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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.
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
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.5
AI Summary
The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues by Sandra Maitri presents key insights from the Diamond Approach tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.