Uploaded to YouTube in 2019
Part 1/4
Thank you everybody. We’re even starting early, this is rare. They know that I’m a compulsvie 1, and we’re always on time, if not early. We’re called over-punctual in the German-speaking world. Well I haven’t taught this … fully … for over 12 years. … I’m eager to teach it. The amazing thing to me is that, as many years as I’ve known it now … already in the early 70’s, ended up being one of the first people to learn it, for some reason. Here, 30 years later, my appreciation for it would actually be stronger. I’m more convinced there’s some amazing truth at work here. Of course psychologists and therapists and scientists have all been putting out books, … how can this be true? How can it be so true? Because scientifically we can’t prove it. It really is a classic example of a wisdom tradition, an oral tradition, that seems to have been lost for many years.
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In the book, The Christian Perspective I’m tyring to trace … the history …. I’m convinced it has originally Christian foundations … a man called Raymond Lull, who was a master envangelist. Made 8 trips to the world we’d now think of as the muslim world. He was trying to find a lingua franca … could talk to teh Muslim world and the Christian world, and not offend either one of them. … got lost in his … in Latin, and really, wans’t known. And then got rediscovered. Those good Jesuits brought it back to the West in the early 70s; and I happened to have a Jesuit spiritual director … who tuaght it to me. We were told we had to keep it an absolute secret …t hey didn’t wan tit to be trivialized. It was only to be taught from spiritaul director to spiritual director. … Once it became, as it has become, a parlor game … its power would be lost. .. Now they speak of the enneagram industry. … Helen Palmer came out with her book in the l… mid 80s … I said okay, the secret’s out. The next time I taught it, in the mid 80’s, I put it on tape, and that’s the set that made me known in these circles. … I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m bragging or something; I keep being invited to give … the address at these Enneagram conventions. I’ve only accepted it twice; I said to one of them, why do you keep inviting me? I’ve said whatever I have to say. I do think I sort of know it, intuitively at this point. It amazed me, because it has moved into the. business world, into the education world … My book tends to be better-selling in other languages than in English.. .. The answer’s always the same: Even these people who have taken it to rather wonderful but secular levels, are recognizing that it has lost much of its power. “Bring us back to the spiritual foundation.” That’s the tack I’m going to be giving you today … It was a spirtiual tradition, totally, entirely. The years of refinement seem to have been done, in teh world taht we would now call Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran … where the Sufi schools … took the original capital sins of the desert fathers, and refined them, and made them subtle, and helped to understand the difference between them. Then Raymond Lull (my theory goes) brought it back … to the Christian West, but then it got lost in his Latin texts, and no one bothered with it. But anyway, w’eve got it again. And it’s, I hope, will be a gift for you. You see the title that I gave it this time; is I believe a return to its original understanding: The Enneagram as a Discerment of Spirits. … Word may not be … to you. Discernment … absolutely essential for this mystery called “church.” The discrimination of spirits, if you wil. The recognition of the subtlety of the natureo f evil. He seemed ot think, as many spiritual directors have recognized over the centuries. If you don’t recognize the subtle nature of evil, you will be overcome by it. … The Lord of the Rings phenomenon. … The original books are a study in the nature of evil; the subtlety of evil. For all the grandiosity of the three movies, I don’t think they approach the book … all the American mind is ready for is spectacle; we love spectacle! The very meaning of drama … had to have character development and plot development … the thing that would destroy that subtlety would be spectacle. … Already, 2500 years ago, you get caught up in the spectacular … battle drama that takes 70 minutes in the movie … Absolute good, and absolute evil .. entirely anathema to what Tolkien was saying. My point here is, we no longer understand the discerment of spirits. We like spectacle. That’s what we’re speaking into when we talk about the Enneagram; why most people trivializae the Enneagram, too. We’re not ready for subtlet. … Evil has to disguise itself! The very word Lucifer, it means the light-bearer. The one who carries light; evil never looks like evil! That’s why presidents can sell wars, okay? Most people are into the spectacular, and have no ability to discern anything with any degree of subtlety. The quote … at the beginning of my book … from Corinthians: “The angels of darkness must disguise theemsevles as angels of light.” That is the byline of understanding of the Enneagram. Evil will always look like good; that’s the only reason any of us will do evil. Because it’s moral, upstanding, patriotic … We’ll create some rationale, to justify our doing of evil. ____ the wonderful German-speaking poet said, “Unless you tame your demons, you will never know your angels.” I do encourage you to be taking notes; I’m goingto be saying a lot today; most will be lost by the end of the day … unless you’re taking notes. Now, we’re not into … killing demons. The genius of it, and this is where it’s uniquely Christian: we’re going to make the devil work for God. That’s the genius of it. This model of the total overcoming of evil is what we have in spectacles. Total good guy, total bad guy. Learning that this energy that can be used for evil, which in the Lord of the Rings is precisely the ring; a ring isn’t a bad thing! But if you’ve read the LOTR, the ring is the symbol of power, from beginning to end. .. It’s a temptation to everybody in the movie. You’ll see people with initial gifts … the temptation to misuse their gift for evil purpose. Even the hobbits, who come off crystal-clean, are all touched by evill … You cannot not be touched by it. You cannot not struggle with the temptations of pwoer. Everybody does. … Even in the movie; you return to the Shire at the end … in the book, Frodo returns and says, “This is now as bad as the world of mortals.” The greatest temptation in the movie is to try to create an absoultely perfect world. That’s the ilusion of Genesis already. To refuse to live with the tepted … original sin. ..That’s what created communism! An ideological pwoer way … communism all started with peace and justice people. People who were very liberal, as it were. Thought they could attain peace and justice by power. It’s always pointing out and revelaing that subtlety. … As soon as you try to bring about even good things by enforcement, domination, or power—they become a bad thing. Most people can’t see that! We can now kill people to make the world safe against terrorists. …. All discrimination, all discernment tstops. At a conference, a moral theologian said this war doesn’t meet a single criterion of a just war. … But most of our .. Christian people bought it lock, stock, and barrel—because they have no discermnent of spirit. They have no ability to recognize the real nature of evil, and the real nature of good. ….. … If we don’t teach this kind of discrimination … the world will continue to sell itself out to evil. Paul says in Galatians, “he stripped the principalities and powers of their phony authoirty, and marched them naked through the streets in his triumph.” Stripping them and marching them through the streets is what we’re about; not killing them … … make evil show itself! Make the policeman of Birmingham employ their water cannons on us. … This is the ultimate overcoming of evil. This is why the Enneagram has been called a negative system. … In some ways, it isn’t entertaining. I’m going to make fun of every one of you in this room. .. If you don’t suffer that humiliation, if you don’t react, “That’s me!” If you don’t feel that, by the time you leave here, you didn’t get it. If you leave here feeling good about yourself, you didnt’ get it. You have to feel bad about yourself, first. Yes, the truth will set you free, but first, it will make you miserable. (17:00)
So today, we’re into making you miserable. That’s my work. … distinguishing between spirits, translate it the way you want. .. is one of the named and original _____ of the Holy Spirit. Few people have been trained in it. We constantly confuse good with evil. This has to do—and I’ll try to train you today—with learning to recognize energies much more than superficial external traits. Now the only way I’m gonna be able to teach this is by giving examples of external traits. A lot of you are going to start right there. “She’s an artist—therefore, she’s a 4.” That’s not deep enough. … …. … So don’t look for traits; we want to look for motivations. What’s their real form of perception? You’re gonna find that you all take your reality in through a chosen set of blinders; and we’re gonna try to explain why there’s nine. … There’ll be those of you walking out the door saying, “I’m a perfect 10.” … We’re gonna teeach through the traits, but don’t get lost in the external traits. They’re just partial giveaways. When you get good at it, you read energies. Helen Palmer was a psychic intuitive; she’s convinced you can train people to be psychic. That’s what this was about, initially. It was training people to read the soul! How to read the soul, and how to pick up, after a while, you could pick it up by their body movements, by their gestures, by their face. The more compulsive a person is, the more easy they are to read. … … Here I’ve known this dang thing for 30 years, and I’m still a 1! I hope that gives you a bit of compassion with yourself, and consolation. I don’t know why it’s true, but you’re one number, and you’re gonna be that till the day you die. I think it’s the shape and the name of what the Christian tradition called Original Sin. There’s a primary slaw, and there seemed to be nine basic shapes to this flaw. We’re addicted to it, is the trouble! That’s why you won’t let go of it. All you can do is move it to a level of consciousness, that on my first tapes, I called the Level of Redemption. … Until you can laugh at it, you’re not gonna be free from it. If you try to attack it, you know what you’ll do: You’ll attack it with the same energy that you are, which will only double the energy. In other words, I try to make myself not a 1, by being a 1! That’s the only way I know how to do anything! … That’s driving out the devil with the prince of devils. So we’re gonna overcome Iraq with Iraq’s methods; which makes us Iraq in energy … Without (this level of discernment), you can have 3 PhD’s, and you won’t see it. That’s why conversion and repentance was tied up not with education, but transformation. Education is not the same as transformation (or conversion). In the spiritual life, education is not necessarily an advantage. In fact, good Franciscan tradition would say it’s very often a disadvantage. Because it gives you, very often, more trust in your head, that you can figure this out. So, transformation, repentance, conversion, is on a very different track than mere education. … Now, I think we could say the Enneagram is .. a psychological explanation of what we would call Original Sin. But I’d want to counter that right away by saying this is not primarily psychological. We in the West tend to like the psychological categories, and we think that we’re almost the final explanation. No offense to the therapists in the room, but .. All problems are interpreted psychologically, but the real solution is almost always spiritual. .. Because the individual psyche is precisely that—it’s too individualistic! It’s text outside of context. It’s individual outside of participation. Good as far as it goes. But a therapist without contact with cosmos, outside of spirituality—doesn’t have much, finally, to say. The Enneagram seems to have been a recognition in Christianity, and in Sufi Islam—although it took form in the Jewish Kabala, too. All three monotheistic religions seem to have recognized its wisdom … There is a primary blindness in each of us. Today’s words, we’d probably call it a primary addiciton. What we’re addicted to, sorry to say, is primariliy yourself. It’s called egocentricity. Until that egocentricity is broken, I have no reason to believe you will not read all of life through personal self-interest. And that’s why I can’t even fashion this in terms of self-growth. I would say most of the teachers are teaching it (that way) today. Appeals to your self-interest. “How can I grow? How can I become more whole?” Don’t read me on that level. That might happen, as a corollary. But do understand it as a corollary; it’s a sort of side advantage. Now, we, spoke in the Christian tradition of seven capital sins. Raymond Loll had eight already. It’s interesting that in all three historic paradigms, the one that’s missing in every case, is Fear. You know why? Because fear is so omnipresent in all of our lives; it’s so constant and universal; it’s the almost exact opposite of faith; we’re all living inside of our fears to some degree. None of the ancients seemed able to recognize fear as the capital sin it is … Ironically it’s the biggest number of all. Some teachers say 50 percent of the human race are 6’s. We couldn’t see it, because it was everywhere. There are just some people who make an art form out of it. They really just see everything through their fears. It’s no worse trap than any other one. Trouble is, it gets a lot of confirmation. IT’s called patriotism, militarism, church, dogma. Religion and military is sort of what makes the world go around. Why? Because sick religion and sick militarism both appeal to the fear type. People who cannot trust themselves, and need to belong to a system that is never wrong. I will sell my soul to the church; I will sell my soul to the American government. So I don’t have to take responsibility for my life. Now these energies, these natural flows within us are hidden, they’re deep. They were called passions by the medieval masters. One had to discern his or her true passion, or juice, or energy source. They were pretty much associated with sin. But it was called his blindness. His compulsiveness would probably be the psychological word we use today. See, too much of a good thing, is a bad thing. When you’re young, you over-identify what you’re naturally good at. You play your gift for all it’s worth. You have to do it! It’s the only way to grow up. You play what works for you; why wouldn’t you. You find a style that impresses people; gets you the friendship you want, or the power or control you want. By the time you’re in your 20s, you’re expert at it. You’re gliding on your gift. It got you your wife, your school. There’s no reason to stop doing it. Without being thrown off your horse, you won’t. Somewhere in dark journey, I enter into the dark wood, or find myself in the dark wood—that has to happen spiritually. In modern times, it happens somewhere in the 30s. If you’re too rich, good-looking, or famous—you push it off to the 40s, 50s, or 60s. Or maybe forever. If you’ve suffered some kind of failure in your life, some humiliation, some sin … Meister Eckhart got a quote: “One should not repent too much; the value of sin is very great.” Wow! No wonder we condemned him; called him a heretic. But listen to Jesus: “Why do you call me good; God alone is good!” Stop this good stuff; you’re not that good. None of you! The best thing you do is for very selfish motives. You do it to look good, to succeed, to get power, to get people to like you. And I do too, and it’s just terrible. When you stop hating yourself even for that; say i’ve met the enemy, and the enemy is me. .. For some reason it’s called the Gospel, and God likes it. Or Paul’s wonderful line in Romans: “Where sin abounds, grace abounds even more.” Wow! Good line, huh? That’s the breakthrough point for grace—of course it is, huh? Julian of Norich: “First the fall, then the recovery from the fall. And both are the mercy of God.” None of us were told that the first fall was also the mercy of god. ‘Cause it’s the hole in the soul, as the alcoholics say. It’s got to happen … sin and salvation are correlative terms. I started there, working with teenagers in Cincinnati in 1970 … You know, preaching the full gospel to 16-year-olds. They love it! They don’t do much with it, ‘cause they haven’t sinned yet. You understand? … They don’t hate … They haven’t fallen into the hole yet … Haven’t gone into that endless capacity … for self-rejection. And only then, does the consoling word of good news and unconditional love begin to have redemptive effect … goal here is not character-building—sorry! It’s not personality development … I know that, after the last 40 years … what we’ve all grown used to. … they all think it’s personality development and character enrichment … self-knowledge. It’s gonna give you some self-knowledge … but it’s almost gonna happen on the side; almost by accident. And you’re gonna know then, it’s a grace. IT was given! IT won’t come from your effort; … from you figuring it out or working it out … my goal … to move you toward a contemplative awareness; a transformation of consciousness much more than a development of consciousness. (repeats that) Not at all development of ego, but in fact humiliation of ego. Just the opposite … the way the American mind thinks. A new mind, instead of a newly-informed mind … I”m sure you want to leave here today with all kinds of new information … it won’t be the information itself that will convert you … unless it subverts you! So all I can do today is inform the calculative mind, as I call it, … your normal … mind you all operate out of. I’m going to inform that mind … so it will stop trusting itself so much … You let go of the calculative mind; that’s my term in the book Everything Belongs. Until you subvert the calculating mind, normally you cannot fall into the new consciousness … Too much concern … for personal self-knowledge, … will actually keep you inside of the calculating mind. So we just need a strong enough sense of ourselves … this is the task of the first half of life … You need a strong enough sense …. to confront total reality. It seems that we use our, what Ernest Becker calls, our character armor. Some of you are gonna ask, where does this character armor come from? … Is it nature? Is it nurture? … I don’t know, I really don’t know. I know you get it real early. The answer I’ve been given over in Europe, to resolve the dualistic split … one-third nature, one-third nurture, one-third free choice. … I can remember, as a little boy, already wanting to be a good boy! Wanting to be a little goody-two-shoes … Now, no doubt, I was preconditioned for that, by my mother especially. And no doubt, my Catholic experience told me, you should be a good boy. I had all these wonderful justifications … but in fact, I chose it, I think, at some level of subliminal consicousness …
What the Enneagram wants to say … You are destroyed by your gift. (Repeats) No one ever thought of that! Right? The very thing that you think is your strong point is the thing you will over-identify with. It becomes your set of blinders; you overplay your cards. Normally, by the middle of the 30’s, it should start showing itself to you. A lot of people … started teaching this to HS kids; it went right over their heads. .. They haven’t sinned enough yet. Many lines in Jesus shows he understood this basic pattern of discernment and disguise. He said “the stone that the builder rejects is in fact the cornerstone.” … There have been a few things that you decided to eliminate. I don’t ever want to look like I’m bad; like I’m selfish. That wouldn’t fit my public image … especially being a priest, it’s even worse. Every one of you has a certain thing you reject. … We call it the shadow self … it’s not really the evil self … The unacceptable self. If you’re a 3, you just cannot accept public humiliation and failure … And so you become an efficiency expert … organizing, mechanizing … greasing the wheels of life, so you always look like this knight on a white horse. And so God .. has to get you off that white charger, so you stop charging into life … That stone that you rejected; you’re weeping over failure, your acceptance of failure—that has to happen to you. And that will be the cornerstone of your strong, true, and integrated personality. That’s it, in one line. You can leave now, nothing more to teach you all day. The 2 wants to think of themselves as so loving; they must weep over the recognition that all of their loving, their attempts to serve … are from a self-centered purpose. Until they face that, they won’t find the cornerstone … that builds the integrated personality. You see what we’re up against? In an arrogant culture like ours, which never wants to face humiliation; our whole country is 3 energy … Poor 3’s have a hard time being converted … Because it’s called success! It’s the only name of the game. The American typology; the whole world sees it. … I was so glad, when the war started, I was out of the country. “There go those Americans again, with simplistic answers for complex things.” …. If you’re unwilling to carry that ego humiliation that comes in the middle of life, you will not move toward total reality. When I say “total reality” today equals god. We who are believers simply use the word “God.” … Those who don’t believe will use “total reality” or “force” or something else … We actually frustrate in ourselves and for ourselves, what we want the most. This is what’s damnable about human nature; we really are our own worst enemy … acting at cross-purposes to our own best intents and purposes. We need to know how … So that you can flow with your gift; and also integrate your sin, your shadow, your failure. That which you’re afraid of; the stone which you have rejected. The contradictions that we are must be overcome … by affirming them and countering them almost simultaneously. Affirming that broken sisde as the place of the wound. .. It’s through the wound that we are healed; through the wound that we come to god. .. The art-form of the Enneagram … teaches you how to do that. Amazed people think this is New Age or pagan—it’s anything but! IT’s Christian to the core in my understanding. … A level of Christianity that frankly a lot of Christians haven’t wanted to go. We’ve all created a survival strategy, a strategic self… . A personal manager, that we have to fire. This manager is in total control of you. He’s been in control so many years, you don’t want to fire him. … Terese of Avalon said, “The sinner is actually one who does not love himself enough.” S/he does not see, or admire this whole self that we are, and so we split; we try to love the good self and the reject self, and we get into this dualism that characterizes most Western people.” Instead of the suffering of reality; this bearing of the burden of the two sides of the mystery that we are; allowing, as Jesus puts it in Matthew 13: “the field of weeds and wheat to grow together until the harvest.” Let them grow together—don’t go and try to pull out the weeds. If you do, Jesus says, you’ll destroy the wheat along with it. Why didn’t we hear that? Because the calculating mind is always a dualistic mind; it can only read reality in terms of either-or. That’s why Peter Jackson did what he did with Tolkien’s book; that’s the best he could do .. is, spectacular battle scenes! We must notice … how we each block ourselves by a preferred style of perception. And that style of perception has become your way of getting your energy. And it works for you! But what I want to point out to you is … it’s white gas. Your car can go on it, but it’s finally gonna destroy the car. … What we’re gonna try to do today is take that white gas out, and at least show you how to get access with ethyl supreme, you know, the real good stuff. It seems that what we do, we actually subvert—and this has to be our original sin—we actually subvert our pleasure and our enjoyment. … If you’re not enjoying life, at a foundational level, you’re not doing it right. You’re involved in this approach avoidance; going with the energy, and attacking it, and hating yourself for it … always at the same time! Most people I know live with one foot on the accelerator and one foot on the brake. Do you see? The guilt, and the shame, and the fear. “I shouldn’t be this way, but I am … I’ll keep hating myself for it.” When you’re living life right, you’ll enjoy life. Even underneath (hardships), there’s a foundational happiness: I am who I am, and it’s okay. God is using all of me, to bring me to God. And I don’t spend any time now, splitting, or projecting, or avoiding, or denying. Because it is what it is, and I am what I am. Good and bad put together in one self … God’s love is so total, he uses even your sin in your favor! Even your so called dark side … to bring you to God. … A lot of approaches are based on getting rid of something that damn it, I can’t get rid of! … self-hatred now characteristic of the West. This constant deep … self-rejection. The sinner is actually one who does not love himself or herself enough. I hope on the other side we can increase this love of yourself …. like a self-created cartoon character; I’m going to make simplistic jabs at all of ‘em today. Maybe all 100% doesn’t apply to you; but I bet 10% does, probably 60%. Here’s what’s even worse: Your compulsive self is actually what people admire and applaud you for! It’s how you got your job! So why change it? Unless you really want the truth; unless you really want God. That’s why it’s very difficult to convert people in the first half of life! “Hey, I’ve gotta ride it for a while yet!” It’s why you sort of roll your eyes at your teenager some times. “God, he’s going down such a dead end; but he’s got to do it!” … By my age you just see right through what most young people are doing. “OK, I did it too; someone held onto me. Someone believed in me or loved me.” … Let’s start moving into the three big areas. …
That’s a big overview; I’ll keep coming back to it … As you know, the nine types; let’s draw our big circle up here you’ve seen many times. Look at that, pretty good!
If you wanna know why they’re nine, BTW, and this has been confirmed and reconfirmed on so many level … because the three Trinitarian parts of the human person are mind, and spirit, and heart. There’s different words used for that, but in some way or another, those seem to be the three parts of the person. Before you hone in on your deliberate number, I want you to see the traps of the three areas in particular; How you can be trapped in the head; you can be trapped in the heart; you can be trapped in the gut or the body. Now the pure entrapment—these poor people, they have a double compulsion. If you’re a Nine; if you’re a Three; or if you’re a Six. Those are the purse sins (laughs). In concentrated, distilled form. You see, even the wings, it doesn’t make sense yet—the numbers on each side of you; even your wings are in that compulsive space. These gut people (Nines), are all into their body selves, instinctive selves; we call it gut. The response to reality is an immediate, gut response. These heart people are all into their feelings, emotions, how other people think of them. And the poor 3 in the middle; that’s all they have, “How will other people think?” and the poor Six, is totally into their head, which they of course call common sense. The head becomes their absolute security system and control tower. … What I want to say at this early point—all three of these in their generalized form, substitute their gain for authentic contact with what is. The head people substitute thought and thought systems, and patterns of thought they’ve become used to, for authentic contact with reality; for educated feeling, deep honest, holistic intuition. They never connect with what is on an instinctual honest level. It’s always via their head trip. Everything goes first to the mind … and if it passes muster up there; they’ll actually meet you. No, not you, but the categories of you, or my fears of you. .. Now we all do this, by the way. But again, the head people just made an art form out of it. Which is why any contemplative teacher is trying to (make) you disassociate with this damn head. You cannot be present to what is through your head. (REpeats). But head people think they can, and that finally becomes a paraylsis to them. Heart people, you’d think these are gushy, little, feeling, warm people. No! I’m going to say something … shocking … These so-called feeling people, Two, Three & Four—they don’t have feelings at all! Why? They have everybody else’s! They don’t know what they freally feel! The Four is striving to authentic; the Three is doing an endless dance … and the Two is constantly running into your world, and invading your space to try to help you; … pretend they know what you are. Even the heart person doesn’t really contact what is, what’s right in front of them. They look like feeling people, but theyr’e one significant step remomved from authentic contact with reality. It’s always via other people’s feelings, which are themselves pseudo-feeling. We’re walking around with our phony feelings, and the Three is taking those on. … Then finally for the break, let me say the same about myself—us gut people. We’re a case! We absolutely abort our contact with reality, experienced through authentic feelings. … By making previous judgements, as to the meaning of the event. That previous judgement is held in our body! We have an immediate like or dislike for everything. Everything! Oh, I wish I weren’t that way! Whether it’s okay or it isn’t okay; reality comes at us gut people like a shock wave … everything is too much for us. Ahh! Ahh! Ahh! How do I react to that; we take it on like a full body blow. One’s — I’ll just control it all the time, “I’ll just relate to good people.” Eights … just keep punching it out, attacking it back, get out of my way. The Nines, just honest: “oh my god, it’s too much!” They just back off. It’s too much; this full body-blow every three minutes. And we’ve learned survival technique, to try to contain that much energy. So that’s very over-simplified, but I wanted to give you the big picture; before we now move into the parts.
A goodness grown to a pleuresy dies in its own too-much. That’s what we’re seeing, and Shakespeare knew it. He was a Four; they have an amazing ability to naturally discern spirits; Fours and Fives are the best at that. Some of us have found wisdom in Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now. He has a quote about our loving of our own unhappiness. He calls it in the pain-body; he says we live in our own pain-body and we choose it. Most of us would rather be our pain-body, than take a leap into the unknown, and risk losing the familiar but unhappy self. We’d prefer the familiar and the habitual. He says, “Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it, or fix it.” See it gives you a task; it gives you somebody to be angry at today. It gives you energy to do your work. Anger really works—it’s great energy. Now, the resistance will cease if you make it conscious. I wanted to quote that; that’s largely what we’re doing today. Exposing the demon … as Jesus always said at every exorcism: “show yourself.” Once it’s partially conscious, the game’s over. Once you see how silly this is, why do you keep beating yourself on the head and think that the effect is going to be different? … It’s going to be the same; it’s how you process reality. (1:01:29)
I’m gona take another time to keep talking general; then … when I get into the specific numbers, they’re going to make a lot more sense. I’d also like to co-relate what I’m gonna try to say today with what I’ve said elsewhere about the true self, false self. I wanna say that now, because in this teaching, I’d like to co-relate this … instead of what I did on my first set of tapes, 20 years ago, where I called them the Redeemed and the Compulsive. Those words are still okay. But the word Redeemed is too churchy for some people. I’m going to say the True Self is really the whole self; good and bad. That’s on a continuum with the False Self. This does not make the false self bad! This is the container which you use to start learning from; got it? You’re never going to kill the total False Self, nor should you! You’ve got to learn how to use it; you’re going to use the devil to get to god; but it isn’t really the devil. With each of these numbers, you’re somewhere on a continuum between freedom and compulsiveness on any given point. I don’t think it’s a straight line; where you get it and you stay there. It just never goes away. It just takes new forms; the older you get, it just takes more cleverly disguised forms. I would say only the True Self is strong enough to let go of the False Self; and that’s why this is inherently a spiritual system. Without some initial God encounter, some falling into the larger self, who you are in God and who God is in you, the little tiny self is not secure or content or happy enough to let go of this. It needs all these games too much. The True Self just doesn’t need to famous or rich or good-looking to be happy. You’ve found it at a deeper level and can let go of external things. In our country; we’ve got a giant system of advertising and merchandising that entirely sells people in the False Self. Boy, when that starts falling apart for, let’s say, the Baby Boomer generation, what are they gonna do? They’ll create more systems to get what they want—because the false self is so needy! Moment by moment. We’re seeing this in the neurotic character of so much of our public life. The self needs constant adulation, money, to show itself that it is something. …. So, I do think in that sense, the Enneagram is inherently religious language. IT is prepared to tell you that the only way out of your Enneagram compulsion is by some kind of authentic God experience …. The true self is the non-needy, non-compulsive, non-unconscious self that emerges from conscious union with God. It’s really, if you want a constant word for it, it’s the soul! The soul is given; it’s not created. It’s the place within you where God objectively abides; has nothing to do with your performance, or your worthiness. Your readiness to participate in it is a different thing. The False Self is the psychological self, created by what you have done, and what has been done to you by others. We will continue to be a litigious society, suing people, because everybody else made me do it. It’s mother’s false; his fault, her fault, instead of saying, I am what I am. There’s no point in blaming anybody for it; it’s my wound. And I better deal with it. You can sue for $10 million, and it won’t change the nature of your soul. It might confirm you in your righteousness; “my abuser was the impure person; I’m the pure person.” This even knocks politically correct thinking. You can divide the world into perfect-bad and perfect-good people. Yes, maybe it was that person’s fault; maybe that person needs to be restrained. But don’t think restraining that “bad” person will solve your soul problem. I still have to do my growing up. We are caught in a huge kind of victimology today. It’s always outside the self that the problems of the self are trying to be resolved … other people, other people, other people. The True Self is non-acquired; the False Self is the acquired self. And it’s the acquired self, that you’re attached to, damn it! The soul is indestructible, the basis for all your boy and all your security. That, you’re not attached to. Even more, the more secular our society becomes. The False Self is what I think I am, and what I’ve learned to need to be. The False Self, the acquired self, is the talkative self. It talks too much. There’s a place for telling your story, describing it all. But don’t think that by more describing, by 10 more hours with a therapist, you’re going to get to the True Self. In many ways it attaches you even more, because you’ve spent so much time talking about it. What characterizes the True Self … is silence. I don’t need to find the right words. It’s beyond words. The more you’re capable of creative silence—I don’t need to fill every moment with chatter—I think you’re moving more toward the True Self. Words are almost a way of filling me up. Assuring me. Here I am, Mr. Talk himself saying this! (Laughter). That’s precisely how I got to see it. In terms of my own soul. So I need to be a hermit as much as possible on the other side. This talking too much defines me—as significant, as smart, as wise—all these self-images I can take on myself, or you can project onto me. …
Now, I’ve gotta repeat, one more time, you don’t kill the False Self—that only enhances it. Three steps. One; You dis-identify with it. We’ll try to facilitate that dis-identification today by exposing it for the silliness it really is. You do this by observation, not judgement. Observation creates the subject-object split. You have to teach this in Contemplation 101. I now stand over here and watch my thinking mind, my stream of consciousness. I see it, almost as an objective observer. A free or fair witness; not judging it, but just, “Oh, that’s what’s happening!” You start seeing how often you do the same thing—which is why Eckhart Tolle says 93% of human thought is repetitive and useless. You tend to have three or four patterns by the time you reach middle age … you just keep thinking the same thing over and over again. That’s why most people aren’t very interesting to talk to. Always Fear. Always Caution. She’s a Six. But, a redeemed Six, a True Self Six—you’ll sense a liberation, a something that is much larger than fear; you’ll recognize they’ve so dis-identified with it, that they’re actually better at overcoming Fear than the rest of us. That’s the amazing thing that happens. The overcoming of your sin will be your strongest gift. Threes are lovers of integrity to an amazing degree. “I wanna do it honestly! I wanna be truthful.” Friend of mine would come to me and say, “Richard, don’t let me bullshit!” Threes are masters of bullshit—as are Eights. What Threes do, is sell you themselves, which is usually easy to do, because they’re almost always good-looking. They’re always salesmen. Then, they may realize, sometimes, they’ve sold the wrong thing. Then they move toward this endless desire for honesty and truth. This comes after the dis-identification. We call this observing with the Third Eye. To see yourself objectively, without judgement! From being raised in the church, that’s very hard to do. … You want to label it … Just stop it. That’s just an ego trip; the ego wants to position everything, put it in a pecking order. The soul doesn’t (need that). Believe me. I can’t see her soul, because I’m so trapped at good-lookingness. You dis-identify—Step Two. You have to identify with another source, another energy. You have to find another ground on which to stand. Archimedes, give me a place to stand, a lever and I can move the whole world … “I just got humiliated.” If I sit here inside of Richard and do a pity party, that someone humiliated me—you’re a trapped person. No truth, nor grace, will come from that moment. You’ve got to dis-identify. “I’m doing the pity party thing.” I’ve got to stand in a larger self. Falling into the hands of God. Most people’s language is, “I prayed, ‘God help me.’” That’s good! I can’t do this now—I’m trapped inside my feelings of hurt. God help me to speak civilly, with feelings of grace to this person, who seemed to just make fun of me. You have to hand it over to God, and hand yourself over to God. Then, thirdly, you take back—this is gonna feel like a surprise. You take back the appropriate energy of the False Self, and integrate it into a single eye. And you do so from one center of operation, without judgement or without inner conflict. That is the piece and contentment you see in the saints. You’re not fighting the wound any more. You suffer the wound. This is subtle. You suffered the ego humiliation—it does hurt! Who of us can deny that. It’ll take years of practice to compartmentalize. To know how to move apart. I’m not talking about a game of denial. I’ve got to own the hurt. Some say, don’t forgive too quickly, too glibly, or too soon. But the dis-identification allows it not to possess you. There’s an ‘I’ here that can have the feeling. You’ve got to find that ‘I’—that autonomous ‘I’ hidden with Christ … and that self, the humiliation rolls off your back, like a duck’s back. But the False Self is highly hurt-able. You’ll have to practice that for years. You’ve become attached and practiced in the first form, the knee-jerk reaction. She kicks me, I kick her right back. Neither person grows. It’s almost a kind—the third space, moving back—the effort of non-effort. You stop trying to justify and rationalize, or legitimate why you’re right and she’s wrong. You come to a kind of surrender; it is what it is. It’s what is, that will bring me to God. It’s what is that will always teach me. Not what isn’t. See, we spend all our time fighting things that don’t exist, but should exist. …. Anything that keeps you from enjoying and living in the present moment, we call it Resistance. We’ll leave you in the split self—our word for the split self is the diabolical self. You have to come back to the True Self, which is always the One self. Now, an ability to look back, not judge it, not love it, not hate it. To re-connect with it, but now, not be controlled by it. I don’t think a large percentage of people work at it too long. What we’ve done is stop people. I’ll use a graphic example: Don’t look at Playboy. What we end up with is Willpower Christianity. It’s Prometheus as our God; not Jesus. He suffers the reality, rather than compartmentalizing it. He owns it, and lets it own him. But is not possessed by it. Someone said, “the last thing humans will let go of is their suffering.” We manufacture a set of expectations about ourselves that we require to be happy. You probably brought ‘em here today. I can understand that; we all do it. But know, when you do it, you’re basically going to live an unhappy life. You have set yourself up for constant, continuous unhappiness. Your ego is imposing its template on reality. And when that doesn’t come back to you, you’ll be unhappy. See the power you’ve put outside yourself? Everybody else is in control of your life. You’re all being jerked around by everybody else, instead of drawing your life from within. That I define my happiness. Which can only be done inside of the True Self. Expectations will never be met … When you are foundation-ally joyful, when you’re doing it right, you will have momentarily, at least, you will have overcome your compulsiveness. You will be living by a life not your own. That’s it! (Repeats) You will be, to use our English phrase—you’re a larger-than-life person at that moment. There is a Knower within you, a Lover within you, that knows and loves who you really are. That’s the soul, the True Self. When you can let that do the knowing, let that do you the loving, you will be content. You will be able to live without disguise, a noble, simple, clean life. You can enter into the pain of the world, but don’t let it carry you and possess you. (1:24:00)
Back to the three sinners again. Because there are these three sinners, they also seem to take three forms. I know it still sounds a little clever. There is the compulsive center number—the double compulsion. The center point is pure compulsion: the three, the six, and the nine. They are most masked from themselves. It’s very hard for them to be converted; they have the hardest time getting out of it, because they’re so totally enmeshed in it. Life is a total shock-wave of heart, of body-gut, of head trips … for the three, respectively … The Three is so trapped in their feeling world, that what they do to get out of it is to move into the world of action in the Three; service in the Two—this world of feeling is so confusing to them. They don’t know how to put up boundaries to it. …. A world of aesthetic enhancement; I don’t know all these feelings floating around; I’ll just make it pretty. They’re into aesthetic sublimation with words and colors. For the Four, you don’t understand a Four until you know, the metaphor for them is more real than the reality. The rightly chosen phrase or word is better than the thing that the word points to! … They die for symbols. They love this world of fantasy; because it’s their only way—the symbol can control endless floating feeling in their life. It’s three different dances. In a certain sense: the Three is the pure compulsion. I’m gonna call the preceding number in each case the obvious compulsion. You see a Two, and you just know they’re full of feelings. You don’t know it as much with the Three. They don’t always look like heart people—they’re efficiency experts. In the preceding number, it’s the obvious compulsion; they’re obviously heart people. In the following number, in this case the Four, it’s the conflicted number. In other words, they’ve created a little disguise and a little game, even from themselves, for a clever way of controlling their feelings, or their head, or their gut. This is very, very important to understand. In each case it’s true—the numbers pattern into one another. I still don’t understand the genius of this thing; why it could be so cleverly defined. Not only do they meld into and participate in one another; but the flip number will be right next to you to balance you out. The Eights are the ultimate hard people; and right next to them are the ultimate happy people, the Sevens. So the previous number is the obvious form of the compulsion. The Five is such a head person, always into their words and ideas, theories and ideologies, books and explanations. Eights are so trapped in his body response; that’s why he’s just kicking back all the time; he doesn’t know how to get out of his instinctual self; and so he takes it out on you, literally. Because it’s too much. The conflicted numbers, to run back to ‘em quickly. The Five is obvious head; head, head, head. The Eight is obvious body. The One—we are conflicted gut! I get that constant shock wave of reality, it’s too much, too much! We take it all in! It is too much. The way I’ve decided to handle it is sort of reform it, fix it. We’re natural reformers; that’s why I’m here today reforming you! We’re always rearranging the room. Mr. Clean is our patron saint. It’s our little way; we can’t clean up the whole of America …. so I’ll clean my bathroom. Whereas the Eight just goes with his gut response; I’m fighting my gut response. The preceding number, in each case, is the obvious energy. The Fives, Twos, and Eights, you can pretty much pick ‘em out. The Twos even talk with seductive sweet voices; they’re on the make all the time. Their whole lives are a seduction game. … The following number in each case; we’re the conflicted people. With Seven, to say something about him or her. You’d never, looking at a Seven, think they’re a head person. They’re going to Disneyland, dressed in primary colors—you’d never guess! The world is wonderful; they refuse to see the downside of everything. They’re actually head-tripping constantly about what could go wrong. They’re scared in many ways, and they’ve found the ultimate disguise for fear—whistling in the dark! You get sick of the whistling; you know they never face the dark. I have a friend that’s a Seven that went to the Passion of the Christ last week; he spent the whole time with his hands over his eyes. So we’re all conflicted; we’re trying to reform the world; because we can’t bear this much reality. … That’s true of all nine types; we’ve found a way to block too much reality. Julien of Norich: “The reason that God does not want us to sin … is that when you do sin, it prevents you from seeing yourself as God sees you.” In other words, it makes you hate yourself. God wants you to see yourself as God sees you, and when you do stupid self-destructive things, you can’t see yourself as God sees you. So, when you can flow with the good, true, and beautiful—then you can honor this divine image that you are. You can recognize this divine image that you are. It seems that all sin, all compulsiveness, comes from an initial self-hating. Plus they also tear down the trust between people; we don’t see the divine image in one another either. We see others as so selfish, we can’t see the image of God. … We try to be good, to make it easier for others to see the image of God in us. My novice matter told us this when I was 19; don’t just have an obligation to be loving; but to make it easier for the other friars to love you! … In other words, sin is that which blinds us; more than anything that makes us unworthy. Get rid of that worthiness game. Your worthiness comes from the soul anyway; you didn’t create it. Stop the worthiness game and recognize; the core of the unmasking of sin, is letting you see your blindness. We are blind on that level, once you can see correctly, the good includes the non-good, then it becomes so much easier to love, and to stop fighting, everybody else. Saint Augustus says, at the beginning of his confessions: “I was not with You, because I was not with myself.” (repeats) It’s right at the beginning—brilliant, brilliant! I don’t think you can be with God, unless you are first with yourself; which means you stop eliminating what you find unacceptable. … So I’m gonna define discernment as a trained awareness of when an energy is true, and centered, and grounded, the true self—and when an energy is uncentered, ungrounded, and False Self. You can be trained in that! Every one of you in this room—women tend to be better at it. You can tell when someone is a centered, grounded human being. You’ve got a foundation … You could call the Enneagram, homeopathic healing. … You are healed by the same thing that wounds you. … Moses holding up the snake that hurt hte people—became the pharmacists’ symbol. You’ve got to actually eat a little bit—all innoculations are based on the same thing; you give a little piece of the disease to the person; help them deal with that, and ironically that creates the protection against the disease. There it is—written into human biology! You can’t just get rid of it; you make friends with your shadow. You tame your demons. Moses insisted people that were bitten by the snake, look upon it. The Cross became the new snake. To look upon it; to see what we do to goodness. What humanity does to goodness. It hates it; it attacks it. The conflict you see in the movie the Passion; the conflict between religion and the Good One. The religion .. when it doesn’t learn how to see, becomes the worst thing.
So what we’re saying—you cannot deny your personality. That’s what God uses. I’m not saying that, in a glib, follow your bliss way. It’s much more difficult than that. The dis-identification; the moving back into it without judgement. You will find spiritual growth by going back through the same experiences that caused your problems in the first place. That’s why people can’t let go of those primal hurts. If wounded by their mother; they keep being attracted to older women. Where it was done wrong; I wanna do it right. I wanna find one good mother; to heal the wound where I had the bad mother. Just naming it; I hope we’ve come to see it, modern psychology has helped us to see it. A Seven, for example, does not become anything other than a Seven. It’s precisely through joy and happiness, and seeing the risen life in all things, that they will come to God. But now it’s the resurrection not on this side, but the other side, of the Crucifixion. It’s still joy … My father was a Seven. He had dementia the last 10 years of his life. He could barely stand at the end; but he’d jump to his feet; smile from ear to ear; call me by name, and run toward me. He was a good father; part of the reason he was so good, was that he was a Seven; he never saw the bad in any of us. He had to live with my mother, who was an Eight! We tend, it’s amazingly often, to marry the person right next to you; because they are your flip, and your opposite. They balance you out, in some ways. They do; my mom and dad balanced me out. My mom was demanding; my dad was forgiving; and it worked, in our life.
I want to say one more thing before we move into the original types; how it’s hard for each of us to live in the now. Because, I am convinced, that the purest form of spirituality is the ability to accept the Sacrament of the present moment, and to find God in the present moment. Gut people only live in the now, in a shocked, overwhelmed way. That makes them substitute their judgements for real contact or real presence. They’re always carrying all kinds of unfelt, unprocessed emotion. Remember, shock-wave every three minutes. … So we control it, and therefore, we have the hardest time living in the now. That’s why I have to go apart; that’s why I have to process contemplation. … There are continually being blown away by the strong gust of wind of the present. Which is why the Nine just withdraws and stops feeling. It’s really a wonderful survival technique. … Heart people have a hard time living in the now, because they are reacting to, carrying, and trying to please everybody else’s concerns. They have a very hard time with contemplation. Their way of overcoming it, ironically, is action. Our way is with judgements. Their way is action—serve you, decorate you, make you an efficiency expert. They’re always processing the past; so it’s very hard for them to forgive. They keep replaying what you did to them last year. … They’re also in the future. They’re trapped in a flurry of now-feelings, but the now-feelings aren’t theirs, but everyone else’s. You see the wisdom of meditation. Let go, let go. … Don’t have to feed that feeling now, foster it. Most people, the name of the game is feeding their feelings; soon they are possessed by a demon. Now, head people are stuck in the present. They love to sit quietly in meditation; they do meditation in an information-gathering way. They have to withdraw, in some sense, to deal with all the thoughts, data, and emotions they’re trying to make sense out of. They like, maybe, silence; they like to withdraw. But their problem is, they keep thinking and processing inside of the now. You can see why all great teachers of prayer are saying to let go of feelings, thoughts, and for us body people, to sit in a way that’s more holistic than just body awareness. … How do we resist? Gut people resist aggressively. Our quick responses will come across as brusque, absolute, and even harsh. What we’re trying to do is stop the flood of perception that’s coming toward us. If you catch a gut person on the run, when they’ve got a lot of tasks in the head, you’re not gonna get their best response. You don’t know that you have caused it … They’re saying, stop the flood of perception; I can’t take any more right now. The Eight will push you back; the Nine will simply glaze over; and we Ones will try to fix you or change you. Heart people resist in a way that often feels manipulative. They will often feel invasive, intrusive, high-maintenance. Like, help me deal with my feelings; give me time, notice me. They’ll demand to be noticed. They’re by definition very needy people. Twos, Threes, and Fours have a lot of needs. For response, for being taken care of, admired, being liked, thought special, whatever. So, I think that’s pretty much all of my overview. That will allow us to move into individual spaces … How many minutes do we have John? Oh, didn’t I say that—mea culpa, the good boy wasn’t good, he didn’t do it right. Head people resist by being of course, aloof and withdrawn. They go inside in some way; and ruminate with their perceptions, and their ideology, trying to re-validate what their existing ideology is. Which is why they tend to be intellectual snobs. They tend to be conservative … When you get a Five, a Six, or a Seven that can take risks—they can be the most creative revolutionary of all. But left to themselves, in their compulsive form, they tend to be intellectual snobs… pulling everything back to when the truth really existed back in 1950, which just happened to be when they were a boy. You see this in a lot of conservative religion; it’s these head people seeking control. They tend to be very attracted to religion; it gives you … reassurance, on a head level, that they are in control, and they are right. The form it takes is Fundamentalism, and it’s happening all over the world. If it’s true that 50% of the human race are Sixes, you can see we’ve got a problem. If we don’t expose, in the good sense, the nature of fear, and the utterly binding and blinding quality of fear. I think the world is going to be led down all kind of roads by fear-based people who have never had to face fear for the demon that it is; but it’s always been called virtue.
Okay, we have a couple of minutes on overall questions, on anything I’ve tried to say up to now. Then, after this, we will start going into the numbers one-by-one.
Q1: … You had mentioned earlier in your talk strengths and gifts.
RR: I could do that before the break, I bet we’ve got time. Just to name them; that would be nice. Remember that, I’m going to, because I’m coming from the faith background. … The classic capital sins. We added two: the Three and the Six; fear and deceit. And is it an accident or not? That those are the sins that are controlling the West. Because we never recognize the Three and the Six as capital sins. We’ll explain that as we go through… Let me start with the 1. Our capital sin, or weakness; the best word for it is resentment. I’m not going to describe it in great length. The capital name is anger, of. course. The opposite of that, which I hope you’ll see in me at some time today, I hope it’s there, is in fact the opposite—serenity. I’m actually better at overcoming anger than the rest of you, because it’s been my demon all my life. When I’m my best self, I’ll be the most serene of all of you. Isn’t that wonderful? For those of you who are 1’s, that gives you a little hope. The sin of the 2, is pride. Not the usual sense of vanity or conceit. It’s a sense of far outweighing their importance in your life. They ingratiate themselves and make you need them, and then hate you if you don’t need ‘em enough. That grandiosity of ego, that constantly pushing themselves into institutions and relationships as: “Aren’t I important? Aren’t I wonderful; aren’t I absolutely essential to the task; my love is saving you.” That in fact becomes their blindness. When they face it, they cry for three days. It’s very humiliating for a Two to face the self-centeredness of their love; and they flip into their greatest gift, which is humility. They can become more humble than most people, because they see the phoniness of their love. For some reason, for the soul … nothing is more humiliating than seeing the phoniness of their love. You wanna cry; I though I was being so good, and I wasn’t being good to you at all; I was being good to me. Oh, that’s painful! The pain is so great, in a good sense, that it makes them into very humble people. The Three, which was one of the denied, it wasn’t in the original capital sins, is deceit. This doesn’t mean they go around telling lies. They wouldn’t be so gross as to do that. It just means, they embellish the truth. They put their best foot forward—why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you show your best looking face? We’re all threes in that sense. We try to embroider the truth, and we try to hide the shadow. They’re natural salesmen without even trying, without even working at it, they know how to sell a product, and tell you what’s great about it. First of all they sell themselves. I mentioned before, when they face that, they become great lovers of integrity and truth—that’s their virtue; exactly the opposite of their deceit. Yes?
Q: ~~~
RR: Maybe time for one more, at least, the Four: The sin of the Four is envy. It’ll take longer time to describe it this afternoon. But they have an immediate eye, it’s spontaneous! For class. For taste, for that looks good; that sounds good; that smells good. That—they can’t help it! They’re classy people. It’s the French who have made an art form out of it. It’s the Japanese in the Orient; the same thing. You go to Japan, you think you’re in a constant art museum; how can any one country be so beautiful? Beauty is paramount to the Four, and they can’t help it! Now, their virtue, when they stop getting into this envy, of people who are, ‘Oh, she’s prettier than I am; or he’s more artistic than I am; Oh he’s getting promoted and I’m not.’ That’s hard to accept; anyone who’s ___ than they are. It can really blind them; there’s many novels in history about the rage of the rejected Four; whose art form is not appreciated or whose art form is not loved. When they can weep over that, they flip into equanimity, a kind of even-souled-ness; that’s literally what it means. A kind of ability, and this also creates even greater art in them. That subtlety of good and bad, of darkness and light. That’s why they’re masters of subtlety. They face subtlety in themselves. Instead of looking for, you know, a total perfect artist; they have to learn that the truth is somewhere in between. When they learn to honor that truth and love that truth that’s in between, they in fact emerge with their greatest gift. Let’s take another stand-up five-minute break, and we’ll return for the next session.
Part 2/4
I’ll continue the rest of the circle and then dive into the Ones.
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Just giving you the names; the Fours the sin being Envy; the virtue being Equanimity. Then we move into the head-space. The sin of the Five, is called Avarice. Not in Uncle Scrooge sense, but an avarice for knowledge, for details, for “I Know.” It’s the Faustian temptation for knowledge for its own sake. Their virtue, the opposite of Avarice, a taking-in energy, is detachment. The disconnection from all of this. You see this often in their lifestyle; they don’t need so much, because they get all their juice from information. Zen Buddhism comes out of this space. We can co-relate all this to the great religious traditions. The Six, I mentioned, is Fear, the other unnamed capital sin. Interesting that fear was not called a capital sin. And now it’s 50% of the human race. When a Six faces his or her fear, they become the most courageous and loyal of all people. They’ve faced it, moved through it, and don’t let it control them any more. The Seven, the sin is gluttony; what are they gluttonous for? Fun! Their whole life is a search for adventures. They’re always on an airplane today. Their gift is joy. That in fact they are naturally positive, upbeat people—don’t take that away from them. Just see it intuitively. We Ones and Fours, tend to see the cup half-empty. The Sevens always see the cup seven-eighths full. The Eight, the sin is Lust, in terms of the classic capital sins. The German word lust is much closer here. The English word simply connotes sexuality. The German word lust is a passion for life. Lusty people are people who do it with total abandon, total freedom, devil-may-care attitude; that really is the older meaning of lust. Therefore, you see it in their gift side, which is passion. They tend to do things, they talk, they gesture, with a presence, a body presence. You almost feel that when an Eight enters the room; “I’m here!” Their body says it, and you notice it. You’re going to see that you really respond to energy in other people much more than what they do, or what they say, literally. It’s the entire body energy. I’m convinced the aura, halo we painted around the saints. When right-wingers get upset about energy language; we were masters of that language at some point. … We don’t see that anymore, so maybe we don’t paint that anymore. Finally, we come to the Nine. Maybe it’s not accidental that they’re last. The Nine is the most forgettable. The reason, they’re the most forgettable, in any crowd, is they don’t make themselves noticeable. They think of themselves as the invisible child; they let you not notice them, and we take them up on it! Both my younger brother and sister, they’re both Nines. They’ll joke about it now; “Here you are, not noticing us again.” They’re both so nice, so easy to be with, roll with the punches. Me and my older sister take over the event; we’re both Ones. The Nines, sort of lost in the wind of it all. The word for that, is Sloth, or laziness. But do you see—it’s not describing traits or action; Nines can be very hard workers. It’s on the level of energy they’re lazy and slothful. They don’t put out any energy that gives you a handle on them. They don’t say anything, they don’t define themselves; it’s kind of nice. You can often use them; take advantage of them, because they don’t demand attention. It’s a slothful lazy energy. Finally, when they recognize they’re doing that to themselves, it flips into its opposite, which is Decisive Action. They know, I’ve got to do six things today; they’ll wake up, and be more methodical, clear-headed, and clean-headed than some of the rest of us. But they need to make a list, and check it twice. It looks the opposite of laziness. But you’ll still see that the underlying energy is relaxed, laid back. They don’t move quick, necessarily. … The way they walk, you’re not sure if they have a goal. Nines are very likable people; but you do take advantage of them. We put them at the top of the circle deliberately; in a sense, they are Adam and Eve at the Garden of Eden.
Many teachers make the point, and I think it’s in great part true, that the Nine is who we all were if you go back in history far enough. … Little villages in Africa … it makes so many people in the third world attractive to us. They roll with the punches. … Now we from the overdeveloped worlds; they look lazy! We don’t realize; all these other eight types are running around with survival skills, domination skills, controlling skills. Adam and Eve in the garden aren’t playing any of those. If you have a Nine friend you know … they’re just so easy to be around.
Okay, now we will begin, for the rest of the day; leaving time for afternoon question and answer, to describe these numbers in detail. I will do it through traits. While teaching the traits; I’m trying to teach you the energies. You know them in your life. These first days, these first weeks, you’re gonna make a lot of wrong judgements. You’ll try to type your children and your mother-in-law … I said, in bragging style, you would know by the time you leave here. That is in general true … it’s meant to be taught; when most people pick up the book; … many put it down and are bored to death by it. But if you hear one person teach it, then you’ll understand the book from the first page. Many teachers will not put it in book form: “It should only be taught by the mouth … to ears that can ask questions.” If at the end of the day, you don’t know what your energy is, you are almost certainly a Six or a Nine. The rest of you are gonna know. When you suffer the humiliation you have the right number. If you don’t suffer the humiliation, then … you don’t know how stupid it is … If you get the silliness, the partiality of it all … The Sixes have been trained, in fear, not to trust themselves. Usually when I give a long conference, the Six settles its way up to me; they need to get reassurance that they indeed are a Six from the authority figure. They’ve given far too much of their power to authorities. Or they’ll write me long letters afterward … They mean so well; they’re very humble, in general (the Sixes).
I’m going to start with the One, because it’s who I am. If you’ll allow me to mock Richard and make fun of myself, then you’ll hopefully allow me to do it with you and you won’t take offense. … A compulsive need to feel that I am right. It is so constant; remember you all have it; we just made an art form out of it. We got the message that if we were right, we would be on top of the situation; we would be in control. We would make uncontrollable world a little bit more controllable. Driven toward moralisms, … arrogance, absoluteness. … We work so hard to be right; we tried as little boys, to please my very-demanding mother. I’m not blaming her for it. I knew the only way to keep her love was to be a good, little, right boy. It worked! I became her favorite. I’m not saying, it’s always going to apply that you got it from your parents. Not just, “I am right,” but “I am good.” It takes such a moral tone! So it’s crucial that, midway through our life’s journey, we see that we’re not good. Martin Luther was a One, a classic One. We’re always trying to reform everything. Our animal symbol is the barking dog. We’re just barking at ourselves! “Richard, you should work harder! Richard, you should do it better!” Now, it has some gift form to it; we almost always are good teachers; since we’re searching for right word to communicate right idea, which we of course have (laughs)! We’re perfectionists; but really! It’s only by our own stupid definition of perfection. I’m very sloppy about some things. But I’ll have 2-3 areas, where I want it the way I want it. … it gives me untold happiness, when it’s that way. When my wastebaskets are emptied. It’s a better world! (laughter) It’s so silly, and I know it’s silly! I can go to bed easier that night. I’m only real when I’m making effort. When I’m giving it … we’re hard workers; we’re workaholics, really. 1’s and 3’s are both workaholics. We’ve got a self-image, a muscular self-image. There’s got to be other ways to be strong and heroic and significant. We don’t trust any voices that feel soft and sloppy. They’ve got to be self-sacrificial voices. We become little cadets; little seminarians, like I did. The self-image is, “I am a good boy/girl. Look at me, how good I am.” You see why I said, at the beginning of the day, you’re destroyed by your gift. Imagine how unreal you’re going to become, if you try to really maintain that into your 40s, 50s, and 60s. The one left to himself is anal retentive, looking around for things to make better and correct. Looking to clean up the world. John the Baptist was probably a One. You tend, not to like your own number. You see it for what it is—you know the game you’re playing; because you’ve been playing it all your life. Three’s compete with each other for the same successes. They know when the other is being half-deceitful. “I’m gonna make sure s/he doesn’t get away with it.” We tend to have bring animated faces; ordered and tidy spaces. Abe Lincoln, Ralph Nader … You see a high moral achievement in someone like Abe Lincoln; and Ralph Nader, too. We can be very linear. If we have our righteous explanation. A lot of Ones are attracted to Fundamentalism. We’re often correcting ourselves inside. Tonight, what will be going through my mind is how I didn’t do it right today. I don’t know how not to do that. Self-criticism and other-criticsm, we are critics, critics, critics. My friends call me, Hornets. You just go after things. We’re very focused; anything that keeps us from our focus, we tend to resent. What we’ve got to stop doing is being on a flow, so we can be interrupted. It’s very hard for Ones to multitask. If my minds going this direction; don’t pull me over there! You’ll see a flash in my eyes. It’s immediate instinct inside of me—why are you interrupting me? Don’t you see I’m going on this flow? We’re impatient; we’re worn out by the end of the day; by 9 I just start fading. Remember, the whole day has been full-body perceptions of reality, non-stop. It’s too much; I don’t know how to make it right! I will lash out with a strong overstatement, which I do on tape, too! We tend to be into meritocracy. About I deserve, you deserve. If you listen to my tapes, I’m always preaching against that. All my sermons are to myself! Like St. Paul was, another One, maybe an Eight, I’m begging for unconditional love, begging for justification by faith. On the gut level, we can’t believe that you get anything for nothing. … We deeply resent people who want a free lunch. God, I sound like a Republican! What makes you think you deserve that? (is what my gut wants to say) We try hard and you should try hard! If the truth is told, we don’t respect people that don’t try hard; that don’t give 100%. We don’t respect it, because we think we give 100%. In truth, we only give 100% in a couple of areas. Those are humiliations that we learn as life goes on. Shoulds and oughts control our whole life. Our entire life, then, is a search for grace. And when we get it, we really get it. When it overwhelms me, I could just weep; the world is finally reconfigured into a beautiful world, and I can finally be happy. The one space I’m not happy in, and yet I maintain it for some reason … This world where—You only deserve something if you work hard—is not a happy world. We’re forever fighting the cosmic war against crud. Here were people who seemed to be having my values … Peace and justice people; we have a love for those things in the world; that’s the way it should be. More often than not, when i got close to it, I was not impressed. The energy was not right; the traits were correct. They’re out there on the picket line. But do a planning meeting with them, and they’re as violent as anybody else. Lot of peace-and-justice people are Ones, who want the world the way they want the world. It gave me an immense sympathy for them, and an immense impatience with them. By reason of my Franciscan vocation, and having a chance for an interior life, and Jesus showing himself to me as a young man already … I’m sure it’s the reason I became a priest; there were moments that were so wonderful, serene, beautiful, whole—that’s why I wrote the book, Everything Belongs. I think as a four-year-old boy I experienced ecstasy, looking at the Christmas tree. It was a beautiful world, and I was in it, and God was in it. It’s the positive soul experience that you’re trying to recreate. My soul experience is, there is such a thing as a perfect world! I know because I tasted it for 30 seconds when I was three years old. He came from a good home. The wound doesn’t come first. Here I think Matthew Fox was brilliant, emphasizing original blessing as preceding original sin. The soul child … my soul child would be the Seven. As a little boy I was always happy. My mother told me I would squeal with delight. Scream! Those shock waves of reality were coming toward me; they were for the most part wonderful. I was a happy little Seven boy; and then the wound came, I don’t know when. Somewhere, damn it, it isn’t a perfect world! And so, what I move into, is, I’m going to find a way to make it perfect. I’m going to make it the way I want it, and that becomes the One. Now, I cannot not be a One, it’s my strategy. It’s my life’s grip; my way of getting energy and perceiving the world, for so long. Every so often, I’ll taste that happy little boy again. It’s enough to live for. To know that perfection is possible, and possible enough that I can let go of the imperfection. I don’t need to fix everybody, and fix the church. It’s a different space inside. That’s just a very quick example. Another thing you tend to let go of, true of One and Two … in the quid pro quo thinking of the One, we tend to make accounts of what we’ve given. How much you owe me. We do it in our heads; the Two do it in an emotional way. … Most of you don’t have that luxury; we’re almost trained in keeping lists. Maybe that was the real meaning of the law of poverty … don’t have to worry about money and making lists. Breaking down meritocracy, worthiness systems, the notion I-deserve-You-owe is a system that all of us engage in. The country is Switzerland; if you’ve ever been, you won’t see any trash on the streets. In fact, I don’t think there’s any trash in the whole country. They build these real pretty little boxes, that you put the trash in … The time—who makes watches? The Swiss! You’ve got to be on-time … To come in late, like a few of you did—I should have pointed you out. It’s unacceptable in Switzerland! The Mexicans could not survive in Switzerland. And … banks! Is it any surprise; keeping accounts and keeping them very accurately. You’ll see how countries take these compulsions to an art form. Switzerland has taken One-ish-ness to an art form. (31:57)
The story I remember telling on the first tapes 20 years ago: The first time I taught in Zurich, I think I was teaching the Enneagram … it was a Sunday morning … the streets were deserted; I walked across the middle of the street—we call it jaywalking. Now on the ends of each blocks, there’s very clear markets where you are to walk. … A man shouted at me from is window: “Nein, nein, nein!!” He pointed over—you walk, in the appropriate place! This is unbelievable. The church is, or was, filled with these people; it very-much appealed to those kinds of energy. Those novice-masters … they thought there was something meritorious and salvific about walking inside the lines. We took culture and made it into salvation, which is horrible, but almost every culture has done it … … … We’re mostly barking dogs. Okay! That’s the One!
I’m gonna go right into the Two. Notice we’re moving from the Gut space; my responses are from my gut. … I can stand up here and talk so much, because I’m not thinking about it. … It’s coming straight from my belly to my mouth. … Sometimes it serves me well. But … sometimes, I don’t say nice things. That’s the price you pay for being a gut person. It’s either your best self, or it’s your worst self. Now we’re going to go into the heart space …. … If my need is the need to be perfect; their need is the need to be needed! It drives their entire life; the creation and manufacturing of neediness. I will make you need me; I will ingratiate myself to you by loving service … so you cannot live without me … and never entering my mind that I am being anything other than a martyr-servant-slave …. …. All the heart people are very needy; very needy emotionally. They don’t recognize what immense emotional responses they constantly need, to tell themselves they’re important, special, or whatever. They repress the consciousness of their needs; pretend they don’t have any needs at all … “My only need is to meet your need, my dear husband.” Then, just let me warn you: Every, I don’t know, four days, or four weeks—hell hath no fury. You will pay. You let a Two give to you, you will always pay! Finally, after this self-sacrificial martyr, giving of themselves, they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and realize: No one’s giving back to me. They get into the blame game. It’s almost the flip of who they want themselves to be. What has happened to me? I’ve become a dragon! … I’ve heard words come out of a Two’s mouth that are crueler even than Eight. Other than “need,” the other key word in the Two’s life is “boundary.” They give away boundaries too easily. They give away their soul for a sardine … to get you to kiss them, or hold them, or anything. Then they retake their boundaries now and then; and that’s when you’ll see their worst self. When they almost look like an Eight; for a moment. That’s when they run out of the room crying. If they allow grace, they will cry for three days; and they will return a transformed person, a very loving person … They really are—they really do know how to love. They’re good lovers! Sweet, gentle, caring, tender … They are good nurses. They know what you need there in bed; before you even do! Which sometimes makes you unhappy … But the price they’ve paid for that; here’s their virtue becomes sin, becomes virtue, is they don’t know their own needs! They often don’t have a clue, what their own feelings are. When they find them for a minute, and recognize that no one is needing them … So you can pick up a Two; you can manipulate him. All I have to do is put the word “need” in the sentence, and he or she will go off and do it. “Happy to meet your needs, father.” That recognition, now and then: “Damm it! I’m letting everybody manipulate me!” … … …. What you have to do to help a Two is … to really feel their own feelings. I am not saying all women are Twos. But you women know, women culturally are told they should be twos!! Every woman fights with this; culturally are trained … You’ve got, on some level, to be a Two, to be a mother; to read that little baby’s needs. They wake you up, several times during the night. You’ve got to die to your own needs. Women, very often, are trained in Two-ness. Women who are Twos then have a double compulsion …. It’s all summed up in this word co-dependent. Fifteen years ago, that was the buzz-word. The word was created for the Two. They do raise it to an art form. They don’t know what their feeling is, or their need is. They have these magnificent antennae that can pick up from the twitch of your eyebrow, what you need! (Laughter). They run to get it; now the trouble is, when the third eye … enables them to see their own neediness … Sometimes they’re dead wrong, too. Sometimes they’re meeting your needs that are not your needs; that’s when you feel the intrusiveness… and the manipulation. So I’ll speak out of the other side … they’re not only manipulatable; they are manipulators. That’s hard for you to hear if you’re a Two. They use seuctive, charming, Christian, contemplative language. The more holy it is, the more seductive … they’re prone to guilt, and they know how to give you good guilt! And so they’ll love to use language of holiness and church, and you owe it to Jesus or whatever! Jesus would want this from you, and stuff like that. Be careful of religious language from a Two! (From a One, also be careful.) Seeing myself play these games has made my own mind so critical about religion. If the Two doesn’t get in touch with what their need is in this relationship … their observation of you will probably be doubly wrong. A lot of people don’t like Twos, because they constantly feel this, I’m being shoved around. She needs me to need her, more than I need her to need me. I’m feeling controlled, minute by minute, by minute. …. they actually feel shame, for having any needs. I’ve seen them tear up, when I say, “What do you, YOU, really need?” They never speak immediately. There’s the choking up of the throat; not knowing what to say. You want to take ‘em in your arms and hug ‘em. They’re: “I don’t know what I need.” They cry a lot, Twos, and people with Two wings. I am seven steps removed, really, from my true instinctual self, to know what I, I really need. Some need to go through years to get the texture of that, and the shape of that … The country—are there any Italians here? Have you ever been to Italy? They’re always feeding you food; they’re always, apparently, visually loving and helpful. But why is it you don’t really feel helped? I think if you compare it—if you go to England and Scotland, the shopkeepers will walk with you halfway to make sure you don’t get lost. The Italians just want to get you out of their way: “Down there. Over there.” That’s them at their worst; not really helpful. Just, think of us as warm, loving, heartfelt family people. I learned this from Italians … in a family; absolute expectations of hugs, and kisses, and visits to mama, and what you owe mama …. it controls your whole life to the day you’re dead. It’s the classic dysfunctional family. Now, every race has these … But, I’ve also seen this humble, loving servant in Italian people. The redeemed Two. The utter, manipulative user, that makes a show of love, but is not loving. And the person who really does know how to love. The Two animal is the licking puppy. … When you start feeling licked, you know you’ve got a Two in sight … (46:00)
It’s always a little more than you want. That’s why the Two has to work at boundaries. “Could you use that now. Am I going to get in the way?” You have to practice that for a while, to see, if I’m really helping you; or if I’m really helping me, in the guise of helping you. All of us do this at different times … we play this game … with someone whose attention you needed, at a great degree. The Virtue, humility … you only achieve by getting humbled. That’s true of all the virtues. Some have described the Enneagram as a training in Virtue. If there was a visual symbol; the Pueblo Indians have it with the Ogre-lady; the Ogre-lady has a hook. She’s holding a hook; when a Two loves you, they’ve always got a hook. They want something back! And they don’t know that! You learn it very quickly; there’s always a price. You start wanting to keep Twos at a distance; “I’ll pay tomorrow, but take (the affection) today.” I must say, we’re all sinners in this regard—the Two is prone to gossip. She has everybody’s feelings but her own; they need help to process this plethora of feelings. And so they’re highly prone to talking, gossiping. They really are trying to process it; you need to help ‘em find a safe, responsible, highly spiritual person. That’s why we created therapists. But Twos can wreak great havoc in a community, where everything is for public consumption and public communication—it’s no good. I see that as the tongue of the Ogre-lady. … What you’ll be seeing in the days ahead, is various images for all of these things. Until you get an image, an icon, a picture, a saint, a biography—you don’t get it. They say we’re transformed in the presence of images. Jung said that … We need an image; Catholicism understood that much better than Prostentantism. Any quesitons?
Q: Who are the saints?
A: For Two; some people use the little flower, but I think she’s more a Four. … I have some written down here; who were the other saints? Vincent DePaul, for sure. You know, I said Mother Theresa in my first book, but we changed it in the new one; I think she’s an Eight. The Eight in redeemed form looks like a Two. I was there in Calcutta, and heard all these stories from her community—she’s an Eight. A tiger mother; like my own mother. My brothers and sisters tend to be rather secure, because our mother feverishly took care of us. That’s the good side of the Eight. So who else? John the 23rd; well, now; Andreas insists he’s a Nine. All of these are guesses … I can see why you’d say … the Franciscans told me, when he was pope, the first day, on the feast of Francis; he was up on his throne, … All the cardinals were on rows each side. …The door swung open, and all the little brown robes came in to meet the pope. He came running in, threw his arms around all of them. Just hugging them and kissing them. So that does feel Two. But that might be Italian, also. Italians look like Twos; they’re trained to look like Twos … They are very loving; they do know how to read you; there’s an empathy and a sympathy in the Two that is extraordinary. I am all day going to be emphasizing the negative, but if I don’t say enough of the positive, ask that question. I emphasize the negative to subvert your addiction to it. … they are natural helpers. You give a Two a job, you know it’s going to get done. If she or he has to work till 10-o’clock at night … It’s always tied to relationship. You disconnect a Two from all relationships … which is why the hermitage is good for them too; they will feel a sudden major loss of energy. Their giving is always associated with relating, or someone liking them. There were 1,400 Franciscan hermitages in Europe … All of us .. need to break the codependent world of community and family. They are wonderful gifts, but they keep many of us as a codependent, immature level.
Q: Is resentment spread across all the types?
A: Well, certainly Ones make an art form of it. Twos do it too, though, in the form: “You didn’t give me back in kind.” I would say you see the subtlety of the concept of resentment in Ones and Twos. But you’re right—all of us play our resentment game.
Q: A saint for the Ones?
A: I mentioned Saint Paul, and Martin Luther, although Catholics were trained to not call him a saint, I guess. I think Gandhi would probably also be a One; many of those we canonized. I hesitate to point out saints that were perfectionistic; you really wonder what some of them were like to live with. The amount of anal retentiveness it takes to be always good … Read the lives of the saints; the only people that got canonized were Ones and Twos. Righteous like a One, and …. That’s done a lot of damage. The saint has at least seven other faces. We call this—good way to end this morning session—we call this whole diagram the face of God. Each of us looks out at reality with our limited perception, our own set of blinders. If we could perchance, by God’s grace, look out at reality from nine pairs of eyes. If you could stand in the eyes of a Seven; and enjoy the way they do. If you could stand in the eyes of a Five … have that detachment … To do all of them is to enjoy the eyes of God.
You know it must reveal our deep deep desire to understand this mystery of human nature … a desire to improve our relationships with other people. As I keep saying, however, that’s a corollary. Primarily it’s a tool for your own conversion and transformation. So you can almost catch your sin out of the corner of your eye. You can’t catch it directly … They’re all … emotionally familiar. You’ve got to catch it on the run. There, “got,” I did it again. The humiliation continues for months. “There you are. You’re doing it again.” It’s so exposing, of the false self. Because, it never is a pure energy; it’s always filtered through self-interest and self-protection. When you see how much self-interest and self-protection is going on inside of you; it helps me understand what the saints meant by weeping over their sins. The weeping mode is different than the fixing mode. To repeat one more time, lest you missed it: If I would go out to change myself, I would do it in a One way, which would only make me more of a One. That’s what the saints meant, by you can’t convert yourself. Only God can do it, and all you can do is get out of the way. You can see it, and stop your … justification of it.
And with that, we move into the Three. The Three is a center-space. A central stress point for the Three. They both prefer the heart, and yet they repress the heart. .. the conflict there inside of them. They want to be relational, loving, caring people, and they are. But they also want to do something with it! They’re dynamic people, who want to move life toward action; they grease the wheels of life. If you want to get things done, get the show on the road, you’d better get a Three at your side. They immediately, intuitively see how to organize something for the greatest sense of efficiency. Their self-esteem comes from competence in the outer world. And I want to tell you a secret about a Three; it’ll help you love them. There’s this terrible deep fear in a Three, that he or she will not be lovable if they weren’t producing. That you’ll forget about me; you won’t like me. Why would you like me?! It’s that whole thing we all face. No one could like me; the only thing you could like is my product. They become masters at the production of product. That will keep you loving them; that will keep your heart oriented towards them. … But because of that inner conflict; they also are out of touch with their heart in a certain way. Tbh, Threes can be … you see in the stereotypical American businessman … very superficial. That heart is so conflicted, so torn … A Franciscan who worked with me; works in Europe as the head of Franciscans International. We got to be very close; and we would share our souls. For (him) to enter a room; he looks like the essence of self-confidence; you think there’s not an ounce of self-doubt. He says, the moment I enter a room, on an unconscious level, I’m assessing the situation to see how I can impress them. How can I succeed here, how can I get the show on the road? How can I make it happen? You can see now why the world calls America the Three country. What it sells out to is what we call Yankee pragmatism. For the American, if it works, it’s true. We’re not interested in philosophical or theological truth. If the war appears to be working, we’re in favor of the war. No background philosophical reasons. Now, that’s the worst state of the Three—workability. We call it pragmatism. A kind of need to be on the correct team; to be affiliated with something that’s going somewhere. They’re naturals at political savvy. They read .. about who’s got the power. It’s second nature to them. Whereas the rest of us could be very naive about where’s the power in this room. I don’t mean in terms of domination; I mean more … how can it be organized so this group of people could work together. In this sense, they can be very effective community builders … It’s pretty amazing; I don’t have a natural eye for it at all. This whole resource guide you see, somewhere hear … (I must have had a Three help me put it together) it’s a man in this room; how can we put all that together and make it available for people. I don’t know how to make Ones sell-able or workable. We Ones aren’t really ambitious; we’re righteous. We’re righteous and arrogant. …. Let me describe that ambition; it’s probably what makes them deceitful. … Martha Stewart; a classic Three; she turns everything into sell-ability. They don’t sell it unless it’s attractive. But it leads them, sometimes, into playing with the edges of things. … The ill will I see toward pure Martha; in part, it’s because she’s a woman. Men don’t like strange women … Lot of people don’t like Threes; they run circles around us. They get too much done; and there’s always good-looking besides. This convinces me; there’s probably a connection to body self-image. Little kids that are really cute .. “people like me!” I’d start doing my little dance; wouldn’t you? In a sense, the Three is even more a pleaser than the Two. The Two pleases individuals; the Three pleases systems. They’re actually more impressive in a group than they are one-on-one. I’m told this; I don’t want to offend anybody’s Catholicism; but bishops who have had one-on-ones with the pope; they say, as a one-on-one, he’s not nearly as impressive. For whatever reasons. We’ve all seen him on the stage. The youth of Europe just in awe; the Three knows how to play the crowd; how to lead a group. And a group gives them the authority; they’re natural leaders. I would say half the Presidents of America were Threes; John Kennedy clearly a Three. They relate to the camera better; the stage better; to the public forum better than they do the individual. When you’re with them privately, they struggle for the right word. Stellar performance. Very interesting. But it is this heart conflict; it’s a suffering for them. They want to be personal … but they, on a certain level, and this is humiliating for them to admit: if they had to choose between person and product, they’ll choose product over person. The sell-ability of the product. That’s another piece that sometimes makes people distrust them. “Maybe I’ll be swept up in them, and maybe he’ll use me.” That’s the worst thing Threes do; use people … for the product. They’re so glib, attractive … that you let ‘em do it. They’re hard to resist. They’re always selling themselves, to the group! But again, out of the other side of my mouth—they’re good at it! In terms of leading, and organizing the group. In terms of recognizing the gifts that are there. … They’re potentiators; they’re great at seeing talented people. “You know, I think she could do that. … I’ll bet she could.” Extraordinary gifts … But it’s fast food. It’s the too-glib, too-quick solution. It isn’t always long-term food, from the Three. They’re natural competitors, natural winners … they know how to tell a lie, and make it not sound like a lie; the used-car salesman, I guess. Dale Carnegie: How to tell a lie and be sincere about it. Is it any surprise that the Dale Carnegie course went on for years in America? … the need to be successful! Success becomes an idol in their life; and that’s why failure is a necessity. They must, for the sake of their soul, fail. Poor Martha’s in the middle of it right now. In terms of the soul! You have to suffer one great defeat, by your misreading of a situation. What they’ll normally do, and they’re masters at it, is to turn their failure into a success. They’ll rearrange it in their own mind, and your mind. That’s why they need to be married; they’ll be one person in the marriage who is a Truth-Speaker, who will not let you off the hook. … The Three can go home and fail with that person, have one person who knows them as they really are; where they don’t have to shine, they don’t have to … They need one person like that where they can finally be loved for who they are. Every one of us wants that. Not just because .. they’re important. And successful. So many of them go toward roles and titles, and totally immerse themselves; there’s a lot of Bishops who are Threes; a lot of heads of everything who are Threes. Roles, and titles, and costumes, and hat—just reassures the Three, that I have a role, and I’m significant. They’re far too tied to roles. Spiritually, you have to help them detach. Can you just be Bill today? … One place we all have to be, where we can be naked and loved apart from our roles? Image is very important to a Three; very often God has to take it away from them; so they can fall back in to who they were before image. … we call it Madison Avenue; the communicating of image as if it’s substantial reality; when Madison Avenue is nothing more than images; and yet it makes billions for people, the selling of images. Is it any wonder that the selling of motion pictures has become the American art form. … We really know how to communicate the image. So the Four wing is already coming in; the artistic creativity of the Four. But the putting it on film, and transporting it to the whole world … Hollywood is a culmination of Three and Four; creativity with product! Bill Clinton undoubtedly a Three, Ronald Reagan probably. We’ll keep electing Threes president. I think Bush is a Six; Kerry might be a Three. We’ll probably keep electing Threes because they mirror the level of consciousness of this country. Winners who look like winners … all you have to have is a winner’s face … and talk like a winner, and that’s our president! He’s gonna be our leader … Does it work? Is the first question in a Three’s mouth. Can you do anything with it? Will it go anywhere? … They’re good at it. But what dawns on them somewhere in the middle of life, is in a certain sense their life is borrowed; it’s not their own. That’s the liminal space, the moment: I don’t want to live someone else’s agenda. I’ve got to say, “Who am I?” Apart from public image, from persona. Many of our people have translated this all into money; the making of money proves I am a success. It doesn’t say you are a success on that meaningful level. Their self-confidence comes precisely from workability; from the flow happening. When they get caught up in that flow, it is so exciting to them. They can probably work 20-hour days. It’s amazing the amount of energy a Three will have. The dynamism itself is their food. The creating of workability; the creating of success in other people’s eyes. But then, they have to eventually pull it back—what is really success in my eyes. They don’t know, damn it! They want to cry. What will be happiness for me? I’ve spent my life trying to make you all happy. They tend to be stereotypically feminine or masculine, without working at it. A woman who’s a Three is feminine, sexy, and on the make with the crowd. They love clever little one-liners, that in two words can pull together the whole conversation. Stephen Covey: the seven habits of highly effective people. Or the one-minute manager. It’s good stuff! They make it concise and clear: why? It’s more sell-able, more manageable! That’s one reason for American success throughout the world. I go to so many countries where I want to say, “Get to the point!” … … We cut through all the extraneous stuff that’s going to get in the way. It isn’t the point! After they’ve gone on babbling for 20 minutes; they have no patience with that. That impatience will make you upset; “he’s not listening to me.” But he is listening, but they want to know what to do with your message. They like clean phrases … They always look like they’re being looked at. Glamorous models; they don’t dress down. Without trying, they put on nice clothes, present their best self. Present it to you. In a certain sense, they look at themselves from outside, and know how they look. But they could stay out forever; and become very very superficial. That’s the international image of the Americans. They get a lot done, but there’s very little under the hood. The rest of the world feels we can’t carry on in-depth conversations. It’s just these clever one-liners that a Three, and a Three culture, settles for. The animal is the racehorse; they almost always win the race. The show horse; looking good while winning the race. The peacock is also used; it puts up its beautiful tail and says, “look at me!” And it is beautiful, and it is attractive. (1:24:00)
I know I said this; I will say it again, cause it makes the point; it’s the way I was first taught it: “Now Richard, when spiritually directing a Three, remind them when you cut off the tail of a peacock, they’re just an ugly chicken like everybody else.” Remind them to put the tail down every once in a while, and just be a human being; be one of the crowd. .. They are convinced you’ll be disappointed if they’re ordinary; you won’t care about ‘em anymore. “The only possible reason you would like me … is because I’m manufacturing success for you. The day I’m not .. you’re gonna drop me.” That’s what they fear. Not to tie this up with parents, but very often, Threes did have one parent whose love was very conditional; almost without exception. One parent who they learned very early … “I gotta perform for (them).” That is so deep inside of them; Threes have a hard and long conversion. They’ll keep going back to where they’re fed. They do in an especially strong way. So you get the sense of the double compulsion of the center point. That person is doubly trapped; his Two, his Four are both heart. They have to work to get “head”; to be rational and logical. They get jerked around by their feelings. They think, because a person likes them, that that person will also be effective, a hard worker, productive; that’s all projection from their side. They go through life being disappointed a lot. “Gosh, she hugged me; I thought she could be president of the corporation.” Their heart gives them the wrong signals. They project onto people that respond positively to them personally; they project all kinds of qualities that they later find are not there. Threes do need good spiritual directors or spouses, to help them clarify their heart world, their emotional world. .
My first book, Discovering the Enneagram; my co-writer’s a Two. So in that book, the Two was the strongest chapter. Two with a strong Three-wing. He said, Richard, I’m at the point where I don’t ever believe my first feeling. It’s always off! You’d think of these as the feeling people—ha! Unless the Two or Three can pull back from this first feeling, this dance of who loves me—get out of that dance, alright? You’ll never find objective truth there, and you’ll get hurt and again and again. On the personal or public level. The virtue is Integrity; and the sin is Deceit. This deceit being the not-telling open lies, but rather presenting an attractive self; a self that is other than the whole truth. Alright, with that, we’ll dive into the Four. the last heart space.
Q: Country? The United States?
A; And Isreal! If it’ll help understand why this Jewish-American thing can’t be broken, ‘cause we’re the same. They can’t see our dark side; and we certainly can’t see theirs. Because, we’re the same. No, not Germany. Wait for Germany!
Four. We’re still in the heart space. It’s the conflicted heart. They have all these
Q: (Joe)
Not only do they feel these emotions but they find a creative way to distill them and get in touch with them. It’s through the word … or an art form. It pulls together their complex, subtle and emotional life. In a way that, literally, they can get a handle on it. In art museums, they’re breathy with excitement. Beauty, for them, is like a religious experience. The world will be saved by beauty! The Four believes that in their gut. The exact flip of that is also true. Fours are maudlin; Fours are dark—that’s a form of beauty for them! Fours are moody; they’re suicidal in the worst sense. They love to talk about death and darkness; film noir in France. Can France make a happy movie? They are attracted by the dark side; they really are. So much so, that even when something good happens to them, they’ll turn it into a tragedy. They love the tragic, while saying they don’t. They love to have had a tragic childhood; they’ll make it much more tragic than it was. The tragic gives them energy! So they naturally wrap themselves around it. A guy in the seminary with me, classic Four. He would disappear for a few days, in his room, all holed up. The formation directors would knock on his door; he’d say he was sick or something. He’d appear after three days; he’d written an Overture, or something, each time. Immense creativity! But basically, he was depressed for three days. Deep, dark depression. They just love to be depressed! They would swear they don’t love to be depressed. But they do—they need it. “It gets me my energy.” They know their best creativity comes out of suffering. So many artists live in the poor part of town, in a little apartment. It would drive most of us crazy. They’ll milk that for all it’s worth—how poor they were. They know how to milk the suffering, and make it into art. They will often destroy relationships! Fours can be very difficult to be in relationship with. They’re not easy to raise, I’m told, either. Everything is primadonna performance. This is the center of the world! The need is the need to be special. They are rather creative special people. But they’re attached, addicted to it; trying too hard. So a lot of people don’t like them. All the heart space people make enemies for three reasons: 1) the hysteria of the Two in reaction; 2) the manipulativeness of the Three; and 3) the eccentricity and the tragedy of the Four. They love black; I see a few people here in black. Black is the tragic color, but it’s also the color of dignity. If at all possible, they’ll wear a mauve scarf over the black outfit. Mauve, whatever that exact color is—I’m sure the Fours could tell me—I don’t know why they’re attracted to it. People don’t normally dress in purple and red; they do. In some ways, they’re easy to spot. They refuse to be one of the hoi polloi. They refuse to be one of the crowd. Sitting at a table, they will try to sit apart and separate; they will pull their chair back. They feel they lose their energy, if they’re like everybody else. “It’s like death, to sit here just in a white T-shirt.” To be sitting like everybody else. They have to make their statement in the way they sit, in what they’re wearing. You might as well learn to love them for it. They’ll naturally see the different way to do everything. Which is why their art never ceases. They will not fall into any kind of conformity. … It reached an eccentric explosion in the hippy movement; the Four energy took over America. It was counter-cultural; they often are. We’re debating so much about the homosexual issue these days; they' have no trouble understanding it. They’re naturally androgynous. They just seem to get it; it’s their natural space they move in. It might not be acted out in a genital way (they may be heterosexual). That’s the nature of their soul—they’re male-female! Many people confuse gay people with Fours, and they’re not the same. It’s that same integration of male and female, that the gay person has. They’re two different things. They like a kind of smooth rigidity. They don’t want to admit that there is a rigidity. They’re perfectionists just like we Ones are. Ones and Fours understand one another; the One takes it in a moralistic direction; the Four takes it in an aesthetic direction. Once it feels right to them, you better not tamper with it. … … They’re a strange combination of being very rigid people … aesthetically! The arrangement of a room is important; you’d better not go in there and move that sofa! They understand feng shui naturally. And they’re usually right; but that word “right,” that becomes their rigidity. They can be demanding about it. … They’re natural snobs, just like the Five. They work for a studied casualness. They’ve worked all morning, to try to look like they just through this on. … What they put together will usually look pretty good; they do have elite standards. The ordinary is what they avoid. The ordinary is boring to them. They can’t find any energy there. Why would someone want to be like everybody else? So, their conversion comes precisely when they can eat the ordinary. When they can sit in the circle like everybody else! And wear a white T-shirt that isn’t shocking or showy, and not say something that’ll make everybody notice them. When Fours can start doing that, you know they’ve broken through … They’ll still be creative people, but they’re not forcing it on you. Not forcing you to notice them all the time, by their prima donna status. You’ll see this in its art form … in Japan. They work so hard at studied casualness. Their yards, their houses, all of it is worked at! I remember walking on the edge of Tokyo, where they had rock gardens, where they actually sell rocks, in all kinds of shapes. The Japanese on a Sunday afternoon, are walking around the rocks; finding the meaning to the perfect rock, to be hauled to sit in their yard in the perfect place. And then banzai; arranging the tree, it takes great care and many years, to get the tree to look natural. But it’s totally artificial! That’s the Four! … And they hate artificiality; they despise it in themselves. Their life is a search for authenticity … they want it desperately. It’s their Three-wing … Looking for the right word, the right symbol … Thomas Merton is the quintesential redeemed Four. Here it is 30 years since he’s been dead; you pick up his book, and it’s still right on. William Shakespeare, a redeemed Four. I’m going to read Sonnet 29 of Shakespeare—since the Fours will only listen to me … if I read poetry. … Sonnet 29 is almost a quintessential study of a Four.
Line 2: they love to be outcasts! … This whole thing is a study in: envy, self-pity, chosen sadness, the classic psychological type of the Four which is Manic Depression—and he loves it! All of it. The envy: “Featured like him, … with friends possessed. Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scopee …”. He’ll move all his suffering to this beautiful love statement; “Haply I think on thee.” Here’s the depressive going toward the manic: at the end he scorns to change his state with kings! He’s been able to suffer today and has been able to have ecstasy today. That’s all the Four needs. Give them some suffering … and then ecstasy—their ecstasy has to have some breaking some rules. Go outside the lines; something others will dismiss or look down upon. That’s why they understand homosexuality. You don’t understand the Four until you understand that energy. I’ve mentioned the countries: France and Japan. If you haven’t eaten in France, you haven’t eaten. How can people produce such delicious food? You can’t be a short-order cook in France, without, I was told, 1-3 years training making sauces and souffles. Food has got to be hautte cousine … Because, to be ordinary, would be to be like the English. Who wants to be like the English? That’s what they would clearly feel. French people only tend to vacation in former French colonies. Why would anybody want to come to the United States? Where everything’s so ordinary! So that’s their snobbishness; even though the rest of the world admires it, because their snobbishness is half-true.
The animal is the basset hound that walks around looking so sad all the time. And the mourning dove—the cooing and lamenting, about how tragic their life is, and how sad their day has been thus far.
Q: … related to the androgeny … most primitive cultures
A: You could go down that road. Whenever you put the male and female together in a person; then there comes with that an ability to read meanings and events better than most. This is true of the healthy Four. The unhealthy Four is an eccentric, neurotic narcissist. If you take that rich inner life, which they do have, and connect it outward, to the Three-wing, which is what Merton did, then you’ve got a productive Four, who’s not just special, but doing something with his specialness. The Four with the Five-wing … he or she does not know how to get out of himself. They become very narcissistic; they sit at home and paint, and stick the paintings in the back room. It has no social purpose.
Q: …
A: I have my own bias there, but I do believe that a certain degree of solitude; you see it in all the great world religions; you not only become more capable of it, but you have a greater need for it. Now the Five may hide there … I would say, a certain degree of social, healthy solitude. Not anti-social solitude, where you hate people … that’s not God-led solitude. Where you really know you have to live out of a larger truth than everybody else’s voices, and the need to talk. That’s necessary for everyone in the second half of life. Mostly can’t handle it in the first half of life. Any other questions? If you want to offer names like that (the previous person mentioned Frasier)
Q: Where does David fall?
I would think he’s a Three; you don’t become a hole-man … kings are masters, holding together a three-ring circus. He’s a warrior, a musician, a lover, and a king. Anyone who can hold that much together is either a One or a Three. The One does it in their head; the Three does it organizationally.
Q: …
The Seven and the Three find it hardest to be alone; if the truth were to be known, the Two does too. The Two needs it to break their codependency pattern. The Three needs it to find out who they really are. The Seven needs it to stop being an airhead.
Q: .. Do they deceive themselves …
Yes, in that, they’d be similar to the Two. Deny their own needs; when remember, all three of the heart peoples are very needy, emotionally. For emotional response.
Q: …
Yes, that would be the tragic flaw of the Three. Denying their own failure; their own weaknesses. It’s crucial the Three have one truth-speaker in their own life.
Q: Van Gogh a classic Four
That’s right. Yes, he’d be an idyllic, poster-child Four. Cutting off his ear … ooh, that’s tragic!
Q: Edgar Allen Poe
Of course, Poe! The dark side.
Q: Michealangelo
I would have said that; but some of the other teachers told me; they think he’s an Eight. The passion comes through … I can see why you’d say Four. It’s his passion, with his artistic skill … that you can’t resist looking at a Michaelangelo sculpture. The very fact that his art can make you so passionate, probably tells you that he had a very passionate energy.
Q: .musicians
I would think a lot of musicians would have to be Four, to have any sensitivity. Now Mozart’s a Seven; you can feel it in his music. It’s all over the place.
Q: Goerthe
Oh Goerthe, of course. He would be the German Four. … Leonardo da Vinci; I would think Four. Off the top of my head. But this is the only way we could get it … Sorry we didn’t do it more earlier …
Part 3/4
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We go from the heart space to the head space! Even though I hope you see as I go that these are melding into one another; there is an interlapping. And in fact, if you look at the classic diagram of the Enneagram; the biggest space in the Enneagram is right here, between the Four and the Five. That was intentional; the reason being, if you can bridge that gap, between head and heart—that person is creative, holistic … again I speak to Thomas Merton; his books speak to your heart and your head simultaneously. To be fully in your heart and fully in your head, have them not cancel one another. Good intellectual work, and good emotional work—with the two goods feeding on each other. Let’s pretend we’ve jumped over that gap; we’re in the Five space. This is the pure, obvious compulsion, remember that? So, in a certain sense, the Five looks the most heady of all the three head types. Externally, they tend to be absent-minded professors. They live their whole life behind poker eyes, with compulsive observation of the data. Always taking in the data; they can’t get enough! There’s always more that can be known, another book that can be read .. They all have glasses! Their energy is all in the eyes. They are watchers by definition. Their eyes are like vacuum cleaners. Any kind of ideology, explanation … they love the encyclopedia. Doesn’t mean they’re all intellectuals; some may just do it as an exercise. They like to sit in the back. They want to control the energy, and control themselves. … In the back of the room, they won’t be observed, but they can observe. That’s what they like! They’re very stingy. … they’re emotionally stingy; stingy with any stories about themselves, … though they always want to know everything about you. They want to gather information. On level of soul, it’s as if, there’s too much heat in the kitchen … “I’m leaving.” Where do they go? Into their head. … When I was younger … the Fives would always try to get the room on the third floor in the corner. They like to live alone; they’re natural hermits. They’re natural celibates, probably for the wrong reason. Sexual engagement is too emotional, too engaging. They don’t have a strong need for it. “I’d rather maintain myself, maintain my boundaries.” They overdo it with their boundaries. The animal is the owl, therefore. The Barn owl … you hang out in the barn for an hour, the owl will come out. They love to watch. They love to come up with universal theories. Their philosophers: St. Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure Hegel, Heidegger … how else would you come up with a great big universal explanation (Aristotle) unless you were a Five? … So, i don’t have to emotionally engage with people, or with life, or with naked bodies. I’ll just think (or plan, or organize) my way through life. They sever the connections as much as they can. That’s why they can become real loners, and even dangerous people, if they don’t have some healthy community or relationship in their life. They need some community to add as a check on them. … Sometimes when they start telling you their theories, you can’t shut ‘em up. “Okay, we got it—you can be quiet now” They go on and on and on … they’ve been living inside of this head; they’ve constructed this huge theory; you’ve got to be subjected to the whole thing. They’ve cut themselves off from human relationship. Unlike most others, they don’t know how to read your eyes to know when you’re bored with them. These are classic college professors, who are given this permission to stand behind a pulpit and just talk to you ad nauseum. … Fives, forgive me, can be very boring. Because they’ve had no reality check for the meaningfulness or helpfulness of their ideas. It’s all inside of their own little control tower, bouncing back andd forth … He’s brilliant in some ways, but stupid in other ways—unless he connects with his Four wing. Then, you can have the brilliant professor … who has the information, and can tell when it’s getting through to you … The Five is the typical boring professor. Has nothing to say; but sometimes does have something to say; but you have to wait around for second semester before you’ll hear it. Whole first semester, he’s talking around it, and around it … until, finally he himself understands his own point.
Q: He’s having a conversation with himself.
It’s an internal monologue, and you’re subjected to it. … He does find great energy on his inner ideas. I don’t want to say the person is narcissistic or selfish … But it often feels like a monologue, not a dialogue. Stingy for information. They love books. A woman Five said to be in a library is like a sexual orgasm. “To have books all around me.” That’s true for Fives. They love their books/ideas. They don’t attempt to spend a lot of money on themselves. Their favorite phrase is “interesting.” Now, interesting is a noncomittal statement. Good interesting or bad interesting? You might retort. One of the great difficulties of the Five is making commitments. They’re so withheld; a commitment is a certain degree of emotional engagement with the other. They don’t want to engage with your ideas, or relationship. But on the positive side, if you want a good, objective counselor, get a Five …. If you want power behind the throne, someone who can calmly say, there’s this way of looking at it; and don’t worry about that too much … dang it, they’re usually right! Some say detachment is their sin, and detachment is their gift! The only number, you can use the same number for their sin and their gift. It’s a virtue when you need objectivity, calm … They love computers; they’re just addicted to computers now. They can live their whole life—instead of a wife, they have a computer! I can just relate to this, nonstop. I have to say, over the years, many of my best advisors have been Five. Especially in difficult situations where everybody’s taking sides, throwing around blame … The Five can very often see it objectively. In part, I’d say, because of their withheld-ness. The Five, I’m told, feels empty. The information is an endless attempt to fill up that inner emptiness. A great big hole, that will never be filled. That’s their primordial soul experience. They don’t have a great need for personal feedback .. They are the quintessential head space … They can do without people the most. I’ve probably met more Two-Five marriages than I would have ever expected. A classic example of marrying your exact opposite. The two is the compulsive giver; the Five the compulsive taker. You can see, when they’re both nineteen, and they don’t have much self-knowledge yet, there’s a natural attraction. Let’s make him the Five; he appears masculine, grounded, calm, collected. She’s bubbly, emotional, lovey-dovey, kissy-friendly. That’s the usual pattern I find. It works for about three years. Of course all marriages then face the shadow at a certain point. The Five starts wondering—when are you going to let me just stay at home; I don’t want to go to all these parties. She starts resenting him because he is staying home all the time. I don’t know why God lets us make all these mistakes … Now the country I gave, I don’t know that it’s the best, I used Scotland. Our image of the stingy Scotsman, and the aloof Anglo-Saxon gentleman, it’s probably a bit of both of those. I would just say the UK, the English and the Scots; that stiff upper lip stuff we make fun of amongst the English; the intellectual snobbery, the superiority complex; that pretty much is our stereotype of the English. An image of reserve; always staying back from.
The Five, Six, and Seven all have a first response to reality to back away from. To pull back, find my own ground, find my own understanding and perhaps re-enter. Far too often, they stay in the withdrawn position. Especially the Five; they’re classic avoiders. Buddhism comes out of the Five space; it makes an art form out of observation and detachment. … The image of the crucified Jesus, that comes much more from the Two space. (/And the Sufis did call Jesus a Two.) What they saw was the great perfect lover, who loved sacrificially for the right reasons. … When they find the freedom to give it out, before they’ve taken it in, instead of collecting energy, to once in a while take a risk and give energy before they take it from you, then you know they’re growing up. When they can get involved in various forms of volunteerism. Wouldn’t you know, one Five I knew became a massage therapist. She totally moved against her compulsion, and is a very healthy spiritual director today. That would not be her natural mode, to be massaging other people’s bodies. … That took a major giving, a major risk-taking, a major moving-against the withholding and collecting instinct. There are unhealthy Fives you’re around; you actually feel like you’re being sucked on. I don’t mean sexually; like they’re taking your energy. I’m worn out, I’ve just being in the room with them for 15 minutes. They’re always wanting! I’m supposed to be the knowledgeable person; and so they’ll always want more of my knowledge, more of my facts. They’ll come with one question, two, three … four questions. They’ll get you with their questions. If you try the English and the Scotch, you’ll get a partial feel for it. The burrowing fox is another animal; that spends much of his day inside of the burrow, and just comes and looks out, and sees if there’s any risk, or any threat. If no emotional risk or threat, maybe I’ll come out. Some say the Five lives their entire life behind a lone-way mirror; in which they can look out, but won’t let you look back at them. If you say the word “share,” they head for the exit. They hate to share, especially if it deals with feelings. … Touching is not their thing; they’re not real tactile people. They’re the objective people that ground the flights of fancy and emotion a lot of the rest of us get lost in.
With that, the Six. I told you earlier, this is by far the biggest type. Many would say, it’s actually 50 percent of the human race. What creates that? An insecure childhood? The insecure world—is that why so many people are filled with fear …. It’s also the type that we divide into two major types. They will feel very different. There is the Phobic Six; that animal is the mouse, or the deer. It runs … as soon as there’s danger. Then there’s the Counter-Phobic Six; which would be Adolf Hitler, who pretend they’re not afraid; you can normally see it in their eyes. They’re scared to death of reality. And so what they decide to do is move totally into it and take absolute control of it, but it’s all out of fear. The Counter-phobic Six is often mistaken for an Eight. But they’re in fact very dangerous people … because they try to disguise their fear with bravado and false self-assurance, and “I know, I can do, I’m not gonna let anybody hurt me.” I’m not gonna let anybody get at me. Without healing, all of us are dangerous people—but especially of the Counter Phobic Six; it’s a smaller portion of the Sixes. But they’re the psychopathic, sociopathic personality in their worst form; these are the people who go in post offices and shoot everybody in sight. Very fear-based people! Who don’t for a minute admit that they’re afraid. And deny their fear to themselves; audre cantra, we said in Latin—they act against their fear to hide it from themselves, and do very destructive things. They’re very attracted to the military, to guns, to militarism. These two boys at Columbine, I betcha anything they were Sixes. Counter-phobic Sixes. They’re just fascinated by any talk of Nazism and skinhead worldviews. They focus the danger on some particular race, or some particular gender. … who kill women. The Counter-Phobic Six is a classic skapegoater. To control their constant anxiety—and know that the Six does have constant anxiety—they will find something to hold that anxiety. They are the bad people. They are evil; I am good. I am doing a good thing for the world by eliminating them. Inside of their mind, remember they’re all in their heads! There’s no corrective possible; no way you can get in; it’s all a self-validating system inside of their own brain. Notice how many of these mass killers or loner, who live in a little cabin somewhere, and just justify their entire world-view. … It’s the Five come to a very sick, paranoid level. If you want the description description of the Six, Psychologically, it is the paranoid type, who sees danger everywhere.
Now, the much more common form, thank god, is the Phobic Six. I am sure there’s a lot of you in this room. Lovely people. Naturally humble; naturally teachable and loyal. If you’re married to a Six, my sister is. She always says, “I’m so glad I’m married to six; he says you should be, I’ll be loyal forever.” Sixes are faithful, loyal friends and partners. once they decide to trust you, you’ve got a friend for life. Everyone else can turn against you; but if they’ve decided to be your friend, they’ll be your friend. They will stick with you, even when other people might say bad things about you. The loyalty comes from a deep, deep place. …But, to be honest, it also comes from a place of fear. This is hard for them to recognize—that the world is a scary place, and the aligning of self with another person, or a strong person, or institution, or country, is a strategy to overcome that fear. Especially religion and military, they are attracted to. It’s no surprise, on the front of churches, it says, “For God and Fatherland.” The two go together, in the Six’s mind. Those are the ultimate security systems; my country will always protect me, and my God will always protect me. Not the other people, just my religion. …. That’s the delusion, that his or her fears lead her to. They often can avoid their own delinquency and darkness by seeing it over there, and fighting it … over there .. (25:00) They love to think of themselves as orthodox, true in the best sense of the term. It can also be the worst sense of the term; where my conservatism is nothing but self-security, protecting myself. The country is Germany. My book first came out in Germany; I remember the first trip I went over there after the book had come out. I thought, these Germans are not gonna like being called Sixes. I’ve never had a single German disagree with me. They say, that is our country. You don’t understand the German type … unless you understand, the dominant, all-pervasive nature of fear. … The German philosophers, with final explanations for everything. The Final Explanation, the very phrase Hitler used … is a search in the security-seeking mind. They can’t deal with ambiguity … all-pervasive insecurity. In the German, it has taken on the stereotype many of us have of the German people. I’m German by background. The achtung, this is the way it is, no discussion—you’ve got to know, it’s a front, it’s a cover, don’t believe it! This book is now in every fourth house in all of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I think that’s the reason it sold so big. The German people are trying to find a way out of, why do they keep doing this? The world wars, the skinhead. The Six gave them a way to understand that; and I would like to believe, gave them a way out of it. “We are fear-based people,” and that leads us to this idolization of militarism, and idolization of religion …. We’ve got the answer; the Reformation began in germany. Luther did have an answer, but then it goes to absolutism, and then we’ve got the same problem all over again. It creates dictators, tyrants who demand absolute loyalty. Sixes don’t like, in their unhealthy state, to look at you eyeball to eyeball, because they know you’ll see their fear. I can see it in George Bush’s eyes very easily; I believe he’s a Six. … As his father was! Very interesting. If you look at George—gosh, he’s trying so hard. He wants to speak with authority, but the natural authority is not there. You can hardly believe it—that he really believes it. That’s Six energy—tremendous self-doubt inside of him, and overcoming of it by bravado. I basically think he’s a phobic Six. … Some of it is counter-phobic, with willingness to kill, capital punishment in Texas … They say somewhat unkindly, Sixes are either at your feet, or they’re at your throat. I know, over the years, the Catholic church tends to gather an awful lot of Sixes. Because I don’t always say things in the way Catholics are used to, after mass I have a lot of Sixes attack me. They’re at my throat; they just want to kill me, because, talking this way utterly undercuts their security system. My spiritual director who taught me the Enneagram; he said Richard, you want to know why you became a priest? One reason is to change the Sixes, who’ve controlled the priesthood for too long. … The Six is all into conformity, the laws, legalism, ritualism. We Ones only believe the law as long as it works. We’re like Threes in that way …
What else can I say about the Six? Some people say to give a childhood explanation; that they didn’t have reliable authority as a child. I think we’re probably producing more Sixes than ever, when I see the rise in fundamentalism. There is the psychic need for something solid, authoritative, certain. Is it any surprise that the religions that are growing are the religions with absolutes? The only communities growing are not Franciscans … they’re very conservative groups with absolute immediate answers to everything. That appeals to young men under 25; and also, to the Six. They said if the Catholic church keeps going the way it’s going, the only people left in it will be Sixes. … Not people for a journey, a journey of faith, which demands not knowing! Not being certain. You have to be able to hold a certain amount of ambiguity, to be a person of faith. And we’re not teaching that at all! … I can’t hate ‘em for it; but they have this tremendous need for absolutes. An extraordinary amount of young Sixes are becoming priests. What that means for us … I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to fit in! I don’t have the need for all of that, because I had it once. I had a reliable authority structure for my mom and my dad; it gave me psychic groundedness … Most people, when they don’t know who they are, are attracted to the Six kind of stuff, even when they’re not Sixes. Maybe that’s why, it appears that half the world are Sixes. In the Muslim world, the Jewish world, and the Christian world, people are demanding absolute clarity, absolute black-and-whites. This does not bode well for our worldview. This, for me, is one of the strongest examples of the political implications of this teaching. If we can expose some of these demons, these lies, maybe we’re gonna unfreeze a lot of frozen people.
Animal?
Rabbit, or deer, or mouse. The counter-phobic animal is the rhinoceros. Apparently when they’re afraid, they charge into you.
Conversion experience?
There’s a number of them; that’s probably why I didn’t get into it. First of all, they have to find an authority they can trust. You know, I would still say that for all nine types, the only way out is an authentic god experience. But I’m gonna say that very strongly for the Six. If the Six meets the god who is their rock, their fortress, their deliverer …and I mean that on the experiential level … I know there’s someone holding me, believing in me, who loves me, who is more me than I am myself. That’s the quickest way out for the Six. … These become the Oscar Romeros, the patron saint of the Sixes. … the bishop of El Salvador. Read his early letters and writings; he was a fragile, insecure, scared little priest who wanted to follow all the rules; and that got him promoted as primary bishop in El Salvador. Weeks into his tenure; one of his major priests was shot; that was a conversion experience for him; he fell into the hands of the living God … his sermons are some of the most courageous you could possibly imagine. A tragedy like that can do it, too; it makes you find your one absolute that you can rely upon, so you will stop relying upon outer authorities, and you will begin to rely upon inner authority. That’s the big movement … We Catholics have been warned against that. “Don’t trust yourselves; trust the priests and the Pope.” That does not help anything. It doesn’t help the coming of the Gospel. At a certain level in your life, brothers and sisters, that’s all you’re gonna have. If you haven’t learned to go to a solid place where you know it’s not just you, but it’s God in you, and you in God, and I’ve got to do it now and pay the price for it; that’s where you finally get the meaning of faith. It’ll feel like breaking the rules: “My god, this is dangeorus.” The example of this bishop in Austria. Nobody supported him; not his family, not his town. We now have a room named after him. This Austrian layman said, I cannot do it, it is wrong. Can you imagine the fear? His wife, she knows the Enneagram; she said—he’s a Six. He found his place of truth in God; even the bishops couldn’t convince him he was wrong.
I’m a Six; I heard you use clarity as synonymous with certainty. For me, there’s a difference … I’m seeing also, I see many types such as Eight and One … … As a Six, it’s very much the nuances, the greys; it may be the insecurity that drives that. But to me, I’m not Black and White as a Six …
You’re coming across as a very healthy Six. That is a healthy Six! I think that’s an excellent distinction. The One and the Eight are much more inclined to black-and-white thinking. If a Six aligns itself with an authority … then it can find black-and-white thinking …
Do Sixes choose phobic Sixes as their leaders? Somebody like Rush Limbaugh … is he a phobic Six, or a … manipulating Sixes
I think Rush Limbaugh’s an Eight. Remember, you see your own fault in other people. Sixes are not that trusting of other Sixes; they see through it. They know that person is afraid
So why did Hitler rise in Germany? It sounds like he scared German people
Counter-phobic Six, yeah. I’m not sure.
what positives in Sixes?
Loyalty and courage. They are very loyal in what they believe in, to their friends … Also … they’re the most humble. The rest of us are so damn sure of ourselves. They have this healthy self-doubt. You wish other people were that way! I know they take it to a toxic degree and subvert themselves. … Humility, comes from healthy self-doubt.
You said something around lack of commitment?
That was in the Five. The Five is afraid of commitment. The Six will be very committed; sometimes too committed.
For me, the Six would be security; the Five would be knowledge
I agree. Yes.
falls into substance abuse?
There are several who are most inclined toward addiction. The Nine, because they can’t get their energy; they think drugs or alcohol will do it. The Two, because the Two is trying to feed him or herself from outside, by other people’s inputs, literally, their food or drink that they give us. The Twos joke about their love of chocolate, very often. But food in general becomes a medication for the Two. This will fill up my need for love. This food, this drink, these drugs, this alcohol. And the Seven, because they overdo everything, which we’ll get to in a minute. The Eight, I wouldn’t say is especially inclined toward it.
Judy: Is their a number Sixes are good with? … My request for outer authority here …
Most common thing I find is the original triangle of Threes, Six, and Nine; those types move between each other, and counter-balance one another. So … Please don’t take that as absolute.
Bob: .. China?
Some people have said Three for China, too. I don’t know the exact energy.
I was thinking Six
Well, there’s a Three-Six-Nine movement. It might be Six. And moving toward the Three … Might be true. Any other questions on those two?
You mentioned the Four moving to Five …
The Four being balanced by the Five-wing and vice versa. We’ll get to the wings, still, this afternoon. (46:30)
And now with the Seven type, which is the conflicted Head type; you might say the Disguised Head type; doesn’t look like the head at all. You might say the need with the Seven is the need to avoid pain. They have an immediate set of ways to run from it and to avoid it; and they’ve created a rather clever way to do it—classic denial. They’re masters of denial. “I will not admit on or participate in the dark side of anything.” I will pretend that everything is beautiful. I will keep smiling … That’s their gift; that’s why we all love ‘em. A Seven comes so easy to a Seven’s mouth. A One has to work to smile; not a Seven! Their eyes invariably sparkle—invariably! They’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about everything. Their eyes are formed to see what’s up; what’s hopeful, what’s possible. They’re natural optimists; they can’t help it! What gets ‘em into trouble, and what will usually be their wound, is something that was dark, in their life, that they just refuse to deal with. Procrastinating, avoiding—my son isn’t on drugs. They’ve got this idyllic notion about what their family is. By the time they own it, he’s two years in to total addiciton. They will not see the dark side; they will insist. everything is beautiful. In the ‘70s it took the form of the charismatic movement in the Catholic church. Everybody praising Jesus, smiles on everybody’s faces. You couldn’t hate it; aren’t these happy people? It even invaded the Catholic church; we allowed this kind of freedom, this kind of joy. But there was never a talk about the dark side of things. The justice issues, the poor, the minorities—anybody outside our little circle of happy Christians. They want to make everything pretty (it becomes their downfall). They aren’t good at dealing with the down side of anything. But, they do keep us up. They love adventures; they love to create adventures, to collect maps and travel schedules. I know one who reads Southwest Airline schedules. .. Gosh, there’s eight flights a day between Houston and Dallas! They’re amazing; anything to do with travel. Or going to a different place than here. Because here is always painful; always boring, inadequate, and insufficient. … When they get there, it’s a disappointment too! You see why they’re the classic glutton. “I’m on the beach in Waikiki, and I’m supposed to be happy.” More and more; what they’ll admit to you in moments of greater honesty, is that none of it makes you happy. … Their philosophy of life is that more is better. … They really do believe that, almost to gut level. They’re great friends to have, in terms of taking you on their adventures. They will feel that superficiality you can sometimes feel in Threes. … No ability to talk about anything in real, anything in depth, or go beyond the planning of another adventure. They’re often called ego-plan. Planning is an art form for them. They’re futurists; all of their life is out in front of them. When it becomes the present, it’s always boring, insufficient. Finally, you’re not happy. It’s especially dangerous for people who are wealthy, frankly. Poor people, when they’re Sevens, it becomes a survival. They live in the barrio, “but I’m gonna be happy.” So you see these smiling, happy little poor people. The Philippines is a Seven country. Everybody’s smiling, all the time. They don’t have much ability to deal with tremendous injustice; because they keep forgiving it, and making the best of it! They could have Marcos dictator as their president; they even forgive him. They refuse to face his dark side! He’s ripping you off! Don’t you realize? Oh, but he’s nice, he’s okay. Well, you know … Brazil would be another Seven country. I was there a year ago. Life exists for singing and dancing! It’s the most sexualized country I’ve ever been to … But you can tell, they’re living at that level, that excitement, fun, adventure, joy … If it’s fun, it’s good. For the Three, if it works, it’s good. For the Seven, if it’s fun, it’s good. In the poor of the world, it’s a beautiful thing. When it becomes this seeking of endless, endless luxury, and more elaborate everything—is what’s happened to the Seven in our country. We used to say they all want to be buried in Disneyland. They like primary colors. Sevens don’t tend to come to Enneagram workshops! This is too heavy; this is hard work today. … To sit and listen to a speaker all day; it’s the smallest percentage of people that come to Enneagram workshops. They don’t like to do inner work. They like to do fun things! They like orange and yellow. Yellow cars, orange shirts. .. sort of exciting! Turns ‘em on! Go to Brazil; everybody dressed in flamboyant colors. The Mexicans have a little bit of it … That ability to smile through your tears. Some of your friends who are Seven, you learn to watch their face. You’re gonna see that their mouth is smiling, but there’s fear and anxiety in their eyes. … Whistling in the dark, thing. They’re pretending it’s okay, but at a deeper level, they know it isn’t. I just can’t face that! IT is too much … When they recognize that their whole life journey has been characterized by running from pain, that’s a major conversion. Usually it means the facing of a pain they cannot avoid. … true for all of us. There’s no way to get around it. I remember when my father, a working German farmer. … I went home for his retirement at 65, and he had never missed a day of work … Santa Fe railroad. He was a Seven, always happy and positive. When he had to come home, and knew he wasn’t going to have any work to do the next day … he just sobbed. He couldn’t imagine that he was of any value … His great pain; not being able to work. His era, the Depression, that was your form of overcoming pain, and being able to survive. “What good will I be anymore?” When Sevens really do finally have to face their pain, they don’t know how to do it. They don’t have a clue! … to hold it, in some ways. Much of their lives, they’ve kept it at a distance. Now children love a parent who’s a Seven. They can immediately be children, even when they’re 60! I don’t know how to be a child! Ones are heavy. Sevens are light! Children adore their Seven parents. They’ve got a children’s heart, and a children’s eye. The eternal girl; the eternal boy. They actually—you see it in the Philippines—they don’t look as old as they really are! You’ll be surprised; she’s only 45! She’s 60, but she looks 45. Shows again that unit, between our body self. The sparkling eyes, the smile, helps them look younger … Their animals are the butterfly; if you ever have a Seven working for you, they can’t stay at their desk longer than three minutes. They can’t stay with anything, any methodical work. They’ve just decided, we have to buy something at K-Mart. Just jumping around from here to there; tasting the nectar of this, always looking for new adventure. Also, otters. The otters out at Monterey; they just play all day, glide around, they look up at you and pat their tummies. They’re fun animals. Monkeys are much the same. They would come right to my window. Play is a way of life for the monkey; there’s no other goal beyond that! Now who of us wouldn’t like a monkey, an otter, or a butterfly. But, you do get tired of it. If you want them to do some methodical work, or deal with their son on drugs—and at that point, you just pull out your hair, and just want to say, “Get serious! Settle down!” It’s not forced on us, that dealing with pain; and that’s why we produce so many addicts, or obese people, who are Sevens. They have not learned how to say no to themselves. No is unacceptable. Yes is always good. That just isn’t true, and it gets them into a lot of trouble. That inability to say no to themselves. If it has fun written on it, it’s impossible for them not to do it. … I’m convinced my father, St. Francis, was a Seven. If you go to Franciscan Italy, he only goes to beautiful places to pray. Dancing through the forest … singing, that’s why he was so likable. They’re likable people! Fun to vacation with, be with! They make the best of everything; they always up the energy. Now, can you see why Francis emphasized pain, and why his body, is finally even imprinted with the stigmata? It’s absolute going against his natural instinct. He admitted after the end of his life, he overdid it. .. He knew, as every … gormand does … left to myself, it’ll just be sex, and drugs, and rock-and-roll. “I’d have sex all day, if I could get away with it.” If he doesn’t limit those pleasure expectations, it will destroy him. It will take away the true joy. … Francis pushed all the way through to spiritual joy. He’s known as the joyful saint, the joyful beggar. Right before his conversion in the oldest biography, he’s called the King of the party-goers; he’s a wild young man! And, another thing I should tell you about Sevens—They love infinite horizons! They love to stand on mountain tops; to climb up a telephone poll and look down on the whole area. Whenever there’s an infinite horizon, the Seven just get juiced! It’s the desire of their soul: infinite horizons, possibilities. … When you take that from them, they can be hard and cruel … Francis, he describes his conversion. He says, at one point, he’s standing in the back yard, looking at the stars … He says, If these are the creatures, what must the creator be like! That becomes his breakthrough, to the spiritual search. So, life is a banquet to be devoured for the Seven. But in some ways, they can’t really get into the banquet, because they’re always planning it; always planning a better one, always in the future. They love to throw parties, to tell stories. They can be con men, historians, travel agents, tour guides, map makers—anything that visualizes movement away from here. Right after having this most-positive … we’ll flip into what looks like the most opposite, the Eight.
If the Seven looks like the most positive of all types, the Eight would seem like the most negative of all types. Those people who have Seven with an Eight-wing or Eight with a Seven-wing … are really high-energy people. Fun, and obscene, at the same time. These are the people who drive the party world … just switch back and forth from wild, crazy obscenity, to wonderful, fun-loving juice-filled joy. Those are great people to have around; they’ll wear you out. The Eight is defined by oppositional energy. He or she gets his juice by opposing you or fighting you … … young man who kept coming up after each of my sessions … every time he had some big complaint or criticism, something that I didn’t say right. So … that evening, I asked … who’s that young man? What’s his problem? … Andreas said, “Oh, Michael? He has you on a pedestal; he thinks you’re the greatest thing since toasted bread.” … All he’s done is fight me all day! “He’s trying to get close to you!” He was hoping you'd invite him out for a drink tonight. That’s the strange thing of the Eight. … they’re afraid of direct intimacy, so they create indirect intimacy. They think, because they like a good fight, that you would too! They respect people that say bad words. They love it when you say them. Now you’re a man. Now I can take you seriously …I had a provincial, who was na Eight. I was trying to be a good little boy. I said yes father, thank you very much He said, “Oh, stop it Richard. I expect you to fight me.” I said, “Oh.” I didn’t even know how to do it. He didn’t want little goody-two shoes, saying yes father, yes father. That’s the way an Eight operates. They oppose you; they like it when you oppose them back. They’re really interesting; the other flip in the Eight, and I promise you this is true … inside of an Eight, there is the exact opposite. All that huffing, complaining, criticizing; inside of my mother was this gentle little girl. I’m sure she let my father see it. My sisters never got to see it. Very few people do. They will only show it to several people that are safe. … that exists in every eight. If you can speak beyond the huffy and puffy—they often appear downright cruel! Rude, obscene, unkind. Don’t be put off by that; know that there’s a little girl inside there, a little boy … When you’re not put off by that power, they finally respect your power. Power is everything to na Eight. They walk in the room, they immediately see, who has the power here. IN my conferences and talks, they will immediately take me on … they’ve got to show me up, say something that puts me down. I had to learn early; that’s going to happen to me a lot. It’s always Eights. You can’t take it personal. It’s real hard to do. It’s a way of engaging with you. It’s a way of seeing, are you going to spare with me!? IT’s almost a form of intimacy. The rest of us don’t get it. Ones operate out of the good-boy energy; they operate out of the bad-boy energy. They love to say, “fuck you.” They like that shocked look on your face. Now they know; are you going to bring me in, and let me talk honestly? They hate superficiality; they go right for the jugular vein in every conversation … My mom was a great cook; once we were at the table, she’d take off, usually on the Republicans. We’d be kicking her under the table, thinking, whispering, “Shut up, mother. You’re alienating everyone at the table.” Then she couldn’t understand why everyone would leave early. “Mother, you can’t talk that way.” “Well, I don’t know—why can’t people hear the truth?!” … They love their truth, which is always an exposing of the powers that be. My mother … she said, mom you want to go along with me? She said, I don’t go to confession … “Well I haven’t done anything wrong.” (Laughter) I mean it was that simple and clear. At her deathbed; I was so lucky; I said, “Mother, you’ve got to forgive daddy, for anything he might have done wrong; you’re going to die in a few days.” She said I know … But, ohh it was hard for her. Three days before she died, that she could finally ask him for forgiveness for anything she might have done wrong in their whole marriage. “Is there anything you need to forgive him for?” “Yes, he cut down my flowers with the lawn-mower.” They were fighting; he was trying to extend the lawn; she was trying to extend the flowers. That was the big reconciliation at her deathbed! She forgave him, but she had to wait till three days before she died. They don’t like being vulnerable; it’s very hard for them … to admit they’re wrong. To present a powerful persona. “I can do it,” is their motto. If the Four is an identification with feminine energy, the Eight is an identification with masculine energy (conceding those terms are culturally defined). The Eight likes to be hard. The Eight feels his or her energy through her hardness. They often don’t even feel or admit that they’re feeling physical pain. Their ability to endure pain … It’s very common for Eights; “I can walk with it, I’m not gonna complain about it.” They glory in their ability to take it. The Warrior archetype. Anything that’s pushing the self to the end; demanding more of the self. Archie Bunker was a likable Eight; he gave it a face and a form we could somehow handle. They love to use vulgarity. Not my mother; she never used them … but I’m sure she was thinking it inside. To avoid facing their own vulnerability, they will throw it back on you and attack you. It’s very hard for an Eight to go for an hour without being upset about something, without dismissing some foolish rule, or ridiculous custom. They see arrogance everywhere, and don’t realize they are themselves. The key is to remember the little boy, the little girl, that is as tender and sweet as can be; just the flip of what you’re normally going to relate to. You might never see it; they might not have the courage to show it to you. I promise you it’s there. Their gift is living life to the full. The author of Zorba the Great; he could write about Eights because he himself was an Eight. Tom Cruise can only play Threes because he is a Three. But the gift of the Eight is passion, pure and simple. If you learn to admire that passion and give it back to ‘em … You get in his circle or her circle of respect. What country? Spain, of course. La conquistadora … looking for things to conquer. It’s what the world loves in Spain and what we hate in Spain. The animal: the bull! Toro! The country that tries to kill the bull; they’re facing their own energy, their own arrogance—and killing it. The cockfight, the same thing. You can’t help but admire the Spanish, but it’s this love-hate relationship that most people have with Hispanic culture. They created this word “macho,” and the Eight is the macho man. It’s the love of machisimo, and relating through machisimo. The rest of the world seems not to respect it anymore; we’re so aware of its negative … Also the snake, and the tiger.
Opposition is true friendship … in Greece?
Wow, never heard that; thank you.
What about conversion?
They have to be forced to vulnerability. That’s why it’s so important they have to be married to some feminine, sweet, loving woman. Often they marry Twos. Twos are the only ones sweet enough to soften the aggressiveness that is in the Eight. Very often, Eight fathers and mothers … anything little, vulnerable … tender and cute. I’ve seen Eight men just weep over their children; because a child is no threat to their power. And calls forth their little-boy soul. Unless they meet—and learn to respect and protect—vulnerability .. I don’t think they’ll be converted. Mother Teresa. … Most of your great reformers and revolutionaries … Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, anybody who takes on Benito Juarez; these are all Eights. Larger than life people who take on the whole system. Who else would do it?! Mother Jones, pointing the finger at the whole American government.
Okay, the Nine. We’re back to Adam in the Garden. The sin is called laziness; it’s the lack of focused energy. Focus is the key word; they will spend all their lives trying to find their focus, and they can’t do it. At any key moment, that shock-wave coming at them … “I’m not going to feel it; it’s too much!” Everything is too much; I’m just checking out. And so, they spend their lives taking the path of least resistance. Their motto is why stand, if you can sit down? … Why not enjoy yourself? To the rest of us, they do appear lazy. They like to procrastinate; they seldom take initiative. They’re not initiating in relationships, in projects; they constantly need a fire lit under them. They very often connect with an institution or a structure or a schedule that will light that fire under them. I don’t know how to get myself up at 6 in the morning, unless I know I have to be at work at 7. Without a structured world, they will just float. So many alcholics in jail or on the street, are Nines. They don’t know how to structure; focus their life. They get pulled this way or that way. If they’re not in a good marriage, they literally meander through life. In every sense. Not knowing what priorities really are. I forgot to eat breakfast! If you have a child, you know you’ve got to take care of the child—it provides a focus. You leave ‘em without structure, and they self-destruct. They really get very little done; they don’t know how to initiate anything, they put off everything … they make molehills out of mountains. Even when there is a big issue, they don’t see it. Oh, okay. They’re real humble out of it … They’re numbed down; they’re called narcotized people, who don’t feel any feeling if it isn’t absolutely necessary to feel it. Because … life is too much. They take the full body blow of experience. For those of you who are Nines … just to walk out on the street: “What should I be doing? Is there something I’m missing? I bet I am!” So … I just won’t do anything; that’s sort of their whole philosophy of life. Life is too much, so let’s make ourselves comfortable while we’re here. So they role with the punches; that’s why you like ‘em as friends. They won’t force themselves; they’ll participate. They don’t think you’ll be interested in what they have to say. They think they’re not that important. You’re all going to say things more important than what I have to say. It’s beautiful their ego is so in size … but it’s sad because they really do allow themselves to be overlooked, not to be taken seriously, not to be included in the conversation …. You’ll bring it up with the group: “Oh, yeah. We didn’t ask Sharon what she thought.” Nines put out no energy. I have to tell them; “This is partially your fault … you don’t tell us to take in your energy, so we don’t include you.” They’re natural peacemakers; this is the heart of their gift, along with decisive action. They harmonize the very room; if you have a few Nines in the room, the energy will stay placid; it’s very lovely. They won’t let it go too far. One or two Nines on your staff; you can feel them at the meeting, harmonizing the conflicting energies with all the rest of us who are doing our thing, our little dance. It’s almost the peace of their body, refusing to be bothered by it all. “I will not let that (or you) destroy my day.” In that sense … they do hold their ground. Very often they’ll wait till the end of the conversation, when you finally notice (them). Sometimes (they’ll) come out with two sentences. I remember one Nine; we were going on for a three hour meeting, our goal, our vision statement, on and on. John waited, just observing it all, watching it all, no real emotion on his face. I asked him what he thought. he said, “I think ___ should be a community that doesn’t need to be important.” …. “Oh.” Everybody looked at him. It was the way out! It was the freedom space for all of us. We were all trying to make the community important. That was the end of the meeting; there was nothing more anybody could say! (Laughter) .. So simple at times …. it doesn’t let itself get cluttered; it keeps the ego out of the way. They’re naturally humble, they really are. But I gotta repeat, they can drive you crazy. They get very little done. What did you do all day? They seem to get very little done. … You can always help ‘em by giving them a clear set of priorities, a clear task. Once it’s clear, in terms of expectations and a timeline …
Country? I said it quickly; maybe it’s Sweden, I don’t know much about them. It’s all countries before they get developed. It’s everybody before they get sophisticated. … Everybody sitting around the fireplace, telling their stories. All I gotta do is eat, and sleep, and take care of the children. You find it all over the third world. … I was asked twice to teach (this) in India. I asked why, you’re such a wisdom culture, you’re so far ahead of us. They said we know everything about essence, but we don’t know about personality. What breaks down projects in India, is the way we hurt each other with our personality. We do that too, I said. But they said yeah but you don’t understand essence. The people of India; this 5,000, 6,000-year-old culture, people that know, on some level, who they are: a tremendous capacity to suffer. They insist they’re a Nine culture. I think it’s true. Their ability to wait, for hours, for a bus. I’m getting so impatient; they’re all sitting there. You see it in Mexico. Mexico, by the way, is 8.5. Mix macho with manana … Which makes them such an interesting culture. They’re so laid back, easy-going like the Nines. But then they want to attack things and change things, make things …. The animals would be the meandering elephant. What else? … The ostrich? I think we made that the Seven. The whale? Why is that a Nine? Redeemed? It comes up. Sort of floats through the ocean; once in a while, makes a little movement. The manatee; that would feel like a Nine, wouldn’t. Just sort of looks like he’s happy, floating there in the water.
Okay, you’ve got it! Now it means, processing all of this, for whatever time we’ve got left. Conversion for the Nine? I was saying it, but I didn’t tell you it was the conversion. It’s being taken seriously, and put inside of a structure where they see that they can be taken seriously, operate, and get things done. Then they start losing that paralyzed, impotent feeling about themselves … They’ve got to be put in that, where they can feel that they are a contributing member. And they will be! That’s why so many primal people understand community so well …. They don’t need to be the big cahuna; they’re quite happy to be Number Two, or Three … Just knowing they’re doing their part, is the gift.
Our structure now is … it’s 10 to 4 (the time). This break is supposed to be 15 minutes. Take a good long break; and the rest of the day will be filling in all the gaps. I still have to teach you the Wings.
Part 4/4
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Okay, let’s start integrating some of this. Now, if you’re trying to figure out where you lie on this; I’m just gonna give you some ways to understand that. I’m sure some of you see, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. That’s good! To see we all participate in all nine of these sins, compulsions, blindnesses. What you’re going to start doing … is recognizing there’s a concentration of some numbers, right next to one another. “Well, I see a lot of One in me, a lot of Two in me,” that kind of thing. You’re honing in to the area. What we’ve got to find is the middle point, and the two wings. You’ve heard us refer to that. I don’t know why it’s so clever; I don’t know why it works. I just know it’s true, that for some reason, the numbers on each side, you participate in. The center number is your primary compulsive blindness. Your primary way you perceive and get your energy. Therefore you think it’s your only self. If you remain trapped there, then without doubt, you’ll move toward the compulsive end of the spectrum. To fly .. you need to develop the numbers on each side. Normally … like I developed my Two wing as a young man. It was really only in my mid-40s, that I gave myself permission to be a Nine. I didn’t have to keep saving the world; I could just be a person, be ordinary, float through the day. Without the Nine wing, the One is a driven, not-so-pleasant … unpleasant person. … Not having to save the world; for me that’s salvation! But, left to myself, I can get all into my principles and my righteousness. Thank god, there’s a wing of me that does like and want to connect with people. I have a strong Two-wing, a need to be needed … It’s an essential part of me to soften that hard-edged One, that of himself is too hard, arrogant, idealistic. I’m gonna go around very quickly. If you’re a Two, god bless you, but you’re gonna get lost in co-dependency, if you don’t have some principles, which is your One-wing. So think of Two as “people,” think of One as “principles.” They need one another; the people people, the Two, need some principles that can satisfy them, so they don’t try to get all their energy from people. It’ll suffocate you! Some days, hey, I don’t need anybody around me; I’m carrying out my principle of recycling … Then, look at what you got; this is why loving Twos can be very effective; they’ve got their love on one side, and then their effectiveness. … some Twos will work with programs and policies … that really are working on the practical level.
Let’s call Three “practical.” There’s nothing wrong with being practical—allowing the rubber to hit the road; to change and improve this world for somebody’s life. Without it, the Two gets lost in romance novels and soap operas … I want to help people’s relationships with one another; that’s their Three Wing. .. The Three, left to themself; but thank God, s/he needs and likes people, and cares about them. That’s his/her Two-wing. What Threes often put off till second half of life, very common pattern, is the Four Wing. Because t’s going to slow them down. “I always wanted to paint,” for example. Very few Threes will lend themselves to that subtlety, that calmness, of doing something that isn’t gonna be any big shakes in the world, but you know what, it satisfies my soul, just to carve this wood. You’ve got to give the young man permission to develop their Four Wing, and not feel guilty about it; or not need to make a big industry out of it. “I”m just carving this wood for it to sit in my bedroom; they’re just beautiful for their own sake.” A balanced-out Three can do art for its own sake.
The Four, left to himself, can get lost in his art, or his special-ness … And so, as Merten did, here he is living as a Trappist monk in a hermitage. … all his books started getting published in 1948. He had effectiveness about him. He developed his Three-wing. … ON the Five side, that was his hermitage itself. He needed a high degree of solitude and apart-ness. That was his Five wing. That probably grounded the Four into some kind of death. ARtists often need a studio, a place where they can go to get quiet. The solitude is necessary for them … to think and study and pray, and be alone. You can’t take that from a Four, or even from a Four-wing That part of the self, inner creativity … composing, needs to be honored, which is The Five Wing of the Four is a need for solitude and study. Without that, frankly, they become superficial artists. If they don’t develop the solitude where they can process some of their suffering, their sadness. Read. … What to do to that thing when left by itself, is narcissism. Both wings lead them away from narcissism.
The Five, left to himself, is a curmudgeon, just into his own philosophies and theologies. The Four gives him emotional subtlety. Gives him right-brain to balance out his left-brain. Tremendous integration between the Four and the Five; it’s the merging of the two hemispheres of the brain. He needs it. The Five also has his Six wing. Why does he need that? Because The Five can get lost in theory; can become airheads and move toward the Seven, due to disconnected theory. You want to say to the Five, “So what?” You ever go to a metaphysical book store; and just open book after book. Does this person have any reality contact? Any connection with what’s happening with economics or politics or the culture? It’s just these fabricated world views of people who have had no reality contact. Well look at the Six wing? These are people tied to orthodoxy, conservatism … ground yourself in some good history! So you don’t just fabricate theories that are disconnected to any philosophy, psychology except your own. The un-critical Five will do that; will skip right over to the Seven and become mutual airheads; re-affirming one another’s theories. America is filled with this kind of thought today; people who’ve never disciplined themselves to get a good liberal arts education, and no that my thought is partially connected to somebody else who had a good brain; tied into tradition in the good sense. That’s the Six; they make an art form of tradition; conservatism … the past. Nothing wrong with that. I wouldn’t have the self-assurance to talk the way I talk, if I hadn’t been trained in very traditional … theology. I know I’m not outside the pail … if I couldn’t have validated this in the Scripture and tradition … If I thought this was just ___’s thing …
The Six, left to himself is lost in his theories and theologies. If he has to balance it with some good intellect of the Five; that’ll help him. And wouldn’t you know it? The Six, who is buried in cement, by loyalty to tradition and the past—he has a happy-butterfly Peter Pan wing. God knows they need it! Please encourage your Six friends to do some funny things, light things, loosen up a little bit! Conservatives in the Catholic church just can’t do that. The Seven makes an art form of laughing. Conservatives, usually trapped in the Six space, desperately need to have fun, loosen up, and laugh. Seven, left to himself and herself .. is nothing but fun! Flying off to newer and happier places. You’ll find this invariably in Sevens … They don’t talk about it much; but they’re actually very conservative and traditional. Remember the picture of the Buddha. One hand on the ground, and one hand open to infinity. If he doesn’t have one hand on the ground, tied to tradition in the past—be careful. The Six-wing is the lightning-rod connection for the Seven.
Wouldn’t you know it, Mr. Positive, Mr. Happy, has this Eight wing that needs to say “Fuck you!” You stop taking Sevens serious after a while, you really do. If once in a while they can get damn mad, and admit this needs clear-headed justice work—that’s what you want to see, in a healthy Seven. To flip from the positive to what appears to be the negative. The Eight … seems so oppositional; but can go out and enjoy a good party; go out and talk to children; remember Sevens can talk to children. Don’t trust anybody who’s heavy all the time. … I’m so heavy all the time. I joined the right order; the Franciscans; we don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s probably our problem! We’re glad to see the cookie jars are always Franciscans; the drinking monk is always a Franciscan. The Franciscan space is the Seven space, that once in a while flips into the Eight. Liberation theology comes much more out of the Eight. And no surprise, that it came out of the Spanish-speaking world! That’s its sin, but it’s also its gift. That passion for the poor, the little guy; that’s Eight at its best. And so, the Eight who has taken on the whole world … look at it, he has this little lazy, manana, Nine-wing. He can stop saving the world, and enjoy the day, and stop being so significant, and so special.
I admit that was quick, over-simplified … Oh, I forgot the Nine! What did I say about the Nine—they’re forgettable! Oh, mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa … the Nine, Adam in the garden. Here we have the most laid-back easy-going of all the Nine types. But look at his/her two wings; they’re intense, One and Eight, on each side of the Nine. If you get to know a Nine, they invariably have some deep values—deep! They feel them inside, by all these body attacks of life; they hold ‘em in their body. The One wing and the Eight wing, showing itself, now and then—not every day! Now and then, you’ll see that, my god, she’s got some deep beliefs in this regard. That she holds very deeply; she almost doesn’t know how to bring them to focus herself. Which is why … she needs to belong to a group … ‘cause s/he is humble enough to admit, I can’t do it by myself. I can’t make a total difference in the world. That’s the mystery of church. A kind of Nine humility. I can’t do it all myself; but I can do my little part—with a vengeance! (Which is their Eight wing) or with righteousness, which is their One wing. Laid-back Nines can paradoxically be very effective people …
Archbishop Hunt-hausen, a Nine, in Seattle. He was beloved, by the whole Diocese; he just said no, I can’t pay taxes, I don’t believe I’m gonna support this government. People asked him, “You don’t pay taxes?” “No.” So you see this intense value system, in his wings, but they do it very quietly. In that sense, Nines can be very effective change agents. Because they are not threatening! The way the rest of us threaten. Sorry, Nines, that I forgot you. I hope this is helping you discern. Try to spot two numbers, right next to each other. Then, which one is the midpoint, and which one is the wings. Questions, about anything now, it’s all open. Judy .. is a Six. Sixes are called questioners! She’s so humble, I know she won’t mind. One way they deal with their anxiety is to clarify it with questions. They can serve a great function in a group… You’re asking the questions a lot of the rest of us are thinking. … But because they’ve become anxiety in you; you face your anxiety quicker than the rest of us do; you’ll ask the questions many of the rest of us our thinking.
Direction - integration …. ?
She said, am I gonna talk about paths of integration, and paths of dis-integration. … This is called the arrow theory. I emphasize the Wing theory most, but I don’t deny the truth of the arrow theory. Some teachers base all of it on this. Let me put it up here simply: When we Ones are doing well, I can see this in myself, we take on the energy of a healthy Seven. Even though I’m very heavy, I can actually be happy and silly when I’m doing well. I mentioned to you earlier, that one reason this position. .. one of the latest (most recent) discoveries about the Enneagram. The Seven gives me such consolation, because that’s who I was as a little boy. … At some point; this would be called the original wound … my original blessing could not be sustained; and—you don’t have to accept it, but it sure works for most people—I found a way to be a moralistic perfectionist to try to recreate my little happy world. It’ll never work, but damn it, I keep doing it. That’s my original sin. See the beginning of the new book, The Christian Perspective. It’s called the soul-child theory of the Enneagram. That your soul-child … when you’re doing real well, you go back to that. You’ll see that in each of these arrows. The Two … when doing well, takes on the best aspects of a Four. They become creative. Instead of their obsession with people liking me; they use some of their creative energy for things instead of people, and for them, that’s a virtue. … She was creating this beautiful alter; it was the feast of Our Lady … I said who are you making this for? she just needed to make it. It was a way of her processing, I think, some of the pain of her life. She just started crying, she was so happy. She had taken this quiet day, at our guest house, to create a shrine. She moved her “people” energy to “thing” energy, and for the Two, that’s good, that’s healing. For those of you who are Twos … I won’t have time to open it up for conversation, but I want you to try to remember, if there wasn’t a part of you as a little boy/girl who liked to be creative … It’s almost always there. You couldn’t maintain it, but you still go back to it, for a little moment of joy, or consolation.
The Three, when doing good, believe it or not, they become like a very healthy Six. They take on some of that structure and groundedness; they stop trying to save the world. They just go back to their Catholic mass, where they went as a little boy, and re-find themself there. Just go back to where I began; and do the ritual one more time. IF a Donald Trump had something like that … he could maybe save his soul. Maybe he does; I don’t mean to put him down … He would probably be the quintessential American Three … Soon he’s flying off into the ozone with money-making, with no, what does this mean for tradition, or the church? You go back to Threes; invariably they had a structured, traditional, authoritarian family, in the good sense! Their way to maintain that perfect world, was to become famous, successful … I can force it! I can make perfection happen in this world! Of course, they can’t.
The Four, when they’re doing well, they take on the best aspect of us Ones. .. Without any doubt in my years as a priest, I’ve had more Fours come to me for direction than any type. They intuitively know we have what they need. They need the discipline and the focus of a One. You go back to their youth; they alone can do it. Going back, they’ll find some focus. … I’m sorry they don’t have more time to develop that; they’ll lay it on you. … why they are a Four …
The Five, when he or she is doing well, they decide, okay, I’ve got all my theories and theology; how can I make a difference in the world? (They go to Eight.) Helping the poor in concrete ways instead of just spinning out theories. We have a man on our staff who’s exactly that. … But invariably, if the Five goes back to his boyhood or girlhood, he’ll find there was already affirmation; some early Eight energy. He was a little Eight, but he couldn’t do it, wasn’t allowed to do it. And so he theorized the whole thing; intellectualized the whole thing. … And was disconnected from theology.
The Six, when the six is doing well, actually takes on some of the peacefulness of the Nine. That’s why they’re both so humble, the Six and the Nine. They take on the best characteristic of the Nine. Not the bad. Only the good. A healthy Six, looks like a Nine. A healthy One, looks like a Seven. The Seven, when he or she is doing well, takes on, believe it or not, the healthy research and study of a Five. That keeps ‘em from being an airhead! That’s exactly what they need. I have Seven friends who haven’t read a book in 20 years. They hate reading books, unless they have pictures on every page, in bright colors. When a Seven is doing well, they’ll hunker down, and say it’s time I do a little research on this. It’s time I ground myself in some good intellectual work. Without it, they will be Peter Pan, just flying off into the universe. I’ve asked two of my Seven friends—what were you like as a little boy? Both said, I was quiet, I wanted to be alone in my room; that’s who I first was. This airhead stuff is a distortion! Why these points are such a consolation; I am so happy when I can be happy, because that’s really my true self. My spiritual director told me, I need to have someone get me down on the floor and tickle me once a day. .. It’s got to be a big meaningful encounter, or I can’t enjoy it. That’s my rule; it’s like, I don’t know …
The Eight, when the Eight is doing myself, dang it, they look exactly like Twos! She’s the quintessential example … amazing and healthy; very nurturing, very sweet; they can especially do it with children; children bring out the young person in people. We need children in society for all of us to grow up. They clarify for all of us. … They take away our game; because our game doesn’t work with kids! I can’t do my big teaching; that doesn’t mean anything to Gracie. “Why is he always talking,” she must wonder. All of us have to let go of our compulsive game with the child. The only one who is fed is the Two. And finally the Nine, when the Nine is doing well, and I’ve seen this in healthy Nines, believe it or not, they take on the effectiveness of the Three.
Remember I said the gift of the Three is decisive action? Three check off their lists … the very loss of focus, which is their general problem. When they can prioritize; for this hour I’m going to do this—they end up more effective than the rest of us. So in the classic sense, you can’t call Nines lazy! They actually are very effective; you’ve just got to help ‘em focus. So, that is the Integration line. If you reverse each of those lines, you will have the disintegration line … In other words, when I’m not doing well, it’s probably why I get impatient fours, I become like a maudlin, depressed, moody Four. The reverse of the arrow that comes toward me. Let’s say a ONe and a Four marry one another. In a certain sense, the One is very good for the Four. But in a certain sense, the Four is the worst possible thing for a One. I don’t know how to resolve that. That doesn’t mean that person as such; I mean that energy. I know One-Four marriages that do quite well; they’re both perfectionist. … Don’t let any of this be deterministic.
So I gave you the integration; I’m going to let you fill in the dis-integration. When you’re falling apart, you will take on the worst aspect of another number.
Did I forget the Nine? Again? … The Nine … I guess I’d almost have to ask, is there any Nine in the room who’d want to expose themselves? How were you a Three as a little girl? … In other words, did you like to run around the house and do all kinds of things? That would be what they’d say; that somehow, you were, of all things, a doer—making things happen, in your little play girl world. Yeah, things like that. See? For some reason, that was not a sustainable project, and you decide, I’m going to take, the easier route. Which becomes your Nine-ness. Which is now your greatest gift, and your worst fault. But on your better days, you will go back to your little girl, and be a Three again. It’s very subtle, but I haven’t asked a person yet who can’t make this theory work in their own life?
Question—When you’re going to your integration; you’re taking the best qualities … When you dis-integrate, are you taking the worst qualities?
Right. … The reason I’d have problem with the Four, is I take on the worst qualities of the Four when I’m not doing well. This depressed, self-pitying … I can’t go near it; the reason why, because it’ll catch me. We Ones try so hard to be perfect; when we can’t get there, we fall into occasional depression. They have tremendous power to suck us into their vortex. That’s our worst self. We know it. If anyone wants me to do that ….
You say the energy from the U.S. comes from Three … which integrates to Six. That doesn’t appear to be happening in our culture.
See America suffers from having only a 200-year history. We don’t have strong traditions of anything. Birthday cake and the flag. That’s humiliating for us to admit; that we’re not a traditional culture. From the very beginning, there’s many cultures, building together. So, when we go back to tradition; we tend to go back to what we now call fundamentalism. Trumped-up traditions, manufactured certitudes, superficial loyalties. I don’t know any country in the world that has the flag in the sanctuary. Only in the U.S. Because we have nothing else. Our country is almost tantamount to God to us … pure, unadulterated idolatry, wouldn’t be tolerated in most countries in the world. I had a priest friend … his parishioners get upset with him … So we’re searching to go back to tradition, Six-ness. … but it’s always this fundamentalist, idolatrist stuff. It’s a recognition that we need it. Some high percentage of Americans now identify as born-again. That phrase wasn’t even used 50 years ago. Instead we had the phrase, “a heart strangely warmed.” Now that I can trust. But, I am, as an ego possession, a born-again person; uhh, that’s such superficial religion, it seems to me. Since it’s not a relationship; it’s something I have become. That’s a three searching off in the ozone for traditions.
The Catholic church is number Six. It relies on authority, and certitude.
But … they’re teaching to Sevens. In other words, the church doesn’t want any discussion back.
You’re Irish, are you? One thing I fail to mention in the Seven; the Irish male is very much Seven energy. Not so much the Irish female …
actually … IRish creativity … depression … similar to Greece
But if you look at it, it’s always finding a way to triumph over the tragedy. Frank McCourt, he’s laughing at it, from the first chapter … I’m still saying it’s a Seven energy. If you visit, you’re overwhelmed by it, the dancing and singing. I’d only be dissuaded by it … some way it’s Four energy; this love of the pain. But the way they turn it into joy is not typical of the Four. That would be my only hesitation in calling Ireland a Four country. … As for the females: I would think they’ve split into the two wings—either Six or Eight. They either go strong into conservative traditionalist; or flipping over into these strong women who tell it like it is. That’s just my analysis.
The Irish wake would be perfect Seven stuff. Dancing on the grave, and dancing at the wake itself.
Other people …
Yes; thank you, I told Doug to ask me that at the break. Important for your discernment of where you might be. Sometimes people are absolutely convinced they’re a certain number. But … they were subsumed inside what either their mother, their father, or their childhood wanted them to be. If they haven’t made that break yet … they’re still desperately trying to get mom or dad’s love …. Those people really think they are .. .whatever they’re pretending to be. You want to talk about conflicted; those are people forced to live up to a self-image they are not. They tend to be neurotic and unhappy people. That could really send some of you down a wrong course. Thinking you’re a number because it was your family script to be that number; or to take on that particular energy. Try to compartmentalize that, insofar as you can, to find your authentic self. I’ve seen it in marriages, too. IF one marriage partner dominates the energy in the household, and proclaims, we will live this way; sometimes a subservient or humble type will think they are their spouse’s energy. … That’s when therapy can be very helpful. You can break that, and say, who am I apart from my husband, apart from my mother
Can you talk about whether by biology … if you think that, for lots of men, they get acculturated by Threes … to be a CEO …
That’s right, in the United States, I think every boy thinks he should be a Three, in some way. You know how many boys that defeats in every high school. The Threes run circles around everybody else. I’m not, and I don’t need to be. We could take this to every other country too. Is every Swiss boy told he should be a moralistic little soldier. He probably is, until very recently.
If you are taught to be this Three; as you age and the environment changes, should you be something else?
I think so. The assumption here is, I’m the wrong number. If you think you’re something you’re really not; you can change. But I’m going to be fatalistic, and say your real number, you cannot change. I don’t know why; I think it’s the shape of original sin. Some of you will try to avoid that; and go out and say you’re a little bit of each of them. Please don’t do that; it won’t profit you at all. You need the humility to accept you are one big blindness; the one that has to be faced. You’ll avoid that facing by saying that I’m a Perfect 10, or a little bit of each of them. But I’m finally going to entrust you to come to that insight. If we had 3-5 days, we could have panels … You could test them out. But we don’t have time for that; the discernment are going to be back on you. Most of them will have it within 24 hours. Except the Sixes and the Nines. The Sixes want authority resassurance.
You’re talking about going to … the redemptive. Other than reading and listening, how can one get to use the Enneagram … how do you get there?
It’s gonna sound simplistic, like I’m avoiding the quesstion. Its genius is it’s not based on any technique or formula. You put it out, and the insight itself is the clap of the master’s hand. The scaffolding falls or begins to fall. It’s all based on insight; epiphany education. You’re saying, once I get the original epiphany, how to continue to grow with it. I suppose that’s why we put these books over here. Suzanne Zerker; her book on Enneagram spirituality is brilliant. The new Ridso/Hudson book, on the Enneagram; it gives you… open-ended avenues you can move beyond. The insight will keep deepening. I learned this in the early 70s. … I’m still discovering ways that I’m a One. It’ll confront me; I’ll say, “You did it again, Dick.” You’d think, I’m supposed to be a teacher of it; I’m supposed to know this. That’s how deep the compulsion is. That becomes, finally, your humility. You know, I’ll never totally be without it. I’ll carry my sin to the grave, as it were. That’s hard for the ego to bare. I cannot conquer over this entirely. All you can do is enough so that you don’t keep destroying yourself, or hurting other people too much. When you hurt other people, you start being able to see it; that gives room for apology and asking for forgiveness. Paul asks that of us; that we … not try to make ourselves perfect. You can’t. That same compassion which you have toward yourself; I hope you can … begin to offer to other people. … We’re each trapped … You’ve got to put up with me; I’ve got to put up with you. You stop taking everything personally. She’s not doing that to get you; she’s doing it because that’s how Twos are … The more I have to be patient with my One, the more I learn to be patient with the others.
Last question. … That’s the whole retreat … In light of that, it probably is best to point you to some of the books on prayer and the Enneagram. Contemplation, even though these people are the best at it … because they like to withdraw … They’re actually terrible at it, because they like to think. Contemplation teaches you how to stop the thinking function. Of course I’m of the opinion that contemplation is where everybody is led, finally … You have to stop associating and identifying with your feelings (as well). We got people … sure, contemplative prayer is good for us. But we tend to have so much body energy; and my spiritual director helped me see that. Walking meditation is often best for me. We’re going to be teaching Walking Meditation … All gut people have high metabolism; you have energy that needs to be expelled. To find some way to be expelling the energy, I can often be more centered, and more in conscious union … when walking than when in the lotus position … Movement united with prayer. I’m very non-Buddhist in that regard. This ideal of sitting the body perfectly still … I don’t think that always works. Stilling the mind, yes. But you’ve got to find a way to expel this body energy that all of us are holding. For me to take a goal-less walk, to constantly put one foot after the other … I think that’s true of us Body people, and in various ways it might be true of a lot of the rest of you. The Fours can find it in dancing, sometimes. Your dancing can be an act of constant communion with God. …
Okay! I think we’ve got a break! This is enough? I hand you over to the Lord. Let’s end with a prayer. Loving god: All of this is so that we can be with you, which is to be with ourselves, which is all we have. We thank You for this day, and the humility of these sisters and brothers, who’ve listened to me so long. You be their teacher from here; you be there guide; you tell them what to remember and what to forget. You let them know, you give them that epiphany that they need to break through and to break beyond. We put our lives in your hands; we thank you for this gift of the face of God, the nine faces of god. We thank you that one of them is our face; and we pray that we can trust that face; we’ll also see you and love you, and see not just with our eyes, but with Your eyes too. We trust that this is happening already, and we offer our prayer, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Bonus Richard Rohr talk: Abundance
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The Lord be with you.
Reading from the Holy gospel … from Luke.
Well the body of Christ is one of those words that has so many levels of meaning. And we’ll just skim the surface as we look at that. The first one is noted in that first obscure reading, when this character named Melchizedek appears out of nowhere. Have any of you ever met anybody named Melchizedek? No. Maybe a black person would have the courage to do it. But his very name is somewhat strange to most of us. And yet he’s carrying these universal symbols of bread and wine. And that’s setting the stage for what will become a Christian symbol. Because it seems some form of bread and some form of wine, or at least intoxicant, are found in almost every culture. So it’s a universal food. And in the second reading, we have Paul, giving his description of the Last Supper. Where he talks about this symbol, of God giving himself for us to eat, becomes a new and everlasting covenant. You see, the old covenant was pretty much expecting it to be bilateral. God gives to us, and we give back to God, and it’s a good deal. The Jewish history showed that the people were never able to obey it; and so finally what has emerged in Jesus is a unilateral covenant. Where he does all the giving, and we do all the taking. And that’s the symbolism of the mass as we still know it today. This bread, given for you, as a symbol of the divine. This wine, poured out for you, as a symbol of God’s outpouring love.
And then in this Gospel, which for some of you, might have seemed like, what does this have to do with the body and blood of Christ? We see that it isn’t just, the human body of Jesus that is the body of Christ. It’s not just the people of God, yourselves, you are the body of Christ. It’s not just the bread and the wine, which is also the body of Christ. But of all things, it now becomes a potluck supper! How secular can you get?! It’s just an ordinary meal. But here’s the significance: That God, in this meal, Jesus, I should say, moves the people from a worldview of scarcity to a worldview of abundance. They, all, like most of us do, probably when we look at our bank account, we always say there’s not enough. And, sometimes maybe there isn’t. There’s only five loaves and two fish. That’s the natural human response. Without grace, without infinite love, we all live in a worldview of scarcity. And Jesus is trying to move them from this “there’s not enough,” to “there’s more than enough!” It isn’t just a miracle story. So what if Jesus is a magician? Wow, our Jesus can multiply fish and bread! You go home unchanged. The miracle stories are never just miracle stories. In fact, that’s not even the point. It’s not bread and fish that are being transformed, but hopefully your minds and your hearts. To understand what it takes, to move from—Let’s call it what it is: Basically, a stingy worldview! Most of us have it! We grasp, we save, we pile up, we collect. Because we’re just not sure there’s gonna be enough. That’s why the final line, “All were satisfied, and there were still 12 wicker baskets left over.” It’s not bread and fish that they’re talking about. It’s an abundant mind; a generous heart. That can give away and not be afraid. Almost all of us, certainly myself—we have to be converted to that. We’re not raised in it.
I was raised with poor parents, who were Kansas farmers during the dust storm in the Depression. They were not just poor, they were very poor. And so we were trained to save, save, save! When my mother took money to the bank, to deposit in her savings account, you would have thought she would have two acolytes on each side, holding a candle. It’s like, making a pilgrimage to save money. She wasn’t so concerned about spending money; it was just saving money. And any of you who were born, lower middle class or poor, that’s the way you think! We’ve got to save! And the trouble is, it creates an ungenerous heart, where you horde, instead of surrender; where you keep, instead of give away. And so we see in this last symbol of the body of Christ, is that it’s a table—you chose a good song, Jeff—a table of plenty!
Let me just put it this way, that anything that leads you to a worldview of abundance is the body of Christ. Anything that leads you to generosity of spirit, is the body of Christ. Some of you know I got a new dog; she was in bed with me this morning, wrestling. (Laughter) I woke up with a generous spirit. So, my new dog is the body of Christ. It’s anything that makes you love instead of hate. Let life flow out of you, instead of try to just worry, “Is there enough for me? Is there enough for me? Is there enough for me?” Don’t go there! It would be a terrible waste of your one, wonderful, godly life.