Beatrice Chestnut - The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge

Copyright 2013 by Beatrice Chestnut

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2013

ISBN: 978-1-938314-55-1

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She Writes Press

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This book is dedicated to David and Charlotte, in the hope that they will grow up in a more conscious world. You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree; but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities.In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization. But, like any other living organism, the human individuum needs
favorable conditions for his growth from acorn into oak tree; he needs an atmosphere of warmth to give him both a feeling of inner security and the inner freedom enabling him to have his own feelings and thoughts and to express himself. He needs the good will of others, not only to help him in his many needs, but to guide and encourage him to become a mature and fulfilled individual. He also needs healthy friction with the wishes and wills of others. If he can thus grow with others, in love and in friction, he will also grow in accordance with his real self.

Karen Horney, MD, in
Neurosis and Human Growth:
The Struggle Toward Self-Realization

Introduction:

Self-Awareness and the Enneagram

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui [master of himself] if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

William James, Principles of Psychology

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In the space there is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Victor Frankl

M ANY PEOPLE TODAY SEEK ANSWERS to such questions as Why do I do the things I do? or How can I have more fulfilling relationships? or How can I achieve better results in my work and live a more satisfying life?

When we want or need to make some sort of positive change in our lives, we understandably look for a path to greater self-understanding thats both easy-to-use in everyday life and effective in helping with lifes many challenges.

Being able to change your behavior is central to any personal growth effort, and at the same time its incredibly difficult, given the power of our unconscious habits. In order to change behavior to achieve personal growth, we must develop one capacity: We must develop the ability to create the mental and emotional space inside ourselves to observe and understand what we are doing and think about why we do it. From this starting point of being able to see our thoughts and feelings in action instead of just being absorbed by them, we can begin to see more clearly where and how we are stuck in a habit and how we can make the conscious choice to do something different. If we have the mental room to reflect on the nuts and bolts of our habitual functioning, we open the door to greater self-understanding.

In this book, I hope to achieve two goals. First, to show how ancient wisdom teachings illuminate the idea that self-knowledgewhich I define as the capacity to observe, think about, and own your thoughts, feelings, and actionsis the key to real growth and the ability to live a happier, more balanced life. And second, to provide a map and a set of instructionsyour owners manual for your own selfthat will show you how to expand your self-knowledge so you can start or deepen your study of your self in a way that leads to positive change.

You can create a seismic shift in your life through increasing your self-knowledge, and this book will help you examine the unconscious and automatic thoughts, feelings, and actions that make up most of what you do every day. It will teach you ways to make these moments more conscious and purposeful. From ancient times through today, this practice is the foundation for leading a life that is more creative, flexible, whole, effective, authentic, and content.

The Common Truth of the Human Condition:
We Are Asleep

E ACH OF US IS UNIQUE and endowed with great potential, but we exist in a kind of waking sleep because of our early childhood programming.

The good news is, much of what we need to know about how to achieve greater peace, freedom, and self-knowledge has been around for hundreds or maybe thousands of years, encoded in ancient teachings, philosophy, myths, and symbols. However, it can be difficult for modern people to access these timeless truths about what it means to be human and how we can transform ourselves to manifest our highest possibilities. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to introduce, explain, and translate central aspects of a profound wisdom tradition that has been around for centuries, but has only been rediscovered in the last fifty years or so.

This ancient teaching begins with the idea that in order for us to grow and changeto develop our ability to make more conscious choiceswe first need to know how we truly operate in the present. To become all that we can be, we must start where we are and know exactly where and who we are. One of our deepest unconscious patterns is the false belief that we already know ourselves well enough to understand why we think, feel, and act the way we do. I will argue that, in fact, we dont; and that thinking we do know who we are is part of the problem.

In order to know ourselves and evolve in positive ways, we first need to see that we essentially operate in a kind of waking sleep. Without conscious effort, we function to a large degree mechanically, according to habitual patterns, as we go about our everyday lives. Our sleep is the unexamined belief we all have that we live lives of relatively unlimited freedom, when the opposite is true: We respond in predictable, repetitive ways according to the dictates of our early programming, much like uniquely specialized machines. And like machines, we have no power to grow out of this pre-programmed condition as long as we have no conscious understanding of how our existence is limited by our programming. We dont always understand what we dont understand and we are limited to the degree that we dont recognize our limitations.

This idea that the human condition naturally places us in this state of unconscious, automatic behavior can be found in both Western psychological theory and Eastern spiritual traditions. Indeed, we can see evidence of our own waking sleep in the ways in which we repeat the same comfortable habits day after day, and how we regularly tune out and go on autopilot. When we go into a room and forget why we went there, or when we are reading a book and realize we did not really take in the content of the last page, or when we feel ourselves engaging in conversation while our minds are simultaneously drifting, or when something significant happens and we cant really feel our emotions in response to itall of these are telltale signs that our habits are running the show. Perhaps its more accurate to say that our habits are the show. Our work, therefore, is to learn to pay attention more consistently to what is actually happening in our lives.

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