The Enneagram is a supplemental tool for Self-transformation but used alone will be overwhelmed by the P-B context and identity. Added to the arsenal of the Simple Reality worldview, and the practices of insight meditation and The Point of Power Practice, it could powerfully support the process of awakening.
Helen Palmer, an early promoter of the Enneagram, corroborates the Simple Reality approach to the distinction between response and reaction, and creating a new identity. “When you find yourself moving into anger or fear, the first step is just to be mindful, to observe what is happening in the moment and shift attention to the neutral place in the belly. Then you simply wait, so that your energy does not go out reactively and create its inevitable backlash consequences [afflictive emotion]. At the very least, you convert the negative energy into a neutral place [response], which allows you to more easily see someone else’s point of view [compassion]. Eventually, when you can maintain that neutrality under pressure, an experience of essence [True self] can arise.”[i]
“Unlike other psychological systems, the Enneagram treats all personality types as inherently defensive structures. Our acquired personalities, Palmer explains, serve to mask, mimic, and protect from further harm the more essential potentials that we inherit at birth but from which we’re increasingly cut off in the course of growing up. By characterizing the defensive characteristics of each personality type so precisely, the Enneagram is a unique tool for self-awareness. Most traditional psychotherapeutic techniques seek to make patients aware of unconscious defensive patterns. Moreover, the system can be used not just to identify and loosen destructive personality fixations such as fear, anger, and deceit but to convert them into their higher opposites—qualities of essence such as courage, serenity, and truthfulness. It provides a route not just to more adaptive behavior in short but to an experience of a truer self.”[ii]
In our search for wisdom we cannot afford to overlook any insights that will facilitate our journey toward freedom from suffering, our emancipation from the old delusional identity.
[i] Schwartz, Tony. What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America. New York: Bantam, 1995, p. 400.
[ii] Ibid., p. 377.
