What’s
Your Number?
Using
the Enneagram for Self-Discovery
and Healthier Relationships
by D. Patrick Miller
Published by Fearless Books at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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in this age of the spiritual supermarket, certain signs indicate the irreversible entry of esoteric knowledge into popular awareness. Take this personal ad from a weekly newspaper in California:
Enneagram 9, gentle, fiery, svelte, and rare, seeks 35 to 37, good-looking Cancer man with Leo moon, evolved Enneagram 9 or 8. Richness, depth, passion and partnership possibilities.
This ad suggests that knowing the answer to “What’s your sign?” may soon no longer suffice as standard singles bar repartée. Hipsters on the make had better be ready with a reply to “What’s your Enneagram number?” — and the cognoscenti should be able to furnish their dominant “wing” as well.
To the uninitiated, this may all sound
like so much gobbledygook. Those familiar with the history of the
Enneagram may shake their heads in dismay at the apparent corruption
of yet another profound spiritual legacy. But for better or worse,
the Enneagram is doubtless here to stay, and spread, in popular
consciousness.
What
is the Enneagram?
Strictly speaking, the Enneagram is a nine-pointed star, a symbol of ancient and uncertain origins that may have once served as a mathematical map of cosmic reality. According to J.G. Bennett in Enneagram Studies, the symbol “could be used to represent every process that maintains itself by self-renewal, including, of course, life itself.” Most scholars trace it back at least 2500 years to the secret Sufi society known as the Sarmouni Brotherhood.
The Enneagram was introduced to the West by the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, who had it painted on the floor at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. There it was used as the pattern for an elaborate choreography of movement exercises, designed to imbue Gurdjieff’s students with an instinctive sense of how fundamental cosmic processes are played out in the material world.
Gurdjieff did not directly teach the “Enneagram of personality” that is rapidly gaining adherents today. That system is universally credited to Oscar Ichazo, founder of the Arica Institute, who claims that he learned the Enneagram directly from Sufi teachers in Afghanistan before he became familiar with the writings of Gurdjieff.
At any rate, Ichazo was the teacher of Claudio Naranjo, who further developed the psychological profiles of nine basic personality types corresponding to the points of the Enneagram. Naranjo in turn began teaching the system in the early 70s. Some of his earliest students were American Jesuit priests, who sparked a rapid dissemination of the knowledge in the Jesuit community.
Until the early 1970s, the Enneagram was transmitted as an oral teaching, in keeping with the Sufi tradition. By 1973, brief notes on the personality types could be found at Jesuit theological centers in Berkeley and Chicago. But there was no book presenting a modern understanding of the Enneagram until 1984, when Roman Catholic authors Maria Beesing, Robert J. Nogosek, and Patrick O’Leary published The Enneagram: A Journey of Self-Discovery. Popular among Catholic readers, this book did not gain a general readership and is faulted by some for a narrowly religious view of the Enneagram.
Recent Teachers and
Controversies
Although new Enneagram teachers and authors seem to pop up almost daily, the two best-known proponents of the system for the American general audience are Helen Palmer of Berkeley, California, and Don Riso (writing and teaching with partner Russ Hudson) of New York City. Riso is a former Jesuit seminarian who encountered the Enneagram in 1974 in Toronto, when fellow students familiar with the system assigned him a “Sufi number.” Annoyed at being pigeonholed by a typology he first regarded as just another California fad, Riso resisted the Enneagram until his repeated exposures to it in the Jesuit environment encouraged him “to see beyond the glib use of the system to the genuine insights it contains.”
Riso’s first book on the Enneagram, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery, appeared in 1987 and has been followed by several more, including The Wisdom of the Enneagram. He continually develops new material based chiefly on observation and intuition and gives workshop trainings with his partner Russ Hudson through the Enneagram Institute.
Palmer is a psychology teacher and intuitive counselor who co-directs an Enneagram teaching center and gives trainings worldwide. (In 1979, she was the subject of an aggressive investigation by Mother Jones magazine, which attempted, and failed, to debunk her psychic abilities. See Sense & Spirituality Report “The Truth about Psychics.”) A student of Naranjo, Palmer has taught thousands of people the Enneagram using live panel discussions with identified exemplars of the nine types. Her first book The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life was released in 1988, followed by The Enneagram in Love and Work.
Whether it originated with the crazy-wise Sufis or the problematic Gurdjieff, the legacy of the Enneagram material seems charged with controversy. Oscar Ichazo has repeatedly tried, by legal means, to stop dissemination of the teaching beyond Arica circles, claiming that other teachers’ published interpretations of the Enneagram constitute copyright infringement. The courts have consistently disagreed, construing the Enneagram of personality as an idea, which by definition belongs to the public domain and is therefore fair game for any and all interpreters.
Those interpreters as well are prone to disagree about who has really got it right. Palmer and Riso, for example, have held vigorous differences on the system. Still, it’s safe to say that the central aspects of their respective teachings correspond for the most part.
As a student of the Enneagram myself since 1986, I’m less interested in investigating controversies than in collecting valuable insights on the practical use that people can make of the system. This is the first article to provide original comments of Riso and Palmer side-by-side, and I appreciate their willingness to participate in this effort to coordinate the views of the two leading Enneagram teachers.
Why Study the
Enneagram?
Those unfamiliar with the Enneagram might wonder why anyone would find it worth fighting over. The short answer: As a guide to human character, behavior, and motivation, it simply has no equal. Simpler to grasp initially than astrology and more applicable than typologies derived from psychological testing, the Enneagram provides a clear and easily recognizable map of nine distinct personality patterns. For most people, it simply rings true.
In his preface to Palmer’s first book, renowned consciousness researcher Charles T. Tart describes his experience with the Enneagram in terms that will be familiar to its dedicated students. “When the nature of my type was explained to me,” Tart writes, “it was one of the most insightful moments of my life. All sorts of puzzling events and reactions in my life now made excellent retrospective sense to me. Even more important, I could see the central way in which my approach to life was defective and I had a general outline of the ways to work on changing it. I understood the behavior of many of my friends once I could type them and was able to interact more effectively with them and be a better friend. Years of personal growth work following that initial set of insights identifying my Enneagram type continued to validate the usefulness of the system to me.”
The nine basic personality types identified by the Enneagram are understood to be “fixations” of psychic energy that mask people’s real spiritual essence and create a drag on their potential for growth. Whether karmically determined or formed by early family experience (or both), our fixations constitute our habitual way of looking at the world and relating to other people. We identify ourselves by our personalities, but we limit ourselves by them as well.
The point of studying our personality type is to recognize habitual patterns of perception and relationship, then learn to grow beyond them. It’s generally agreed that we can’t change or fully transcend our personality type during our lifetime, but we can become less limited by our type’s fixed traits. The experience of our own personalities can be transformed from that of a lifelong compulsion to a loose-fitting style of being that allows us to try on other perspectives and ways of looking at the world.
As Helen Palmer succinctly puts it, “I don’t want to give up my personality. But I don’t want it to run my life!” Don Riso suggests that unless we recognize our personality type, we may be trapped by it like rats running endlessly in a wheel. “The drive to affirm ourselves is healthy,” he points out. “But our fixated personalities constitute mistakes about who we are and which way we should go in life. We want to affirm our real spiritual selves, but our personalities are plastered over them. That’s how we get more and more enmeshed in incorrect strategies of living and relating. We suffer from the illusion that we will find ourselves if we intensify our habitual patterns, when actually we need to recognize them and gradually surrender them.”