency. That sense of deficiency is the embodiment, as it were, of that conceptual formulation. The delusion also shapes how each ennea-type reacts to its specific difficulty.
Out of the interaction of the specific difficulty and the way it is responded to, which is the specific reaction, the core of each ennea-type is formed.
cosmos as a whole. They are the understanding of reality in terms of its totality. In other words, using theistic terminology, it is understanding what God is. From a non-theistic perspective, it is understanding what total completeness is. These three Ideas are the most important for basic trust. Holy Truth, Holy Love, and Holy Perfection are the three ways that, when combined, tell us
The Ideas of the corner formed by Points Five, Six, and Seven are views of the human being from the perspective of the whole: how this reality is reflected in the human soul, what the true relationship is of the human being to this overall reality,
