[Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism

[Leigh Goldstein]

After reading Naranjo's "Character and Neurosis: An Integrative View" and "Ennea-type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker", it became very obvious to me that my personality and my behavior were a close fit to type 5, and that the inner psychological dynamics of that type fit me very well. 

This caused me to see (surprise) that some (not all) things I had considered "good", desirable and a valuable part of my nature were actually obstacles to what I wanted; just like many people had been telling me all my life.

As Richard says, some of the attraction of meditation for me was avoidance of relationship and the denial of the need for relationship. Shortly after this, my mediation seemed to get significantly (for me) deeper.

One reason I think this material had this effect on me was the shock of reading an accurate description of myself in great detail, as if in a biography, in a book of types. The explanations it gave for my behavior were more believable than what I had been telling myself.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Richard Hayes 
  To: Buddhist discussion forum 
  Sent: Monday, January 05, 2009 10:21 AM
  Subject: Re: [Buddha-l] Enneagram and Buddhism


  On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 12:16 +0800, Piya Tan wrote:

  > Interesting, Six is the Guardian.
  > 
  > And I suppose you are an Eight, the Confronter.

  No. Strangely enough, three and eight are the enneagram points on which
  I have by far the lowest scores. 

  Determining the types of other people is, of course, pretty nearly
  impossible. That's fortunate, since it's also pretty nearly useless. Far
  more important is to gain some insight into those aspects of oneself
  that are obstacles to the very goals one most longs to attain.

  For most of my life personality typologies have fascinated me. The first
  one I encountered was a Myers-Briggs test I had to take as part of a job
  application. When it came to the interview stage, the personnel officer
  showed me what the Myers-Briggs profile of the most successful people in
  the job I was seeking. He then showed me my profile (INFP) and pointed
  out that it was precisely the opposite of the profile of a success
  (ESTJ) in that job. He said I would probably hate the job, hate most of
  my colleagues and hate myself for being there. He was, I am sure, right
  on the money. I came to think that Myers-Briggs had probably saved me
  from a bad experience.

  A few years later I became intrigued with Upatissa's typology in
  Vimuttimaggo (still one of my favorite books), which is also found in
  Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimaggo. I identified myself (correctly, I think) as
  a hate type, full of anger and rage. Not wanting to be stuck there, I
  took up metta-bhāvanā practice and eventually (say, thirty years later)
  became somewhat more mellow and a bit closer to the more healthy side of
  a hate type, which Upatissa calls the discernment (buddhi) type.

  About fifteen years ago a student introduced me to Helen Palmer's book
  on the enneagram, and I then identified myself as a type one (also
  driven by anger and rage). In subsequent work I've come to see that a
  much more accurate fit is type nine (still very much anger-driven) with
  a strong one wing. I still mostly do mettā-bhāvanā, but have lately been
  wondering whether other practices might complement that and help to
  break down, or at least reduce the effect of, a few other barriers that
  get in my way from time to time.

  Something that a lot of people I have come across have noticed is that
  most people have a tendency to gravitate to spiritual practices that are
  least likely to transform them and most likely to keep them stuck in
  unhealthy patterns (and thus fail to be spiritual practices at all). For
  example, people with a strong tendency to withdraw from problems rather
  than face them head on tend to become dhyāna addicts. Dhyāna practice
  can be a kind of narcosis. (I've certainly done a hell of a lot of that
  particular form of escaping into narcotic samādhi during my life, and it
  has probably done me very little good at all, and it has surely caused a
  lot of problems for the people who have had to live with me.) 

  -- 
  Richard


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