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The Ideas of the top corner are independent of the human being, while those of the Six corner are the awakened or objective perspectives of that total reality as it is reflected in a human being. When you experience yourself through the Holy Ideas of the top corner, you experience yourself as God, not as a human being. But when you experience yourself through the Ideas of the Six corner, you experience yourself as a human being who is a reflection of the overall reality.
what doing is, what functioning is, what living is, and that is what the Holy Ideas of the corner formed by Points Two, Three, and Four refer to. They are views of functioning in relation to these perspectives, and they provide a true understanding of what it means to act. They address how doing and functioning happen, who does it, and how one goes about it.
if you understand them, you will know in what direction a particular practice leads and whether or not it will take you to what is real.
We will make three triangles, each formed by one Holy Idea from each of the three corners, thus representing a view of the universe, a corresponding view of man, and a view of functioning. The three triangles are composed of (1) Points Eight, Five, and Two—Holy Truth, Holy Omniscience, and Holy Will, (2) Points One, Seven, and Four—Holy Perfection, Holy Wisdom, and Holy Origin, and (3) Points Nine, Six, and Three—Holy Love, Holy Strength, and Holy Harmony.
The awareness that the cosmos objectively exists now; that this existence is its own definition, and continues whether an individual understands it or not; and that the individual experiences the truth of Reality most completely when he views each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening. —Ichazo, 1972
Holy Truth. It refers to the unity of existence, and includes and goes beyond Essence and the Absolute.
As you contact this quality of love, you are in touch with the actual essential aspect that you long ago identified with your mother. This level of the truth of the situation is the essential truth. That truth is a quality of love that is present in you but is only felt on a relative level as the desire for ice cream. On this essential level, the facts of your situation take on a sense of meaning, of richness and of depth, because they usher you into the realm of what truly exists, beyond the surface of things.
ontological presence—it has a substantive existence. Although the relative truth of a situation can take us to the essential truth of it, the essential level is not dependent upon the situation. It is self-existing; it is its own realm existing independently of who we are and what we are doing.
So we have moved from the fact of what is happening to what truly exists within you, and from there to what truly exists beyond your body—what exists in the whole cosmos.
boundless dimensions keep revealing themselves in continuing depth, one after the other, as we penetrate deeper and deeper concepts within our mind, and these dimensions will lead us eventually to the deepest, innermost truth—absolute truth. This dimension of the Absolute is beyond all concepts, including that of existence or non-existence.
not that there is a formless or boundless dimension that pervades everything or is the essence or everything, since seeing it this way creates a dichotomy that does not exist. It is not as though there is me and there is my essential nature.
So it not only pervades and fills the universe, but it is the universe. This understanding that there is no universe separate from this pure boundless self-existing Beingness is a more complete level of the truth. The perception that Being constitutes the totality of everything is what is generally called a mystical experience. Before this, you may have spiritual experiences, but when you experience the oneness and the unity of existence, you are on the level of the mystical.
This is the perception that there is absolutely no duality—either horizontally (between objects) or vertically (between dimensions). So although we experience ourselves moving progressively into deeper and deeper dimensions of reality as our inquiry becomes increasingly subtle, Holy Truth is the perception that all these dimensions exist simultaneously. They are all facets of the same reality, so the sense of a hierarchy is ultimately illusory.
So Holy Truth challenges and ultimately dissolves the ego’s sense of separateness. While one does experience the sense of unity when experiencing any of the formless dimensions, the perception here is of the unity of the dimensions themselves. The Buddhists call this “total completeness,” while the Sufis call it the “all-inclusive state,” or the “Divine Being,” whose all-inclusive name is Allah. Allah, then, does not refer to any particular dimension or state, but refers to all that exists—at any time, on all its levels and in all its dimensions—as a unity.
He whose great soul is never vexed by doubt Knows of a surety that there is but one Existence absolute.
The person and the existence join in one, For unity admits no variance. He who is free from self, when he obtains That freedom, through his echoing soul resounds “Verily I am God,’ and in eternity Is opposition overwhelmed, and then The pilgrim and his progress are but one. Concord and incarnation spring from variance, But unity is born of pilgrimage.
All that is has me—universal creativity, pure and total presence—as its root. How things appear is my being. How things arise is my manifestation.
Because no objects exist which are not me, You are beyond perspective or meditation. Because there does not exist any protection other than me, You are beyond charismatic activity to be sought. Because there is no state other than me, You are beyond stages to cultivate.
Because self-arising pristine awareness is already established, One is beyond justifying it; the transmission of this great teaching provides direct entry into understanding. Because all phenomena do not exist apart from me, One is beyond duality. I fashion everything.
There is no me, no you, no other, no universe separate from God; no universe separate from the Void; no you and Essence, no personality and Essence; no physical body and soul—all these distinctions are illusions and are not ultimately real. There is only one thing, and it cannot even be called “one” because if you call it one, you are comparing it to two, and it is not one in contrast to two. It is nondual, an indivisible existence, no matter how you look at it or think about it.
In some traditions there is a debate about what the ultimate reality is: Is it the Absolute, or is it the state of total completeness? The Sufi and Kabbalistic traditions take the view that the Absolute is the ultimate reality. The Indian traditions are divided, with the Vedantists taking the Absolute to be ultimate, while some of the yogic paths take the state of total completeness to be ultimate. The Buddhists disagree: The Theravaden tradition believes the Absolute is ultimate, while the Tibetan Buddhists are divided. The Nyingmapa sect believes that the state of total completeness is
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If you define ultimate truth as the actual state that is experienced if there is no manipulation or conceptualization of your experience, you recognize it as the state of total completeness, because there is no duality present in it.
In either case, the perception of the unity of all of existence—Holy Truth—remains the same. It is the perception that there are no divisions and no duality between things, that everything is one Beingness, one existence.
The most important understanding of Holy Truth is that physical reality and true existence are not separate. Physical reality is made up of objects which can be discriminated.
if your perception is unobscured by your beliefs, your inner perception becomes unblocked, and the universe looks quite different. If your perceptual capacities are clear, you recognize that other dimensions exist in addition to physical reality, such as love, Beingness, and awareness. At this level of perception, you see that there is only one existence, one homogeneous medium. This medium encompasses physical reality, which is one particularization of it. Objects are seen as objects, but they are not discrete—they are more like waves on the surface of an ocean, lacking existence without the
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Surprisingly, this perception of unity makes physical reality itself appear more concrete, not less. It appears more three-dimensional, with more sense of depth.
But when the boundless dimensions are perceived as interpenetrating the physical, the three-dimensionality is enhanced.
When duality is seen through, physical reality is imbued with the essential dimension, and the two become one. This gives the physical more reality, more substance, more existence, more meaning, more depth, and more dimensionality. When you look at people, they seem more substantial, and even their bodies appear more physical, in a sense.
The physical and the essential become one. It is not that the physical is filled by the essential, but rather that the physical is the essential. In the same way that your muscles are composed of atoms, so the whole of your body is made out of Beingness. When this sense of unification is complete and there is no duality in your experience, physical reality itself is experienced as the ultimate reality. Then all of physical reality, including all its objects and all of its manifestations, is seen as that beautiful, substantial, and fundamental reality.
Grace doesn’t happen to physical reality; physical reality itself is the grace, is the beauty, is God. This is what Buddhists refer to as the Great Seal, the Mahamudra, in which all that you feel and see are unified with true nature. It is the unity of appearance and emptiness.
no separation at all, no division at all, no distance between the surface and the depth—in fact, there is no surface and no depth. There is no inside and no outside. They are the same thing. The unity is the complete interpenetration, the complete intermixing of inner and outer.
From the perspective of unity, there is no such thing as dying, nor of being reborn. There is no such thing as ego death, and no such thing as enlightenment either, since you are already the unity.
If you don’t interfere or manipulate things and just let them be the way they are, you will experience this state of unity, which I sometimes refer to as the natural state since it is allowing things to be as they naturally are.
Holy Perfection means that everything is perfect at all times because there is never anything or any experience that is not the reality of the Holy Truth. Even when you experience yourself as separate from the reality, that is again the reality. So from this perspective, there is no need for a person to do anything—you don’t need to practice, you don’t need to understand yourself, you don’t need to do any work on yourself since everything, including yourself, is already in the state of unity. It is from this perspective that some teachings, including the Buddhist Maha Ati teaching, say that
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This is the foundation for the practice of Dzogchen, which is taught by the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism.
From the Dzogchen perspective, the natural state is always the state that is occurring; you are just not always recognizing it as such. Even when you are not aware of it, you are in it. The only difference is that when there is recognition, you suddenly see the depth, the concreteness, the reality, the beauty, the harmony, and the grace of how things actually are. You see how things are already perfect, and this is why another name for total completeness is the Great Perfection.
The moment you see that there is nothing but God, you recognize that everything is perfect at all times and at all points in space. If God is everything that is, how can there be imperfection? When you don’t like some manifestation and you want things to be different, all it means is that you have not surrendered to the Holy Will.
The Idea of Holy Truth is that nothing is excluded. The ego is not excluded, thinking is not excluded, reactivity is not excluded, neurosis is not excluded, and the physical realm is not excluded.
This is difficult to conceptualize, because this One is an infinite existence. Since it has no boundary and encompasses infinite space, you can’t conceive of it as the mathematical one.
The state of unity, experiencing that everything makes up one thing, appears in all the boundless dimensions. The sense of it becomes progressively deeper, until one experiences that all the dimensions are unified.
Generally, most people initially experience unity while experiencing one of the formless dimensions by itself. So if one is experiencing the state of unity on the level of Living Daylight alone, it would be the sense that everything is love; or if one is experiencing it on the level of the Supreme by itself, it would be the sense that everything is pure Being, pure presence.
Egoic consciousness is, by its very nature, based on division. If there is no duality in your perception, the ego is non-existent.
This is one of the subtlest and deepest principles, without which the ego could not exist and function in the way it does. It arises as a result of the loss of perception of Holy Truth. When a direct perception about reality is lost, which is to say that when one of the Holy Ideas is lost to our experience, what arises is not a particular state, but rather a distorted, erroneous, mistaken idea about reality, which we call a delusion.
So if there is no perception of the fundamental unity of all of existence, then there is the perception of duality. If there is duality, there is the loss of unity. The loss of unity is the loss of the condition of the natural state of total completeness. Basically, it is the loss of God Consciousness.
God and the universe, God and myself, you and I, ego and Essence. This belief in division as ultimate is a conviction so deeply ingrained in the soul that it is one of the last things we can even contemplate confronting, let alone releasing. Even after a long time traveling the spiritual path, we cannot conceive that this might be an assumption about reality rather than the truth.
This conviction is so deeply entrenched that it has become an organizing principle for the very particles of our souls. Like a magnet arranges particles of metal, this conviction arranges our souls so that we can’t even imagine that things could be otherwise.
The word holy in the language of the Enneagram is not used in the usual dualistic sense: that which is opposite to the bad, the mundane, or the human. Holy means objective, how things really are beyond the cloud of egoic experience. So here, holy means objective truth.
This loss will be experienced as the sense that something is fundamentally wrong. The closest thing to this sense is the feeling of “original sin.”
Ultimately, you blame yourself for no longer being divine, and later this blame is projected onto others in order to protect yourself from the self-hatred that would otherwise result.
From the perspective of the Enneagram of Holy Ideas, the depth of the sense of self-blame is not dependent upon what actually happens, but is due to the absence of the perception of Holy Truth. So, universally, children blame themselves for the loss of their sense of being divine, for their fall from grace.
