The
Enneagram and
Spiritual Goals
The
world’s religious literature is full of instructions and
techniques for transcending ego and detaching from our
limited identities. The purpose of many such practices
is to help us waken from the trance-like dream of our
lives and open to realms beyond our personality and
worldview. But getting to such realms and staying in
them are two different tasks, because we keep putting
our defenses in the way.
One
paradox of seeking spiritual revelation is that it
never comes when you expect it. You can’t force
yourself to have a vision anymore than you can
point a gun at a flower and order it to grow.
Grace comes unbidden; it demands hard work, yet
unfolds effortlessly, in its own time and season.
Since
you can’t force revelation, you are limited to two
general approaches: 1) opening yourself to higher
realms through practices like meditation, fasting,
dancing, chanting, silence, singing, praying; and
2) clearing out any “lower” defensive obstacles
that you put in your own way.
Many
spiritual practices unwittingly ignore secondary
gains, overlooking the unconscious will and
symbolic benefits that drive lower behavior. They
recommend a disciplined opposition towards
“sinful” tendencies, either by dissociating from
them or by trying to go against the temptation.
But
if you focus exclusively on opening to higher
realms without working on your psychological
defenses, you’ll tend to have spiritual
experiences that aren’t integrated or sustainable
in daily life. Meditating your defenses away
without an understanding of their function, will
tend to bring them back. Historical dilemmas that
you disregard in favor of getting spiritually high
will stay disregarded. When you come back down to
daily life, your issues will still be waiting.
It’s possible to be a world-class meditator and
still have emotionally immature relationships; to
achieve peaceful, balanced inner states and yet be
prone to road rage.
On
the other hand, if you work solely on resolving your
“lower” personality issues, with no sense of anything
beyond, you can get stuck in a psychological paradigm,
overfocusing on autobiography, reliving your history in
a way that reinforces your defenses. As we shall see,
some people do this with the Enneagram, using the
system’s diagnostic depth to give themselves problems
and excuses that they didn’t previously have.
As Aldous Huxley put it, “Where personality is
developed for its own sake, and not in order that it may
be transcended, there tends to be a raising of the
barriers of separateness.”
Instead
of aiming too low or too high, the main way out is
through. Generally this means facing what
you’d rather avoid, making peace with your ego so
that you can let it go, while maintaining a
spiritual practice that deepens the sense that you
are more than your ego.
A
cartoon once showed two Buddhist monks sitting
together meditating. One turns to the other and
says, “Nothing happens next: this is it.”
Spiritual awakenings that endure tend to be
matter-of-fact rather than dramatic; something in
you opens to grace in a way the rest of you can
live with. Earth shaking, visionary revelations
aren’t common, even for full-time seekers.
If
you use the Enneagram as part of a spiritual
practice, generally good goals to work towards
might be: becoming wide awake and fully present;
seeking the spiritual in little things; recovering
a deeper sense of your own integrity; becoming
more up-to-date in your responses; loosening your
psychological defenses; resolving stuck points in
your history; making room in your life for the
aesthetic, creative and soulful; cultivating an
inner quiet; trying to better understand any
people you hate or vilify; and surrendering to a
broader sense of relatedness into which your
defensive, wholly separate self-image dissolves.
Blog
Copyright
1998, 2013, 2017 by Thomas Condon
www.thechangeworks.com
