(Bennett’s enneagram as a universal transformer)
Foreword This book is a collection of talks and selections from journals and books by J. G. Bennett and articles by some of his students, explaining the meaning and application of the enneagram.
Bennett took it on board as a practical tool of understanding transformation of any kind, a universal structure.
their experience and understanding. There is no exclusive way to the truth, not even one best way, though each of us may think so. The Work, like Nature, produces a vast multitude of seeds and scatters them abroad to ensure that however many may fall by the wayside the harvest at the time of reaping will come. We must nurture our own seeds, but not, for that, neglect those of others.”
The new edition was called Enneagram Studies to emphasize its wider scope. It was certainly a stimulus in the writing of my own book The Intelligent Enneagram in 1996.2 In the present revised edition (2007) I have now added a contribution of my own around the theme of the enneagram and time1† and have also re-organized the various chapters.
(Systematics: number as master idea)
Bennett himself followed Pythagoras in considering number as primary for our understanding of cosmos (on any scale). He developed a method of thinking he called systematics3 in which every integral number was taken as a “master idea,” capable of revealing cosmos in its own unique way, each leading in a progression onto the next of higher number. In doing this, he was rationalizing ancient practice while relating it to modern systems thinking. He defined a system as a “set of independent but mutually relevant terms” and proposed that such systems gave a way of thinking that complemented our more usual linear ways, as used in writing and calculation. It is now a common theme that our western culture is dominated by linear thinking and needs some correction; hence the call for “holistic” thinking. Bennett’s contribution was exceptional in offering a kind of “logic” for this.
understanding. In a pure system, every term is equal to every other: a state of intellectual democracy. In a structure, terms could be differentiated into different types and systems could be combined in a variety of ways.
The eleven chapters are arranged to tell a story that pivots around the idea of Man as a Transformer of Energies.
The whole series was thus divided into two complementary halves. Such a scheme has recently been disclosed in the structure of Rumi’s thirteenth century poetic masterpiece by Simon Weightman2† a onetime pupil of Bennett. The “same” story is repeated on both sides, but on one side it is from the standpoint of man and on the other from the standpoint of God.
The two aspects of a ring closing in on itself with two perspectives feature in the enneagram. The symbol has nine points or lines (ennea, nine; gram, drawing) but is also described as having ten points 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 with 0 and 9 coincident. Relative to each other, the right-hand side of the symbol is material and the left-hand side spiritual. However, Gurdjieff being Gurdjieff, he would not settle for a merely binary distinction and made a ternary one. This meant that there were two “turns” in his “stories” (given by the points 3 and 6). This difference makes Gurdjieff’s contribution all the more unique.
The realm depicted in the enneagram between points 3 and 6 is that of work in the sense of Gurdjieff’s definition as “voluntary labor and intentional suffering” or of Keats’ “Vale of Soul Making.”
An anthropologist such as Mary Douglas remains within the provenance of myth and story, while followers of the fourth way look further to an understanding of real processes taking place in the world and in themselves now. In this respect, Gurdjieff’s threefoldness appears essential; for instance, because it allows for a mutual action between the spiritual and the material. However, if we look to the work of Joseph Campbell on structure of myth, in particular the mono-myth of the hero (as he discusses in The Hero with a Thousand Faces), we do come across a version of the “middle realm.”
The enneagram can be understood in a formal or abstract sense as a member of a class of structures with 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, and so on terms (the integral series squared) and also within a larger class still of “N-grams” of any number of terms.
(The living symbol: perpetual motion and time)
Since 1974 when Bennett’s The Enneagram was first published, many books have appeared purporting to be about the enneagram but in fact merely about the scheme of nine types or “fixations,” as first devised by Oscar Ichazo. The fact of having nine terms has led many people to superimpose the enneagram symbol on them; whereas this set of terms is more likely to be an exemplification of an ennead or nine-term system, rather than an enneagram, which is a nine-fold structure. In contrast with the enneagram, the nine terms of the fixation scheme do not form a progression (as in a sequence of transformation) at all. A powerful aspect of the enneagram is its representation of different kinds of time. The outer circle represents linear sequential time, while the other figures in the symbol represent different orders of time, one static or “eternal” and the other cyclic or recurrent. It is therefore inherently evocative of living organisms, which change while remaining the same. As Gurdjieff pointed out, a living organism has to eat and transform energies. In one of the pieces included here, it is explained how a man has three kinds of “food” that have to blend together. The third phase of the enneagram (region defined by points 6-9) represents the region of fulfillment and is not guaranteed because it relies on both our own intention and “help.” As Bennett likes to emphasize, it is inherently dramatic.
Bennett’s work has inspired many practical people, including Richard Knowles in particular, whose book The Leadership Dance9 applies the enneagram to the realm of management and was based on years of experience in helping organizations improve their performance in critical areas such as safety. It can be placed beside Ken Pledge’s article on structured process in scientific experiment (reproduced in this book) to emphasize the technical and precise insights the enneagram can foster.
enneagram he does not understand. For the man who is able to make use of it, the enneagram makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary. Everything can be included and read in the enneagram. A man may be quite alone in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand and in it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before. “If two men who have been in different schools meet, they will draw the enneagram and with its help they will be able at once to establish which of them knows more and which, consequently, stands upon which step, that is to say, which is the elder, which is the teacher and which the pupil. The enneagram is the fundamental hieroglyph of a universal language that has as many different meanings as there are levels of men.
A man may be quite alone in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand and in it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before.
“The enneagram is perpetual motion, the same perpetual motion that men have sought since the remotest antiquity and could never find. And it is clear why they could not find perpetual motion. They sought outside themselves that which was within them; and they attempted to construct perpetual motion as a machine is constructed, whereas real perpetual motion is a part of another perpetual motion and cannot be created apart from it. The enneagram is a schematic diagram of perpetual motion, that is, of a machine of eternal movement. But of course it is necessary to know how to read this diagram. The understanding of this symbol and the ability to make use of it give man very great power. It is perpetual motion and it is also the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists. “The knowledge of the enneagram has for a very long time been preserved in secret and if it now is, so to speak, made available to all, it is only in an incomplete and theoretical form of which nobody could make any practical use without instruction from a man who knows. “In order to understand the enneagram it must be thought of as in motion, as moving. A motionless enneagram is a dead symbol; the living symbol is in motion.”12
Between these lie the participation of our own life-blood and meaning. Gurdjieff introduced the enneagram in a discourse on symbolism in which he spoke of the union between knowledge and being (and laid the foundations for what Bennett later developed as systematics). This is almost totally unrecognized in the West, where we expect everything to be fed or explained to us without having to make any effort even of logical thought, let alone engage in “intentional suffering.”
Gurdjieff introduced the enneagram in a discourse on symbolism in which he spoke of the union between knowledge and being (and laid the foundations for what Bennett later developed as systematics). This is almost totally unrecognized in the West, where we expect everything to be fed or explained to us without having to make any effort even of logical thought, let alone engage in “intentional suffering.”
(The necessary gap: will and the present moment)
What is “incomplete” in the presentation of the enneagram? It is the absence of a present moment, which Bennett defined as “the field of operation of a will.” Without this, the enneagram is lifeless. People need to contribute not only their knowledge but also their life-substance. There is a long history of people acknowledging that any esoteric or sacred text or symbol must be incomplete, or even that it must leave out the most important thing. Another way of putting this is to say that every such text or form has to leave a “gap” for the reader or applicant.
There is a long history of people acknowledging that any esoteric or sacred text or symbol must be incomplete, or even that it must leave out the most important thing.
Gurdjieff’s cosmic vision proposes that the whole universe is still in process of being adjusted to make it work! It is not a perfect machine, nor a stage of free will.
Engaging with it gives us a chance to contact this process in the concrete present moment, which is that which “truly knows.” It is in the act of harmonizing fact and value (as represented in the two sides of the enneagram) that we can be “taught.” Putting ourselves in the uncertain realm between our own purpose and the constraints of existence is the condition of making ourselves susceptible to understanding.
About 2,500 years ago it was discovered that the intermediate sounds given by adding a quarter, a third or a half produce sounds acceptable to the ear. In this way Pythagoras and others established what we now call the seven-toned scale, the notes of which were named by Guido d’Arezzo five hundred years ago (do - si - la - sol - fa - mi - re). It was noted at a very early stage that the intervals between do and si, and between fa and mi are different from the other five in as much as they change the pitch only about half as much. These were called semitones. The Greeks did not attach any special importance to this property, but in Central Asia it was given a cosmic significance.
For a fuller account of the “Law of Sevenfoldness” reference should be made to my book Gurdjieff—Making a New World.† It is only from experience that we can be convinced that Gurdjieff’s “intervals” give a satisfactory account of the way things go right or wrong in a self-regulating process.
(Man as transformer: the cooking metaphor)
“The meal that is cooked in our lives is the soul. The raw material of this meal is all our experience.”
This is quite true, but it is not the whole story for something is also happening in the kitchen itself. The kitchen has to be in a certain state of preparation and things in it are going to change. Its state has to be maintained.
We usually take all this for granted and do not notice its importance because our thoughts are flowing in a single line. We notice only when things go wrong, and then the cook begins to concern himself with the function of the kitchen boy and the kitchen boy begins to concern himself with the cooking process. Linear thinking will assume that only the cooking process is important and disregard the need to maintain order in the kitchen, the cleanliness of the utensils and the provision of what is required.
By playing their roles without losing their own freedom, the people can remain independent of the process and yet it is they who make the process possible.
If they remain free the process will be right. If at the end of the cooking they have become exhausted, or in a bad humor, or if they have become excited or anything has happened as a consequence of cooking the meal, again energy has been lost, something has been wasted.
will or spiritual nature and there is his being or soul nature. It is rightly, though very seldom understood correctly, that Man has got three parts, body, soul and spirit. In the true Man, body, soul and spirit are present together like the three parts of cooking a meal. The body compares with the kitchen, the soul compares with the meal, the spirit or will compares with the people who do the cooking under the direction of the chief cook.
On a great scale lasting over thousands of millions of years there is a great cooking taking place on this earth. There is also a Will that is concerned with bringing about the great event of the production from this earth of a living whole to serve some great purpose or cosmic banquet.
(Three foods: bread, breath, and experience)
In our own bodies we have the example, which is usually taken for illustrating this theme, of the three kinds of food for Man that are called food, air and impressions. We make the mistake of thinking that only the coarse food we eat is nourishing us because it enters our sense experience. The coarse food we eat is concerned with the state of the bodily organism, it is not our soul food. The reply Jesus gave Satan: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” gives us this clue. It is not bread but breath that feeds the soul. Gurdjieff expresses this by calling the air we breathe “our second being-food.” We are also nourished in a still deeper sense by our experience. Our spiritual food is distilled from our experience of life.
The further back we go, the stronger is the evidence of a universal belief in the correlation between breath, the life principle, and the soul of man. We have lost contact with the belief that breath control has some special significance for the transformation of man.
In general, the functional aspect of every completed event is rhythmical. Everything that happens, happens in cycles. For example all the functioning of our organism is in cycles: our breathing, heartbeat, activity and repose, birth and death. It is all a process that returns into itself and renews itself. Where function does not appear to be cyclical, it is either because it is a broken or interrupted process, or because what we are looking at is a small part of a greater cycle and appears to be secular because we see too little to recognize its rhythm. Being is not like that. Being does not return into itself, nor does it undergo this kind of progression of cyclical transformation. It is always either integrating or disintegrating, evolving or involving, moving towards unity or multiplicity.
(Cosmic cooking: earth, biosphere, and Elohim)
The earth is not a “living” being in the sense that men and horses, bees and worms are. It begets life in a sense that is similar to the way in which a cook “prepares” a meal or a painter “paints” a picture. There is a Creative Genius associated with the earth that is expressed by the word Elohim in the book of Genesis. This creative genius plays the same role in the evolution of life as does the chief cook in the preparation of a meal. We can also picture the spiritual powers that perform all the functions needed for the evolution of the planet. These Gurdjieff called the “Heavenly Host.” The solid earth is the kitchen and the biosphere is the food to be cooked. The community that must be fed is the spirit world, which needs bodies to fulfill its destiny.