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THE DYNAMIC ENNEAGRAM eBook Serial excerpts
The Dilemma
Spiritual goals
From "Fours"
The Dilemma
The dilemma the Enneagram spotlights is this: we are in a trance,
living out a story. The plot was formed early in childhood; it is now
20, 40 or 60 years old. Major chunks of this script are based on who we
used to be and early conclusions we formed about life. Some of our
present responses are obsolete or driven by motives we don’t understand.
To varying degrees, we do what used to work.
Evidence of this is everywhere. There may be
persistent conflicts that we struggle with, ways that we make the
present uncomfortably like the past. We impose old themes on new
relationships, transform neutral incidents into familiar dramas and cast
our friends into related roles.
Sometimes there’s an “inevitable” feeling, like a
sense of déjà vu, as if a secret plot line is determining how events in
our life must proceed. There could be big omissions in our story,
options that are routinely excluded from our self-description. Or maybe
our inner narrator always says the same old things, only repeating the
clichés from the story of our life.
Not everyone had a tormented, unhappy childhood that they
pathologically repeat in the present. On the other hand, no one had an
ideal childhood and even very healthy people who study the Enneagram see
how they are caught in an overall pattern that can include repeating
themes, blind spots and habitual defenses. The expression of this can be
obvious and outright, for instance, when we “marry our mother” or
“marry our father;” or subtle and implicit, as when we marry someone
we’re sure is nothing like our mother or father but who later turns out
to be.
In Enneagram literature this drive to recreate past
premises is called a “compulsion.” What’s crucial to discover about your
Enneagram script is the extent to which it preoccupies you, the degree
to which you are living the story of your life instead of your actual
life. When you allow your self-created script to overrun reality, then
you will experience it as something happening to you, without your
choice, driving you automatically – a compulsion.
Many versions of the Enneagram portray your
personality style as a “false self” as opposed to the “true self” of
your essential nature. As we shall see, this belief can set you up
to fight with your own defenses, which actually makes real change more
difficult.
It’s more accurate to say that your ego is a
one-dimensional self, a small department of your total being. It’s
definitely part of you, as integral as your left arm, but when you
overfavor its version of events, the natural gifts of your Enneagram
style become a kind of curse. When solving problems or coping with
challenges, we naturally turn to what we do best, trying to play from
strength. But the Enneagram shows us that when we overuse a strength it
becomes a weakness, a rigid, preprogrammed response. Like a Shakespeare
character, blessed and cursed by the same quality, we have the “defects
of our virtues.”
Caught in our ego’s story, our world becomes
overcontained, our choices artificially simple. We make life too
predictable, seeing and hearing what “should” exist instead of what
does. No longer allowing things to happen, we make them happen – the one
way they’re supposed to. Our story creates our behavior while our
behavior creates our story.
Deep in our ego’s trance, we approach life with a
miniature set of responses. Secure in the familiar and known, we think
we’re coping well but actually we have few options. We lock ourselves
into inflexible positions, grow out of control about being in control
and, especially under stress, do more of what got us stuck in the first
place.
At our most compulsive, we may do things in a faulty
way simply because we always have, almost as a form of personal
tradition. We “go wrong with confidence,” sticking to our limited
strategy despite the cost, embracing a distorted certainty like a
fundamentalist who insists that the same absolute principle should apply
to everything.
Our sense of identity gets warped, too. In our ego’s
trance, we overidentify with our self-image and play roles that are less
than who we truly are, reacting as though we have no more options than a
character in a play or novel. Attached to one way of seeing ourselves,
we defend our image from the world’s feedback and contradiction. “That’s
just the way I am,” we say, and then work hard to prove the statement
true, acting like someone who has climbed a tree, kicked away the ladder
and now insists they were born in a tree.
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.
From "Fours"
Introduction
Four is one of what I jokingly call “nature’s
Enneagram styles.” In extreme old age people often slow down, grow
laconic and mellow; turning Nine-like, no matter what their true
personality style. In their early twenties, many young adults pass
through a natural Sevenish phase when they first venture into the world
to sample life’s variety and delights.
In a similar way, nature temporarily turns all
teenagers into Fours, in that the universal teenage experience contains
many of the elements of Four psychology: a sense of alienation; a
conscious search for identity; a preoccupation with who you are as
unique from others; a tendency to romanticize death; the conviction that
no one has ever felt what you feel and a keen awareness of both the
elation and pain of love. The famous poetry teacher John Ciardi was once
asked whether people have to suffer to become poets. “No,” he replied,
“Having been a teenager is quite enough.”
Like Ones, Fours compare reality with what could be.
While Ones look for imperfection in the world around them and want to
correct what’s wrong, Fours turn away from reality to live in their
imagination, feelings and moods. While this leads Fours to a creative,
idiosyncratic point of view, they can also get mired in their own
subjectivity.
Healthy Fours are idealistic, have good taste and are
great appreciators of beauty. They filter their outer reality through a
rich, subtle subjectivity and are often good at metaphorical thinking –
the ability to link unrelated facts and events; to understand and
experience one kind of thing in terms of another; seeing what
anthropologist-philosopher Gregory Bateson called “the pattern which
connects.”
Fours naturally practice a mild form of synesthesia –
a chronic blending of the senses that can produce rich complex
reactions to ordinary events. A Four entering a new situation could see
something that triggers a mental image, which in turn evokes a feeling,
which then reminds the Four of a song. The song could evoke more images
which in turn evoke more smells, tastes and feelings. The Four’s senses
can run together like a watercolor in the rain; they can see sounds,
hear feelings, smell images – a kaleidoscopic rinse of impressions.
Asked what he likes best about his personality style, a Four says, “I
don’t know if a lot of other people can appreciate things and places and
events with as much detail and richness and largeness. Even when I’m
bored it’s intense boredom.”
This sensory richness is like the raw material of
creativity and healthy Fours give themselves ways to express their
intense inner life. A Four songwriter says, “When I write a song it
reminds me that I have an identity. It’s like I get all my feelings out
on paper. Then I can look down and really see them. They become
manageable.” “From the beginning,” a Four actor comments, “acting seemed
like therapy, since I could transform my pain into something creative.”
In Enneagram books, Fours are often described as artistic and many
famous artists have had this Enneagram style. Otherwise, Fours have all
kinds of occupations, although they try whenever possible to make their
work creatively interesting.
Like Ones, healthy Fours can be morally courageous,
idealistic and work hard for what they believe in. They are contributors
rather than complainers, often committed to improving an imperfect
world. Some have a distinct need to realize an inner vision in the outer
world, perhaps by initiating innovative projects that have humanistic
or artistic aims. To this end, they can be daring, determined and
practical. “When I’m on my deathbed,” says one Four, “I hope I can look
back on my life and be proud. I don’t want to waste my life on the
frivolous.”
Fours are sensitive to the suffering of others and
want to minister to it. “I feel like I am in a position where I can
affect other people,” a successful Four explains. “I enjoy giving back. I
have to have something that fills me with drive and purpose and
passion. Service to others does that more than anything.” Another Four
adds, “Having experienced pain and loss has made me more understanding
of other people’s suffering. And more generous.” Fours can be
empathetic, foul-weather friends, able to understand the distress of
others, especially willing to attend to a friend’s pain when others
might turn away.
At their best, Fours express the universals of human
experience for all of us, articulating and affirming the reality of the
inner life; insisting that dreams and feelings are as real as tables and
chairs. Fours can be fine teachers and therapists in this regard. As
one Four says, “The ability to describe internal experience as a result
of having gone through it myself, and to work with other people
therapeutically because I have devised ways to work with myself – I
relate to that very well.” Fours can also be open advocates of the
passionate life. “Avidity, curiosity, passion and anger are my conscious
constructs,” a Four says, “They keep me from being too sad, from giving
up.” Learning about themselves and applying the knowledge are strong
tendencies for healthy people with this style.
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