Kimberly Moon - Enneagram: An Essential Guide to Unlocking the 9 Personality Types to Increase Your Self-Awareness and Understand Other Personalities So You Can Build Better Relationships and Improve Communication

Enneagram

An Essential Guide to Unlocking the 9 Personality Types to Increase Your Self-Awareness and Understand Other Personalities So You Can Build Better Relationships and Improve Communication

Copyright 2019 by Kimberly Moon

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Chapter 1: History and Origin of the Enneagram

T he history of the Enneagram of Personality is widely disputed, but there are some main points that are agreed upon as major contributing factors. There certainly seem to be roots that can be traced back to the philosophy of Ancient Greece. Some will emphasize the mathematical and geometrical qualities and evoke Pythagoras and Boethius; others point to its connections to the tradition of Kabbalah. These various traditions make up the framework that expresses the intrinsic archetypes that can be found in the Enneagram of Personality and serve as perspectives and traditions to consider when approaching the use of the Enneagram for self-development.

Platonic Essentialism serves as a founding for many of the archetypes and symbolic systematology involved in the foundations of the Enneagram. Basically, this comes from the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, and it states that every person has an essence. This essentialism is a core human concept that alludes to the Essence of the soul. The idea is firmly rooted in the belief in the existence of the human soul as a concept. Platonic essentialism was germinated in Greece and Asia Minor. Eventually, the ideas moved, as spices and materials did, geologically south, to areas now known as Syria and even further to Egypt. It was in these places that the ideas were adopted by early Christian mystics who focused on the ways that the divine form was lost in the ego. This is the origin of the Christian concept of the seven deadly sins. The original inspiration for the Christian seven deadly sins was contained by the same material that contained the nine types in the Enneagram.

Most scholars agree that it was the Sufis, people from the sect of Islam that emphasize mysticism and ecstasy, who developed the concept of personality types. They were spiritual and mystical people, who did a lot of work in the area of spiritual research. The Sufis culture was deeply ingrained with mysticism. It was under their influence in the 14th and 15th centuries that the idea of personalities became defined. It was a Sufi belief that there were nine essential patterns or orientations to life. These patterns and orientations represented the image of God that exists within a person. There is also the other side of this representation: the opposite force within the person, which serves to block the realization of the power within.

The Sufis had a tradition of spiritual development that encouraged people to find their way to God over many years, and they witnessed from direct observation the nine ways in which individual personalities manifest and how they run into obstacles in their journey. To condense the Sufis primary question, one could put it like this: What happens? What happens to our original goodness? What happens along the way to cause us to be distracted, or anxious, or too angry to have clarity in our lives? The Sufis philosophy is congruent with Platos. They had a conception of the human experience that agreed with essentialism, providing a means to reach self-actualization and self-realization.

The Sufis believed that our psychological and spiritual developmentour experiences, our upbringing, our attitudes, and positioning in the worldgrow a tension between two dualistic truths that are available to each aspect of us: the virtue, or essential truth that mimics the divine form, or the vice, which serves to distort and subvert each virtue. You can see how this has directly influenced the Enneagram. Each Enneagram type has an essential vice and an essential virtue. These are traits that they naturally embody, and either might spring up in the face of challenges. Each types virtue and vice can tell you a little about how they position themselves in the world and in their ideas.

Think about the way that our upbringing and context influence the way our personality is expressed. If a child grows up in a chaotic household, an environment in which she must protect herself, then she will develop ways to protect herself. The most developed and often used parts of the childs personality will be the ones that serve as protection. This could manifest itself in many ways, whether the strategies are good for the child or not. Once these behaviors and attitudes are firmly established, a person feels like they have an identity, and the ego starts to take hold. We then develop strategies to protect the undeveloped parts from criticism.

The Sufis had a beautiful, long tradition of meditation and prayer and mysticism. This path toward spiritual guidance has led the Sufis to integrate many concepts with spirituality. As their mathematical capabilities grew in the fifteenth century, Sufi mathematicians discovered the decimal system. This led to the concept of periodic decimal fractions (when one is divided by three or seven). As their scientific and mathematical understanding of the world grew, this knowledge was incorporated and fused into their spiritual understanding, and the Enneagram was one of the products of this marriage of science and faith. In the nine points of energy that the Enneagram describes, the Sufis saw nine refractions of the one divine love. The word Enneagram itself comes from the Greek words ennea (nine) and gramma (letter).

The Sufis understood the potential for insight in exploring our vices. The Sufi tradition asks, What do our negative qualities teach us? and it encourages the idea that positive and enriching value can be gleaned from exploring our negative sides. Before we can move on and understand ourselves, we have to look at how we are benefitting from the vices.