12 Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 they led me to your presence. I found myself entering into your heart and becoming a part of you. Through your spiritual power I was able to ascend to the knowledge of the power of the Nine Points. Then a voice, addressing me as Abd an-Nur, said, ‘This light and knowledge have been granted to you from the Divine Presence of God to bring peace to your heart. However, you must not use the power of this knowledge.’ The voice bid me farewell with the salutation of peace and the vision ended as you were finishing the recitation from the Quran. Shaykh ‘Abd Allāh replied: Surah YaSin was called ‘the Heart of the Quran’ by the Holy Prophet and the knowledge of these Nine Points was opened to you through it. The vision was by the blessings of the verse, ‘Peace! A World (of salutation) from a Lord Most Merciful’ (36:58). Each of the Nine Points is represented by one of nine saints who are at the highest level in the Divine Presence. They are the keys to untold powers within the human being, but there is no permission to use these keys. This is a secret that, in general, will not be opened until the Last Days when the Mahdi appears and Jesus returns. Others have traced the Enneagram to the influence of the Kabbalistic Sefirot, through Medieval Christian philosopher Ramón Lull (1232–1315), and the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) who published Arithmologia in 1665 – containing the Enneagram on the frontispiece of the volume – was reported to have influenced Gurdjieff’s ideas on the nine-pointed symbol (Webb 1987) [9]. Gurdjieff is also recorded as having said that another one of its origins is in “esoteric Christianity” (quoted in Ouspensky 1949, 102). Ichazo (1991, 101) alludes to the ancient sources of the Enneagram as follows: The enneagon figure, which the Gurdjieffians affirm that I took from their Master, is in fact one of the forms known as ‘seals’, which were produced by the Pythagorean school (500 BC), and the Platonic mathematicians (300 BC) who studied the internal relation of numbers with geometrical forms, giving to each number, not only their characteristics, but their internal interrelations. Although the Enneagram contains a sacred psychology, it is essentially a method of spiritual transformation. However, contemporary Enneagram proponents typically overlook or misunderstand this aspect because they invariably confuse the domain of the psyche with that of the spiritual. To reduce the Enneagram solely to a system of psychology, or a codification of personality types, serves to distort our understanding of this sacred symbol by undermining its ontological and cosmological foundations (Nasr 1994, vii–viii). The human psyche is subordinate to what is higher than itself (i.e., the Spirit). This principle has been, for the most part, rejected by modernity, which has cut itself off from transcendence thanks to the secularizing tenets of the Enlightenment project. The main danger to which personality type theory all too easily lends itself is psychologism – the reduction of the Spirit to merely psychological states. This aberration largely defines the contemporary “spiritual” scene, especially New Age thought, yet this malady also afflicts modern psychology as a whole. 7 Psychologizing the Enneagram The prevalence of this reductionism reflects a profane mentality that continues to dominate the present day. In particular, it shows how traditional symbols, such as the Enneagram, can be usurped by a materialist psychology. The question now arises as to why it is important to unearth one’s particular ennea-type. Palmer (1991, 9) presents two reasons for this which, in themselves, are helpful in conducting our everyday life: (i) “The reason for discovering your own type is so you can build a working relationship with yourself”; and (ii) “The second reason to study your type is so you can understand other people as they are to themselves, rather than as you see them from your own point of view”. This exclusive focus on “typology” or “fixation” is a recent phenomenon, and bears no resemblance to the Enneagram’s traditional use. The problem with a desacralized interpretation of Enneagram personality types is that it lends itself to a ‘static’ view of people, by falsely identifying the empirical ego with a person’s true identity. This error is testimony to a psychologism that obscures the existence of a higher order (Oscar Ichazo quoted in Isaacs and Labanauskas 1997, 21): The Enneagram authors have made the grave mistake of making this theory into a typology of nine ‘personality types’ as tools for ego aggrandizement, instead of a method of ego-reduction and final transcendence of the lower ego that, in fact, is like a sickness that has to be cured and transformed, in order to become completely developed human beings in a state of self-liberation.
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