Pitfalls to Clarity and Self-Awareness
When the Enneagram Becomes a Trap
In a recent episode of our podcast Do You Know You, we dealt with various issues related to the pitfalls one can experience on their self-awareness journey. Many who are on a journey of self-discovery want to see themselves clearly, which often leads us to seek systems like the Enneagram or other typologies. However, along the path of seeking clear sight (another word for this is clairvoyance) is bias, misinformation, and self-sabotage.
Seers and mystics in almost all cultures have used reflective surfaces (mirrors, dark pools of water, polished stones, mirrors, or crystals ) to peer into the past or future. This practice is sometimes called scrying. The reflective surface acts as a conduit between the seen world and the unseen (or inner) world and unlocks the latent wisdom of the seer. After some time of gazing at the surface, one would begin to see cloudy or ethereal mists sprawling across the surface, which was a signal that the intuitive faculties were opening to allow the Seer to see or know what they were seeking.
However, if the seer didn’t allow the mist to clear and began to interpret the scene from this obfuscated view, it could lead the seer astray, and the interpretation could easily be tainted by bias. This is why this practice was often guided by a knowledgeable teacher who could instruct about the pitfalls of clear-seeing, namely bias and lack of focus on what was important to note. Navel gazing, a term used to describe the act of focusing one’s attention on oneself to deepen self-awareness, can, under the right conditions, mimic the divination practice of scrying.
Like most of you, we believe the Enneagram to be a beneficial tool for fast-tracking psychological awareness and internal development. However, like any psychological or transpersonal tool, it must be appropriately used to truly reap the benefits it can provide to our psychological awareness. The recent resurgence of the Enneagram as a pop-culture personality typology has led to a barrage of online information of varying accuracy and usefulness. We all desire to know ourselves, and some of us seek systems like the Enneagram to help us plot the various twists and turns of our psyche.
We are the first to preach the necessity of accurate typing or identifying our egoic patterns to loosen the grip of egoic control over our lives. Yet here is where the problems arise. We tend to get caught up in the obsessive identification of the various magic tricks of the ego, including all its defenses, behaviors, strategies, and proverbial sleights of hand designed to keep itself alive and help satisfy our emotional, mental, and physical desires.
Engaging in obsessive identification and labeling of every behavior and nuance that arises in the psyche often only strengthens the ego’s influence over our lives. We work with clients to help identify these patterns and understand that once the mind can categorize experiences (in this case, using the Enneagram), it can help us to integrate our experiences more fully and then glean new insights that may aid in our personal growth.
Finding our core type, Trifix, instinctual stacking, character structures, and archetypal patterns gives us a glimpse into who we are, but it is certainly not all we are. We could sit for hours in analysis, coaching, or therapy and get no closer to who we really are. In actuality, the longer we spend dissecting our psychological processes, personal histories, and emotional and mental belief systems, the more dissatisfied and hungry for more analysis we become. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue this aim because it is a necessary step for most people to develop self-awareness, but it shouldn’t be the end goal.
The mind is insatiable in service of the ego, and while our Enneagram journeys may give us a temporary sense of satisfaction, the ego always craves more. So it seeks new systems (astrology, human design, Myers Briggs, Big Five, etc.) or redefines itself within existing systems (i.e., re-typing our core type, Trifix, or instinct), or throws all the systems out entirely in search of some more tangible satisfaction. These distraction exercises serve to keep the mind engaged (we often call this “mind candy”) but also strengthen our identification with the false self (or ego). This is the equivalent of identifying the mist in the crystal ball as the truth and then seeking to find the truth in the mist without letting it settle to reveal a clearer picture.
Don’t get us wrong; the mind candy is a necessary step to finding the keys to more profound spiritual work for some. Thus, we’re happy to feed the mind some of its cravings. With the understanding that appropriate doses of candy can help give us the sugar rush necessary to continue the deeper journey of true self-discovery. For some, when they begin to tire of the incessant tricks of the mind, uncovering new levels of peace and awareness gives way to learning how to conquer some of our ego's more challenging defenses and traps.
So, as much as possible, we encourage everyone to avoid getting caught in the mist in the crystal, realizing that the mist may obstruct your view temporarily and thus lead you to believe that all you’ve been seeing up until that point was an illusion and, indeed, it was. But don’t let the illusory nature of the mist lead you to construct new levels of illusion (mists in the guise of obsessive labeling, navel-gazing, re-typing, system-hopping, etc.). You then end up with an impenetrable fog that may completely obscure the path.