Read an Excerpt
Roaming Free Inside the Cage
A Daoist Approach to the Enneagram and Spiritual Transformation
By William M. Schafer iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 William M. Schafer Ph.D.
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4401-8862-6
Chapter One
Three Fundamental Ways to Process Experience
Brief Introduction to the Enneagram
The term Enneagram is derived from the Greek words enneas meaning nine and gramma meaning writing. Hence Ennea-gram means a "nine-writing." Its origins go back some six thousand years to Sumer (present day Iraq and Iran) where it seems to have been introduced to describe fundamental laws of the development of everything-from the cosmos itself to your newest baby nephew. It was generally drawn as a circle in which are inscribed an equilateral triangle and an irregular hexagon:
In modern times, the Enneagram refers to a system that describes nine personality types (or nine versions of "me"). For those who are unfamiliar with the system, each type is identified by a numeral and sometimes by an additional word or two of description. The descriptive words change slightly from teacher to teacher but the numerals do not. The types may be briefly described as follows:
1. Ones: Perfectionists These are conscientious, dependable people who bring clarity and order to life. However, their belief that there is only one way to do things correctly canmake them rigid and intolerant.
2. Twos: Givers These people are sensitive, caring, and warmhearted, but they so intensely enjoy helping others that they often end up trying to do for others what others could better do for themselves.
3. Threes: Performers These are highly motivated, effective people to whom success seems to come naturally. However their focus on achievement often comes at the cost of inner feelings and relationships.
4. Fours: Romantics These are emotionally intense, creative people who seek deep connection with others. However, their inner feelings of being alone and misunderstood can be over-dramatized in ways that end up pushing others away.
5. Fives: Observers These folks are analytical and self-sufficient. However, their fear of being overwhelmed by the demands of others leads them to withdraw and safeguard time and energy for self.
6. Sixes: Loyal Skeptics These people are imaginative and perceptive and often have a pleasingly offbeat sense of humor. However, their tendency to focus on potential dangers and others' shortcomings to the exclusion of everything else can turn them into a burden or even source of conflict to others.
7. Sevens: Epicures These are energetic, buoyant people who bring fun and endless possibilities to family and friends. However, they can be self-centered and so inclined to escape boredom and pain through distraction that others find them unreliable.
8. Eights: Protectors These are strong, direct people who are concerned with justice and fair play. However, their all-or-nothing style often seems overbearing to others and can be exhausting to themselves.
9. Nines: Mediators These are salt of the earth people who will give you the shirt off their back. They are calm and able to see all sides of an issue but often find it hard to get going and make decisions when they are needed.
The Three Centers of Experience
The Enneagram divides these nine types into three major groupings called triads.
Each triad contains three types who share the same predominant way of processing experience. One group processes experience viscerally in the belly, a second group emotionally in the heart, and the last group mentally in the head. The distribution of types and triads around the nine pointed symbol is given in Figure 2.
Daoists call these three centers dan tian, or fields of elixir, locating the lower one just below the navel and a few centimeters inward, the middle one at the level of the heart, and the upper dan tian between and slightly behind the eyes. The idea of three centers may at first seem strange to some readers, but it is quite common to most ancient traditions. And it probably should not come as a surprise to anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of neurology, for it nicely mirrors the modern division of the brain into hindbrain and stem, mid-cortex and limbic system, and neo-cortex and pre-frontal lobe. In evolutionary terms, the hindbrain and stem are the oldest sections of the brain. Often referred to as the reptilian brain, they deal with basic functions like breathing, temperature regulation, hunger, and sex. The limbic system and mid-cortex are more recent developments. Called the mammalian brain, they regulate feelings and emotional bonding. The newest additions are the neo-cortex and the pre-frontal lobe. Primarily hominid elaborations, they allow for planning, foresight, and abstract thinking.
The older world traditions did not reduce all of these functions to a brain located in the head, but divided them between the belly, the heart, and the head. (Actually, modern neurology would also tell us that the brain is not located solely in the head but is distributed throughout the body.)
The body, heart, and head centers are often referred to today in Enneagram circles as the three centers of intelligence. In this book, I prefer to call them the three centers of experience, because I think the word intelligence suffers from our western bias toward conceptual rather than energetic categories. Daoists would be unlikely to use the term centers of intelligence because they believe the central task of self-transformation is managing energy rather than mastering concepts. Daoist practice is not so much concerned with discovering universal truth but with maintaining harmony with life's natural movement. Accordingly, the three centers are looked upon as fields whose function is to receive and circulate three different types of the life force, which is called qi (sometimes written chi or ch'i).
Body Center
The body center (sometimes referred to as the belly center) operates viscerally, through sensations and instincts. In the Daoist view, the body center is the seat of jing qi, or vital quintessence. Vital quintessence is life energy in its purest and most rarified form, caught as it were in the act of transitioning from the non-manifest world to the manifest one. Frequently in these pages, I will suggest that the human soul can be regarded as a Being-Loving-Aware. That is, the soul can be thought of as the part of us that simply wants to be "here," welcoming into awareness the miracle of life that is happening at this very moment. The body center is the home of the Being aspect of the soul, or the aspect that seeks simply to be "present". It is the center we most often rely upon when our very existence is being threatened. Jing qi, therefore, is concerned with three basic functions: survival as an animal, power necessary to function within the animal hierarchy (matriarchy or patriarchy), and sexuality in its aspect of procreation. The awareness of the body center, therefore, is attuned to the physical energy of others and to the life force itself. The conscious aspect of body-centered experience is its quality of presence, sensed as immediacy ("there," "just so"). Its higher manifestations in consciousness are the feeling of being grounded and solid and of the discernment of power needed to act in a given situation. Its lower manifestation is an underlying sense of anger and resentment about how the physical world impinges upon the self with all of its demands and necessities.
If you are a body type, you may have some difficulty recognizing that this is your predominant center of experience. After all, you grew up in a culture that is radically alienated from the body and rather ignorant of its manner of knowing. Quite possibly when you were small, you may have frequently encountered occasions of being sure that you "knew" the truth of some incident but had difficulty putting your felt sense of the event into words. Because you experienced life primarily in the body, it took you a few moments to move your experience up from the belly to the head and to translate your felt sense of a situation into concepts so that you could communicate it to others. You knew what you knew, directly and without words. But at school and perhaps even at home, the preferred way to communicate one's experience was verbal, and your visceral way of knowing may not have been given sufficient recognition and encouragement. As a result, you may have felt slightly inferior. This feeling may have led you to neglect your body experience and move everything up into the head since that made you seem more like everybody else. Take a few moments therefore to ask yourself where you first "know" something. For example, when you meet someone, where do you first "get" what kind of person they are? When you enter a room full of people, how do you first know what is going on? When you react to some circumstance, where does the reaction begin? If you are a body type, you will recognize that you don't do these things by thinking in your head but by sensing in your body.
The belly center of experience's chief characteristic in consciousness is the utter certainty with which it senses whatever it perceives. When you know something in the body, it seems beyond all doubt. This sense of utter certainty is a tremendous advantage when your very survival is threatened, for at such a moment the last thing you want to do is to sit down and weigh alternatives. However, there is a downside, too. As we have all experienced on occasion, gut instinct can sometimes be dead wrong!
Heart Center
The heart center perceives through emotional pathways. The heart center of experience is concerned with the personal aspect of the life force, or human qi. Human qi is the energy we use to construct and maintain a sense of community with all living beings and is related to the aspect of soul I call Loving. Much of its activity lies below the level of explicit consciousness. The heart center is sensitive to the moods and feelings of others and to one's own perceived worth in their eyes. It endows what it knows with personhood, life, and value. Unlike mental perception that creates distance between knower and known, emotional knowing enhances connection between them. Just like vital quintessence, human qi also serves the three functions of survival, social and one-to-one relationships. The emotional/recognition system by which babies and parents bond and become attached to one another provides a survival function for the infant. The affectional/belonging system of human tribal identification guides the child to become a member of the social group. Finally, the emotional/erotic ties of pair bonding provide people with the motivation needed to achieve intimacy with a partner.
If you are a heart type, you experience life primarily in and through your feelings. You don't have to go looking for them or figure them out through a process of reasoning-they just appear in your consciousness. You also read other people's feelings easily. More importantly, you want to connect to others on a feeling level. This search for connection is your greatest strength for it makes you compassionate and open-hearted. The disadvantage is that the urge to remain constantly connected to others can dull your inner sense of self, making it necessary for you to find yourself in and through the reactions of others. This can make you vulnerable to fluctuations in your sense of self worth caused by other people's reactions, comments, and moods.
Head Center
The head center connects to the world through thinking. The aspect of soul to which it is especially attuned is the Aware function. Although the head center is the home of analytic and logical thinking, Daoists see it as more than just a generator of ideas. The higher dan tian is also home to what is called the numinous mind, which is the foundation for mystical experience. The energy of the head center is called shen (spirit or numinous). Shen has three functions. It performs a survival function, for without shen even the physical organs of the body forget how to function and die. It performs a social function in that it grounds the perception that all beings are one. Finally, it provides the energy that connects each individual to the Source, which would seem to be the ultimate one-on-one.
If you are a head type, your everyday awareness feels like a conversation in the head. You have a sense that "you" are somewhere inside your thoughts, which seem to reside in your head. You spend most of your waking moments thinking, which feels like talking to yourself. It is hard for you to not think. The great advantage of this is that you are good at predicting and managing events. The big disadvantage is that the mind is also a generator of fear, doubt, and mistrust, for the mind can dispute anything it conceives. This is especially likely when thinking is cut off from the energy of the heart and the belly.
If you do not yet know which center is the one you most depend on to process experience, start observing yourself. It may be helpful to focus on times when you meet something new-greeting a stranger, entering a meeting at work, or taking your first walk around a strange city. Conversely, you might observe your reactions during a routine and familiar experience such as driving to work or dining with family or friends. Where does your experience begin? Does it start with the sensations in your body, the feelings in your heart, or the thoughts in your head? If you want, ask a friend or someone you live with. How does that person see you? The process of self-observation or of asking for feedback from others will do you good even if you fail at first to come up with a definitive answer.
How the Centers of Experience Develop
Do infants already experience life primarily through one of these three different centers? It is difficult to say with any certainty. Infants show significantly distinct temperamental styles even in the neonatal ward. Yet the tri-partite division of brain functioning in the newborn is not yet clearly differentiated, for the infant's brain is still busy organizing itself for many months after birth. What accounts for the fact that adults end up with one dominant center of experience? And most important, what do the three centers have to do with the central spiritual task of reclaiming our essential nature as expressions of the one fundamental consciousness or "I"? In the two sections that follow, you will find a brief description of how infants seem to experience the world, followed by three early childhood experiences called shocks of embodiment that change their experience. For me, the transition tells a story of how our original state of innocence is transformed during early childhood into something else that we now call "normal" life. My hope is that the short digression will better equip you to ponder how you became your particular personality type, how it continues to function, and to what extent the automatic nature of its functioning causes you suffering.
Three Elements of Infantile Experience
We can begin by describing the three elements of infant experience, elements that can easily be observed during the first two years of life but that are often overlooked or misunderstood. I call them Presence, Joy, and Awareness of Others' Awareness.
Presence
The first element is the quality of Presence. Because it appears in experience prior to any thought or concept, Presence cannot be defined in words. It is that presence to oneself without which nothing else could be present. It is pure awareness-bare of all internal commentaries, judgments, comparisons, fears, or desires. Such is the awareness I observe in a calmly alert newborn, whose tiny body sometimes seems reduced to just a pair of eyes totally absorbed in sights that are still fresh, unlabeled, and unburdened by the weight of prior experience. I am tempted to say that such an infant is not only present, but that he is an embodiment of presence itself.
A calm, alert newborn is present in this manner because he has no other choice. His experience is of necessity devoid of memories of previous similar experiences, expectations of what this new experience should or should not be like, or desires of wanting it to end or to go on. The infant, without knowing it, is simply present to the miracle of being.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Roaming Free Inside the Cage by William M. Schafer Copyright © 2009 by William M. Schafer Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission.
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