The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues

(Inner transformation, not personality typing, is the book’s aim)

This book is not simply about the enneagram. It is about inner transformation. It is about understanding some of the major characteristics of our consciousness in the state of personality or ego—that of believing and taking ourselves to be the person who is the product of our personal history. It is also about the changes our inner atmosphere undergoes as we become free of that identification. And finally, it is about skillful means, as the Buddhists would say: how to orient ourselves so that this transformation has the possibility of becoming a reality.

Our modern and postmodern world, based on this materialistic perspective and extolling only reason and scientific objectivity, has produced alienation, depersonalization, and existential meaninglessness experienced in small or gross ways by many.

Using it as our guide, we will explore the ins and outs of our personality structure not simply so that we can become more functional and “fixed” but, as in Naranjo’s original orientation to this map, so that we can gain deeper access to the full dimensionality of who and what we are.

(Transformation requires direct experience, not just intellectual insight)

For this inquiry to be transformative, it must involve more than intellectual insights about ourselves. Rather than using our minds to lead our inner exploration, our understanding needs to arise from our direct experience. We must be in touch with the whole of our present experience, including our emotional life and our physicality. What Almaas found is that if we engage our inner process in this way, things will naturally unfold within ourselves, revealing progressively deeper layers of experience. If we dive into the contents of our consciousness in this way, we work through them. Without pushing or pulling at ourselves, we can move effortlessly through layers of our personality structure and into the realm of Being—

This radical shift of consciousness expressed in the movement from the passions to the virtues necessitates first of all understanding the territory—what forces and motivations propel our ordinary consciousness. And I don’t mean simply understanding it intellectually, since it is only by traveling through this terrain that we will discover what lies beyond it. By

Translated into spiritual terms, this means that if our practices and our orientation toward our personal process are those congruent with the ways our deepest nature operates and the ways that it affects the human soul, our inner work is likely to bring us closer to our depths. If our practices and orientation are those of the personality, they will only lead us deeper into enmeshment with that structure.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another. —PLOTINUS1

(How passions crystallize from early loss of reality’s goodness)

In all likelihood, our early reactions to what is traumatic for our infant consciousness are inseparable from our loss of perception of the ultimate goodness of reality. That is, our emotionally reactive patterns, which in time crystallize into our passion, arise concurrently with our distorted view of reality, our fixation. Whatever the causative factor, it is clear that we are predisposed to develop into one particular ennea-type, with its belief structure and its corresponding set of emotional and behavioral patterns.

The passions are “passionate” insofar as they are compulsive—as Naranjo says, “we are subject to them as passive agents.”4 We cannot choose to disidentify from our passion, since its whole bias and orientation is basic to our personality structure.

An emotion is like water that breaks through a dyke, passion like a torrent that makes its bed deeper and deeper. An emotion is like a drunkenness that puts you to sleep; passion is like a disease that results from a faulty constitution or a poison.

(Ego as deficiency: personality built around the absence of depth)

Since by definition the personality is a sense of self built around the absence of the depth dimension of reality, it is inevitable that when we are identified with it, we experience ourselves as lacking something fundamental. We experience, in other words, a sense of deficiency, which we may ascribe to various causes or character flaws, but which is part and parcel of the territory of the ego.

• If the self-preservation instinct is the most pronounced, one is preoccupied with survival and material security in an effort to find happiness and fulfillment. • If the social instinct dominates, one is oriented toward achieving a sense of belonging, a place and status in community. • If the sexual instinct is most emphasized, intimate relationship seems to hold the promise of satisfaction.

Or, to put it differently, one particular instinct becomes the most “passionate” in the sense that our personality is geared around its satisfaction, and this becomes the area of life in which we feel our deepest insecurity and vulnerability. The passions, in turn, bind and distort our instinctual drives so that when we are identified with our personality, our instincts are not functioning freely but are tied up with the concerns arising out of a limited, and thus distorted, self-definition.

This is not a matter of changing our experience, and this is something I can’t underline strongly enough, but of incorporating the perspective of the

virtues in our approach to what we encounter both inwardly and outwardly. Such an approach can radically shift the state of our soul.

Before continuing our discussion of the virtues, it is important to talk a bit further about this term I have just used—soul. Insofar as we are discussing transformation, we must understand what it is that undergoes a metamorphosis as we develop—what it is, in other words, that is informed by either the passions or the virtues. When I use the word soul, I mean our personal consciousness, what we are referring to when we say “I” or “me.” It is our soul, then, our alive consciousness, our particular locus

The personality structure is simply a mental construct, a set of beliefs and internal representations, and this structure shapes the raw material of our soul much like a plaster mold into which fluid is poured and thus shaped. Our soul takes the shape of our personality structure.

It is our soul that experiences and in time embodies the universal principles of Being, such as compassion, clarity, support, and so on. Our alive consciousness, then, is what is informed by the personality and by Being, and implicitly by the passions and the virtues. One of the principal characteristics of our personal consciousness or soul is that it is highly malleable and impressionable. We are shaped by what happens to us, most dramatically, as psychology has showed us, in the early years of life. Following roughly the age of seven to nine years, the period during which our capacity to self-reflect is fully developed and thus our sense of self coalesces, what occurs is in most cases less pivotal and formative.

it. A Three, for instance, might not consciously realize that he believes he is beyond the rules the rest of us follow, that he sees others as incompetent, and that he lies and is deceptive.

bad. To a One, for example, the other typically appears as someone who is imperfect and is in need of correction, while the sense of self is as someone who knows what is wrong and can point it out. The affective tone is the passion of anger, which must be understood, as Naranjo says, as “a more inward and basic antagonism in the face of reality than an explosive irritation.”

How does this kind of transformation come about? One fundamental law of the soul is that our beliefs determine our experience. We can see this in the object relations that were described above: if we hold reality to be a certain way, we tend to experience it in that way.

Those who have had peak experiences of one form or another know that they seldom lastingly change our sense of reality. How things were before inevitably reasserts itself in our consciousness. Simply trying to change our beliefs doesn’t work, unfortunately. Real change is far more complicated than trying to change how we think, since it involves change in how we experience reality. All successful spiritual practice is a matter of orienting our sense of possibilities, our conceptual framework, and our understanding of the nature of ourselves and the universe in accordance with how things actually are—not how they look through the veil of the personality. In the language of the enneagram, these attitudes are those of the virtues. Understanding them in an experiential way moves our experience progressively more in alignment with Being.

The so-called inner triangle, which we see above, is said to express the “law of three,” that of an active, passive, and neutralizing force—a universal threefoldness in all that exists. Or, the notion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

But there are a thousand things which prevent a man from awakening, which keep him in the power of his dreams. In order to act consciously with the intention of awakening, it is necessary to know the nature of the forces which keep man in a state of sleep. —G. I. GURDJIEFF1

Man is asleep. This is the fundamental tenet of all spiritual traditions. Realization is often called awakening. We may experience ourselves as very alert and alive, but as the great spiritual teachers throughout the centuries have taught, we are walking around in a kind of stupor or dream. Our attention is directed outside of ourselves—toward our work or relationships or the myriad of other details that go into our lives—and most of us neglect our inner lives.

Ennea-type Nines who have done some inner work are usually all too familiar with how the passion of laziness manifests in their personalities. It is a drive, if we can call it that, toward inattention to self, self-neglect, and heedlessness. It is a muffling and damping-down of a Nine’s inner life, which may feel dull and uninteresting to him. His attention is elsewhere, outside of himself, since his inner life seems of little importance or value to himself or anyone else.

Our present sense of reality is largely a product of that distant past—primarily the first few years of our lives—with an adult veneer laid on top. We are indeed sleepwalkers to a great extent, moving through our lives in a trance, unaware that there is more to life than we experience.

We also take ourselves to be beings whose lives will end when our bodies die. We have, in short, become identified with our physical forms, believing them to be the whole of who and what we are.

Implicit in the ego, then, is a fundamental distrust of reality. The failure of the holding environment leads to the absence of basic trust, which then becomes disconnection from Being, which leads to reactivity, which is ego activity. The Enneagram maps the various ways the ego develops to deal with the absence, disruptions, ruptures, and discontinuities of holding.

For Point Three, it is to deny the need for holding but pretend to oneself, “I can do it on my own. I know how reality can be and how I’m going to develop and I’ll make it happen.”

For Point Seven, it is by planning how to make it good, and fantasizing what it will feel like, rather than feeling the pain of the loss of holding.

While the realm of Being fades into the obscurity of our unconscious, for some it is not too far away. A faint recollection in the soul remains, although to speak of it in these terms is far too conceptual. Let us say that a flavor of it remains present in the soul, a whiff, a preconscious knowing that there is more to reality than what we consciously experience. It is these people who become spiritual seekers, following the trail of an almost cold scent.

I think that it is both more constructive and more accurate to see the formation of our ego structure as part of a continuum of human potentiality. A necessary evolution, in other words. As we have seen, the personality develops conjointly with the capacity for self-reflection. After the scaffolding of the ego structure is formed, it becomes possible to work through it while retaining its by-product, our capacity for self-knowing. If our ego structure is too unstable, it is difficult for it to relax or for us to let go of it, depending on your point of view. Since it is vulnerable, it is also brittle, and so experiences of moving beyond it are threatening and can be traumatic. This is the reason that it is important to have a well-developed personality structure before beginning spiritual work. It appears—since this is how we are designed—that developing a personality structure is part of our human journey, and the next stage of it is moving beyond it. It is likely that we are wired in this way so that we can consciously know Being, so that we can know the Divine as our nature. So rather than simply being the embodiment of and being made up of Being, which is what all of manifest reality is, we have the unique opportunity to know ourselves as such. It may be that this is how the Divine can know Itself, through our human soul’s experience.

Whether we believe that this is our purpose as human beings or not, what is certain is that it is possible to move beyond our personality structure. There are volumes upon volumes recounting the stories of those souls over the centuries who have not only glimpsed objective reality but have learned to abide there. All of the spiritual traditions were founded by one such individual, whose view of objective reality became the logos of that teaching, and whose way of getting beyond the veil of the ego became the methodology of that path. And there are lineages of such individuals in many of the traditions.

The biggest obstacle is the passion of laziness that we are discussing.

Laziness literally means the state of being resistant to physical or mental exertion, of not being vigorous or energetic, and that is not exactly the sense of this passion. One can be very active, work exceedingly diligently, and accomplish masses of things—not be lazy at all in the sense that we use that word—and still be completely neglectful of the state of one’s soul.

What we are talking about is radical personal transformation, such that we know ourselves to be the Absolute, the Divine Itself.

Just as we have seen that the passion of laziness does not simply mean being unindustrious or inactive, likewise the virtue of action refers to far more than just being busy. It signifies being involved in the most important kind of endeavor—that of overcoming the inertia of the personality to remain asleep. Real action, then, is a matter of shifting the habitual orientation of our own consciousness. We have seen that the state of asleepness is one of a diminishment or curtailment of what we are aware of. It is a constriction of apprehension, and so for our consciousness to expand in order to include more of reality, we must do what it takes to expand our awareness. This is essential action, and is the basis of most spiritual practices.

This state might be called one of automatic pilot, living and operating mechanically in response to the external with little or no inner awareness. This is the nature of our sleep, and to awaken requires expanding our consciousness to include ourselves and all the dimensions of reality that are a part of us and that we are part of.

One of our ultimate nature’s central characteristics is that of presence—the fact that it is substantial and immediate, a here-ness. This is why it is called Being. In fact, we can only be in touch with Being when we are fully in the moment. This is why one of the most powerful practices I know, if we work at it consistently, is what Gurdjieff called self-remembering. It is a matter of being fully present in our direct experience and dividing our attention between the external and the internal.

Effort, as Ouspensky notes, is required since outer-directedness is one of the primary characteristics of our personality structure—it cannot exist without it, and we have to exert ourselves to overcome the inertia of this tendency. This inertial pull to maintain our status quo with its outer orientation is one of the deepest and most insidious barriers in spiritual work, and is laziness in action once we are aware that we are asleep.

One of the major characteristics of our personality structure is its tendency to hang on to and quickly reassert the familiar, despite it being an unsatisfying or even a miserable one.

but for those who are not, this can only be wishful thinking and empty words. Effort is needed if we are to overcome the undertow of the personality, lulling us back into the sleep of our conditioning. Adopting a so-called nondualistic attitude that there is nothing we really need to do to awaken is, for most people, a spiritually sophisticated way of succumbing to their laziness. Those who follow devotional paths centered around an enlightened teacher often maintain the outer-directed orientation of the personality in the sense of waiting for a transmission to open up their consciousness. This does, of course, happen. In the presence of someone in a deep state of realization, if we are receptive to it, our consciousness cannot but expand, since the depth such a person embodies and is in touch with exerts a pull on our consciousness. It does this because this depth is what is most real. And attuning ourselves to and emulating such an individual is one way of orienting our consciousness toward the reality they inhabit.

Sitting in meditation, even for an extremely long time, will get us nowhere if we are daydreaming, planning our day, or going over our shopping list. Action means applying ourselves to the practice, regardless of which one we are doing. This is the reason spiritual methodologies are called practices—we must continually work at them. The occasional retreat, workshop, or weekend may put us momentarily in touch with our depth dimension, but it takes steady, moment-to-moment practice for real transformation to become possible. Our self-remembering cannot be sporadic or practiced only when we feel like it. To truly have a lasting effect on our consciousness, we must work with it continuously.

We understand when we experience this that who we are cannot be limited to or contained within the body, and so the body cannot be who and what we are. Our sense of who we are can then shift from our deepest identification with the body to knowing that we are something beyond it. Eventually, we may come to see that the body is animated by the soul and is its vehicle.

We might think that we experience our body as it is, but we are actually experiencing it through a thick cloud of assumptions. If we were to contact it directly, without our ideas and inner pictures of it obscuring and informing our perception, we would experience it completely differently—as pure luminosity, for instance. With our outer-directedness and narrowing of experience to the surface of things, we are likewise eliminating from our awareness perception of energetic fields, as described in the chakra system of the body, in acupuncture, and perceived by those who see auric fields.

As we continue with this type of exploration, an extremely interesting thing happens: our experience starts to open up, revealing deeper and deeper layers within ourselves. The outermost layer is, of course, the body, and as we move deeper, we are moving into our soul. Then in time, we start to experience the nature of our soul, which is the reason it is called our True Nature. One law of our souls is that if we are present to our here-and-now experience with an open and fresh attitude of curiosity and inquiry into the contents of our consciousness, our experience will rapidly deepen.

Our ultimate nature is who we are without our history, without our mental constructs defining, albeit unconsciously, our experience both of ourselves and of the world around us. It is who and what we truly are, stripped of all conditioning.

Or, if we are faced with a huge challenge of some sort, Being will respond as courage, if we are not blocking it. Receptivity to Being requires that our soul must be permeable enough for the qualities of Being to reach our consciousness. This means having some degree of freedom from our personality, and this develops as we do our practices—as we practice the virtue of action, in other words.

As we assiduously practice the virtue of action, doing what it takes to become more present and conscious, we are setting the stage for this

In time, with repeated experiences that offset our historical sense of who we are, that sense of self changes. After experiencing over and over again, for instance, that the basic nature of our soul is something fluid, changing, and has a sense of purity and goodness to it, we can no longer sustain the old belief that we are fundamentally stuck or bad, for instance. We cannot make this shift from personality to Being happen for the simple reason that the very one who wants to make that shift is the personality. Or, more accurately, our soul informed by our personality, since the personality is a mental construct and our soul is what gives it life.

our True Nature. There is also outer action: behaving in accordance with the principles and characteristics of True Nature, which the Buddhists call right action. This is another nuance of the virtue of action. Basing our conduct on the deepest principles we know is a practice that helps to bring our soul into alignmentwith the enlightened state, and supports our consciousness opening to Being. While such a practice may seem like a pretense and can become one if it becomes an empty form, it is really an evocation of the truth of our depths. Acting out of our reactivity is the real make-believe, since such actions do not express who and what we truly are. Right action is an assertion of our will in doing what is most authentic, functioning in accordance with the truth of our depths, and such right action helps us contact that depth. Functioning according to our deepest truth, not that of the personality’s reactivity, actually reinforces our embodiment, our living of True Nature.

It is essential movement without interference from the mind, arising naturally from the body’s need to function in harmony with its environment. Action is the normal attitude of a being in tune with his own energy and with the energy of the planet.

CHAPTER 5 POINT THREE—DECEIT and VERACITY This world is nothing but the glory of Tao expressed through different names and forms One who sees the things of this world as being real and self-existent has lost sight of the truth To him, every word becomes a trap every thing becomes a prison   One who knows the truth that underlies all things lives in this world without danger To him, every word reflects the universe every moment brings enlightenment —LAO TZU1

All three of these types are deeply concerned with how they come across and are perceived by others, and so are organized around the form and the front of things. With an ideal inner image of how they think they should be as a guide, these types attempt to morph or shape-shift into that form, molding the fluid medium of their souls into the rigid form shaped by their minds. They monitor their presentation very carefully, and so keep their attention focused on the surface of themselves rather than on what is going on deeper down. The packaging becomes more important than the substance.

The difference is that Threes fully believe that they are the facade they are peddling to others. As Naranjo puts it, “the essence of their psychological aberration is the confusion of the self-image that they sell (and others buy) with what they are.”2 In our last chapter we discussed how each of us has an ego ideal, an ideal picture that we carry around inside of us and measure ourselves and our actions against. While all the types attempt to live up to their ego ideal, the image types take this one step further, and try to present themselves as this ideal.

Here is where the passion of Point Three, deceit, begins. As mentioned earlier, at each corner of the enneagram, the passions of two wings of the point on the inner triangle can be viewed as refractions of that central passion. So all three image types share and are oriented around deception—or to put it more directly, lying about their reality. One aspect of this deceit is presenting…

As we have seen, the passion of each point is an inner attitude or affective atmosphere. The fixation of each point, on the other hand, is its core delusion. It is a fixed and distorted belief about reality since it is a view of reality devoid of its spiritual dimension, and it colors and slants one’s perception and experience. It arises in the absence of the enlightened view of reality—the Holy Idea—associated with that point. The passion is…

image, Naranjo thinks it is more accurate for vanity to be considered the passion of Point Three, rather than deceit, as given by Ichazo. Deceit, he believes, better describes the distorted mind set—the fixation—of this type than does Ichazo’s use of the term vanity. Vanity means an excessive pride especially in one’s appearance, or alternatively the state of being futile, worthless, and empty of significance, while deceit means the act of misleading and tricking someone. A case could be made for either vanity or deceit as the passion, but it seems to me that the vanity of believing that one creates and sustains one’s own world is the central delusion of Point Three, corresponding to the loss of the Holy…

There are a number of levels to the deception necessary to…

There is the deceiving of others in terms of shape-shifting to present themselves in such a way that others will approve of, admire, and love them. As mentioned above, while they might not know they are doing it, Threes have the uncanny ability to tune in to the ego ideal of the other and to present themselves…

Threes have the uncanny ability to tune in to the ego ideal of the other and to present themselves as a pretty good facsimile of it, and are much better at this than Twos or Fours.

Those familiar with the ennea-types know that Threes tend to present themselves as the cultural ideal of whatever milieu they grew up within, and adjust that image as their environment shifts in adulthood. For this reason, they are considered the…

This focus on image is a matter of doing rather than of simply being oneself. By this I mean that it takes a lot of internal, albeit unconscious, work to figure out what is ideal and to portray oneself as that, and also that presenting themselves not as they are is an effortful inner activity. This is one side of the fact that Threes are the great doers of the enneagram. The other side is that just as deeply as a Three believes that she is what she appears to be, she also believes that her value lies in what she can achieve. Or, to put it differently, she fervently…

typically believe that it is up to them to generate sustenance and support in their lives, and so are very busy doing everything…

Investing their image and achievements with ultimate value is another nuance, then, of their passion of deception. This is a lie shared by everyone, to one degree or another. The fact that deception is a passion of the ancient system of the enneagram, which maps not only characteristics of the individual types but also universal…

There are all sorts of lies that we tell, which are accepted aspects of the conventional world. There are the “little white lies” that are so much a part of the fabric of social life. The ones we tell to save face, spare another’s feelings, or get ourselves out of a difficult jam, such as, “I’m so sorry for not returning your call—my message machine must not have picked it up,” or “It would be lovely to spend more time with you—it’s such a shame I’m so busy all the time,” or “Don’t you look marvelous!” In the world of business, lies are told to close a deal, to…

In a similar vein, the advertising industry works to sell things based on their packaging—physical as well as conceptual. To a greater extent than most of us realize, in our postmodern world the packaging has become more important than what’s contained within it. Clothing labels are now proudly displayed, so that the wearer of a garment can partake of the glamour associated with the designer’s name. Status is conferred by the approximation of one’s presentation to one’s cultural ideal, by the make of car one drives, or the neighborhood one lives in.

The common lie is that the appearance something or someone has is itself the substance—a lie that we are taking more and more as reality.

We are most often aware that we are distorting the truth or giving it a particular patina when we lie to others, but are not usually aware of it when we lie to ourselves. We deceive ourselves in all kinds of ways—about what we think, what we feel, and what our relationship to our body is. We are convinced that we feel positively toward someone who, when we scratch the surface of our consciousness, we find we don’t like at all; or we contort ourselves into believing that a work situation we really want or need is tolerable when deeper down we can’t stand it; or when we think that we are doing our best to succeed at something when inevitably we do something to undermine our attainment. When we push ourselves beyond our physical or emotional limits without noticing because the job needs to get done, we are deceiving ourselves about what has ultimate value and what is really going on with us. One of our most universal lies is living as though and believing that we will never die, even though cognitively we know otherwise.

When we push ourselves beyond our physical or emotional limits without noticing because the job needs to get done, we are deceiving ourselves about what has ultimate value and what is really going on with us. One of our most universal lies is living as though and believing that we will never die, even though cognitively we know otherwise.

While each ennea-type specializes in one or more of our psychological defense mechanisms, all are based on protecting ourselves from the direct truth of our experience.

Or we undo a thought, feeling, or action through some form of expiation, as when we do something we consider bad and then punish ourselves in some way to remove the offense.

While not typically classified as a defense mechanism, identification is the process ascribed by Naranjo as the defense mechanism of Point Three. Identification is the inner process by which we take on attitudes, values, and functions of another, and incorporate them into our own sense of self.

This is the typical morphing or shape-shifting discussed earlier, in which a Three’s inner reality becomes what is identified with. He shapes himself into an external ideal and so his internal sense of reality becomes indistinguishable from what is outside of him. In the process, he lives increasingly on the surface of himself. We will return to this idea later, as it is part of the key for understanding the passion and virtue of this point.

He shapes himself into an external ideal and so his internal sense of reality becomes indistinguishable from what is outside of him. In the process, he lives increasingly on the surface of himself. We will return to this idea later, as it is part of the key for understanding the passion and virtue of this point.

ourselves and to others when our image, our self-presentation, becomes more important than who we really are. We also lie to ourselves when we believe that our value lies in our accomplishments.

Behind these attitudes and orientations is the lie that the surface of things is what has value and importance. We lie to ourselves when we believe that the form is the substance, and as we’re seeing, you don’t have to be an image type to do this.

So one of our deepest lies is that the material world is the ultimate truth, and hence that we are our bodies. While our identification with the body is nothing new—it seems to be implicit in having a personality structure—during this period this worldview became solidified and sanctioned as ultimate truth.

This is not to say that our appearance is unimportant. Our body is what our soul inhabits in this life, and how it looks reflects much about the state of our soul.

imbalance, just as does the overinvestment of importance in it. As it is our vehicle for interaction with the rest of the world, its condition reflects the inner state of our soul and also tells us a lot about our relational orientation. If one is severely overweight or underweight without some physical cause, for instance, something is clearly out of synch in that person’s psyche as well as in their relationship to others.

Eating disorders based on starvation—anorexia and bulimia—point to disturbances in relationship with mother as well as a vicious perfectionism channeled into one’s appearance.

We end up believing that our appearance is the cause of our joy or suffering, and that if we looked differently, we would feel differently. This is a misplacing of priorities, a lie about the source of satisfaction or its lack. It’s the same as saying that if we change the shape of the container, what’s in it would change also. Changes in our appearance brought about by that great outfit or darling pair of shoes, or at the other extreme, liposuction or tummy tucks, seldom change the character of our souls or bring us more than momentary

Part and parcel of this identification with the personality, with its physical basis, is the belief that we are separate doers in life, or as Almaas puts it, that we are centers of action.

But rather than seeing that this is all happening through us, we come to believe that we are making our world happen.

As Almaas puts it, “If you did not believe that you are an independent doer, it wouldn’t make sense to believe that you are inadequate or a failure.”3 Returning to our analogy, it is as though each separate wave were to believe that its movements were generated by itself. The central question posed at Point Three, then, has to do with who we are and what we do.

But do these things really describe who and what we are? If we are wedded to our personality, we fervently believe that they do. If we are interested in exploring more of our potentiality as a human being—pushing our envelope, so to speak—what we find blocking that expansion is our concepts about these very things. Our inner pictures of who we are and the beliefs that are fundamental to those images act as walls that separate us from the rest of reality.

One of the effects this filtering of reality has is to create the illusion that we are something static. This is because these inner pictures themselves are relatively unchanging, creating the impression that we are something fixed and solid, moving through time and space. If we really understand things as they are, we see that who and what we are is not something unvarying as these representations. We see that the whole universe, including ourselves, is a continuous up-swelling, being generated anew in each instant.

The perspective of Holy Law, then, illuminates the fact that the unity of Being is not a static existence, but rather, a dynamic presence that is continuously changing and transforming as a unified field. Here, we see the aliveness of Being and the universe, its energy and flow and vigorous transformation. This Holy idea confronts some of our very basic convictions about reality, but if we don’t understand it, we cannot really understand what unfoldment means. This is because the

unfoldment of the soul is Holy Law operating in one location, so when we perceive it, we are seeing in microcosm what is happening everywhere all the time. Holy Law is not an easy thing to swallow, since in the process of…

Understanding this helps us to understand the relationship of image and of functioning, both central issues of Point Three. In one breath, we typically describe Threes as focused on their presentation and on their achievements, without questioning what the…

The connecting link is the self in relation to others and to the world around us. So the focus here is not primarily on what our nature is as human beings—this is the question of identity—but on what it means to be a person…

When our sense of self is experienced through the veil of self-images that make up the personality structure, we lose the perception of ourselves as a locus of dynamism inseparable from the continuously moving and changing fabric of the whole of reality. Not only do we then see ourselves as separate and static entities but we also experience ourselves as the source of action in our lives. We become to ourselves someone who moves through time, making this or that happen in our lives. We experience ourselves like our wave, cut off from the rest of the ocean, believing that our undulations are generated by…

The more we experience the truth of things, the more that we see that our personal actions are simply the actions of Being occurring through our soul, and that living a life of truth includes an awareness of this reality. We progressively see that we are each a particular manifestation or arising of Being, acting and interacting in this world, each form of which is also an arising of Being. As human beings, we have the unique opportunity to know our deepest nature and to live it consciously,…

This is what it is to live a life of truth, and this brings us to the virtue of this point, veracity. Veracity means the truth of something as well as the truthfulness of a person. Ichazo’s definition is as follows:   A healthy body can only express its own being; it cannot lie because it cannot be anything other than what it is.   If we substitute the word “soul” for “body,” this definition takes on a depth of meaning in line with what we have been discussing. Living a life informed by veracity, then, is a life in which we…

Obviously, this radically changes our priorities. Rather than being concerned with our image—our appearance and how we are perceived by others—and with the reception of our actions by the world implicit in the quest for success and achievement, instead we are grounded in the depth of who we are. Our interactions and our activities are then the expression of this depth rather than being oriented toward recognition by others. The irony is that without Being informing our consciousness, we experience ourselves as the generators of our lives, but our life is lived always in reference to the outside—how we are seen and what kind of recognition we get. When our life is informed progressively more fully by Being, our sense of ourselves is less and less dependent on the outside and more completely autonomous. We then have a vertical connection with our depth, and therefore are not so oriented toward the horizontal—the outer surface of reality. For veracity to inform our consciousness, we need to see the truth of the extent to which we lie to ourselves. Movement toward veracity, then, means questioning and exploring all of the ways in which we deceive ourselves rather than believing our self-deceptions. This entails questioning and exploring how deeply we are enmeshed in the illusions of conventional reality, the consensus reality of the personality. We have discussed many levels of the deception implicit in the personality structure, and veracity is making them conscious. If what we have explored is experienced directly rather than simply intellectually, we will begin to feel more real. When we believe our personality and take its perspective to be the truth, we inevitably feel disconnected from reality, and so feel superficial and false. This is because we are identifying with something that does not have ultimate reality—it is simply a collection of mental representations of self and other. When we identify with it, we are staying firmly engaged in our inner holographic reality, our inner movie, which while it feels real enough when we are fully engaged in it, just as a movie does when we are completely engrossed in it, leaves us with a stale and empty feeling. This is because we are living on the surface of ourselves.

questioning and exploring all of the ways in which we deceive ourselves rather than believing our self-deceptions. This entails questioning and exploring how deeply we are enmeshed in the illusions of conventional reality, the consensus reality of the personality.

conscious. If what we have explored is experienced directly rather than simply intellectually, we will begin to feel more real. When we believe our personality and take its perspective to be the truth, we inevitably feel disconnected from reality, and so feel superficial and false. This is because we are identifying with something that does not have ultimate reality—it is simply a collection of mental representations of self and other. When we identify with it, we are staying firmly engaged in our inner holographic reality, our inner movie, which while it feels real enough when we are fully engaged in it, just as a movie does when we are completely engrossed in it, leaves us with a stale and empty feeling. This is because we are living on the surface of ourselves.

Understanding this in a way that transforms our soul is not a matter of doing anything. This is a pervasive misconception about working on ourselves, a Threeish orientation. There is nothing to do but be present and see the truth of what is happening within ourselves, and understand its nature. For a time it may feel that learning to be present in our bodies, our hearts, and the full dimensionality of our souls requires effort and feels very much like a doing. This is because we are resisting the inertial pull of the personality wanting to take us out of the immediacy of our direct experience. Being fully present means ceasing the constant ego activity of generating our inner reality. Learning to abide more fully in the now necessitates overcoming the undertow of that habitual inner activity. Becoming conscious of this pull and understanding what drives it is the beginning of the cessation of the doing inherent in the personality.

Without these self-deceptions, we cannot maintain our egoic sense of self, because without these veils, we would be in direct contact with the whole of ourselves, the full dimensionality of our reality.

From the perspective of Point Three, then, the Path is a matter of becoming increasingly honest about what is going on inside of ourselves and this requires skillfully working with our tendency to identify with our experience. When we are identified with what is going on inside of us, we do not see the contents clearly but rather are acting from them. Turning and facing the contents of our soul—the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations—means that we are already separating from them, and not treating them as our ground. So being honest about what is happening within implies disidentifying with it to some extent.

Transcending our psychological material might work temporarily, but it seldom, if ever, permanently resolves that content. The content does not go away, and so we must continue to sidestep it. These unresolved issues have the nasty habit of leaking out in all sorts of troublesome behaviors, like passive aggression, procrastination, and other more damaging actions that can wreak havoc in our lives and the lives of others. And, for many, trying to disidentify simply doesn’t work.

Attempting to disidentify, even if it works momentarily, will not necessarily result in transformation of our soul because disidentifying is not an action. It is not something we can do or try to do. Disidentification happens. It occurs when we no longer believe the truth of what it is we are letting go of. The one who tries to let go of something is the very one generating the experience.

What’s needed then is an immersion experience—allowing whatever that experience is and becoming involved in it as completely as possible, in order to understand it. Notice in your experience of understanding yourself, part of the process is this immersion, is an involvement with the experience, whether it is a belief, an emotion, a contraction in the body, a sense of frustration, a sense of attachment to something—whatever is there is experienced completely, without trying to get rid of it. When there is a complete involvement with what is there in you, then after a while an understanding arises. Without involvement, the understanding will not arise.

We see that it is a lie that we occasionally experience Being—we see instead that we are Being. We begin to feel like a real and genuine human being rather than a shell trying to approximate a life. We are becoming veracity—something real. Instead of expressing conventional reality, the proverbial realm of appearances and lies, our actions become genuine expressions of who we truly are. We increasingly live a life of truth, and the world around us no longer seems like an empty husk but takes on its full dimensionality and profundity.

Our energy, then, goes into supporting our idealized self rather than our real self. As Naranjo puts it, “We may envision pride as a passion for self-inflation; or, in other words, a passion for the aggrandizement of the self-image.” 2 As he continues,   In all three character ennea-types at this corner—II, III and IV—we may say that there operates a mistaken sense of “being” in what others see and value, so that it is the self-image rather than the true self upon which the psyche gravitates, out of which action flows, and on which is supported a person’s sense of value.

Self-inflation is not always obvious in some Twos, whose image involves being self-effacing and, as Naranjo used to say, falsely humble. However, pride is taken in these very qualities for this type of Two. In other Twos, haughtiness, inflated self-esteem, and the sense of being superior—special—are obvious in their demeanor. Whether it shows or not—whether the pride is more internalized or more externalized—every Two, to quote Naranjo, “flatters those who through nearness gratify his pride, disdains most of the rest in haughty superiority.”4 With the idealized image of being a lovable human being, a Two’s investment in how he is received by

Often, the difference between our reality and how we would like it to be is intolerable, and so we escape into prideful grandiosity about ourselves. This is because we have ceased to value who we really are, and instead turned our attention to a mental construct of how we would like ourselves to be. This is an extremely important thing to understand about our pride: it rests upon qualities and characteristics that may have some basis in reality, although not always, but nonetheless exist as part of a picture in our mind—that of our idealized self-image.

Realistic satisfaction in ourselves is also not the same thing as using such tangible accomplishments to inflate ourselves and feel superior to others. Linguistically, we do not differentiate between these two usages of the word pride. Dreamed-up superiority and realistic personal satisfaction in something achieved or in qualities possessed are both definitions of pride found in the dictionary, but obviously, one exists mostly or even exclusively in the imagination and the other in reality. It is the difference between inordinate self-esteem and a pragmatic and felt sense of one’s true worth.

The idealized image is a product of his imagination. But this is not something which is created overnight. Incessant work of intellect and imagination, most of it unconscious, goes into maintaining the private fictitious world through rationalizations, justifications, externalizations, reconciling irreconcilables—in short, through finding ways to make things appear different from what they are. The more a person is alienated from himself, the more his mind becomes supreme reality.

Pride, then, is the personality’s investment in itself. It is the value it gives to itself in order to buttress itself. It is the fuel that gives energy to our mental constructs. Without it, our investment in the images we carry of ourselves collapses.

His self-idealization is an attempt to remedy the damage done {by early unfavorable constellations} by lifting himself in his mind above the crude reality of himself and others. And, as in the stories of the devil’s pact, he gets all the glory in imagination and sometimes in reality. But instead of solid self-confidence he gets a glittering gift of most questionable value: neurotic pride.

It can be hurt as easily from within as from without. The two typical reactions to hurt pride are shame and humiliation. We will feel ashamed if we do, think, or feel something that violates our pride. And we will feel humiliated if others do something that hurts our pride, or fail to do what our pride requires of them. In any reaction of shame or humiliation that seems out of place or out of proportion we must answer these two questions: What in the particular situation has aroused this response? And what special underlying pride has been hurt by it? They are closely interrelated, and neither can be given a quick answer.

Our core experience is one of emptiness—this is inevitable when we are identified with our personality—and this emptiness is not the rich and profound emptiness the Buddhists refer to as shunyata. Rather, it is a painful sense of being flimsy and meager, which most of us experience indirectly as a gnawing sense of insignificance, inconsequentiality, and negligibility. This is often excruciating to experience directly, and so to make life bearable, our pride steps in saying in effect, “No, you are not nothing! You really are someone, and someone very special indeed.” In this way, our pride supports the supposed reality of our personality structure and infuses it with importance and value. Or, at the other end of the same polarity, our pride may say, “Yes, you really are deficient—let me count the ways,” supporting our identification with our shell. To really take ourselves in as we are threatens the whole structure.

This is what the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche described as spiritual materialism:   The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality. Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit. The teachings are treated as an external thing, external to “me,” a philosophy which we try to imitate. We do not actually want to identify with or become the teachings. So if our teacher speaks of renunciation of ego, we attempt to mimic renunciation of ego. We go through the motions, make appropriate gestures, but we really do not want to sacrifice any part of our way of life. We become skillful actors, and while playing deaf and dumb to the real meaning of the teachings, we find some comfort in pretending to follow the path.

As Trungpa continues,   Our vast collections of knowledge and experience are just part of ego’s display, part of the grandiose quality of ego. We display them to the world and, in so doing, reassure ourselves that we exist, safe and secure, as “spiritual” people.

have had many of these experiences, yet learned very little. Even great openings of heart, kundalini processes, and visions can turn into spiritual pride or become old memories. As with a near-death experience or a car accident, some people will change a great deal and others will return to old constricted habits shortly thereafter. Spiritual experiences in themselves do not count for much.

Our peak experiences can simply inflate our personality, puffing it up to cosmic proportions. This keeps us stuck in our familiar sense of self, but with new spiritual trappings that blind us to what is really going on.

When we do this, we are defending against the truth of our situation—that we are firmly entrenched in our identification with our personality—and we are infusing it with a sense of value and importance that is out of synch with the fact that it has no ultimate reality. It exists only in our minds.

When the personality seizes upon such states and uses them to puff itself up, this is the beginning of trouble and sometimes danger for someone professing to be a teacher. Their grandiosity causes them to lose sight of where their contact with True Nature begins and where the personality ends. The two get mixed together—contact with one’s depths becomes abrogated by the personality—leading to messianic pretensions in some cases and to claims of infallibility in others. When a teacher closes the door to scrutiny, either internal or external, when he stops looking objectively at his process or when he becomes defensive and turns the tables on a student by making her questioning of his motives or behavior her own issue, it’s a good sign that pride is operating. When a teacher acts out his animal soul either sexually or in the accumulation of riches, and justifies such behavior as appropriate to his stature or as beneficial to his students, it is another indication that grandiosity is obscuring that teacher’s vision.

We are, in this sense, becoming more objective. We become more objective about the nature of reality, and that includes ourselves. This objectivity or realism is the virtue of this point, humility. Like all of the virtues, it is one of the major hallmarks of true spiritual development.

The ultimate humility is knowing and experiencing ourselves as the mouthpiece of God, the instrument of Being and Its expression. When we really get that everything that we are and everything that we do is the beingness and the action of True Nature, our humility is complete.

“the true human position on the cosmic scale.”

Owning our aggressive drives—our animosity, cruelty, hatred, and selfishness—leads us in a paradoxical way to two changes in perception. One is a shift in how we experience the world around us, and the other is in how we experience ourselves and our nature. The first has to do with confronting our deep-seated conviction that the world is an unsupportive and potentially dangerous place. To the extent that our aggression is projected, we are blind to the benevolence and loving presence that is the fabric of all that exists, including ourselves. Our projection forms a kind of blanket that darkens what we perceive, both around us but also within ourselves, blocking out the luminosity that is present and more fundamental to the nature of everything.

For better or worse, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain continues well into physical adulthood for most of us. It is behind many of the more blatant difficulties people struggle with in their lives—overeating and overindulgence in sweets and chocolate, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual addictiveness, addiction to shopping and so getting into credit card debt, gambling, and so on. Our sense of reality goes out the window in our drivenness toward consumption in our pursuit of pleasure.

New and improved types of entertainment and amusement keep appearing—better, bigger, and flatter televisions accessing more and more stations, a continual stream of new movies, personal music systems to carry around with us, personal computers with all sorts of engrossing programs, DVDs, and so on. The acquiring of endless amounts of information via the Internet and entertaining ourselves with computer games and message boards offers us limitless opportunities for escape.

The acquiring of endless amounts of information via the Internet and entertaining ourselves with computer games and message boards offers us limitless opportunities for escape.

avoiding seeing difficulties in our financial situation, our relationships, or in our work life, and instead of facing reality, losing ourselves in an unrealistically rosy picture of what is going on. Closely connected is the universal tendency to check out of the present through daydreaming and fantasizing. One of the most accepted ways that many of us attempt to evade our emotional pain is through intellectualizing—moving into our heads and living from the neck up. Whenever we escape into our own mental world, you can bet that we are trying to move away from some discomfort.

A characteristic of being an adult is facing things as they really are and doing what objectively needs to be done in our lives, regardless of the degree of comfort or discomfort we experience.

Gluttony, rather, is a desire to taste, to sample many and varied things, as opposed to deeply experiencing them. It is, in this sense, a shopping mentality. It is a drive toward pleasant stimulation, whether it is of the senses, of the emotions, or of the mind. Naranjo quotes Ichazo describing gluttony as “wanting more,” reflecting the insatiability implicit in this passion. So there is a taking in, but not a filling up. Consuming rather than digesting is the focus, and inevitably this leads to dissatisfaction and a sense of insufficiency, masked by pursuit of more stimulation.

Our gluttony is not confined to what on the surface appears pleasurable, and this can make spotting it tricky. St. John of the Cross, for instance, speaks of those addicted to the sweetness and pleasure of spiritual practices, overindulging in asceticism: Therefore, besides the imperfections into which the seeking for sweetness of this kind makes them fall, the gluttony which they now have makes them continually go to extremes, so that they pass beyond the limits of moderation within which the virtues are acquired and wherein they have their being. For some of these persons, attracted by the pleasure which they find therein, kill themselves with penances, and others weaken themselves with fast, by performing more than their frailty can bear, without the order or advice of any, but rather endeavouring to avoid those whom they should obey in such matters…4

For many of us, the intensity of feeling itself is as intoxicating as any drug, and so we unconsciously whip up difficult situations and crises in our lives to get our fix. It is important to see that when we engage in this kind of emotional gluttony, which is called hysteria in psychological nomenclature, we are not fully experiencing the emotions themselves.

Sevens, with their affable, enthusiastic, upbeat energy don’t seem to suffer the way the other types do. They tend to focus on the bright side of things, perpetually optimistic and filled with plans for the future. They are inclined to be interested in all sorts of things, especially interesting ideas—broad global ones that synthesize knowledge from many different sources and disciplines are especially enticing.

Only when we begin to see how much energy they are investing in being “up,” and how driven they are toward the positive, do we begin to suspect that they are afraid of and indeed running from pain. And in many Sevens, we see the result: we can sense an underlying depression, a kind of dry unhappiness, an unemotional dissatisfaction.

Like the mappers and planners that they are, they experience it in a reified way, losing the actual territory in their concepts and depictions of it.

Attempting to understand their suffering seemed like the safest and best way of dealing with it. The movement away from their pain, however, ends up creating its own kind of anguish. It is the anguish of not being able to fully immerse themselves in their inner life, and instead participating from a secure distance.

They have seen reality and so all else has lost its allure. The moral of the story is that seeking truth, rather than fear of pain or the desire for happiness, is the correct orientation toward inner work, since seeking happiness makes you its prisoner just as surely as does pain.

Some people get involved with a teacher who is able to transmit a high state of Being to them. Transmission is one of the time-honored methods of spiritual development. The hidden or perhaps not-so-hidden trap in such an approach in which the student is dependent upon the teacher for states is, first of all, this very dependency, and second, the lack of digestion of the student’s own psychological obstacles to Being. “Catching” a state of consciousness in this way can be—though of course is not always—a way of bypassing the difficult inner work of confronting our resistances and psychological barriers. Unless we confront them, however, spiritual experiences can only be intermittent, like clouds that appear in the sky or don’t, depending on the weather, rather than being readily accessible to us.

Living in isolation or in silence, out of reach of what might trigger our personality is one way of doing this. In many traditions, celibacy is another way of lessening the influences that might arouse our psychological material. There’s nothing like intimate relationship and sexuality to bring up whatever is unresolved in our personality, so eliminating this stimulus is the traditional way of dealing with this problematic life arena.

Happily, things are changing, and learning how to effectively work with our psychology in such a way that it becomes more transparent to our depths is now possible. But it is not easy work. It requires confronting rather than overcoming our suffering.

The urge to leave, to move away from the pain and from the confrontation with their limitations is sometimes an irresistible one for Sevens, and they often are lured away by another teaching or teacher, who promises to be more of the “real thing,” looking as though they will get them to enlightenment faster and more painlessly. Obviously, you don’t have to be a Seven to be a spiritual shopper, and again, I want to underline the fact that not all Sevens are. Many people move from one spiritual scene to another, attracted by one guru and then another, and spend the whole of their spiritual life trying out rather than really taking in and working with a teaching or a teacher.

… when they have once failed to find pleasure in this or some other exercise, they have great disinclination and repugnance to return to it, and at times they abandon it. They are, in fact, as we have said, like children, who are not influenced by reason, and who act, not from rational motives but from inclination. Such persons expend all their effort in seeking spiritual pleasure and consolation; they never tire, therefore, of reading books; and they begin, now one meditation, now another, in their pursuit of this pleasure which they desire to experience in the things of God. But God, very justly, wisely and lovingly, denies it to them, for otherwise this spiritual gluttony and inordinate appetite would breed innumerable evils.

As we have discussed, as infants and young children we can’t tolerate any postponement in gratification of our needs for comfort and in getting away from what feels bad to us. This is partially because our mental structure has not developed to the point at which we have a concept of time. Without that, everything is immediate, and our needs feel that way to us, as well. For instance, when we are very young, we have no concept that eating a balanced meal is important for the development of our bodies and nervous system. We would just as soon replace ice cream or candy for dinner. In time we develop the understanding that if we eat a good meal, dessert will follow, and we can delay our wish for something sweet. Likewise, when we have a scrape as a young child, tolerating the pain of the treatment for it can be unbearable.

Our natural tendency to move toward what is pleasurable and to move away from what is not is clearly one of the driving forces of our behavior, but it alone cannot fully explain our behavior. This is obvious when we consider that many of us persist in behaviors that cause us suffering rather than pleasure. As Greenberg and Mitchell put it,   People are notoriously inept at finding pleasure; they repeatedly engineer situations which make them unhappy. Only a fundamental need for human contact at any cost accounts for the perpetuation of unpleasure in the lives of so many people.

is that they do bring us a certain kind of pleasure—that of familiarity. It is this inertia about maintaining the known, regardless of how unhappy it makes us, that is at the core of much of the perpetuation of our tendencies. In fact, only when we recognize the comfort that sustaining the familiar brings to us do we begin to unlock its hold upon us.

this. As we have discussed earlier, if our orientation is toward pleasure, we will orient toward enjoyable experiences rather than toward the truth of our experience. When we do this, we are perpetuating the gluttony of the personality, rather than aligning ourselves with the attitude of the soul informed by Being. We are relating to spiritual experience as though it were something yummy to consume, and in so doing, preserve our sense of self as empty and in need of being filled.

For our inner work to be truly transforming, we need to value truth above pleasure, as Shah’s story tells us. Instead of going for the high and maintaining the attitude of being a seeker after those lofty states, we must directly engage the content of our soul, regardless of how it feels to us. When we attempt to fill ourselves, even when the content is spiritual, we are tacitly assuming that we are an inner black hole, a mouth needing to be fed, an emptiness; and when we are identified with our personality, we feel as if we were just that. But to find out who and what we really are, what our nature truly is, we must face into and engage that sense of emptiness rather than trying to fill it. When we do this, we are radically shifting our inner orientation, and this shift is all-important for the outcome of our endeavor. Rather than relating to ourselves as an emptiness needing to be filled, we begin to relate to ourselves as the journey itself. Rather than being focused on what will fill us or on what stimulates us to react, behave, or feel one way or another, then, our process itself becomes forefront. This is a dramatic shift of focus from the object of our experience to the subject, and without it, who we take ourselves to be does not change.

We must have beginner’s mind, free from possessing anything, a mind that knows everything is in flowing change. Nothing exists except momentarily in its present form and color. One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped. Before the rain stops we hear a bird. Even under the heavy snow we see snowdrops and some new growth. —SHUNRYU SUZUKI1

And you must be ruthless to do this. Unearthing the passions within your own soul requires brutal honesty with yourself. It demands being willing to see yourself exactly as you are, which is often not easy to do. This is because the passions themselves stand in our way, convincing us we don’t need to look in the first place and obscuring what we see when we do look.