Sandra Maitri - The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues: Finding the Way Home

Table of Contents

ALSO BY SANDRA MAITRI

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
New York

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book arose following workshops I led in the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003 for the Ridhwan School in Boulder, Colorado, and the Enneallionce for Inner Work of Hamburg, Germany. I am grateful to Anne Laney for organizing the Boulder workshop and to all who supported it, and to the various organizers in Hamburg, especially my translator, Boris Fittkau.

I am deeply grateful to my very bright and very talented editor at Tarcher, Mitch Horowitz, for his continuing appreciation, support, and understanding of my work. His astute editorial input has once again helped to make a better book. I am also grateful to him for leading me to my wonderful and also very smart agent, Katherine Boyle, to whom I would like to express my gratitude for her ongoing support. Mitch and Katie both understood my vision and saw the importance of this book, and together encouraged me to produce it. I would also like to thank Deborah Miller for her meticulous copyediting of this book and for her astute queries and suggestions, which have helped to make this book, like my first one, stronger.

My profound thanks go to Hameed Ali (A. H. Almaas) for his generosity with his material, for his gracious Foreword to this book and his encouragement for me to write it, for his wisdom, and for being the remarkable light that he is for the planet at this time. And deep gratitude goes to Claudio Naranjo, who introduced me to the enneagram back in 1970, and as my first spiritual teacher, started me on the Path. I feel deeply honored by his support of my writing on the enneagram.

I would also like to thank Sherry Anderson, Mayuri Onerheim, and especially Rosanne Annoni for their reading of the manuscript, helpful comments, and encouragement. Rosanne, in particular, spent hours going over it and making useful suggestions. She is also a member of my painting group, which includes Jeannine Jourdan and Gabi Spina, and to all three I am grateful for the weekly nonverbal respite from writing. Many others contributed directly and indirectly to this book, and I would like to express my gratitude to some of them: to Eugene Cash for his helpful etiological input and Buddhist quotations; to Ralph Sharrett for making the diagrams; to Alia Johnson for showing me the Virginia Woolf passage so many years ago; to Bob Rosenbush for his ceaseless support and encouragement of my writing; to my dear friend Geneen Roth for her interest, enthusiasm, and advice about this book and many other things; to Jeanne and Paul Rosenblum for their friendship, many meals, and sustaining warmth; to Joyce Lyke for being such a good friend during this period, which I am more thankful for than I can express; and finally, to Brian La Forgia for his healing presence, wisdom, generosity of heart, and his love.

My students have taught me much of what is contained within this book, and to all of them, I express my thanks for their sincerity and devotion to the truth. It is an honor to work with them all, and I am grateful that I am able to do this. Decades of witnessing the personal processes of my group-mates and fellow teachers of the Diamond Approach has also contributed to the understanding in these pages. It is also an honor to be on this journey with them, and to watch and be part of their transformation.

And to all those who have made their own inner journey over the centuries, I am grateful. This book would not be here without the legacy they have bequeathed to us in advancing our collective consciousness.

FOREWORD

Being so involved and lost in the details of our lives, we forget that these particulars are actually the outer layer of our real lives. We might not even know, if we have not had the good fortune to have some awakening to true reality or to have encountered some genuine spiritual teaching, that these details merely form the outer layer of what is a much more magnificent reality. We might remain so surface-bound that we view ancient spiritual tools and methods for accessing this magnificent potential of human life only as means to help us deal with such everyday details. This is, to a great extent, how the wisdom of the enneagram has been usedwhich is why I am happy when I see books about it that remind us of its original and noble intention. Such is the present book.

In this second book on the enneagram by Sandra Maitri, she succeeds again, and in a more effective way, in showing how the enneagram is, more than anything else, a tool for inner transformation. She achieves this in a new way, one that both illuminates the basic and subtle aspects of the path of transformation and that reveals the inner meaning of some important levels of the knowledge of the enneagram. In her first book, The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram, Sandra focused on the enneagram of fixations, or the psychological types. Here the focus shifts to the enneagrams of passions and virtues, with a pioneering exposition of such important dimensions of the amazing wisdom inherent in the enneagram.

The map of the enneagram, according to its original sources, reveals the design of reality in all its facets. There exist many enneagrams in this system, each revealing and elucidating the structure of reality in one of its dimensions. The enneagram of fixations, for example, addresses the dimension of ego or personality types, that is to say, the dimension of normal egoic experience. The enneagram of fixations focuses on the mental nature of the ego types, their underlying delusions, and the many character traits that emerge from such delusions. Sandra clearly showed in her first book how the fixations emerge from the loss of the Holy Ideas. This developed and fleshed out, amongst other things, the insights of my book on the enneagram, Facets of Unity, in which I primarily focused on the Holy Ideas and how their loss leads to the delusions of each fixation. In her book, Sandra showed how the totality of the fixations develop out of such delusions.

In my work, that of the Diamond Approach, I use the map of the enneagram in three significant places. At the beginning of the inner work of transformation, I frequently use the enneagram of fixations, which can help in recognizing and understanding the patterns of ones ego personality and sense of self in great detail. As the path unfolds and delves deeply into the nature of reality and realization, I use the enneagram of Holy Ideas, which can help, in amazingly clear ways, to reveal the true design of reality, reality as experienced in enlightened consciousness. In the middle of the path, however, where one begins to experience ones essential nature and experiences some integration of this essential presence, I use the enneagrams of passions and virtues, as developed and understood within the view of the Diamond Approach. The passions are the qualities of the heart when under the influence of egoic experience, which manifest as inner attitudes and affective atmospheres that both express the fixations and drive their particular actions. The virtues are the expression of the openness and development of the heart due to the realization of spiritual nature resulting from inner transformation.