[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Timothy Smith]

I can say categorically, that I've never met any serious student or  
practitioner of the enneagram
that would acknowledge what Curt asserts and Alex quotes has any  
bearing on the current
state of enneagram studies and practice.

It seems to me that a great deal of what has become specialized  
science began
with the same end in mind that Curt articulates.  The question for me  
is, so what?
Timothy Smith
Wheelwright Associates

www.wheelwrightassoc.com



On Jan 4, 2009, at 5:19 PM, Curt Steinmetz wrote:

> Alex Wilding wrote:
>> Curt Steinmetz told us:
>>
>>> First of all it should be noted that the original intention of the
>>> Enneagram was, literally, to explain everything.
>>>
>>
>> What a bizarrely unlikely project! I *shall* be looking into some  
>> of these
>> links, but this is not an encouraging start.
>>
>
> The theoretical basis is to be found in Plato's Timaeus, although  
> Plato
> in turn based much of his cosmology on Pythagorean ideas.
>
> If one accepts that the Cosmos is rational and that the "logos" of our
> individual souls (that which gives us the ability to reason) is of the
> same kind as the "logos" of the World Soul (which extends everywhere),
> then one is almost done. All that remains is (1) to demonstrate that
> reason itself is reducible to a manageable number of basic  
> principles (9
> is the most popular number), (2) discover what those principles are,  
> and
> (3) develop systematic means for "reasoning" reliably from the
> (unavoidably) very abstract basic principles to real life useful
> applications.
>
> Obviously (if you think about it) once such a general system is in  
> place
> it is still a nontrivial project to apply it to specific problems  
> (this
> is the origin of the phrase "a simple matter of programming").  
> Almost as
> obviously is the fact that once a specific application has been worked
> out in it's gory details the "system" behind it all can easily be
> forgotten about. For example, the design of every digital electronic
> device is based on concepts developed by George Boole and Alan  
> Turing -
> but one need not know that in order to send and receive email.
>
> Umberto Eco devoted a chapter to Raymond Lull in his book "In Search  
> of
> the Perfect Language":
> http://tinyurl.com/75ydsq
>
> Here is an excerpt:
>
> "Lull led a carefree early life which ended when he experienced a  
> mystic
> crisis. As a result he entered the order of Tertian friars. It was  
> among
> the Franciscans that all of the earlier strands converged in his 'Ars
> Magna', which Lull conceived as a system of perfect language with  
> which
> to convert the infidels. The language was to be universal; it was to  
> be
> articulated at the level of expression in a universal mathematics of
> combinations; its level of content was to consist of a network of
> universal ideas, held by all peoples, which Lull himself would  
> devise."
>
> Curt Steinmetz
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