Presence: Being and Function

What makes the Enneagram a vibrant system in service of the transformation of consciousness is in how it directs us to Self-Remembering and reveals the psychological patterns that characterize a lack of presence. The principal feature that makes the Enneagram so useful in this regard is in clarifying the relationship and role of Personality to Essence. While an intuitive understanding of Personality and Essence provides an immediate value in distinguishing our habitual psychological patterns from a deeply felt sense of a more authentic “I” within, there’s still a great deal of difficulty on a path of inner work that an incorrect view of these concepts can create. This difficulty is primarily because the Personality orients itself through what it can envision, and it cannot “picture” a quality of existence that is not based in function.

The concepts of Essence and Personality stem from Gurdjieff but permeate Enneagram teachings. This dualism shows up in other traditions as well, but what Essence and Personality are and actually refer to, and what their proper relationship to one another is, is generally misunderstood or vague. In the context of modern Enneagram studies, the term “personality” and “Ego” are often erroneously used interchangeably. Personality is a psychological system that provides a means for us to function in the world, including a self-concept that allows us to recognize ourselves and anticipate how others will respond to us. Ego means “I am”, and it’s the sense that the personality and the psychological activity of the personality is the basis for identity. Ego is when we become psychologically identified with personality, attributing our sense of identity to psychological activity.

We become so fixated on the personality structure that our occupation with it siphons away any available attention for Essence. While we infuse the personality with meaning, it has no “life” of its own apart from propping up habitual psychological patterns. The personality is essentially a system of psychological organization, a self-concept built around certain associations, for the instinctual drives: self-preservation, sexual, and social. Therefore, almost everything we believe ourselves to be, all that we define ourselves by, and nearly all actions we undertake are merely for the sake of fulfilling instinct and has no intrinsic “substance” of its own - this is why, in the trance of identification with personality, we feel so alienated from our core and largely unfulfilled. Viewing the personality in this way, as a structure for securing instinctual resources, is humbling because it can lessen the self-importance and grandiosity we often give to our personality.

Essence is “what is”. It is what Gurdjieff said we are born with. When we are born, we are not blank slates. We have qualities and possibilities that accompany a basic, sensitive awareness. Essence is the rightful source of our sense of “I”, the true sense of being what we are, our authentic identity. Essence is what in us can “be”, can have “Being” or real substance. This means when we say that we are present, it is Essence is present, because is the thing that can exist independently of activity of any kind. Our task as people undertaking inner work is to give Essence more energy, attention, and consciousness such that it is the active force while rendering the personality more relaxed and passive. When identification with personality occurs and we lose contact with Essence, most of our Essential qualities become reduced to derivative expressions from the constricted lens of the ego or completely lost and our awareness becomes becomes automatic and insensitive.

What becomes a source of confusion in inner work is when Essence is taken to be a more personal and satisfied version of the personality, like a “true self”, rather than Essence being understood as an altogether ontologically different facet of one’s Being. Essence is not functional. It simply “is”. It does not depend on any psychological activity and it’s not a state. It doesn’t do anything. In other words, Essence is often conceptualized as a better version of the usual “me”, but for Essence to take on the center of gravity it requires for authentic realization, it requires a “death” or dis-identification from the “me” that is anchored in personality. This is radically different from the orientation of the personality, which will look for indications that it is “doing inner work correctly” by searching for clues in special experiences, “spiritual powers”, the acquisition of certain knowledge or more highly developed faculties of intuition or insight. This is what Trungpa Rinpoche described as “spiritual materialism”, the ego’s objectification of what spirituality, defined here as deepening consciousness of Essential nature, is and means. These things may happen, but they are not Essence nor are they the goal

Personality imagines that to develop Essence means that Essence begins to be the “do-er” instead of the Ego. This is an important distinction. Essence needs Personality to function. Personality is our “functioning part” that helps us accomplish anything in the material world, and thus, to survive. Essence is our “Being part”. This is very challenging for the Personality to really take in, that to really “be Essence”, to no longer identify with the Personality, our locus of identity shifts from one who does things to one that “is”.

No matter our Enneagram Type, our sense of self is based on some kind of doing, not just Threes. Fours, for example, some of the worst-functioners on the Enneagram, base their identity on repetitious impressions, feelings, and thoughts, a kind of internal “doing”. For Nines, their “doing” consists of putting energy toward keeping aspects of themselves fragmented and separated. From this distinction of Essence and Personality, it means all of our brilliant thoughts, insights, intuitions, capacities, and gifts are not Essence itself, though many Enneagram teachers teach Essence qualities as “gifts” or positive attributes of the Types, which are still function-based. On this point, the habits of our Type as well as the aims each Type seeks constitute the “doings” undertake in misguidedly trying to reach or create Being.

All of our “doing” is based on the use and misuse of Centers. Each Enneagram Type is identified with the body, heart, or mind. The Types on the Triangle have a psychological division or split between their dominant center and the entanglement of the two remaining centers. For example, Type Six is prone to flipping between over-thinking of the Thinking Center and operating from a superego-heavy sense of duty and obligation that arises from the “scrambling” of the Feeling and Body Centers. 

The Types along the hexad of the Enneagram are placed adjacent a different center, so in these Types, the identification with the dominant center is reinforced by the activity of a second center. Type Five, for example, is identified with mental activity, but enrolls the adjacent Feeling Center, gaining an “emotional charge” from thought, while dissociating from the remaining Center, in this case, the Body. This is what Gurdjieff called the “wrong use of centers” or “scrambling”, and it’s basically the architecture of the psychological activity that props up a habitual sense of self, the Ego.

By illuminating personality types so precisely, the Enneagram shows us what, in the first place, to be present with and how to begin to orient to presence by recognizing that presence in all three centers is a much different experience than presence in one or two centers. As we learn to self-observe and self-regulate more effectively, we start to see the habits of Personality and can bring presence to them. We can actually experience our emotions rather than reacting to them and we can observe our thoughts instead of just being taken by them. We can take our personality less personally, and therefore, withdraw identification form it. 

Inner development isn’t getting a better “me”, or a “me” that feels more satisfied and capable. It’s leaving the entire preoccupation and project of “me” behind, or rather, putting it in its proper place. It’s not destroying the ego or ridding oneself of Personality, it’s dying to the personality as the source of “I”, but this entails coming to know oneself on a radically different ontological level that often, at first, seems like “non-Being” to the personality because this new level is at first characterized by the absence of personality.

What can actually be present reveals itself as something deeper than function, deeper than the centers. The “I” wakes up and sees with greater and greater clarity what it is not - and comes to know itself by more deeply drawing into itself, both deeply with and away from the phenomenon within consciousness, coming to further recognize itself as a node of consciousness stemming from a deeper ground of consciousness. 

The Enneagram shows us the results of the wrong work of Centers in our own experience. In this way, It also provides a path to understanding Essential qualities that are distinct from conceptual speculation. Through recognizing one’s own Type and working with the Type structure for long enough and deeply enough, one comes to gain a sense of not only how one is at one’s best, but a taste of the right work of centers. The more balanced and regulated the Centers are, the more they can perform their proper work “on their own” without identification running them. This makes the personality more transparent, which allows for a fuller experience of Essential qualities.

As we orient more deeply toward Essence, the Essential qualities of the nine Enneagram Types reveal that each Essential quality is an intrinsic aspect of presence itself. Presence has a powerful immediacy, a sense of wholeness, and it corresponds us to a deeper sources. it has a holding, loving quality as well as a radiant sense of value. Essence has depth and limitless dimension, and it is always revealing itself renewed and original. It has the quality of realness and truthfulness, and it is unbounded and wholly free to be its own nature.

None of these are “results”, they are simply properties of what is. The Enneagram, then, helps us to see how much energy we waste trying to obtain these states - not just the qualities most at home at our Enneagram point, either - and we can use each attempt to create an Essential state as a reminding factor to draw more deeply into the present and into our nature.