The Enneagram

Why are we so interested in knowing about ourselves?  One reason is that we can build a working relationship with ourselves.  There are lots of suffering in our lives. Physical pain, unmet expectations, multitude of petty annoyances and delays, people who don’t treat us right, and so on causes us suffering.  A common reaction to suffering is to blame the external circumstances.  As we gain some self-knowledge, we recognized that while external events are annoying, we also create a great deal of our suffering in unnecessary ways.  Another reason to study type is so we can understand other people as they are to themselves, rather than as we see them from our own point of view.  This understanding of others can help work teams be efficient, infuse romance with magic, and help families reunite. 

The Enneagram is an ancient Sufi teaching that describes nine personality types and their interrelationships.  The term Enneagram was introduced by G.I. Gurdjieff, a pioneer in adapting Eastern spiritual teachings for use by modern Westerner.  A general term Enneagram was used in his teachings and given wider currency by In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching written by his best-known student, P.D. Ouspensky.  Gurdjieff was well aware of the useless suffering created by flaws of on our personalities, taught that each of us had a chief feature that was the central axis around which the delusional aspects of our personalities revolved.  If we could know that chief feature, the work of understanding and transcending the delusional aspects of personality (or false personality) would become much more efficient. 

To study personality type isn’t so that we learn to spot other people character traits, it’s so that we can lessen our own human suffering.  But the Enneagram is so accurate that I can pretend to be a psychic because I could type quickly and accurately and could come up with an enormous amount of personal detailed information about you and I barely know you.  If you tell me what type you are, I can tell you more about who you are than you ever know about yourself.  To find your type, double click on site. 

Call Me by My True Names
by Thich Nhat Hanh

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

In Plum Village, where I live in France, we receive many letters from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It is very painful to read them, but we have to do it, we have to be in contact. We try our best to help, but the suffering is enormous, and sometimes we are discouraged. It is said that half the boat people die in the ocean. Only half arrive at the shores in Southeast Asia, and even then they may not be safe.

There are many young girls, boat people, who are raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries try to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continue to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate. She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.

When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, there is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we may become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The tide of the poem is "Please Call Me by My True Names," because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, "Yes."

 From: Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hanh

This poem embodies the essence of what Hanh calls "interbeing," the innerconnectedness of all things.

Finding the Beloved

We all want the same basic thing.  We want to be loved and accepted just the way we are.  We don’t want to have to change to meet someone else’s standards or expectations.  We think that we need someone with the same interests, values, temperament, upbringing, well, you name it.  But then, when we find someone who meets most of our criteria, the same thing happens that happened with all other people who came into our lives.  We feel trespassed on.  We feel abandoned and we go numb and ballistic. 

Those who think that it’s just a matter of meeting “the right person” are in for a bit of a surprise.  If we are scare of giving or receiving love, it doesn’t take long before “Mr. or Ms. Right” becomes “Mr. or Ms. Wrong.”  If we aren’t the right person, meeting the right person isn’t going to do us any good.  We are going to attract what we are.  Whoever we are is what we get.  We always meet a partner who has the same level of fear of intimacy that we have.  In that sense, we always get the perfect match.  The beloved is just the mirror image of ourselves.  When we can love and accept ourselves fully, we can embrace the beloved.  And not until.  So look slowly and carefully into the mirror.  When we look into the beloved eyes, know that we are looking into our own.  When the beloved respond to us in fear, know that this is our fear as well.  Yes, relationship is an excellent way of meeting ourselves.  Once we find ourselves, we find the beloved. 

So, let the white horse ride into the sunset alone.  The person who stands before us is not our savior, but the one who holds our hand while we claim our own salvation. The question is do we want to meet ourselves?  Are we willing to let the fantasy go and take the hand that reaches out to us?  If not, better look for a cave in the Himalayas before we spot Mr. or Ms. Right getting on the next circular ride.  Because once we do, we’d be busy for a while. 

Responding to Life

We can’t control what happens in our lives.  We can, however, decide how we want to respond to it.  Life is not just something that happens to us.  We are not a passive victim here.  We are people with continual choices about how we respond to each event and circumstance of our lives.  We can respond with strength and dignity or with fear and blame. 

Our life experience is made up of both: what happens to us and how we perceive it and respond to it.  The objective and subjective content run together.  If we are unwilling to take responsibility for the subjective portion of our experience, we deny our partnership with life.  We reject our co-creative power and accept the role of the victim.  Then we blame God or other people for the fact that our experience doesn’t meet our expectations.  We can pretend that what happens to us is someone else’s responsibility and how we respond to events is irrelevant. But that’s a cop-out.  We deny the very reason why we are here: to awaken from self suffering. 

Suffering happens when we resist or deny our experience.  It happens when we think and feel in a negative, self-pitying way about events and circumstances of our lives.  It happens when we try to make something or someone outside of us responsible for the quality of our lives.  Until we are willing to take some kind of responsibility for our experience, we cannot know our creative power.  However, when we know our thoughts and feeling can shape our lives, we can begin to have impact on any situation that we face. 

It’s so hard to let go of the people we have been close to emotionally:  parents, children, spouses, lovers, friends, workmates.  Attachments don’t die easily.  Sometimes when we allow others to have their own experience and make their own decisions and they choose to leave, there is nothing that we can do.  They must make the choices that best honor themselves and so must we.  It is important that we be gentle with ourselves and allow ourselves to mourn the loss.  If we really allow ourselves to feel our feelings, we will move through them.  We won’t wallow in our pain or make an identity out of being wounded or rejected. 

 Relationships with others begin and end.  Some last for a lifetime; others for years, months, or weeks.  There is no guarantees how long any given relationship last.  No relationship stays in one place emotionally.  Each one has its ups and downs.  An enlightened person deals with what is happening now and doesn’t fantasize about some ideal that isn’t being realized.  She doesn’t expect the relationship to be different than it is.  An enlightened person doesn’t need to be right or to make the other person wrong.  He just needs to be honest with himself and others.  He tells the truth without making the other person wrong.  He remembers the light in himself and the light in the other person.  His ability to stay in truth may be far from perfect, but his willingness to abandon falsehood as soon as he sees it.

I am in the mood "Don't" today. 

If you don’t like starring in one of those melodramatic Italian operas, at the end of which everyone dies, don’t try to be responsible for someone else’s life and don’t let anyone else try to be responsible for yours.  Don’t try to parent your adult friends or lovers and don’t let them try to parent you.  Let them take responsibility for their own lives.  Let them make their own mistakes and learn from them.  Don't give your power away.  Don't try to take power away from them. 

Don’t interfere in other people lives.  Don’t let others interfere in your life.  Bad boundaries here result in a lot of wasted time and energy; they often involved hurt feelings on both sides.   Please, step back and look at the line that has been crossed.  Step out of other people’s lives and back into your own.  Ask others to do the same for you.  Be aware when you step over the line and start giving other people advice about how they should live their lives.  Be aware when you try to analyze, improve, or fix other people.  And back off.  Respect the thoughts and feelings of others, even when you don't share them or agree with them.   

Remember, you are responsible for what you think, feel, and experience, and others are responsible for what they think, feel, and experience.  That’s it.  Accept anything else as the truth and you invite trespass or abuse.  When boundaries are compromised, relationships become difficult if not impossible.  People feel violated, disrespected, and invalidated. 

It is easy to love people who agree with us and support us.  However it is not so easy to love the people who are critical of us and say negative things about us.  Jesus encourages us to love our enemies and he knows how hard it is.  Yet he required that of us anyway.  Why?  Because we cannot come to peace so long as there is hatred in our hearts.  Love means that we accept people the way they are.  We see how they go into fear and push love away and we feel compassion for them.  We keep our hearts open to these people. 

We can love other people without agreeing with them.  In fact this is one of the ways we can tell if we love someone unconditionally.  When our acceptance and our love for a person abide even when we disagree with what s/he says, we know that we love that person without conditions.   Jesus asked us to love people unconditionally.  He didn’t say “love only holy people” or "love people that are in agreement with you."  He said “love everyone.”  Do we have to love the person who just attacked us and our families?  Jesus told us clearly and without exception, “Love your enemies.”

If we can accept our enemies and see them in the light, nothing can take our peace away.  Jesus called us to the most difficult task, because he knows that nothing else would release us from the cycle of violence.

The Background of Unhappiness

The ego creates separation, and separation creates suffering.  Apart of being the obvious ones such as anger, hatred, there are other more subtle forms of negativity.   They are the background unhappiness that many people spend a large part of their lives in.  Do you often experience a feeling of discontent that could best be described as a kind of background resentment?  In his latest book, “A New Earth,” Eckhart Tolle provided some of the most common thoughts that feed the feeling of discontent resentment.  Whenever there is unhappiness in the background of your life, you can see which of these above thoughts applies and fill in your own content according to your personal situation.  Here go:

“There is something that needs to happen in my life before I can be at peace.  And I resent that it hasn’t happened yet.  Maybe my resentment will finally make it happen.”

“Something happened in the past that should not have happened, and I resent that.  If that hadn’t happened, I would be at peace now.”

Often the beliefs are directed toward a person and so “happening” becomes “doing”:

          “You should do this so that I can be at peace.  And I resent that you haven’t done it yet.  Maybe my resentment will make you do it.”

“Something you (or I) did, said, or failed to do in the past is preventing me from being at peace now.”

“What you are doing or failing to do now is preventing me from being at peace.”

Which thoughts feed your feeling of your discontent resentment? 

Abundance

Many of us complain that others do not treat us well enough.  We say, “I don’t get enough attention, recognition, acknowledgment.  I’m being taken for granted.  Others want to manipulate me, take advantage of me.  Nobody loves me.”

Who we think we are is this:  “I am a needy ‘little me’ whose needs are not being met.”  We believe that we have nothing to give and the world or other people are withholding from us what we need. This sabotages situations and create dysfunction in all our relationships.  If the thought of lack—whether it be money, recognition, or love—has become part of who we think we are, we will always experience lack.  Acknowledging the good that is already in our lives is the foundation for all abundance.  The fact is: whatever we think the world is withholding from us, we are withholding from the world.  We are withholding it because deep down we think we are small and that we have nothing to give.  When we start giving, we will start receiving.  Outflow determines inflow.  The law that outflow determines inflow is expressed by Jesus in this powerful image: “Give and it will be given to you.  Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. “

Whatever we think the world is withholding from us, we already have, but unless we allow it to flow out, we won’t even know that we have it.  This includes abundance.  We don’t need to own anything to feel abundant, although if we feel abundant consistently things will almost certainly come to us.  Abundance comes only to those whose already have it.  It is a universal law.  Jesus puts it like this: “For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Notes:  Tolle, Eckhart.  A New Earth.

All over the world at court proceedings you hear defense lawyers say, “This is totally out of character,” and the accused say, “I don’t know what came over me.”   

But over in this corner of the world in Houston at the court house proceedings you hear another defense lawyer, ronlawhouston says, “This is a case of diminished responsibility.  My client’s pain-body was activated, and he did not know what he was doing. In fact he didn’t do it.  His pain-body did.”  And the accused says, “I am unconscious at the time.  I was possessed by my pain-body.  I do not know what I was doing.  I am innocent.”    You can hear both the attorney and client who are greatly influenced by the words of Ekhart Tolle.

Which lawyer would you choose to defend you if you temporary turn into a maniac: a normal defense lawyer or a spiritual normal defense lawyer?