More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“There’s a part of every living thing that wants to become itself, the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, a damaged human being into a whole one. That is spirituality.” ELLEN BASS
“It seems to me that before we set out on a journey to find reality, to find God, before we can act, before we can have any relationship with another… it is essential that we begin to understand ourselves first.” KRISHNAMURTI
“Whatever your age, your upbringing, or your education, what you are made of is mostly unused potential.” GEORGE LEONARD
If we observe ourselves truthfully and nonjudgmentally, seeing the mechanisms of our personality in action, we can wake up, and our lives can be a miraculous unfolding of beauty and joy.
“Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.” SPINOZA
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?” THOMAS MERTON
Presence (awareness, mindfulness), the practice of self-observation (gained from self-knowledge), and understanding what one’s experiences mean (an accurate interpretation provided by a larger context such as a community or spiritual system) are the three basic elements needed for transformational work. Being supplies the first, you supply the second, and the Enneagram supplies the third. When these three come together, things can happen quickly.
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” Herman Hesse
“He who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is wise.” LAO TZU
The aim of this Work is to stop the automatic reactions of the personality by bringing awareness to it. Only by bringing insight and clarity to the mechanisms of personality can we awaken—which is why we have written this book. The more we see the mechanical reactions of our personality, the less identified with them we become and the more freedom we have. That is what the Enneagram is all about.
“Learn what you are and be such.” PINDAR
“Take the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the West—and then seek.” GURDJIEFF
The heart of the story is clear: each of us is in prison. We have only to awaken to “read” the pattern of the lock that will allow us to escape.
Our personalities are no more than the familiar, conditioned parts of a much wider range of potentials that we all possess. Beyond the limitations of our personalities, each of us exists as a vast, largely unrecognized quality of Being or Presence—what is called our Essence.
“The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.” CICERO
One of the profound lessons of the Enneagram is that psychological integration and spiritual realization are not separate processes. Without spirituality, psychology cannot really free us or lead us to the deepest truths about ourselves, and without psychology, spirituality can lead to grandiosity, delusion, and an attempt to escape from reality.
The core of this sacred psychology is that our basic type reveals the psychological mechanisms by which we forget our true nature—our Divine Essence—the way in which we abandon ourselves.
Each of us therefore has become an “expert” at a particular form of coping which, if used excessively, also becomes the core of the dysfunctional area of our personality.
“Man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.” ST. AUGUSTINE
As the defenses and strategies of our personality become more structured, they cause us to lose contact with our direct experience of ourselves, our Essence. The personality becomes the source of our identity rather than contact with our Being. Our sense of ourselves is based increasingly on internal images, memories, and learned behaviors rather than on the spontaneous expression of our true nature. This loss of contact with our Essence causes deep anxiety, taking the form of one of the nine Passions. Once in place, these Passions, which are usually unconscious and invisible to us, begin to
...more
“…the neurotic process…is a problem of the self. It is a process of abandoning the real self for an idealized one; of trying to actualize this pseudoself instead of our given human potentials.” KAREN HORNEY
As spiritual teachers through the ages have pointed out, we have fallen asleep to ourselves and to our own lives. Most of the day we walk around preoccupied by ideas, anxieties, worries, and mental pictures. Seldom are we present to ourselves and to our immediate experience. As we begin to work on ourselves, however, we begin to see that our attention has been taken or “magnetized” by the preoccupations and features of our personality, and that we are actually sleepwalking through much of life.
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” DOSTOYEVSKY
Thus one of the most transformational insights that the Enneagram can provide is the realization that we are not our personality.
When we stop identifying with our personality and stop defending it, a miracle happens: our Essential nature spontaneously arises and transforms us.
Learning how to stay relaxed and present under everyday pressures can make our lives easier.
“Whenever a man awakes, he awakes from the false assumption that he has always been awake, and therefore the master of his thoughts, feelings, and actions.” HENRI TRACOL
“The very things we wish to avoid, neglect, and flee from turn out to be the ‘prima materia’ from which all real growth comes.” ANDREW HARVEY
“All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” JAMES THURBER
Although some of us received many of the following messages, one message tends to be central to each type. Which messages particularly affect you? Type One: “It’s not okay to make mistakes.” Type Two: “It’s not okay to have your own needs.” Type Three: “It’s not okay to have your own feelings and identity.” Type Four: “It’s not okay to be too functional or too happy.” Type Five: “It’s not okay to be comfortable in the world.” Type Six: “It’s not okay to trust yourself.” Type Seven: “It’s not okay to depend on anyone for anything.” Type Eight: “It’s not okay to be vulnerable or to trust
...more
THE BASIC FEARS OF THE TYPES 1 Fear of being bad, corrupt, evil, or defective 2 Fear of being unworthy of being loved 3 Fear of being worthless or without inherent value 4 Fear of being without identity or personal significance 5 Fear of being useless, incapable, or incompetent 6 Fear of being without support or guidance 7 Fear of being deprived or trapped in pain 8 Fear of being harmed or controlled by others 9 Fear of loss of connection, of fragmentation
“We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.” PROUST
Thus, we might say that the whole of our personality structure is composed of our flight from our Basic Fear and our single-minded pursuit of our Basic Desire. The entire feeling-tone of our personality emerges out of this dynamic, and it becomes the foundation for our sense of self.
BASIC DESIRES AND THEIR DISTORTIONS 1 The desire to have integrity (deteriorates into critical perfectionism) 2 The desire to be loved (deteriorates into the need to be needed) 3 The desire to be valuable (deteriorates into chasing after success) 4 The desire to be oneself (deteriorates into self-indulgence) 5 The desire to be competent (deteriorates into useless specialization) 6 The desire to be secure (deteriorates into an attachment to beliefs) 7 The desire to be happy (deteriorates into frenetic escapism) 8 The desire to protect oneself (deteriorates into constant fighting) 9 The desire
...more
Psychology suggests that much of our ability to function as well-integrated, mature adults is determined by how well our specific developmental needs were met in our early childhoods. Those needs that were not adequately met can be thought of as “gaps” that interfere with our ability to experience our Essential wholeness. Spiritual tradition further suggests that our personality has been formed to compensate for these gaps in our development. Our personality is like a cast that protects a broken arm or leg. The more extreme the original injuries, the more extensive the cast has to be. Of
...more
Seen as a temporary cast, the personality is a highly useful, utterly necessary aid because it has developed most powerfully around the areas of our soul’s greatest wounding. It has become strongest where we are weakest. Thus, not only has personality helped us to survive psychologically, it can also now direct us to where we most need to do our transformational work.
But because most of our personality is no more than a collection of conditioned reactions, fears, and beliefs and is not our true Self, our identification with it results in a profound self-abandonment. The experience of our identity has shifted from our true nature to the shell of defenses that we have had to develop. As long as we believe that “My personality is me,” we will stay identified with our personality. One of the main reasons that we resist changing is that the movement back to our Essence always entails feeling the pain of our self-abandonment. W...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.” CYRIL CONNOLLY
That is why it is important to cultivate compassion for ourselves: we have to love ourselves enough to know that we are worth the effort to get to know ourselves as we really are. We have to love ourselves enough to know that even if we become anxious or depressed, we will not abandon ourselves again. When we are willing to experience the truth of how we have been and how we are now, and when we are willing to let ourselves be healed, our true nature emerges. The outcome is guaranteed: all we have to do is to show up.
Type One: “You are good.” Type Two: “You are wanted.” Type Three: “You are loved for yourself.” Type Four: “You are seen for who you are.” Type Five: “Your needs are not a problem.” Type Six: “You are safe.” Type Seven: “You will be taken care of.” Type Eight: “You will not be betrayed.” Type Nine: “Your presence matters.”
If we come from a highly dysfunctional family, this structure will be extremely rigid and restricting. If we come from a more functional family, the personality structure will be lighter and more flexible.
Those who have come from highly dysfunctional families can take heart in knowing that the Essential self within us is completely intact and always looking for ways to manifest itself. Initially, we may have to spend a great deal of time and effort working on the gaps in our development, but the core of our Being is always there to support us. Again, no matter how painful our early experiences were, our Essence cannot be harmed. Our Essence is waiting for the opportunity to reveal itself. In a very true sense, we are waiting for the opportunity to become ourselves. Our spirit is yearning to
...more
When we are able to notice what we are doing now, to experience our current state completely and without judgment, the old patterns will begin to fall away.
Awareness is vitally important in the work of transformation because the habits of our personality let go most completely when we see them as they are occurring. Analyzing past behavior is helpful, but it is not as powerful as observing ourselves as we are in the present moment.
It is a major breakthrough when we fully appreciate the extent to which we entrust our lives to the mechanisms of our personalities and what peril we are in when we do so. Many times it is as if a three-year-old were making many crucial life decisions for us. Once we understand the nature of our personality’s mechanisms, we begin to have a choice about identifying with them or not. If we are not aware of them, clearly no choice is possible.
“The Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there a reference to his waking up.” A Course in Miracles
Waking up from the trance of personality occurs in much the same way. We do a kind of double take, asking ourselves, “What was that all about? Where was I a moment ago?” We can be surprised at how lost we were, although in those previous states we did not feel lost. If someone had asked us if we were fully present and awake, we would have said yes, but from this new perspective we can see that we were not. We may realize that entire sections of our lives have actually been spent in “sleep.”
It may be easier to define awareness by what it is not than by what it is. For instance, we can say that awareness is not thinking, not feeling, not moving, not intuition, and not instinct—even though it can contain any one or all of these things.
Even the most active, focused thinking is not the same thing as awareness.
“Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness, becomes sacred.” THICH NHAT HANH
