A. H. Almaas - Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas

Lucid, precise, and infinitely helpful to seekers everywhere. I heartily recommend Facets of Unity to Enneagram enthusiasts, to my own students of inner knowing, and to followers of every spiritual tradition.

Helen Palmer, author of The Enneagram

Serious students of the Enneagram will find much of value in this book.... The Holy Ideas can be highly challenging material, but Almaas presents them with clarity, thoroughness, and grace such that we can all gain a taste of the deeper truths of this remarkable system.

Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, authors of Personality Types

ABOUT THE BOOK

Facets of Unity presents the Enneagram of Holy Ideas as a crystal clear window on the true reality experienced in enlightened consciousness. Here we are not directed toward the psychological types but the higher spiritual realities they reflect. We discover how the disconnection from each Holy Idea leads to the development of its corresponding fixation, thus recognizing each types deeper psychological core. Understanding this core brings each Holy Idea within reach, so its spiritual perspective can serve as a key for unlocking the fixation and freeing us from its limitations.

A. H. ALMAAS is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in Colorado, California, and Europe since 1976. He is the author of Spacecruiser Inquiry, The Pearl Beyond Price, Luminous Nights Journey, and other books.

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FACETS of UNITY

The ENNEAGRAM of HOLY IDEAS

A. H. Almaas

Shambhala

Boston & London

2012

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

1998 by A-Hameed Ali

Cover illustration: Andre Avdoulos

Cover design: Chris Mol

The Enneagram of the Passions, Nine Holy Ideas (Holy Perfection, Holy Will, Holy Harmony, Holy Origin, Holy Omniscience, Holy Strength, Holy Wisdom, Holy Truth, Holy Love), Psycho-catalyzer, Ten Divine Holy Ideas and Trialectics are service marks of Arica Institute, Inc.

Diamond Approach is a registered service mark of the Ridhwan Foundation.

First published in 1998 by

Diamond Books

Almaas Publications

P.O. Box 10173

Berkeley, CA 94709

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Almaas, A. H.

Facets of unity: the enneagram of holy ideas/A. H. Almaas.

p. cm.

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif.: Diamond Books, 1998.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2403-4

ISBN 978-0-936713-14-4 (pbk.)

1. Spiritual life. 2. Enneagram. I. Title.

BL 624 .A463 2000

291.44dc21

00-040030

Dedicated

with love and gratitude

to

Dr. Claudio Naranjo

who initiated me into spiritual work,

introduced me to the Enneagram knowledge,

and, through his pioneering work of integrating

psychological understanding and spiritual practice,

inspired my interest in that direction.

This book would not have become one without the invaluable and dedicated work of several individuals. The editors, Sandra Maitri, Alia Johnson, and Byron Brown, have managed, with commitment and intelligence, to turn the original lecture transcripts of teachings I gave some years ago into a readable and accessible book. They have done an invaluable service for which I am grateful.

I also want to thank Sue Clarry for her important assistance in the original editing, Sheri Harms for her skillful and necessary copy editing, Byron Brown for his organizing and layout, and Sara Norwood Hurley, Diamond Books production manager, for her indefatigable commitment and support for the project and all individuals working on it.

I also want to acknowledge my debt to Claudio Naranjo, from whom I learned the transmitted knowledge of the Enneagram, and Oscar Ichazo, the source of transmission of this particular knowledge, who was most gracious in providing a preface for the book.

A. H. Almaas

A . H. Almaas presents in this terse and skillfully written book another study on the main thematic of his series of inquiries, which he most appropriately names the Diamond Approach, which essentially consists of examining the totality of the mind in a journey toward the transcendental state of Pure Mind, also known as the Diamond Mind, most especially in the Diamond Sutra. It can also be found in the Platform of the Sixth Patriarch, and the same examination and discovery is found in the Platonic, Stoic, and Neoplatonic doctrine of anamnesis (Gr.) or the doctrine of the remembrance of the eternal Ideas or Forms. The mystical and transcendental point of this doctrine is that we know the eternal Ideas prenatally and that we can re-discover them only by tracing our mind back to its natural origin, which is unborn and whose supreme quality is its ability to reflect itself in the eternal Ideas or Platonic Forms.

Almaas was at one time a student of Claudio Naranjo, who studied with me in 1969 in Santiago, Chile, and in 1970 in Arica, Chile. Naranjo is one of the best theoreticians of our time, and he has shown his proven ability, along with his scholarly presentation and intellectual integrity, by passing to his students an accurate transmission of what I taught and to what precise point my teachings had implied a structure that was logical, metaphysical, and psychological, and in general, a spiritual structure. This spiritual structure is the one that sustains our entire cycle of experiences that are the treasures of our psychic life. At that point in 1969, I was presenting the structure of the mind in a ladder of seven distinct levels, each of which produces a pattern of behavior that functions like interconnected gears, resulting in an organic scheme where the inferior level is contained and explained by the superior one. This, of course, is pure Platonism, but as it is well known by all my students, the sevenfold ladder was only part of a much larger structure of my theory that I refer to with the code name of the Scarab, which is another ladder that has seventeen distinctive and interconnecting levels. The content of this larger scale, as well as the synthesized sevenfold scale, has been developed as an integral part of my theoretical proposition, where each level and its content is part of a structure that explains the basis of things, conforming to the inherent laws of the sevenfold ladder (the Law of the Seven as found in Platos Timaeus, the Chaldean Oracles, and the Hermetica). Because of the interconnectedness of the levels of the Scarab, they have a direct interrelation and influence that is described in the Pythagorean doctrine of the sound of harmonics: When a certain tone sounds, it produces an immediate reaction in the same notes of the other scales. This larger schema I am presenting in a book that I am now in the process of finishing. It is necessary to say very distinctly that the sevenfold structure is complete in itself and reflects the totality of the system in a condensed form. The necessity of passing a synthesized schema in 19691970 was important because of the need of my students to assimilate the method quickly and clearly in order to put it into practice, since the entire teaching has to be understood in terms of an alive philosophy that cannot be embodied unless it is practiced. An even deeper level of embodiment occurs through group processing, teaching, and passing the method of analysis to others. Because the teachings are well rooted in logic and rhetorics, they are explained with direct propositions and scientific clarity.