The spiritual Enneagram:
Origin and meaning of the Enneagram
6 min reading time | published on:
The origin of the ancient cosmology of the Enneagram is not fully understood, mainly due to the fact that this knowledge was mainly passed on orally. There are indications that the Desert Fathers – early Christian monks who lived as hermits in the deserts of Egypt and Syria from the 3rd century onwards – already had access to the Enneagram. Other references lead to the Sufis and, in any case, repeatedly to the Christian environment. The Enneagram became accessible to Westerners at the beginning of the last century through the Armenian wisdom teacher Gurdjieff (1866 – 1949), whose teachings of the Fourth Way became particularly well known through his student P.D. Ouspensky, as did the knowledge of the Enneagram. The Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudia Naranjo contributed to the popularity of the enneagram in the 1960s and later, especially as Naranjo – working in the USA – combined this knowledge with his psychiatric studies and made it comprehensible for Western people.
The significance of the Enneagram lies in its incorruptible description of nine spiritual worlds on which a person has unconsciously fixated. It says that the ego-spirit of every person on this earth – with the exception of fully awakened people who have freed themselves from their fixation – can be found and described in the nine character fixations. Whether a person wants to see it that way themselves is irrelevant. It is a cosmological, impersonal knowledge that can be acquired through self-exploration.
The basic forces in the Enneagram
The symbol of the enneagram is based on the circle, which represents the infinity of being, and the cosmological trinity of basic forces (visible in the diagram as the so-called inner triangle), from which the six other points with their connections are then derived. The creating, preserving and destroying forces are impersonal in nature and form a cycle of birth, lifespan and death. According to Gurdjieff’s teachings, man has access to these three basic forces through his three intelligence centers: belly, heart and head. The understanding of intelligence, which is fanned out here, therefore consists of a trinity of destructive and active power, sentient presence and the ability to recognize. The Enneagram describes nine archetypes that have their roots in these three basic forces and can appear as their natural manifestation through a person: The Saint, the Ruler, the Mother, the Magician, the Artist, the Philosopher, the Hero, the Fool, the Warrior.
What does fixation in the intelligence centers mean?
What appears natural to us in nature – e.g. the birth of an animal, its lifespan and its death; the change of nature through the seasons; a volcanic eruption, the flow of water, the untouched expanse of the sky – all of this is documented and alienated in our ego development. The Enneagram states that every ego world is based on the fixation in one of these three basic forces, which on the one hand cannot be avoided and at the same time becomes the foundation of our suffering. In the course of our childhood, we leave the state of unconscious unity in infancy and an identity crystallizes in the early years, which we call the ego. Psychology sees this ego as the necessary development in order to be able to exist as a social being in this world. First of all, we need the so-called “healthy ego” as a solid structure for our identity.
The Enneagram shows this path of identity formation in a more differentiated way. It speaks of a so-called primal loss in the human soul, which arises through the development of a separate ego. The nine ego worlds named by the Enneagram are seen as compensation for this primal loss. Each fixation occurs in one of the three basic forces of anger, fear and unfulfilled love and thus imitates and compensates for the natural force that has been “lost” in the process of separation.
Thus, in a person’s ego, the naturally destructive and transformative power becomes self-righteous anger and the elementary drive to powerfully oppose life through fixation in the belly center. The fixation in the heart center turns creative, feeling creativity into an excessive search for more, for love, for beautiful ideals – driven by an unfulfillable inner state of lack. And the fixation in the mental center turns a fine, intelligent, preserving power into chronic fear, which leads to mistrust, distancing, hostility (up to anxiety disorder) and false heroism.
Character types? Character fixation!
“A brief review of Gurdjieff: He taught that our understanding of the Enneagram is shaped by what we ourselves bring to it. Taken by itself, the Enneagram is nothing but an archetypal map. The way we read this map depends in every respect on our philosophical or spiritual orientation. “*
The depth of information provided by the Enneagram depends on the consciousness of the user. It is often understood as a pure theory of types, which describes the characteristics of nine different personality types and thus remains on the surface of the actual spiritual forces at work. At this level, the focus is on professional and personal strengths and weaknesses, relationships and positive changes. This is why Enneagram tests offered on the Internet can rarely determine the fixation itself. In most cases, a teacher is needed to guide the interested person precisely to the points that they did not want to see before.
Anyone who is only interested in the leaves and fruit knows nothing about the trunk and roots of a tree. In order to recognize the roots of a tree and thus the inner power that keeps it alive, makes it grow and die, you need to look “under” the world of the visible, i.e. into the unconscious.
Exploring character fixation means looking into the unconscious motives and drives of our ego world
References in the text:
*from “Nine Portraits of the Soul” by Sandra Maitri, j.kamphausen
Recommended reading on the subject:
Sandra Maitri: The way back to the self
OM C. Parkin: Anger
OM C. Parkin: Fear
OM C. Parkin: Unfulfilled love