Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas

by A.H. Almaas

the basic paradigms of our world view, which determine our everyday experience, are an intrinsic part of the web of ignorance that binds us tightly within egoic experience.

What goes through a radical transformation is specifically our view of what truly exists, and the mode of this existence.

Our experience in traveling this path is that psychological understanding and spiritual experience are so interwoven and interconnected that they can best be viewed as forming a continuum of realms of human experience.

the spiritual path in relation to God, the world, and the soul—the three primary elements in any spiritual teaching.

An enneagrammatic type refers not only to a particular fixation or a particular set of behavior patterns, but also to the associated passion, idealized essential aspect, virtue, and so on.

Each Holy Idea represents a particular direct perception of reality as a specific characteristic or facet of the unobscured perception of what is.

The Enneagram of Fixations reflects the deluded or egoic view of reality, expressing the loss of the enlightened view, which is represented by the Enneagram of Holy Ideas.

“When we turn away from our primal perfection, our completeness, our unity with the world and God, we create the illusion that we need something exterior to ourselves for our completion. This dependency on what is exterior is what makes man’s ego.”

human suffering to arise from ignorance of this truth, that is, separation or alienation from awareness of the sacred or the real.

the emphasis is on the awareness that everything is made of one something, one substance, and discrimination of different aspects of manifestation is not part of the experience. This is what we call unity.

oneness. In this perception, the awareness of nonseparateness is clear, but within that whole, unified reality, discrimination is present. One sees the different colors, forms, and movements within manifestation, without those differences appearing as separating

allowing, that is, attempting to take a nonjudgmental, noncontrolling position with respect to whatever arises in her inner experience.

The understanding of Holy Work is that the ego self does not know what is supposed to happen, and that only by addressing what is true in the present moment can one participate in the Holy Work of the whole.

each person is born with the capacity to recognize all the Holy Ideas, but with one of them particularly sensitive, strong, or dominant. This is the one that is most strongly affected by the inadequacy of early experience.

The specific delusion, the specific reaction of distrust, and the particular way in which the self experiences the inadequacy of the holding environment (the specific difficulty, which is again qualitatively determined by the particular delusion), form the elements of each fixation’s particular core.

a particular condition or orientation of the soul that is their basis. The relative presence or absence of this condition in our individual consciousness, or soul, has a significant effect on our orientation toward or away from Being.

The ego is a psychic structure that is based on crystallized beliefs about who we are and what the world is. We experience ourselves and the world through the filter of this structure. Spiritual awakening involves connecting with those dimensions of experience obscured by ego structure.

The first step of this process in dealing with any sector of the ego has two parts. The first is becoming aware of—actually perceiving and experiencing—the particular belief or identification that constitutes the structure. The second is the dissolution of that facet of the ego structure.

surrendering can be experienced as a dissolution, a disintegration, a fragmentation, or a sense that you are falling apart.

basic trust. It is an unspoken, implicit trust that what is optimal will happen, the sense that whatever happens will ultimately be fine. It is the confidence that reality is ultimately good; that nature, the universe, and all that exists are of their very nature good and trustworthy; that what happens is the best that can happen.

Basic trust is a nonconceptual confidence in the goodness of the universe, an unquestioned implicit trust that there is something about the universe and human nature and life that is inherently and fundamentally good, loving, and wishing us the best. This innate and unformulated trust in life and reality manifests as a willingness to take that plunge into the abyss.

When this trust is deep, it manifests in how you live your life, not necessarily in what ...

Basic trust is the soul’s way of attuning to a fundamental law of reality, the fact that our sense of existing as a separate and isolated entity is false, that our ego experience of isolation and helplessness is an illusion based on identification with the world of physical manifestation.

basic trust is even beyond trusting in God, because feeling that you trust in God means that you already have a concept of God.

The ego’s perspective arises out of a lack of this trust. It is based on distrust, on paranoia, on fear, on the conviction that you’re not going to be adequately taken care of and that the universe is not there to hold and take care of you in the ways that you need.

If you are able to surrender, then you are willing to be.

The third step is to allow things to develop spontaneously and naturally the way they want to develop, without trying to channel them in ways that you think they should go.

Basic trust is an inherent condition of the soul.

Basic trust manifests through our actions rather than through our thoughts or feelings, since it is knowledge in the belly and belly knowledge shows through action.

To understand basic trust in action, we need to distinguish it from the ego’s tendency toward inertia and inactivity.

When your basic trust deepens, you have an inner sense of relaxation that allows your soul to unfold spontaneously and naturally. The trust affects your mind in such a way that you begin to see that whatever happens is right even if it’s painful, and things that you had thought were bad turn out not to be bad.

If you don’t have this trust, you are constantly scared, constantly tense, constantly fighting reality—inner and outer.

Enlightenment is not a matter of not feeling pain, but of not fighting it.

So basic trust means trusting enough to let your mind stop, to be silent within, knowing that if there is something you need to know, the knowing will come.

We think we always have to be on the go, always making one thing or another happen or not happen, so we don’t let our minds or our bodies rest. We believe that if our minds are quiet, when we need certain information, it is not going to be there. We believe that if our bodies are still, when we need to act, we won’t be able to.

Basic trust is the effect on the soul of a particular aspect or quality of Being that we call Living Daylight.

The first level of experiencing it is to perceive that it is everywhere; the second level is to see that everything comes out of it; and the deepest level is to know that everything is made of it. At this deepest level, everything in the universe is seen to be originating in, bathed in, and constituted by, Living Daylight.

divine love, conscious presence, universal love, Christ consciousness, or Christ love. In the Hindu tradition, it is called satchitananda, which expresses the experiential qualities of this aspect of Being. Sat means presence or truth, chit means consciousness or awareness, and ananda means bliss, pleasure, or love.

three qualities are the experiences of Living Daylight in each of the three centers. When it is experienced through the mind, it is experienced as light and consciousness. When it is experienced through the heart, it is experienced as universal boundless love. When it is experienced through the belly, it is experienced as a pervading conscious presence. When you feel it in the belly, you feel that you are held, contained, enfolded by a loving presence, and that this presence is what really exists in the world.

Living Daylight is the most accessible of what we call the boundless cosmic dimensions. We call them dimensions in that although they are each experienced as one medium, each contains within it all the qualities of our True Nature, the essential aspects.

intelligent consciousness. It is sometimes experienced as a sense of blessing, which in Sufism is called baraka.

In the Hermetic tradition of ancient Egypt, for example, the universe, or cosmos as they called it, was seen as a living being. This notion was developed in the various monotheistic traditions that originated in the Middle East, and was part of Hellenistic understanding as far back as Pythagoras.

If someone wishes you well or feels positively about you, we say that that person likes and loves you, and so we call this quality love. The universe is experienced here as fundamentally loving, functioning universally in such a way that life unfolds in a positive way, functioning personally in such a way that you become more of what you can be—fulfilling your destiny.

Basic trust is the implicit confidence in reality that results from experiencing this quality, this dimension of Being. It is the trust that even if you fall, you will be held. If you let go, things will be okay. If you let yourself not know, you will be guided. If you do not manipulate, you will be taken care of in a way that is appropriate for you.

the holding environment is the environment during the first year or so of life, the period of infancy before the child begins to develop a separate sense of self. Initially, the environment is the womb; later on it is the arms that held you, mother’s lap, perhaps father and other people, the environment of your crib, your bedroom, your house—the whole situation.

It should be noted that mothers who have it in them to provide good-enough care can be enabled to do better by being cared for themselves in a way that acknowledges the essential nature of their task. Mothers who do not have it in them to provide good-enough care cannot be made good enough by mere instruction.

Implicit in the ego, then, is a fundamental distrust of reality. The failure of the holding environment leads to the absence of basic trust, which then becomes disconnection from Being, which leads to reactivity, which is ego activity. The Enneagram maps the various ways the ego develops to deal with the absence, disruptions, ruptures, and discontinuities of holding.

For Point Two, it is to deny the need for holding but, nonetheless, be manipulating and seducing the environment to provide it. For Point Three, it is to deny the need for it but pretend to oneself, “I can do it on my own. I know how reality can be and how I’m going to develop and I’ll make it happen.” For Point Four, the loss or absence of holding is counteracted by denying that there is a disconnection from Being, while at the same time trying to make the environment be holding through attempting to control it and oneself.

In the process of spiritual work, each time you move beyond your usual sense of reality and of who you are—each time you jump into the abyss with its sense of disintegration or fragmentation and accompanying fear—and you experience Being coming through, giving you a sense of support, a sense of relief, of satisfaction, of meaning, your basic trust is strengthened. The more experiences you have that involve dealing with painful states and memories, and resolving them, allowing you to connect with various aspects of your fundamental nature, the more that sense of trust is created. The more your soul is held and the more basic trust is developed, the more you will unfold.

Holy Origin, we see that what appears in that unfoldment is never disconnected from Being, since it is Being. The fact that reality is appearing right now as your body or your thoughts or your environment does not mean that these things are disconnected from Being. Everything, then, is intimately and inextricably connected to Being. Being is the Holy Origin, and everything is connected to, and completely inseparable from, that Origin.