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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.