Jack Labanauskas
Continuing my monologue with observations or stories about the tribulations that “seekers after truth” (SAT) are likely to run into, I would like you to consider the possibility that everyone starts as a seeker after truth but can easily stray along the way—and that includes historic monsters who have done epic harm; they probably wanted to do too much good for their pet cause at the expense of others. The difference between monsters and saints is the degree to which their views are in accordance with the laws of nature, laws that follow their own timing and alternately nurture or kill. We see winter as putting a damper on vegetation but know the earth needs rest and frost to break down the soil for next spring’s new growth. If we learn to adapt, we can thrive after developing ways to cope with the seasons.
The laws of nature are congruous and we are responsible for knowing rather than believing what our purpose and proper role in life is. To the degree that we comply with this knowledge, we are living up to our best potential. When along the way we deviate (perhaps in accordance to the less desirable inclinations of our enneagram configuration), we get lost. Our mistakes can be as minor as making a wrong turn at the light or as major as taking the wrong train, marrying the wrong partner, choosing the wrong dentist, taking the wrong job or college course or joining the wrong party, ideology or cult. Once embarked on a particular course, right or wrong, inertia can keep us going and there is no telling how far, or where it will take us. We have gotten to where we are today, step by step, after countless little, medium and large choices...many of them long forgotten. Today, we are trying to make sense of it all, aware of the present, with fragmented memory of the past and speculative expectations about the future. Our intentions may be wise, well thought out, supported by will, effort and skill, but if it’s the wrong time or project for the current environment we may fail. Inversely, we succeed sometimes barely trying and against impossible odds.
“Like fire in a piece of flint, knowledge exists in the mind. Suggestion is the friction which brings it out. So with all our feelings and actions – our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames – every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together are called karma – work, action.”
— Swami Vivekananda: Karma Yoga. New York, 1895. Complete Works, 1. 28-29.
My search for answers to life’s larger questions manifested at first as a feeling of urgency to understand while remaining confused about what to search for and where — getting into trouble, making mistakes, struggling with my conscience, meandering between doing the expedient/easy thing or what my better judgment required was typical or more likely. The price, as expected, was occasionally extracted in the coin of suffering or rewarded with temporary gratification. Missing in my life was a sense of meaning. I was not able to find answers digging in my own mind, clearly I needed help and help was not readily available given that I had dismissed as unconvincing the religious notions I was taught in childhood.
The laws of nature are congruous and we are responsible for knowing rather than believing what our purpose and proper role in life is. To the degree that we comply with this knowledge, we are living up to our best potential. When along the way we deviate (perhaps in accordance to the less desirable inclinations of our enneagram configuration), we get lost. Our mistakes can be as minor as making a wrong turn at the light or as major as taking the wrong train, marrying the wrong partner, choosing the wrong dentist, taking the wrong job or college course or joining the wrong party, ideology or cult. Once embarked on a particular course, right or wrong, inertia can keep us going and there is no telling how far, or where it will take us. We have gotten to where we are today, step by step, after countless little, medium and large choices...many of them long forgotten. Today, we are trying to make sense of it all, aware of the present, with fragmented memory of the past and speculative expectations about the future. Our intentions may be wise, well thought out, supported by will, effort and skill, but if it’s the wrong time or project for the current environment we may fail. Inversely, we succeed sometimes barely trying and against impossible odds.
“Like fire in a piece of flint, knowledge exists in the mind. Suggestion is the friction which brings it out. So with all our feelings and actions – our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames – every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together are called karma – work, action.”
— Swami Vivekananda: Karma Yoga. New York, 1895. Complete Works, 1. 28-29.
My search for answers to life’s larger questions manifested at first as a feeling of urgency to understand while remaining confused about what to search for and where — getting into trouble, making mistakes, struggling with my conscience, meandering between doing the expedient/easy thing or what my better judgment required was typical or more likely. The price, as expected, was occasionally extracted in the coin of suffering or rewarded with temporary gratification. Missing in my life was a sense of meaning. I was not able to find answers digging in my own mind, clearly I needed help and help was not readily available given that I had dismissed as unconvincing the religious notions I was taught in childhood.
My late teenage years were a sort of dark night of the soul period for me; after reading most of my father’s (probably a type 4 wing 5 bookworm) collection of classic literature, I came across graphology and became a voracious reader of intuitive/occult oriented material; graphology, numerology, palmistry, psychology... anything about what makes us tick.
What started as curiosity and fascination with the new and exciting, eventually come together as two big loves in philosophy: Vedanta and Macrobiotics. Vedanta satisfied my thirst for understanding the purpose of life, karma, cosmology and let me find my guru and meditation/yoga practice. Macrobiotics offered a satisfactory understanding of the principles of yin and yang, the five elements, training in food, home remedies, visual diagnosis and plausible explanations of how the material world works. These two schools of thought became my support system and the foundation for interpreting what I learned later in life, the Enneagram for example. The Enneagram appeared after the half-way mark in my lifelong pursuit of understanding and immediately became a welcome addition in harmony with the systems I had been studying, practicing and working with. The beauty of the enneagram was its simplicity that would give fellow SATs an efficient and practical access to deepen their insights into human type, nature and dynamics.
This simplicity can be deceiving until we go deeper finding ever more refined applications and correlations with the essential truths in other systems that under-gird all of life... Like a trip down a funnel... as the walls narrow we realize that we are getting closer to other tenets of long established traditional wisdom, the differences melt away and commonalities emerge.
My purpose here is to open a dialogue and exchange between fellow seekers after truth who happen to come from other traditions. And also to avoid “re-inventing the wheel.” It makes sense to approach questions or solve a problems using the system that is best suited for the task. Besides, it would help us avoid a common pitfall I mentioned in last month’s editorial, “the peculiar pattern that most “seekers” as well as “systems” tend to follow... Both start with what is essential, simple and works, but after the initial honeymoon and the initial rush calms down look for ways to get it back. The first impulse is to use our “strength” (i.e. our favorite system) in new, maybe untested or roundabout ways. This can lead to new discoveries or to “stretching” our system into a zone it was not designed for.” Of course, no system is large enough to contain all wisdom passed down through the ages, although many branches of wisdom have proven capable of answering enough questions to guide their followers towards enlightenment.
Now that we had a few decades to take a good look at the enneagram and work with it, we can see better how it can enhance or be supplemented by other systems. I have been impressed with the depth and quality of recent contributions from researchers in fields other than the enneagram who successfully found ways to work with both systems. I would very much encourage readers to write about ways they found of interacting or combining other systems with the enneagram. Many innovative articles along these lines appeared in recent issues including the current one.
We can see, for example, how this would apply to astrology: a birth chart with the planetary configuration at the time of birth in that location is like a picture of the genetic code of the environment in that moment (see below). But the earth keeps turning and the sky keeps changing as do the conditions and environments over the lifetime of that child. Everything changes, and so must also the way we live with the gifts and flaws we were born with. Whatever we were born with will develop in ways determined by our actions and choices within the confines of our environment and the times we live in.
What bothered me in the early days of my enneagram study (limiting it to one “highly abbreviated” point only) was the impression that the prevalent dogma was: “You are a type, and of some significance are the connecting lines, wings, and your subtype. Period. That’s it for this lifetime, you can be mistyped, but you can’t change your type.”
This didn’t go down well with my world-view of change being obligatory like it or not. To see types confined to a principal point, with tentacles of internal lines and flanked by the wings give us 5 points we are connected to and leaving 4 points somewhat out of reach.
Over time as the applications and theories surrounding the enneagram started broadening the picture. We pulled back from the odd notion that somehow the personality (it’s false, don’t you know) must therefore be expelled freeing us to become trait-free, ego-less creatures marinating in essence...?? This notion went to the ash heap of enneagram history along with fixation and a few other concepts... I suppose by now it’s not disputed any more that personality traits are expected to be present as long as there is matter and time associated with the individual. Saints and sinners are characters all.
In recent years a positive view of the enneagram types replaced the pathological one, and more attention is being paid to the importance of “lack” of some as well as “excess” of other traits.
Some typing tests, for example Susan Rhodes’ free test gives you an at-a-lance bar graph that makes it easy to see your entire E-configuration.
http://enneagramdimensions.net/whats_my_type.htm
What started as curiosity and fascination with the new and exciting, eventually come together as two big loves in philosophy: Vedanta and Macrobiotics. Vedanta satisfied my thirst for understanding the purpose of life, karma, cosmology and let me find my guru and meditation/yoga practice. Macrobiotics offered a satisfactory understanding of the principles of yin and yang, the five elements, training in food, home remedies, visual diagnosis and plausible explanations of how the material world works. These two schools of thought became my support system and the foundation for interpreting what I learned later in life, the Enneagram for example. The Enneagram appeared after the half-way mark in my lifelong pursuit of understanding and immediately became a welcome addition in harmony with the systems I had been studying, practicing and working with. The beauty of the enneagram was its simplicity that would give fellow SATs an efficient and practical access to deepen their insights into human type, nature and dynamics.
This simplicity can be deceiving until we go deeper finding ever more refined applications and correlations with the essential truths in other systems that under-gird all of life... Like a trip down a funnel... as the walls narrow we realize that we are getting closer to other tenets of long established traditional wisdom, the differences melt away and commonalities emerge.
My purpose here is to open a dialogue and exchange between fellow seekers after truth who happen to come from other traditions. And also to avoid “re-inventing the wheel.” It makes sense to approach questions or solve a problems using the system that is best suited for the task. Besides, it would help us avoid a common pitfall I mentioned in last month’s editorial, “the peculiar pattern that most “seekers” as well as “systems” tend to follow... Both start with what is essential, simple and works, but after the initial honeymoon and the initial rush calms down look for ways to get it back. The first impulse is to use our “strength” (i.e. our favorite system) in new, maybe untested or roundabout ways. This can lead to new discoveries or to “stretching” our system into a zone it was not designed for.” Of course, no system is large enough to contain all wisdom passed down through the ages, although many branches of wisdom have proven capable of answering enough questions to guide their followers towards enlightenment.
Now that we had a few decades to take a good look at the enneagram and work with it, we can see better how it can enhance or be supplemented by other systems. I have been impressed with the depth and quality of recent contributions from researchers in fields other than the enneagram who successfully found ways to work with both systems. I would very much encourage readers to write about ways they found of interacting or combining other systems with the enneagram. Many innovative articles along these lines appeared in recent issues including the current one.
We can see, for example, how this would apply to astrology: a birth chart with the planetary configuration at the time of birth in that location is like a picture of the genetic code of the environment in that moment (see below). But the earth keeps turning and the sky keeps changing as do the conditions and environments over the lifetime of that child. Everything changes, and so must also the way we live with the gifts and flaws we were born with. Whatever we were born with will develop in ways determined by our actions and choices within the confines of our environment and the times we live in.
What bothered me in the early days of my enneagram study (limiting it to one “highly abbreviated” point only) was the impression that the prevalent dogma was: “You are a type, and of some significance are the connecting lines, wings, and your subtype. Period. That’s it for this lifetime, you can be mistyped, but you can’t change your type.”
This didn’t go down well with my world-view of change being obligatory like it or not. To see types confined to a principal point, with tentacles of internal lines and flanked by the wings give us 5 points we are connected to and leaving 4 points somewhat out of reach.
Over time as the applications and theories surrounding the enneagram started broadening the picture. We pulled back from the odd notion that somehow the personality (it’s false, don’t you know) must therefore be expelled freeing us to become trait-free, ego-less creatures marinating in essence...?? This notion went to the ash heap of enneagram history along with fixation and a few other concepts... I suppose by now it’s not disputed any more that personality traits are expected to be present as long as there is matter and time associated with the individual. Saints and sinners are characters all.
In recent years a positive view of the enneagram types replaced the pathological one, and more attention is being paid to the importance of “lack” of some as well as “excess” of other traits.
Some typing tests, for example Susan Rhodes’ free test gives you an at-a-lance bar graph that makes it easy to see your entire E-configuration.
http://enneagramdimensions.net/whats_my_type.htm
Playing around with concepts, we could illustrate the same chart by placing the bars like spokes on a wheel in the proper locations, or, assuming that a good amount of basic functions are shared between types, portray them as the inner circle with type-specific traits sticking out like a star to the extent that our bar-graph shows. Remember that humans share about 25% of DNA with daffodils, 90% with chimps, so we can assume that among ourselves we share as much or more as in the inner circle...
Better yet, in my opinion anyway, still assuming a center of shared basic functions, if we connect the peaks of our graph directly without going back to the shared circle, we see a Rorschach type “cloud” of traits giving our imaginary type Five an individualized “chart” similar to an astrological chart, but without the benefit of an ever-changing but perfectly predictable planetary arrangement in constant motion.
For the timing factor regarding the seasons and changes of our “planetary periods” the enneagram offers us only the option of re-evaluating periodically our psychological map based on insight into our motivations and inclinations and possibly assisted with the opinions of intimate friends and family. We are just beginning to scratch the domain of archetypal subjective analysis and there is lots more to come...