The Enneagram of Essence and Personality
The Enneagram is the most powerful tool for developing awareness there is, but it is truly effective only when we have a real and experiential understanding of the relationship between Essence and Personality.
G.I. Gurdjieff, the teacher of Inner Work who first presented the Enneagram to the West, made this dynamic the central feature of his teachings, and these terms have found their way into the mainstream study of the Enneagram of personality.
Essence and Personality
Essence is what we are born with, prior to developing traits and psychological patterning. It is the true source of what makes us unique, and it’s the part of us that feels most real, sensitive, and wise. The personality develops around Essence as the sum of everything we learn and acquire through life experience. It’s the part of us that is functional and self-protective, that helps us organize our experience and to accomplish goals big or small.
The everyday use of the word “personality” is used to characterize what makes us unique, what is personal and distinct about us, and what accounts for how we perceive things in the way we do. Personality is something more specific – it’s the psychological structure of our Enneagram Type, including the way that our temperamental and hereditary traits become crystallized into patterns, and the ways that these patterns continue to be reinforced through memories. Personality is the structured part of Essence, with a limited palette of actions, thoughts, and emotions.
In the context of Enneagram studies, the term “personality” and “Ego” are often erroneously used interchangeably. Ego means “I am”, and it’s the sense that the personality and the psychological activity of the personality is “me”. When we believe we are the Personality, Essence goes unrecognized and unintegrated.What the Personality is, at its core, is a kind of management system for our basic Instinctual Drives, the motivational drives shared by all animal life to attend to basic biological and emotional needs of survival, sexual attraction, and of creating and sustaining relationships. Check out our articles here and our webinar series here and here for more.
Essence is not functional. It simply “is”. It does not depend on any psychological activity and it’s not a state. It’s not limited to certain feelings or thoughts. It is so simple and subtle it’s easy to overlook, and often, our Personality has the expectation that “finding” Essence will be a kind of major spiritual revelation that when we have moments of connecting with Essence, we tend not to recognize those moments as such.
When we are present, it is Essence that is present. Personality can’t be present as it is based on memory and habit. It has no authentic volition and cannot make the personal, sensitive, and direct contact that is integral to the nature of Essence. Essence in most people is so passive and weak that we become wholly identified with the Personality and forget our authentic nature.
The aim of spiritual work is to for Essence to have a more active role in our experience and a more central orientation in our lives, rather than sporadic appearances. Ideally, our sense of identity, the feeling of “I”, comes from Essence.
Without Inner Work, our capacity to experience Essence diminishes and we become more fully fixated on the Personality. The more we are identified with the Personality, the more we are “asleep” in the language of spiritual traditions. Our consciousness falls into automatic patterns based on recycled impressions from the past rather than a fresh engagement with the present. We suffer in this zombie-like condition even if we’re not always aware of our suffering.
Qualities of Essence and the Enneagram
The Enneagram describes Nine basic, interrelated ways in which Essence is differentiated or expressed, and how these Nine facets of Essence can be covered over by identification with the Personality. Our Enneagram Type is not just a list of contrasting positive and negative traits, but a way of knowing the qualities of Essence most intimately associated with what’s core to our true identity, and the negative behaviors and the suffering that result when we are disconnected from Essence.
The qualities of Essence can be described in these ways:
Point Eight – Power: The full, substantial, vivid, and alive quality of our presence
Point Nine – Harmony: The direct recognition of the polyphonic, integrated, diverse yet harmonized quality of presence
Point One – Integrity: The quality of our presence as being in alignment or correspondence with something greater than our individual experience.
Point Two – Love: The quality of presence that is a recognition that everything is cherished and cared for
Point Three – Value: Everyone and everything is inestimably precious in and of itself
Point Four – Depth: The quality of presence that has inexhaustible dimensionality and indeterminate mystery.
Point Five – Discovery: The vivid and immediate clear perception of reality unfolding itself fresh and anew moment by moment.
Point Six – Truth: The sense of presence as being fundamental and substantial, the sense of it being the unconditionally true and real thing.
Point Seven – Freedom: The recognition that Essence is not conditional on anything else nor determined by anything. It is fully and wholly what it is, and thus, unbound and completely free.
If we know our Enneagram Type, we know something of our Personality. Most of the strengths and weaknesses of our Type can be attributed to Personality. The Personality can lack development and maturity, and it becomes detrimental when we are identified with it to the exclusion of what’s closest to our hearts.
The attempt to experience power or to be powerful lead to the forcefulness represented by point Eight. The yearning for Freedom comes to be searching for variety and a lack of contentment with the present represented by Type Seven.
The traps of our Personality Type arise when we are unable to to relax into the guidance of Essence. Without connection to Essence, the Personality unconsciously attempts to manipulate our experience to fit our “picture” of what Essential Qualities might feel like, trying to simulate through activity or action what is only possible through the fabric of presence.
Essence needs a healthy, strong, and adaptable Personality so that we can function, survive, and thrive. Knowing all this, we can better understand that our spiritual practice is not to make our Personality better, but to integrate Essence and Personality more intimately.
By practicing, we can better learn to relax the activity of our Personality and drop in more fully, deeply, and experientially into the Essence of who we are. We can better catch ourselves in the act of leaving ourselves, of becoming caught in an ego agenda, and learn to remain rooted in our authentic home, Presence, while we prepare our food, pursue our interests, or spend time with loved ones.