The Enneagram Symbol

G.I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian philosopher and teacher who brought knowledge of the Enneagram Symbol and its “laws” into the modern world in the early 1900s, claimed that anything could be known and understood through the Symbol, making libraries irrelevant.

Anything? I was riveted.

The problem is that finding clear and conclusive detail about the information depicted in the Enneagram Symbol is a challenge. People disagree on its interpretation. It’s a symbol, after all. And Gurdjieff was a bit of trickster, intentionally shrouding essential truths behind a veil of complexity so we would have to work at understanding with our whole being. But he also said the laws are “eternal” and “universal.” If this is true, I thought, we should find evidence of these laws everywhere. So that’s where I went looking.

Rather than sticking to the history of the Enneagram or draining the work of Gurdjieff’s students, I went wide. I tracked the processes conveyed in the Symbol through three lenses: science—including general systems theory, neuroscience, psychology, and a smattering of physics; stories—our world’s narrative tradition, in particular creation stories and the hero’s journey myth; and spiritual wisdom—various religious and spiritual traditions with which I have some familiarity. And throughout this endeavor I lived my way around the Symbol, using my own inner work to explore how the laws can help us in our relationship with ourselves, each other, and life in these chaotic times.

We might ask: why turn inwards and look at ourselves at all, much less take the time to reflect on ancient symbols and “universal laws,” when there is so much to be righted in the world?

The Symbol is a map of the transition between unity and multiplicity. It shows how diverse, even polarized, parts of any system can re-member themselves as a unified whole. As such, the Enneagram has a lot to teach us about union and communion—an essential ethic and agenda for our times.

Many of humanity’s great teachers, both spiritual and secular, find the roots of our modern problems in how we know ourselves as separate from each other, the natural world, and our common Source and ground of being. We are in need of a shared moral consciousness and pathway towards holding diversity in unity, in ourselves and within society as a whole.

The Enneagram provides both, in a framework that accommodates diverse belief systems. Because it maps a universal process, knowledge of the Symbol provides a doorway into our common human experience, no matter our Enneagram type, gender, race, religion, culture, status, age, or political leaning. It reveals a “way” to evolve ourselves, in accordance with universal law, into heroes who can help resolve polarity and restore unity in ourselves and in the world.

I am a psychologist by training, a coach and consultant by profession, and a hermetic philosopher at heart. You can read a more formal bio here. The backstory about me relevant to this book is that since I was young, I have been pre-occupied with universal patterns (or “Truth”), questions about the nature of reality, suffering, the meaning of life, and my own purpose. Pursuing such intangible things led me down diverse paths of inquiry, none of which (I thought) were related to the Enneagram. Until...25 years into my relationship with the Enneagram, I was introduced to the laws of the Symbol and realized its relationship to many of the existential questions I had been chasing for years.

At about that same juncture, I had a bit of a falling out with the Enneagram of Personality. By that time, I had trained with multiple schools, was a certified International Enneagram Association professional, and had been teaching, coaching, and using the system in leadership development work for many years. Despite all that (and a lot of inner work), I had never been able to confidently locate myself in one personality type. I had “officially” moved from 9 to 6 to SP3 over the years, and strangely enough, I could see my life unfold through the pattern of the hexad figure (1-4-2-8-5-7).

While this was discouraging and embarrassing, it also motivated me to explore and compare teachings from different Enneagram schools. In that process, I found varying descriptions of types and subtypes, disagreement about the existence (or not) of countertypes, conflicting theories about instincts, the relevance of wings (or not), and the way to work with the arrows. Even whether or not we have only one type is debated.

This incongruity further fed my desire to look under the hood and make sense of the Symbol myself. I thought if we could understand the architecture lurking beneath the typing system, we might find an impartial authority to resolve some of the differences within the global Enneagram community. I had to believe there was some kind of matrix of meaning behind the manifest teachings that could clarify not only my own issues with typing, but also how the system works to give rise to the core teachings about personality. It turns out there is! And we can uncover it by peering deeply into the Enneagram Symbol itself.

The Hidden Enneagram: Exploring the Mysteries of the Symbol (video)