In my previous post I discussed the difference between reality and personality. The long and short of it is that an individual’s personality exists essentially by blocking out or filtering out a part of the whole. You cannot be yourself as a single, individuated person and take in everything all at once. Individuation and manifestation (what some occultists call life below the abyss) imply a limitation of perspective.

How we get from the One to the Two, from unity to duality, that is, from the Whole to Self versus Other, is an interesting question, one that cannot be answered satisfactorily in a few words. Saying that duality is an illusion is too simplistic, because even an illusion must be something that exists apart from the real, it must *be* something illusory that is not the real thing, so really this explanation doesn’t explain anything. I will tackle the issue if and when I decide to start talking about philosophy. For my part, all I can say at the moment is that we cannot really understand the One and the Two without taking into account the Zero.

Three Urges, Three Passions

Let us take for granted, though, that Two comes from the One. Individuals come into being as centers of awareness that are separate from the rest of the universe. This can only happen by taking some parts of the whole not to be part of oneself, that is, by filtering them out (“I am this, not that.”) This, according to Enneagram theory, can happen in three ways, depending on what it is that is being blocked out.

Conventionally, we recognize people as being made up of three things: Body, Heart and Head. The Body is sometimes called the Guts, the Heart is sometimes called the Soul, the Mind is sometimes called the Head or even Spirit. I shall stick with Body, Heart and Head.

These three aspects of the human complexion are representative of three urges: autonomy, recognition and security.

Even the meekest individual seeks to maintain their autonomy, some degree of space for themselves, which requires that they assert themselves as organisms against the world surrounding them. This is Self versus Other in its purest form, where the self seeks to neutralize otherness and bring it under its command. Even in our painfully egualitarian times he who doesn’t want to starve will seek to conquer the world.

Recognition is a much misunderstood concept. It speaks to the junction between our personal and our social existence, and to our desire to match the image of ourselves that we think exists in other people’s perception, or, which is the same, the desire for them to have the image of us that we have of ourselves. This, however, implies that we maintain a self-image, that is, that we can point at certain definite characteristics we either display or wish to display and say, “This is me.” Only, we cannot really know why this is the case: our self-image hangs in the air somewhat, and feels arbitrary. Why are you only yourself when you are X, but not when you are Y? So, in order to validate it and make it real, we seek to reproduce it in other people’s perception to render it stable. Everyone needs recognition to an extent, and this includes hipsters.

The need for security is the need to know that one’s existence is preserved against imponderable forces that we see as alien to our being. If life consists of Self and Other, of Me and the World, there is no way of knowing whether tomorrow something will happen that will favor me against the world or the world against me. The urge for security is the urge to maximize my chances. It is, in a way, similar to the urge for autonomy in that it sees the Self against the Other, but in this struggle it concentrates more on regimenting and strengthening the Self than on conquering the Other.

These three urges come bundled with their negative side or passion. You cannot conquer the world to maintain your autonomy without anger, seen not necessarily as rage, but as a certain choleric disposition to treat that thing outside of you as a potential enemy or obstacle to be overcome. You cannot have recognition without attaching a great deal of value on the small segment of the universe that you call “me” and that you spruce up with wishes and exaggerations which you want other people to validate. This need for recognition creates the potential for lack of recognition and therefore for shame. Finally, you cannot be looking for security without experiencing fear, by which I do not mean any ordinary fear, but rather the sense of your being teetering on the brink of annihilation.

Center	Urge	Desired Outcome	Passion
Body	Autonomy	Subduing the Other	Anger
Heart	Recognition	Connecting Self and Other	Shame
Head	Security	Preserving the Self	Fear

The Three Centers in the Enneagram: Types Nine, Three and Six

The three centers, i.e., the Body center, the Heart center and the Head center, work in a circle. You establish yourself as an individual body as opposed to the others, you sustain a self-image which you look to accredit in the eyes of your fellows so as to validate your existence, but you suddenly realize that your condition as a separate entity is precarious, so you use your mind to create survival strategies that lead to you being able to preserve yourself as an individual, and so on.

Of course, this cycle is the basis for everyone’s self-sustained existence as individuals, regardless of their particular proclivities. In a way, this is the minimum needed for you to be you, and not another person, or a bunch of moss gathering on a rock. However, this is also how the Enneagram comes into being as a system of nine types.

The circle represents the whole, the unbridled and undivided universe, as it were. The triangle indicates the three points in the Enneagram where the three centers have their hub: 9 is the hub of the Body center, 3 is the hub of the Heart center and 6 is the hub of the Head center. Energy flows uninterrupted from 9 to 3 to 6 to 9 (we will see in the next article how the other six types come into existence.)

I have described personality as a filtering system which blocks out certain aspects of reality to privilege others. Interestingly, the three Enneagram types which represent the hubs of the respective centers are qualified exactly by the fact that they block out, or suppress, the energy of their center.

In other words, Type 9, the hub of the Body center, suppresses its own bodily energy; Type 3, the hub of the Heart center, suppresses its own emotional energy; Type 6, the hub of the Mind center, suppresses its own intellectual energy. This has the interesting consequence that, unless you know the Enneagram, you would never guess that Nines are body types, since they seem soo airy and diffuse, nor would you recognize the willful and competitive Threes as heart-driven, nor the insecure Sixes, who never trust their judgment and are always looking for someone trustworthy to make decisions for them as head-driven.

Yet it is so. We will see in the next article that this is part of a dialectical or triadic movement that leads to the emergence of the other types.