Source Text
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.
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.”
AI Summary
Enneagram Studies by John Godolphin Bennett presents key insights from the Gurdjieff tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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