The Wisdom of the Enneagram

by Don Richard Riso

“One of the best means for arousing the wish to work on yourself is to realize that you may die at any moment.” GURDJIEFF

Finally, many of us resist opening more to life because we are afraid that if we become too healthy, people will not know how much we have been hurt. If we become healthy, we cannot continue to punish our parents (and other significant figures from our past) for making us suffer. If we are angry at a parent or a spouse, we overeat, or drink too much, or smoke to show them how unhappy we are. If we let these feelings dictate our lives, we have succeeded only in taking over the job of abusing ourselves.

“There are many areas of growth (grief and other unfinished business, communication and maturing of relationships, sexuality and intimacy, career and work issues, certain fears and phobias, early wounds, and more) where good Western therapy is on the whole much quicker and more successful than meditation. These crucial aspects of our being can’t be just written off as ‘personality stuff.’ Freud said he wanted to help people to love and work. If we can’t love well and give meaningful work to the Earth, then what is our spiritual practice for? Meditation can help in these areas. But if, after sitting for a while, you discover that you still have work to do, find a good therapist or some other way to effectively address these issues.” JACK KORNFIELD

The superego is the inner voice that is always putting us down for not living up to certain standards or rewarding our ego when we fulfill its demands. When we comply with our superego, it pats us on the back, saying, “Good boy! (or girl!) That was the right thing to do!” But when we do something that our superego disapproves of, it condemns us—this time in the first person.

In fact, our superego is one of the most powerful agents of the personality: it is the “inner critic” that keeps us restricted to certain limited possibilities for ourselves.

However, we must also be on the lookout for the

formation of new layers of superego that come from our psychological and spiritual work. We might call these the spiritual superego or the therapy superego. Instead of berating ourselves with the voices of our parents, we berate ourselves with the voices of Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad or Freud or our therapist! In fact, one of the biggest dangers that we face in using the Enneagram is our superegos tendency to “take over” our work and start criticizing us, for example, for not moving up the Levels of Development or going in the Direction of Integration fast enough. The more we are present, however, the more we will recognize the irrelevance of these voices and successfully resist giving them energy. Eventually, they lose their power, and we can regain the space and quiet we need to be receptive to other, more life-giving forces within us.

Type 5 Marching Order: “You are good or okay if you have thoroughly mastered something.” Contradiction: How do you know when you have fully mastered something? When are you finished? How does what you are mastering relate to the real needs in your life? Fives work on a subject or skill for many years and still lack self-confidence.

Type 9 Marching Order: “You are good or okay as long as everyone around you is good or okay.” Contradiction: How can you ensure that everyone is really okay? How do you know that they are okay? Why is your well-being dependent on the prior well-being and happiness of others? The impossibility of this task leads Nines to “tune out” problems.

5. Maybe I can trust people and let them know what I need. Maybe I can live happily in the world. Maybe my future will be okay.

9. Maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I need to get energized and be involved. Maybe I am more powerful than I realize.

WORKING WITH THE BODY The body is extremely important for Inner Work, because it is a reliable reality check in ways that our minds and emotions (the other two centers) cannot be. This is because, as we mentioned earlier, the body is always here, in the present moment. Our minds or feelings can be anyplace—imagining the future, dwelling on the past, or ruminating on a fantasy—but our body is always here and now. It cannot be anywhere else. Therefore, if we are aware of the sensations of our bodies, it is a solid piece of evidence that we are present.

Perhaps the most important technique for getting in touch with the body and its energies is learning how to relax fully so that we can make deeper contact with each moment. Relaxation is not just something we do in yoga class or during meditation—it is a quality that we can bring to anything that we do. We can do anything in our lives from a place of centeredness and relaxation or from a state of being frantic and having inner tension. Basically, conscious relaxation is a matter of learning how to come back to the here and now again and again, opening up to a deeper and deeper impression of reality.

Paradoxically, the more relaxed we become, the more we will realize how tense our bodies actually are. This can be confusing, because our first experiences of relaxation will cause us to feel more uncomfortable. Our first reaction will therefore be to want to become numb again, but our liberation requires that we stay present to whatever we find—including our tensions. When we do so with persistence, we find that our tensions miraculously begin to dissolve, and our personality becomes lighter and more flexible.

Seeing how easily we numb out, how do we know if we are truly relaxed? The answer is surprisingly simple: we are relaxed to the degree that we can experience sensations from all parts of our body in the present moment. To the degree that we do not experience the sensations of our body, we are tense and are not present. To be relaxed is to feel an uninterrupted flow of sensation through the body, from the top of our head to the bottom of our feet. Relaxation entails having full awareness of the self and the environment—to be in the river of Presence and Being. We fully occupy our body: we experience both the front and back of it and everything in between. But make no mistake—this kind of freedom, relaxation, and flow are the result of many years of consistent practice.

“Pay no attention [to your thoughts]. Don’t fight them. Just do nothing about them, let them be, whatever they are. Your very fighting them gives them life. Just disregard. Look through. You need not stop thinking. Just cease being interested. Stop your routine of acquisitiveness, your habit of looking for results and the freedom of the universe is yours.” NISARGADATTA

“Good-humored patience is necessary with mischievous children and your own mind.” ROBERT AITKIN ROSHI

If you are new to meditation, begin by practicing for about ten minutes a day, ideally in the morning before your day gets under way. As you become more comfortable with the process, you may wish to extend the length of your meditation. In fact, the more you acquire the habit of daily

meditation, the more you will probably want to increase your meditation time, since being in intimate contact with our Essential nature restores us in profound ways while laying the ground for bigger personal breakthroughs. Meditation becomes a respite and an oasis that we want to visit rather than something we have to do.

“Only when the mind is tranquil—through self-knowledge and not through imposed self-discipline—only then, in that tranquility, in that silence, can reality come into being. It is only then that there can be bliss, that there can be creative action.” KRISHNAMURTI

“Your mind cannot possibly understand God. Your heart already knows. Minds were designed for carrying out the orders of the heart.” EMMANUEL

THE ENNEAGRAM OF LETTING GO After years of reflection on the transformative process, the two of us began to see that we spontaneously followed a particular sequence whenever we successfully observed and let go of a defensive reaction or limiting pattern. We saw that the letting-go part could not occur simply through our intention to get rid of a troublesome habit. It was not a matter of willpower. Nonetheless, there were many times when particular habits or reactions dropped away spontaneously—or so it seemed—and we wanted to find out what ingredients made it easier to let go of them. Because we knew, thanks to Gurdjiefif, that the Enneagram can also be

used as a process model, we organized our observations around the Enneagram symbol and created what we call The Enneagram of Letting Go.

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.” ALBERT EINSTEIN

“The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to oneself.” NIETZSCHE

As we become more deeply aware of ourselves in the present moment, we begin to discover what our felt experience is at that moment. For instance, at stratum 2, we might discover that we are pretending to be interested in a conversation at a party. At stratum 3, we might recognize that we actually want to leave the party, and at stratum 4, we might become aware of a feeling of restless agitation in our stomach, or a feeling of tension in our shoulders and neck.

“Your resistance to change is likely to reach its peak when significant change is imminent.” GEORGE LEONARD

Rather than experience the agony that the personality anticipates, what appears to the personality as “nothing” reveals itself as everything, the “shining Void” (called Sunyata in Zen) from which everything emanates. Everything that we know to exist arises from this Void; it is completely empty and yet full of potentiality. It is our freedom and the source of our life. There is no longer a distinction between the observer and the observed: experience and experiencer are one.

“I sloughed off my self as a snake sloughs off its skin. Then I looked into myself and saw that I am He.” ABU YAZID AL-BISTAMI

This is the ultimate destination promised by the great mystical traditions, but to attain this state of consciousness in any lasting way is extremely rare. Only some extraordinary mystics and saints of history have truly lived their lives from this profound state of awareness. But most of us can have at least a taste of it, and often that is enough. To taste this reality even once can change our lives in profound ways. Once we know the unity of existence as a real experience, we can never again regard people, ourselves, or the gift of our lives in the same way.

“. . . Self-realization [is] only the realization of one’s true nature. The seeker of liberation realizes, without doubts or misconceptions, his real nature by distinguishing the eternal from the transient, and never swerves from his natural state.” RAMANA MAHARSHI

The good news is that you are already here: your Essence already exists entirely and perfectly. The person who is reading this page does not have to do anything to make himself or herself real or “spiritual.” Once we begin to see the reasons why we have abandoned ourselves and have left the moment, we run out of reasons to do so. Understanding our personality type helps us to be aware of these “reasons.” When we stop trying to be someone we are not, our true nature emerges: we “observe and let go” and stop interfering with our unfolding; we stop defending a particular self-definition.

Spiritual work is therefore a matter of subtraction, of letting go; rather than of adding anything to what is already present. From one point of view, this can be extremely challenging because the patterns of our personality have been so deeply ingrained in our Being. But from another perspective, we have the support of the whole universe in this Work. The Divine Consciousness wants us to do the Work and supports us in the process. Inner Work is therefore a continuing mystery and marvel to see unfolding in ourselves and others.

The Buddhists say, “There are no holy people or holy places, only holy moments”—moments of grace. All of us have experienced such moments. True moments of grace, when we are fully alive and awake, have an entirely different quality, even in our memories, than other events that we might recall. Essential moments are much more vivid and real because they are still with us; they possess immediacy because the impact of life has penetrated the dullness of our consciousness and awakened us. We realize that as we learn to let go of fear, resistance, and self-image, we become more available to these transformative moments and they nourish our spirits. Thus, while we may not yet be able to produce such moments at will, we can create the conditions in ourselves that make it easier for us to have them.

It is thus not what we do that makes the difference, but the quality of awareness that we bring to the moment.

“There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.” RAMANA MAHARSHI

“If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” BUDDHA

As I left my task, the connection with this aspect of reality remained and deepened, such that I was able to interact with other people from this expanded sense of myself. I felt no need to impress others with this “achievement,” because I could see that it was not really an achievement but simply an experience of the true nature of the world. Further, I could also see that everyone else was merely an aspect of this same nature, so whom would I be impressing? What was most striking about this experience was that I saw that it was entirely possible to be aware of myself as a profound depth of Being, but also to function quite normally in the world—eating, conversing, working, and resting. Respecting and loving others came quite naturally because I actually experienced the true nature of the situation. In other words, realizing our true nature liberates us from the cravings and illusions of our personality, so that we are able to interact from moment to moment with simplicity, grace, and unshakable inner peace. We know who and what we are, and that endless inner restlessness ceases. We are free to accept the greatest and most precious gift of all: the unfathomable mystery of our Being, our very existence.

“. . . Spiritual opening is not a withdrawal to some imagined realm or safe cave. It is not a pulling away, but a touching of all the experience of life with wisdom and with a heart of kindness, without any separation.” JACK KORNFIELD

From this perspective, we can see that when we bring awareness to our habitual personality, we are healing not just our own problems but also the destructive patterns that have been taking their toll for many generations, possibly for centuries, within our bloodline. Working on ourselves therefore redeems not only our own sufferings and struggles, but the sufferings and struggles of all our ancestors, which led to producing people who could be free of them. It is the same as when people became free after generations of slavery and realized that their freedom gave meaning and dignity to the struggles of all the generations that preceded them. A further, perhaps even more compelling reason to do this Work is to prevent destructive patterns from being passed on to the next generation. For instance, we are becoming aware that many of our unconscious habits and attitudes about the environment or racism have reached a critical point. Consequently, many young parents are doing their best to embody new socially and environmentally aware values so that their children will not continue in the same destructive ways. From a personal as well as a generational perspective, therefore, working on ourselves is a noble act and parenting a child is a call to awaken—to see, to respond, and to give wholeheartedly. Raising a child is as close as most people get to being in a spiritual school, because parenting is bound to bring up all of one’s own childhood issues. Often these issues are passed...

In a very real way, when we work on ourselves we are taking part in the evolution of human consciousness.

Transformation happens when our ordinary perspective shifts and we attain a new understanding of who we really are. We must remember, however, that awareness of who we really are happens—as do all moments of grace—only always now. When all is said and done, this is the wisdom of the Enneagram.

For better or worse, there is no such thing as “the Enneagram”—only different interpretations of it by different authors. Those interested in this system are therefore urged to read all Enneagram books (including our own) critically, to think for themselves, and always to judge everything by their own experience.