Chapter 4

Orienting to the Map of the Enneagram

Transcript

We're going to draw the Enneagram from scratch, and in doing so, we're going to reveal some of the deeper wisdom it contains.

Let's start by drawing a triangle. Before we get to 9, we really get to 3. So when we think about the Enneagram, we should always be thinking in threes and triads.

The triangle I'm going to draw here starts with the Buddhist framework of the three poisons.

So what are the three poisons?

First, there is confusion.

In Buddhism, confusion is sort of the beginning and the end of the story of ignorance—of how we got into this mess. There's a basic kind of forgetting of our true nature. And so the project of that particular tradition is to remember—remember our true nature, come back to our true nature.

But we find ourselves in a state of confusion. We don't know who we are. We don't know how we got here. We don't know what's going on. We are deeply confused. And that's scary.

There's a groundlessness to our situation that is terrifying—that we don't like and that we are afraid of.

That's the second node: aversion. We peer into the abyss and we are repelled. There's a "getting away from" energy there.

And in response to that fleeing, we flee away from something toward something else. We seek refuge, blankets, protection, safety. And we'll do anything to get that comfortable and that safe feeling again—even though it's not authentic or genuine. And that's attraction.

So: confusion, aversion, attraction. These are the three poisons of Buddhism. And they're key to the Enneagram.

They're also key to the Judeo-Christian story.

Let's expand our notion of these three points with the story of Adam and Eve.

Eve starts with confusion. "This tree—we're not supposed to eat of it. God said we'll surely die." And she's not sure. She sort of misquotes God a little bit. She's confused.

There's also fear there. We could describe the fear of Eve being that they'll surely die if they eat this. "I don't understand. I'm confused. But I know God said it's bad for us—we're going to die."

But through the serpent, there's also this fascination or attraction to the fruit.

And what happens here is a vicious circle: confusion → aversion → attraction → confusion.

From that base of confusion, Adam and Eve eat the fruit. And as soon as they do, they're terrified. Before they're even scared of God's punishment, they're scared because they're peering into something they hadn't seen before.

Remember, they are now like God. They used to be God's children. The veils have been lifted, and they're suddenly seeing something.

This is a very basic fear. Like if you think you're alone in a room and you suddenly feel a presence—that terror is very raw. It precedes any idea of a threat. It's just, "I thought I was alone, and I'm not."

So we move from confusion to aversion. And in that terrifying groundlessness, Adam and Eve flee into covering up. Covering up the situation. Covering their bodies with fig leaves. Hiding in a bush. Ultimately, lying to God.

Rather than facing their fears and saying, "We're sorry. Please forgive us," Adam says, "Eve made me do it."

It's a deeply shameful moment in humanity. When Adam says, "Eve made me do it," he's not just lying. He's entering deeper confusion. His lie is also to himself. He's gotten confused about what actually happened here.

And the cycle repeats.

There's a story that always stood out to me from Introduction to Psychology, when we studied the patients who had had their hemisphere split. To people's surprise, the reason you do that is because people were having horrible seizures. And the corpus callosum was split, and the seizures stopped.

Incredibly, these people continued to function quite well—even though their left and right hemispheres weren't talking to each other in certain ways.

So the researchers would flash a card to one hemisphere that said: "Get up." And the patient would get up and leave. But the part of the brain responsible for that action had no communication with the verbal center.

So when asked, "Where are you going?"—instead of saying, "Because a card told me to," which they had no access to—they'd say, "I'm going to get a Coke. I'm thirsty."

They'd made up a reason. And in order for that lie to succeed, the lie had to be complete. They had to lie to themselves. They had to become a thirsty person—even though they weren't thirsty at all.

So they moved deeper into ignorance, willful blindness, confusion, stupor.

As this loop perpetuates ad nauseam, the three poisons harden into passions.

Into energies. Into ways of being in the world.

And the Enneagram gives them labels:

Within an individual, we can go through this circle however many times in a minute—it can be very fast. But we also find that these represent three kinds of human faculties:

We're going to label these three core points—these "home bases"—as 9, 6, and 3.

Enneagram Centers and Character Types - Transcript

The Three Centers of the Enneagram

So this, first node of confusion and sloth and forgetting is what's known as the doing triad or the doing center, I should say.

Let me bring that down a little bit. Why doing?

Well, when we're doing, we're not really thinking, are we? There's a way that being busy helps us stay asleep—busy work. There's a lack of introspection or a lack of awareness that is associated with doing things in the world.

So particularly this kind of doing is like not doing what needs to be done. This is a faulty kind of doing, a fallen kind of doing.

The Thinking Center

Then on the fear side, this is thinking. As the famous quote goes, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." There's a way that when we think and we simulate and we anticipate and we plan, we create things for us to worry about, to be afraid of. And that sends us into even more thinking.

So this triad here is associated with the thinking center. But it's fallen thinking, it's faulty thinking.

The Feeling Center

And then this center over here, this lying, this image consciousness—that's all heart. That's all feeling centered, but it's faulty feeling. It's fallen feeling. It's: "How do they feel about me? How do I feel about them?" It's images and mirrors and masks all the way down.

The Framework of Fallenness

So when we talk about the three centers of the Enneagram, we have to be really mindful and remember that we're talking within a fallen framework, a framework of fallenness, a framework of passion.

And so we're all doing, thinking, feeling people, but we have as our home base one kind of passion for a particular faculty.

And as you probably see by now:

And so we're going to draw the circle here to begin drawing the Enneagram as an entire framework.

The Core Numbers

These are known as the core numbers of the Enneagram. And in a way, you could stop here.

It's probably helpful to pause here and ask yourself which type speaks to you, speaks to your character structure the most?

The Doing Triad (Gut Center)

Are you somebody who is preoccupied with what needs to be done? "What am I going to do about it? What needs to be done?" Checklists, action, gut.

You experience the world through doing, and we'll talk about anger there. But when I think about action and doing, there is a sort of inherent frustration in doing. And if you just watch sports or athletic performance, there is a friction as we seek to act in the world. And so that friction is, in the Enneagram, known as anger. And that's characteristic of the doing triad.

The Thinking Triad (Head Center)

Or are you a little bit more up here? The Tower of Sauron comes to my mind. And although it's terrifying, you can also see the terror in that eye. Sauron both casts fear onto others and also is himself paranoid and afraid.

Is there sort of a control center that's monitoring for threat, planning, anticipating, thinking, reflecting? Whether you're kind of in your bunker and withdrawn, or whether you're out in the world actively anticipating threat?

Is survival and safety and danger your primary concern? "What are they thinking? What do I think about this?" A sort of ongoing suspicion—suspicion of others and suspicion of oneself. Because one recognizes, in that suspicion, that there's a lot of false positives. A lot of times we think there's threat where there isn't any. We probably even recognize that sometimes we thought there was threat and there wasn't. But through our accusation, we created threat.

So that's the thinking triad.

The Feeling Triad (Heart Center)

And finally there's the feeling triad, the heart triad. Shame is key here.

Where does that shame come from? That shame comes from a very, very deep early self-abandonment, where, kind of like Dorian Gray, like I threw myself away and swapped in the image of myself. The image of myself became my project more than my actual self.

I lied not just to others, but I lied to myself about myself. And now all my endeavors, all my projects are image conscious.

And so therefore none of my victories matter at all. I'm never made larger by my work. My image may be growing bigger, but paradoxically, through victory and success, I feel even more painfully that emptiness and lack of being. And there's shame there, there's vanity, there's deceit, there's image consciousness.

And you can also taste that fear—the fear of actually being seen.

So that's the feeling triad, the heart center.

The Complete Enneagram Map

So you probably already have certain intuitions about where you belong here, where your character structure belongs, where your automatic conditioning or ego structure belongs.

But the Enneagram takes it further and offers up an additional level of fidelity or resolution on this map.

So in addition to the core triad, we have the rest of the numbers.

Dynamic Relationships Between Centers

So if we just simplify this for now into these faculties of doing, thinking, feeling, and recognize that this is an energetic fluid dynamic map, then:

A 1, you could say is just a person who's doing centered and brings in feeling.

An 8 is one who's doing centered and brings in thinking.

So you can see that 1 is far from thinking. The 8 is far from feeling.

So 1s—they do and then they feel a way about what they've done, and then they do something else and they feel a way about that.

8s do. And then they think about what they've done and then they do again, they think about it, etc.

Understanding the Doing Triad

And then another way to think about the doing triad here to start is if the central question is "what needs to be done":

The 8 has a... I'm checking because, you know, we'll talk about the 8 and lust. So why is lust not a feeling?

One of the words for 8 is revenge. And while revenge is spurred on from an original feeling of wounded injustice, revenge itself is highly calculating. And the 8 has that calculated doing. It's all powered by a kind of resentment, to be sure. But resentment isn't what's powering it.

Compare that to the 1 who's much more of a crusading energy, a crusader for moral action. 1s can be social justice people. And so they're continually bringing in feeling is what powers their doing.

So the 8 is amoral. The 1 is hyper moral. And for the 9, morality is an ongoing question.

You could say the 9 is doing conflicted.

The Thinking Triad

Moving into the 6...

The 7 is one who thinks and then does something and then thinks again and then does something and then thinks and then does something without feeling really.

And this is Suzanne Stabile's framework, which I think is quite good.

The 5 thinks and then feels and then thinks and then feels without really doing happening.

And so you could say the 7 is hyper expressive, hyper expressed. They're planners. They think and then they manifest. They bring things into the world through doing.

So they're very extroverted, generally speaking, and expressed because they have that action quality to them.

5s are under expressed, introverted, withdrawn types.

So you have hypo-expression for the 5. And the 6 is conflicted about expression, conflicted about their thinking.

They don't trust their own thoughts, which produces more thinking.

So that's the thinking triad.

The Feeling Triad

And then finally with the 3...

You have on the one side the 2 who feels and then does something and then feels about it and then does it.

This is a type who has pride. And feels good about what they do. And they need to do things to feel good about themselves. And so they have an inflated... They feel inflated about themselves and about others. There's an inflation of feeling.

In contrast, the 4 who's feeling dominant and then thinks and then feels and then thinks like the 5 is withdrawn.

The 4 and the 5 are at the bottom of the enneagram—are the types who are most separated. They feel separation the strongest, they're in their separation the strongest. Remember the 9—we started at the 9. That's the point of separation. The 4 and 5 are at the basin of separation.

The 4 is a melancholy type. The 4 has a deflated sense of worth. And so they don't do much of anything. They feel and think and feel and think. Of course, they might do art. They might do all sorts of wonderful things. But in terms of their doing in the world, their engagement with the world, compared to the 2, they're deflated.

So you have an inflated sense of worth for the 2, a deflated sense of worth for the 4. And the 3 is worth conflicted.

The question of their being is always up for them, is always an ongoing concern for them.

The Central Types

So you can see that these centers of the doing, thinking, feeling triad are in some ways the hardest to pin down. Because the 8 and the 1 have come up with strategies for doing:

For thinking:

And the 2 feels great and wants other people to feel great. And has this false abundance.

The 4 feels down and melancholy and authentic and raw and real. And the 3 doesn't know what to feel.

But 2s and 4s are essentially just strategies on top of the 3 conflict. 8s and 1s are just strategy on top of the 9 conflict. And 7s and 5s are just strategies on top of the 6 conflict.

So it's always helpful to return to 9, 6 and 3—these the centers of the triad.

The Inner Dynamics

I want to say one more thing here to complete this introduction to the map of the Enneagram.

Remember, when we started, we drew these lines to describe this dynamic of how forgetting or unconsciousness leads to fear, to terror, of the groundlessness of experience. Which leads to fleeing into a mask, a lie. Which then requires more forgetting so that I don't feel the pain of living a lie. I can become asleep to that betrayal.

But that sleepiness or forgetting produces even more fear of the world around me and so on.

Well, the same happens in these additional six numbers. And I'll just speak to that briefly by way of introduction.

The Inner Lines

So, we could start with the 2. Who has this false abundance, this pride.

What's underneath that pride? Well for 2s they know that deep down underneath that pride and sense of false abundance there's a very painful feeling of lack. A very painful feeling of envy. And so the ground or the basis of the 2's pride is the 4's envy.

The pride strategy is a compensation for unconscious feeling of lack.

Well then let's go to the 4. Where does this envy come from? Where does this chronic feeling of lack originate from? Well it's actually an anger that is self directed as opposed to outward directed. And so the basis for the 4's envy is anger.

4s and 1s are both perfectionists, but the 4 is an aesthetic perfectionism. Moment to moment perfection of experience. And the 4 is always dissatisfied or melancholy or you could say masochistic about the not quite rightness of this moment.

Whereas the 1 has that same perfectionism but toward the world. Things aren't quite right. Things need to be improved. They've got this moral rigidity to them and outward related to anger.

Well where does that come from? That itself is a compensation for a sort of gluttonous worldly delight that the 1 underneath has ties to the 7.

So the 1's own rigidity is a response to their unconscious wish to celebrate, to party, to indulge, to enjoy. And they don't let themselves do that.

Now the 7 has this great appetite for the world and for new experience, which seems like it couldn't be further from the 5's sense of emptiness and almost asceticism. But indeed the 7 is a response to and a reaction to an unconscious sense of futility or lack of connection.

There's a sort of pain that the 7 is not willing to feel around how withdrawn they really are. Whereas the 5 is quite in touch with that feeling of emptiness and quite in touch with feeling withdrawn.

And what is underneath that sense of isolation? The 5 has made a kind of choice, has made a kind of choice like revenge—revenge not to participate. A sort of stubborn refusal to pour themselves out into the world.

And so actually underneath the 5 is this vengeance, is this vindictiveness. It's just its manifestation is a refusal, is a withdrawal rather than what's underneath it, which is the 8's raw lust for vengeance and power.

Or more precisely than power—"I won't be dominated. I'll dominate before I'm dominated." The 8's domination is a strategy not to be dominated. The 5 strategy for not being dominated is to remove themselves from situations where domination is an issue.

So what is underneath the 8's lust and passion and vengeance is a sense of pride. A sense that they are lions in the jungle. There's a feeling of profound sovereignty and kind of right that the 8 feels. Which brings them back to the 2.

The Circular Nature

So just as we drew those connective lines for the 9, 6 and 3, these are the connective lines for the following numbers.

And of course it repeats in a circle. So it's important that you hear in this description that there's no bottom, exactly. If there is a starting point in the Enneagram, we would say it's the 9—it's the original forgetting.

You'll see these lines sometimes described as stretch and release points, or integration and disintegration points, or lines.

And all I want to illustrate here is, you know, the lines point to additional construction on top of. So for instance, when the 4, if they're investigating their 4ness can feel how it's a response to the anger of 1, it's a formation on top of that. It takes that anger and pushes it down and makes it self directed anger.

And then the 2, you know, pushes that feeling of envy down and responds to it with pride. But it is circular. So there's no basis here. There's no bottom here.

The Fundamental Teaching

Everything about the Enneagram should reinforce the fundamental groundlessness of each of these character types.

So they all have their logic. But just as I've shown here, the logic ultimately doesn't resolve. There is no resolution to be found in the Enneagram. None of these types is internally consistent or even really workable.

As we continue our work on the core patterns of each character structure, we will always be holding that groundlessness in mind because it's returning to the original confusion and looking at it as opposed to fleeing from it.

That is the invitation of the Enneagram.