The Enneagram - Bridging Time

The Enneagram - Bridging Time

[This is an excerpt from a much longer, yet unpublished essay on the history of the Enneagram called “The Ennead of Heliopolis and the Mystical Genealogy of the Enneagram”]

The symbol of the Enneagram is an invitation into a deeper mode of awareness and engagement than is habitual to the perspective of the personality. It is a tool to help one grasp authentic dimensionality and inner character of whatever phenomenon it is being applied to. This is often lost on even experienced users of the Enneagram, who often regard it as either a flat diagram or as a tool to occasionally wiseacre on for the sake of mental fascination. The living Enneagram, however, is a training in direct knowledge of a phenomenon on multiple levels, seeing into the authentic nature of a thing, process, or event in its wholeness and the inner “laws” that produce it.

The Enneagram was originally taught as a description of process, independently of the typology, so each point around the circle didn’t have a fixed character. Once we know how to read it, however, the Enneagram reveals the relationship between the way anything subject to the laws of time and space changes over time and in accord with specific influences. It links the Essential, atemporal character of a phenomenon, characterized by its three fundamental aspects, to how it manifests sequentially through time. It’s a map of the relationship between the Essential and the temporal.

However, a major struggle for coming to grips with the wisdom of the Enneagram is deconstructing our habitual and cultural views on time itself. I think that the “Gurdjieffian Enneagram” is all too often misunderstood, even by those in the Gurdjieff Work, as a process of sequential events, but the composition and combination of laws the Enneagram is a symbol of represents the stages within any phenomenon in addition to the sequence of events.

Chiastic Time

Within esoteric traditions, time is a mysterious and complex force that generates multiplicity from unity and operates differently at different scales. It’s what tears eternal unity into a “big bang” of expansion in space and duration, and creation descends from the source in distinct levels or worlds. In Gurdjieff’s elaborate cosmology, time is referred to as the “merciless heropass” and all of the created cosmos are, in a sense, a complex mechanism of generating a flow to counter the entropic effects of time depleting the cosmos.

From this point of view, time has levels and is perceived differently from different stages of consciousness, changing one's perception of its presence, quality, and flow. The “higher” the world, the less density, and the lower the world, the more density, the more limitations, the more laws, the more fixed-ness. Greater consciousness can bring one's awareness into a relationship with a world of greater freedom from cosmic laws. This loosens one’s perception of events that unfold from the usual, fixed, sequential passage of time into an awareness of events from a freer world that produce effects both backwards (the future shaping the past, and “coincidence” in the past that seem to predict or anticipate the future) and forwards in time outward from a central point of significance. In a lower world, time appears to flow in one direction, but in a higher world, events appear to emanate in different directions from a source. The Enneagram is a tool for orienting one’s attention from a lower world to its roots in a higher world.

In her book, The Eye of the Heart, A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, Cynthia Bourgeault uses the term “chiasm” to describe the pattern of causality at a “higher” level of time. “Chiasm is a traditional literary form, but the design principle is equally applicable in music and in the visual arts. It consists of paired events arranged symmetrically around a center core. The simplest form is B, A, B, with A representing the center and B the symmetrical wings…. It’s essentially a stone thrown into a pond with concentric circles fanning out around it… Chiasm is a whole different way of ordering causality…” (pg 68) and later, she adds “Chiastic construction begins… with finding the center…” (pg 72).

Chiastic events are perceived not via the thinking mind, but the spiritual-intuitive “eye of the heart”. Through chiastic time, an event has “weight” and substance that emanates forward and backward in normal time like a pebble creating ripples in a pond where an object breaks the surface. From this perspective, an event has a certain kind of gravity that, from the point of view of usual time, can be thought of as the future attracting the past toward it, and the past influenced by the future it moves toward.

Most occurrences simply don’t have enough potency to be free from usual laws, so they don’t rise in significance above normal causality. An occurrence with greater involvement of intention (will) can become events. They are actualized on a subtler level merely the fixed flow of time, where they have a materiality and substantiality, almost like what an object would be like on a higher, spiritual plane (Platonic Form). The manifestation of a “true event” impacts the flow of normal, crude time, in the past and future, and can be perceived through resonances, synchronicities, meaningful coincidences, patterns, and connectivity that escapes linear logic.

Human birth is an example of a chiastic event that impacts us all. Many parents report a sense that the conception of their child was almost inevitable or “meant to be”, or that it was as if the will of the child, yet to be born, was attracting the parents together. This sense may just be a by-product of the sense of specialness that comes from love, but if one subscribes to astrology, one’s birth is a chiastic event that resonates with the “being” of the planets, the level of fate within the Ray of Creation (more to come below), as represented by the astrological natal chart. Apart from birth, people have the sense that significant people, “soulmates”, “essence friends”, certain things that seem “meant to be”, or other synchronicities, meaningful connections and coincidences that seem too improbable to be chance, and events that seem paranormal or psychic happen on this level.

The Enneagram, then, is an instrument of perceiving the relationship between ordinary time with chiastic time. Using the Enneagram to aid us in Self-Remembering holds the possibility of birthing something within us, a spiritual body with a spiritual awareness beyond the automatic awareness that accompanies the physical body, that can have a life on the chiastic level.

Laws of Three and Seven

The Enneagram is based on triads, and the symbol itself represents the intersection of three basic laws of nature and consciousness. The outer circle represents the Law of One. This can be understood broadly that “all is one,” but more specifically, anything interpreted through the Enneagram symbol must be considered in its entirety, including the totality of its “lifespan” through time.

The second law is the Law of Three. The Law of Three claims that any complete phenomenon has three intrinsic elements, represented by the triangle at the center of the Enneagram. We see this at work in protons, neutrons, and electrons of atoms and the three primary colors of the color wheel; it also finds expression in the innumerable trinities found in nearly every spiritual tradition worldwide. Taken together, the circle around the Enneagram represents a phenomenon in its completion while the triangle reveals the three triadic elements of which any whole is composed. To perceive something according to the Law of One means to also be aware of its three fundamental aspects.

We habitually fail to recognize the three-foldedness of events, at great cost to inner life. We get stuck in polarities of good or bad, like or dislike, Essence or Personality. What gets lost in these dualities is a third reconciling element, or “force,” which is distinct from the two, but which “holds” them both. We are “third force blind”. Correct use of the Enneagram is a training in attuning one’s awareness to hold three forces.

Any process, whether a series of actions or the frequency of sound, is articulated, unfolds according to specific natural or cosmic laws. Every process unfolds distinct stages towards its completion, and these stages are described by the laws at work in the Enneagram. The outside of this circle reveals linear time in a sequence moving clockwise in distinct stages. These stages, signified by the points around the Enneagram, also have hidden relationships to one another that correspond to the inner lines of the hexad, which represents the third law of the Enneagram, the Law of Seven.

The hexad connects point one to four, two, eight, five, seven, and back to one. The direction of the inner connections between the points derives from dividing one, representing the whole, into seven parts: 1/7 = .1428571…, 2/7 = .2857142…, 3/7 = .4285714..., and so on. The math and the metaphor correspond.

This mathematical relationship underlies the musical octave, within which each note signifies a point of development the original pitch doubles in frequency. For this reason, the process of the Enneagram is described by Solfege, DO - RE - MI - FA - SOL - LA - SI - DO, to make Seven Distinct stages as well as a return to the first stage, but at a higher order of development, completion, or realization. The Enneagram also includes the semitones of the musical octave, expressed as “shock points”, DO - RE - MI - interval - FA - SOL - LA - SI - interval - DO. The seven-fold spectrum of visible color is another example of the principle, but it is not a phenomenon stretched by time but by frequency.

A process on the Enneagram is initiated from point Nine and proceeds clockwise to its completion back at Nine. The Enneagrammatic octave is completed by returning to the start, but at a higher level of organization. The points of the hexad represent developmental stages while points Three and Six represent “shock points,” gaps in the process where energy can be renewed or where the process loses energy and declines.

Where it concerns a process, these intervals or shocks represent points where the process requires an additional input of outside energy to imbue the process with the energy needed to complete the Octave. All processes are not mechanistic, they have disruptions of energy and direction at specific places. Without the necessary extra energy applied at these shock points, the system would stagnate or decay, not reaching its end.

Point Nine represents the “DO” of a process, the beginning and initiating force, as well as its completion. When a process reaches the final “DO”, it represents the fulfillment of the potential of the initial DO. This also means that every other point between the initiating DO and the finishing DO are sequential developments of the DO, from one point of view, and from another point of view, every point on the Enneagram is contained within and an expression of the “complete DO”, like white light expressed as the color spectrum through a prism.

DO of the Octave is at Nine, followed by RE at One, Mi at Two, first interval at Three, FA at Four, Soul at Five, but a contradiction arises. According to Solfege, Point Six should continue as LA, followed by Seven Si, and Eight should be the second interval. Instead we find the SI - DO interval moved to Point Six, which we’ll return to.

Within Time

The inner lines of the hexad describe atemporal connections, connections between events that relate to one another through a quality of relationship that is not based in linear time or casual events. It speaks to a relationship between events that is not just sequential or the cumulative results of processes that have gone before, but that each distinct stage in a process is informed by other events.

From a sequential point of view, Points One, Two, and Five have lines that connect them with future events. The future stages represented by lines One to Seven, One to Four, Two to Four, and Five to Seven and Eight exist in the form of a potential quality, not as an ordered outcome of things reaching a new specific state. The “seed” of future possibility pulls, guides, or informs the event that is specific to that Enneagram point like gravity.

All points of the hexad, including Four, Seven, and Eight, are all realized by and tethered to events in the past that aren’t merely linear connections or cumulative results. Instead, they mark the quality of time and relationships of qualities. It’s not the functional relationships the inner lines of the Enneagram describes, but the qualitative significance. Events on this level have their own quality and energy.

From the perspective of the Enneagram, time takes on a different sense than our typical perception of events unfolding sequentially. Time is the continual re-arrangement of the order of relationships, patterned by cosmic and natural laws. The external state of things is constantly changing, subject to time’s entropy and negentropy, according to patterns. Yet the inner state, the Being, of an event or person is likewise not static or featureless. It is more free, less conditioned and determined by time as a restriction.

Connecting Two Worlds

Therefore, the Enneagram is inviting us to be sensitive and engaged, on a Being-level, with the quality of a moment, not just our Personality’s emphasis on the mind’s interpretation of agendas and concrete objects. This is just another way of seeing how Presence looks to the Personality like not-doing, and non-function, from one point of view and yet has a vital way of participating in events. What appears random or the result of cause and effect from the outside is informed by intelligent and non-random inner relationships. By being sensitive to this articulation we can better align our consciousness with objective reality instead of getting lost in the shuffle of a confused ego grasping for orientation.

Taking this even further, the Inner Triangle depicts how completion is a state of realization in a higher world and not a result of a process. When an octave is completed around the Enneagram, what can be understood by this is that the states and stages that preceded its completion were already latent in the possibility of its completion. The present moves away from the past toward the future and the future pulls the present toward itself. What determines whether or not an octave reaches completion is the quality of our intention, and the quality of intention acquires more force depending on our concentration of Being. The more present with our fullness, the more energy can be drawn from ourselves toward connecting the octaves of lower worlds to the octaves of higher worlds.

There are many low-grade octaves that reach completion by chance or little intention. This is why we are able to achieve some things, and why the universe doesn’t just fly apart - the lawful mechanisms of material reality don’t require much intentional input. Yet there are “higher” octaves that require intention from the world of consciousness.

From our time-rooted perspective, events seem to build toward a result or completion in sequential steps. Yet, from the Essential Perspective the Enneagram reveals, the opposite is also true - like a prism refracts white light, revealing all the inner stages of the various colors of the rainbow, time is itself a prism revealed in distinct but related stages.

In other words, with our intention and presence, the inner work of human beings acts as a kind of tether between the Essential world and the temporal, material world of process and function. Maurice Nicoll, in his Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky Volume One, articulates a resonant perspective on personality, essence, and time, “You have heard the expression that essence comes from the stars and when we come to talk about the Ray of Creation you will see plainly that the stars signify an order of wars far above the earth in vertical scale. That is to say, essence in its origin - and you must remember that at birth we are essence - lives above us. The point where it enters into Time is the moment of our birth. The point where it leaves Time is the moment of our death. In between these two points lives our life in Time, where a development of essence is possible, and where, apart from this, personality is formed inevitably. That is, personality is formed in Time, and belongs to Time, where essence enters Time and leaves Time. Essence is beyond Time.” (pg 106)

This accords with the message at the heart of nearly all the spiritual traditions of the West, that the human being has a role to play in the functioning of the cosmic order by proactively working to become a vessel or temple where the two worlds meet in the heart, the place of knowing our true identity. Gurdjieff called this “reciprocal maintenance”.