The Centers of Intelligence: The Body, Heart, and Mind
The Centers of Intelligence
There are nine basic types because each type represents a different relationship between the body, the heart, and the mind. The body, heart, and mind are three basic centers of intelligence. They represent three distinct but related means of perception, with different functions and capacities. They represent three distinct but related means of perception, with different functions and capacities. The body, heart, and mind represent the fundamental psychological stratum through which we experience our consciousness and sense of self: we know ourselves through the medium of physical sensation in the body, through feeling in the heart, and through awareness and cognition in the mind. Each type is primarily rooted in the experience of the body, the heart, or the mind.
When we are present, the centers function as they are supposed to - the body supports our functioning, the heart is sensitive and available to feelings, and the mind is clear and perceptive. Unfortunately, the consistent right work of the centers is actually very rare in human beings.
When we are out of touch with Essence, we end up in a state where the centers are only partially functional in the style of our Enneagram Type. This pattern of dysfunction we take to be “normal”, so the study of the Enneagram is a re-education of what the centers mean and how they’re experienced.
The Body Center (also known as the Moving Center) also includes what G.I. Gurdjieff called the Sex Center, the reproductive system, and the Instinctive Center. It’s my view that the Instinctive Center is the center constituting the Instinctual Drives, but the Instinctual Drives and their relationship to the Enneagram are beyond the scope of this overview.
One of the chief uses of the Enneagram is a roadmap for bringing balance to the centers. The Enneagram helps us to find the authentic capacities and qualities of the centers, beyond our habitual ideas about the centers, by it’s lucid illustration of what the dysfunctional qualities are. Working to transform the dysfunction brings us to the real nature of the centers directly.
Losing touch with our Essential Nature produces three primary reactions: Rage, Shame, and Anxiety rooted in the Body, the Heart, and the Mind, respectively. These deep affective stances are so intense that to directly experience them would be nearly unbearable, so they are largely unconscious yet exert tremendous influence on our every perception, thought, feeling, and behavior. They are more primitive and unconscious than our usual experience of emotions. Therefore, the core of our Enneagram Type is the Essential quality, but feeling disconnected from it, our Personality Type is a coping mechanism for this immense and primitive wounding.
Rage, Shame, and Anxiety arise in response to a lack of presence with the Body, Heart, and Mind. They are like painful compensations that are not just negative reactions, but they also perform specific functions, like helping us to protect ourselves, to maintain a persona, and to stay alert, in the absence of each Center being awake and performing its role.
When we are present in the body, we directly experience our sovereignty, our personal power, and we have a connection with a realistic sense of our capacities, but with the loss of contact with Essence, the vital energy of the body becomes co-opted by the ego. They are used to reinforce psychological boundaries via physical tension and numbness, which disengages the whole personality from the immediacy of experience in the body and overrides direct contact with our physical presence. When we’re able to make direct contact with these layers of tension, it’s experienced as uncoiling rage. Rage is best thought of as condensed life force.
Most people do not experience an emotional background of deep rage in their day to day existence, but it is there. In infancy, we’re forced to erect psychological boundaries to protect ourselves from the overwhelming sensations and demands on our lifeforce At birth, we are thrust into a world of unpleasant, painful, and overwhelming sensations we never get to opt out of. We are introduced to hunger, exhaustion, physical pain, and more. The shock of this experience is generally underappreciated. Until death, discomforts of all kinds of qualities and intensities will be an inextricable part of your experience without end. To a consciousness, this is an assault, even an injustice, that contributes to the profound rage underlying the Body Center. The significance of this primordial anguish and grief shouldn’t be overlooked when contending with our own personal pain and eruptions of aggression.
This is universal in all egos, but Types Eight, Nine, and One exemplify three basic strategies of reinforcing ego boundaries - expansion/pushing, dissociation, and judgment. The Body Types represent different ways we all try to preserve our autonomy, directly or indirectly, through boundaries - what sensations we say yes or no to.
In turn, the Feeling or Heart Center is enlisted into the maintenance of the ego. The heart is no longer free and touched by its experience. Instead, when there is dissociation in the body, the heart is forced to “take on the job” of the body center in creating a sense of separation between ourselves and our experience through strong emotional reactivity. Confining the heart to strong emotional reactions according to our likes and dislikes leads to a sense of isolation in the heart which is contrary to the heart’s authentic nature of being affected by and personalizing our experience.
When we are not fully living from our hearts, a gap between our authentic self, including our values, and the actions we take in the world develops. We’re prone to doing things that go against our inner sense of self that can run the range from entering into a relationship that doesn’t honor ourselves, taking on a job that goes against our values, or simply representing ourselves inauthentically. We lose a sense of who we are to ourselves.
The Heart Center is about personal identity, the “feeling of self”. Identity, or more specifically our capacity to directly know and perceive our own identity, does develop through relationships and connections, but identity, and the heart that holds our identity, is ultimately about self. It consists of the “substance of who we are” that we locate through the medium of feeling. The heart is often associated solely with feelings and emotions that are thought of as in reactions or relations rather than their own stratum of consciousness. Feelings can be expressions of self, but they are not self, while emotions are typically responses to bodily states and instinctual reactions.
Further, the heart is also the center where we are touch with the felt sense of our identity, where we feel we are “being ourselves”. However, when we’re divorced from our Essence, rather than a deeply felt and direct experience of our identity, we maintain a self-image that we prop up and represent to ourselves as who we are. This alienation leads to a sense of falsity that produces deep shame. This is universal to all egos, but Types Two, Three, and Four represent three basic strategies of managing shame - emphasizing good qualities and overlooking negative qualities, increasing the personality’s value, and reacting to the inadequacy of the personality as a source of identity.
Like most terms used to make distinctions within the Enneagram, the word shame is not being employed in the colloquial sense. The usual use of shame is interpersonal shame or social shame of the feelings of regret and inadequacy we experience when we step out of line from the expectations of others. The shame underlying the Heart Types is primarily intrapersonal shame. It’s much deeper and existential than interpersonal shame. It’s a sense that one’s identity is fundamentally deficient and unreal, but it's primarily felt to be so in one's own eyes. Invalidation of the self-image threatens to upend the faith one has in one’s own self-image, or, in other words, interpersonal shame can induce intrapersonal shame. As described above, the relationship to self-image speaks to how each Type manages and staves off this kind of shame.
To defend against shame when one is not in touch with the authentic heart, one upholds internal self-image to convince oneself of one’s identity and value - that one is good, loving, and worthy of being in relationship with, that one is valuable and effective, and that one is unique, distinct, and special. The self-image is not identity, but a psychologically useful proxy for identity. The problem is that the more disconnected from our heart we are, the more we rely on the self-image to define us. This identification needs a lot of reinforcement and support, so we then look outwardly for validation of our internal self-image. The terminology can get confusing, but most of us use the term “image” to describe the outward expression of the self-image, or how we want to appear to others, both literally in our “look” as well as in the qualities we want to project for others to see in us. The outward image is used to gain validation to “sell” ourselves on the reality of our internal self-image.
The self-image can be more or less in sync with one’s identity. It’s more than likely that everyone has experienced someone whose self-image is greatly out of sync with their inner identity, which increases their insecurity and need for external validation of the outward image. When we haven’t had adequate mirroring, our capacities to know and experience our identity are very weak, so the self-image and its outward representation are given more weight. Thus, someone who is narcissistic, for example, has little sense of their own identity, and therefore relies disproportionately on outside validation as well as an inflated internal self-image due to the tenuous connection to their inner identity.
The awake Thinking Center or Mind’s role is to be active in reception to impressions and evolving perceptions. However, when Essence is obscured, the thinking center also keeps the ego out of direct touch with its experience, living through conceptualizations, ideologies, and fantasies. Perceptions become filtered through an unconscious background of emotional, instinctual, and physical issues that distort thought and shut down what Eastern traditions refer to as “quiet mind”, the inability to take in the range of impressions needed for confident inner knowing leads to incredible anxiety and a fear that one is without support against unforeseen threats. This instills a profound and disorienting anxiety. While also universal to all egos, Types Five, Six, and Seven represent three means of compensating for anxiety - retreat into conceptualization, seeking external guidance, and keeping the mind occupied and distracted.
We typically think of the mind as little more than a problem-solving “thinking machine”, a repository of memories and opinions, and a kind of constant stream of commentary. The mind’s incessant chatter is taken to be our “inner voice” rather than the coarsest part of the Mental Center, which leads us to infuse the mind’s free associating with a sense of “I”.
We often believe that the mind is where we know things, but this faulty view causes a great deal of suffering because the mind is more rightfully about seeing. Mistaking seeing with knowing ensures we know very little and see even less. Because we live so much “in our heads”, it can be difficult to take an impartial look at what the Mental Center really represents because so much of our attention is anchored into mental activity, so its content is usually mistaken for reality itself.
Anxiety in the mind correlates with rage in the Body Center and shame in the Heart Center. While much of what we experience consciously is mere anxiety of varying intensities, being out of touch with the inner quiet part of the mind produces an anxiety that is better thought of as an existential dread and overwhelming fear of complete disorientation, blindness, and disintegration. The mind becomes full of “noise”, a combination of hyper vigilant over-thinking, distraction and novelty addiction to keep awareness of anxiety at bay, and using mental concepts and imagination to keep the material worlds of the body and feeling worlds of the heart at arm’s length and almost “unreal” so as to remain untouched in a semi-schizoid defensiveness.
The Mental Center matures through education, exposure to ideas and experiences, and efforts of concentration, but apart from the question of maturity and training, something that makes the Mental Center stand apart from the body and heart is that the distortions of the mind are typically not rooted in the mind itself. Rather, they stem from a lack of development and unresolved suffering in the body and heart that are unconsciously influencing the perception and cognition of the Mental Center and derail its education and development. Most of us are familiar with vaguely “Eastern” ideas about the empty character of the mind. This is accurate, if the restless content of the Heart and Body Centers isn’t trying to be unconsciously solved or soothed by the mind.
The negative states of the centers are universal, but our Enneagram Type represents which of these conditions are most emphasized and at the fore of our psychological structure. Types Eight, Nine, and One are those for whom issues of the body center, like autonomy, rage, and dissociation, are central. Types Two, Three, and Four are the types that struggle the most with issues around identity, self-image, and shame because they’re rooted in the heart center. Types Five, Six, and Seven are types based in the mental center, so their primary struggles are with anxiety, inner guidance, and a lack of inner guidance.
Each of the Nine Enneagram Types has specific ways of experiencing and expressing rage, shame, and anxiety. These powerful affects are deeper and more unconscious than our usual experience of emotion, but a lack of understanding this sometimes motivates people to attribute other emotional states to each center, losing sight of what role these powerful psychological forces have in maintaining the ego and motivating the Enneagram Types.