to see a test result won’t add much to your self-awareness — and self-awareness is exactly the goal of working with the Enneagram.
TABLE 3-1: Attention and energy
| Attention Is Focused On This | Energy Is In This |
|---|---|
| What isn’t correct isn’t appropriate | Improving, creating order |
| The needs of others | Giving, helping |
| Applause, earning points | Reaching goals, completing tasks, achieving something |
| What's lacking | Comparing yourself with others, longing |
| The expectations of others | Observing from afar, holding back, and barely getting involved |
| Threats, risks, dangers | Being alert, recognizing and avoiding risks |
| What keeps you constrained, what isn't fun | Keeping options and possibilities open, having fun |
| Vulnerable, the seat of power and strength | Being strong and combative, protecting yourself and others |
| Disharmony, competing desires, plans, and points of view | Integrating, merging with others, avoiding and preventing conflicts |
Managing attentiveness and energy
If you don’t see it, you can’t manage it. People don’t want to see the things that they dislike deep inside. This develops into a habit, as a kind of self-protection, and then they actually don’t see these things. They become blind spots. So, the first step toward self-management consists of observing yourself closely despite all this. Everyone can acquire this ability to self-observe. Of course, it’s easier when you have instructions you can rely on. You learn to systematically question yourself with the goal of interpreting your perception. With this questioning, you recognize that you’re observing something, but you ask yourself what is the meaning of what you see? What could it indicate? This systematic questioning is called self-reflection; some people also refer to it as an internal dialogue.
The descriptions of the Enneagram types function as a kind of mirror. They tell you a lot about the unconscious driving forces and their function. When you look into these mirrors, you will recognize certain things in yourself, but others won't necessarily click. Self-reflection helps make the unconscious conscious.
Self-observation — a natural habit?
Examples of natural habits are eating when you’re hungry and sleeping when you’re tired. Other habits that have crept into your life, you find so pleasant that you immediately miss them when you deviate from them. These are rituals like taking the dog for a walk or watching a sports program. Self-observation, however, will never become a habit, no matter how much you benefit from it.
On this topic, Georges (or Gregor) Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, who brought the Enneagram to the West, says that people are like robots. They act purely mechanically and are programmed toward automatic reactions. People are sleeping — that’s how Gurdjieff expressed it. For the most part, humans aren’t aware of themselves, nor of the effect they have on others or the effect of others on them. They mostly lack will and just react. Surviving is a way to react to the environment. Gurdjieff talks about forgetting yourself: Humans even forget their intentions.
Gurdjieff searched for truth all his life, traveling a lot in the process and spending a great deal of time among spiritual groups whose wisdom he explored. The idea of forgetting themselves, their “sleep,” can be found in many traditions; Gurdjieff didn’t invent it. Buddha, for example, is also referred to as the awakened one. This term describes the various states of being, such as the state of being awake or not being awake. Becoming aware or being aware can be seen as not sleeping. People engage in self-observation and self-reflection when they are suffering but forget them again when they feel good. This is why internal suffering is often associated with the function of waking up again.
Maybe these examples will help when you search for your own intention:
Consciously smile at your mirror image every morning.
Every day before going to sleep, think about a person you love who is absent but whose photo you possess.
In the mornings, think about what you’re planning for the upcoming day.
Observe how easy or difficult this is for you. It’s only about perceiving and noticing it; this is not about a judgment!
Three centers of knowledge
Numerous spiritual traditions, in many places in the world and during various epochs of history, refer to three centers of knowledge: knowledge with the head, with the heart, and with the gut. In Plato’s The Republic (Book IV, 6-18), he (427-347 BC) briefly describes a human's physical structure: first, the head, home to their thinking capacity, with logical or intuitive reason; second, the chest, “which concerns courage,” the potential for inspiration, for heroism, perseverance but also rage; and third, the abdomen, the instincts and passions which are at the service of human nourishment and procreation. When they act according to plan, the associated capacities are called wisdom (head), courage (chest), and moderation (body). These are the three essential human virtues that belong to the head, heart, and gut. There are plenty of deviations from these virtues — vices, in other words. That's because, whereas on one hand, virtue signifies accordance with the developmental laws of humans and this accordance is only possible in one form, on the other hand you have innumerable ways to diverge from this one possible form of accordance — divergences that take the form of vice. (The latter point is taken from Konrad Dietzfelbinger's study Mystery Schools: From the Ancient Egyptians to the Early Christians to the Rosicrucians of the Modern Age.)
The nine Enneagram types are distributed to these three centers, in accordance with the three personality structures that act primarily from the head center, three from the heart center, and three from the gut center. People who are intensely involved in self-research
