0

The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram

Erschienen am 01.01.2001
Bibliografische Daten
ISBN/EAN: 9781585420810
Sprache: Englisch
Einband: kartoniertes Buch

Beschreibung

"The spirituality of the enneagram is revealed in this fascinating study of the personality profiling tool that is designed to measure the ""essence"" within each person." Sandra Maitri about her book: A little background about my book My name is Sandra Maitri, and my profession is helping others discover who they are beyond the confines of their personality structures—I am one of the main teachers of the Diamond Approach, a contemporary form of spiritual work, that is becoming very well known here and in Europe. Since meeting my first spiritual teacher, Claudio Naranjo, almost three decades ago, my lifelong pursuit has been to discover the dimensions of reality outside of my own psychological world, and to help others do that as well. These dimensions are those referred to in spiritual traditions throughout the ages as those of True Nature, Being, or the Absolute. The enneagram, which describes nine ego types, is one of the most effective tools I’ve run across in that endeavor. I first heard about the enneagram in the back yard of Naranjo’s house in Berkeley in the fall of 1971. He had just returned from working with Oscar Ichazo in Arica, Chile, and by word of mouth, about thirty of us had gathered that afternoon to hear what he had learned. He introduced the enneagram to us as a kind of road map describing the inner landscape we would have to traverse if we hoped to become realized human beings. The group that gathered around Naranjo mushroomed into what became an on-going group of sixty or so people, many of them prominent in what would later be called the New Age movement, and the first of his SAT groups was launched. The group’s orientation was as a spiritual work school, loosely modeled on the Gurdjieffian style. In college at the time, working with this group changed the course of my life. This relatively small group was the genesis of the subsequent teachers and books on the enneagram, with the exception of members of Ichazo’s Arica Training. Because of this humble and obscure beginning in this group that was very much on the societal fringe, it has been with amazement that I have watched the enneagram become very widely known, with articles about it appearing in the national media and knowldege about it trickling down into the mass culture. In its popularization, the focus became centered on the psychology of the nine ennea-types and its application became divorced from the context of inner transformation in which I learned it and in which it seems to have arisen. Although the enneagram’s roots are shrouded in mystery, it appears to have originated in a spiritual school in Central Asia, one in which presumably both Gurdjieff and Ichazo studied. Initially, I lamented this "secularization" of a tool that has felt invaluable in my own inner work, but have come to see that the breadth of interest in the psychological side of the enneagram has also created an enormous audience who might not otherwise have been receptive to its deeper dimensions and implications. Deutsche Ausgabe: Neun Porträts der Seele

Autorenportrait

Sandra Maitri is an author, an enneagram teacher, and a principal teacher in the Ridhwan School. She was among the first group of students of Claudio Naranjo. Sandra Maitri has been teaching the enneagram as part of the larger work of spiritual transformation for twenty-five years.

Leseprobe

Chapter 1 The Inner Triangle and the Fall The figure of the enneagram is made up of an inner triangle linking Points Nine, Six, and Three, and an outer shape formed by the linking of Points One, Four, Two, Eight, Five, and Seven. These two forms do not intersect, as you can see on Diagram 4 below, and so the inner triangle is a separate entity of sorts. On the level of the enneagram of personality, the inner triangle represents factors responsible for and stages in an archetypal process—that of the loss of contact with our fundamental or essential nature and the concurrent development of an ego structure. Our essential nature is who we are when we experience ourselves free from the influence of the past—it is our innate and unconditioned state of consciousness. It is our state as infants, and coexists with our soul’s particular characteristics, such as a sweet disposition, sharpness, robustness, and so on. As babies, however, we have no capacity to know that this is our experience because self-reflection has not yet developed. The process of losing of contact with our essential nature is universal: everyone who develops an ego goes through it. That, of course, means virtually every human being on the planet, unless one is born either a saint or insane, i.e., never developing an ego structure. Each of the ennea-types on the triangle can be seen as “specializing” or being formed around one of the three archetypal factors in this loss. They also can be seen as highlighting or focused around the three corresponding phases in the process of ego development. In contrast, the other points on the enneagram can be seen as further elaborations of this process. Understanding the process represented by the inner triangle not only helps us understand the enneagram of personality but also helps us understand what we all need to confront within ourselves to reconnect with our essential nature. Since I am describing phases in a universal process rather than describing the three ennea-types per se, I will refer to Points Nine, Six, and Three, rather than using the names of their corresponding ennea-types. Point Nine, as indicated by its position at the very top of the enneagram, represents the fundamental principle that initiates ego development: the actual loss of contact with our True Nature. This loss of contact is often referred to in spiritual work as falling asleep, resulting in a state of ignorance or darkness. The process of losing contact with that which is innate and unconditioned occurs gradually during the first few years of life, and by the time we are four years old, Essence is mostly lost to perception. This loss of consciousness of our essential nature starts the development of the scaffolding that is the ego structure. Developing this structure is a necessary prerequisite for spiritual development, since part of the ego’s attainment is self-reflective consciousness. Without it, we could not be aware of our own consciousness. Different traditions explain the reason for this seemingly inevitable and apparently regrettable process in diverse ways. Ultimately it remains a mystery, and our beliefs about the purpose behind this loss are immaterial. It is simply a given, and we can either deal with our estrangement or remain asleep to it. A number of factors lead to this loss of contact with Essence, and the first one is identification with our bodies as being who and what we are. According to Heinz Hartmann, considered the father of ego psychology and among the pivotal post-Freudian psychoanalysts, one of the characteristics of our consciousness as newborns is that it is an undifferentiated matrix in which psychological structures that emerge later—such as the ego, superego, and the instinctual drives—are not articulated and distinguished from one another. René Spitz, roughly contemporary to Hartmann and the pioneer of analytic research into the mother-child relationship, extended this concept to that of nondifferentiation, in which there are no discriminations of any sort in our consciousness between inner and outer, self and other, psyche and soma, and, hence, no cognition. (...)

Weitere Artikel aus der Kategorie "Enneagramm"

Alle Artikel anzeigen

Kontakt

(Bestell-) Buchhandlung Plaggenborg, Lindenstraße 35, 26123 Oldenburg, Tel.: 0441 - 17543, info@buchhandlung-plaggenborg.de
Öffnungszeiten: Mo - Fr 12 - 20h, Sa 13 - 20h