The Pale Horse is one of my favorite books by Agatha Christie. I find myself rereading it every couple of years, and I consider it one of the great stories in the mystery genre. Part of it is because it deals (on the surface) with occultism, which is something I am obviously into, considering this website. But mostly it’s because it manages to infuse the reader with an impalpable, ancestral dread that stems from Christie’s almost intuitive understanding of how a human psyche is capable of spiralling into a vortex of mystery, fear and confusion (no wonder she is usually typed as an Enneagram 5 or 6.) Nothing about the plot feels forced: we are led almost seamlessly down the narrow, unlit hallway at the back of our minds into a basement we didn’t know was there at all.
One of the (many) intelligent remarks on human psychology that Christie makes in passing is the following:
“One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.”
This is a great example of how our character works, at least the way Enneagram theory understands it. The thing you hear mentioned and then pops up again almost serendipitously has obviously nothing to do with odd and mysterious synchronicities, as much as it’s a consequence of the fact that, if we are sufficiently struck by the thing in the first place, we will begin to scan reality for instances and confirmations of it. It is not just a matter of being struck, though, but also of need.
We have all made the experience of reality changing in front of us depending on our needs. Think of the last time you received a parcel and couldn’t just tear it open with your hands. You probably started scanning your environment, and immediately all the objects around you that weren’t sharp enough to be useful in opening the package were blended out of your perception, at least to a degree, and those that were sharp or pointy were more or less intuitively sorted by how useful they might be in helping you achieve your aim.
Now imagine if you did the same thing while at dinner with your significant other and there is no package to open. They are talking about how good the wine is or how classy the music is; all the while you are still categorizing your surrounding by how sharp things are and how useful they might be in cutting open a package (and hopefully not your sweetheart.)
In both cases, what you see isn’t necessarily false or wrong. Even in the second case (i.e., dinner with your partner,) it’s true that a handkerchief is less sharp than the edge of a table, which is less sharp than a knife, etc. What *is* false is the belief that the filtering system you use allows you to always see the whole of reality as it is, instead of just one side, and to capture what is important at that moment. In the first instance the filter is useful, while in the second it’s… well, it’s kind of creepy.
Personality is, essentially, a filtering system. We can’t take reality in all at once, so we concentrate on what we believe is important for us, what will foster our wellbeing, get us through trouble, etc. The difference between personality and the example I have just given is that personality tends to be relatively more stable, while the example of the knife is somewhat contingent. The principle, however, is the same.
There is a great debate among Enneagram theorists on when personality forms and we get our “number”, with some–usually those of a more mystical bent–believing it’s inborn, while others think it develops over time as we learn to cope with the challenges of our early life and deploy more and more fixed strategies that we end up overindentifying with to the detriment of others. Either way, the strategies we pick helped us, to a degree, in surviving, but we end up using them to a fault and tend to rely on them even when it doesn’t make sense or even when they might make things worse. Slowly, our personality is at risk of becoming an echo chamber that constantly reinforces old prejudices about ourselves and others instead of allowing us to change, adapt and react to the present moment rather than to some past problem, wound or fear.
Frankly, it is rather pointless for me to pick a side in this nature/nurture debate, especially because it wouldn’t add anything of consequence: the Ennagram is only useful as a tool once one has lived long enough, made enough blunders and achieved enough successes to develop some sense of self-reflection. Usually this doesn’t happen to the necessary degree until well after puberty has finished pummeling us to the ground (though there are exceptions, of course.)
The Enneagram as a typology system captures the nine basic patterns that people tend to fall into depending on how they structure their personal “filtering system.” The point of knowing it is not to free ourselves of it. This can’t be done, no more than one can step into a bucket and try to lift himself up by pulling at the handle. You are not going to get rid of your personality until you kick that bucket. Nor is personality a disease, as much as some in our vapid spiritual milieau tend to consider separate existence as evil and individuals as walking knots of traumas and darkness waiting to be unraveled by the uttering of the appropriate New Age platitudes.
Personality is a damn fine thing. Through it we can look at the world and see something instead of a confused blur of everything all at once. Think about it. We are capable of consciousness, which means that, through us, the universe experiences itself. Without us, no self-awareness for the Universe, or God, or Spirit, or the Anima Mundi, or Existence, or whatever you wish to call it. This experience, though, is only possible by blending out a part of the whole, so that something can come into focus. And this is glorious.
The problem arises when we fail to understand that our perception is limited, so that we can, at least to a small extent, improve it. Our personality is like a dress. We can wear it loosely and graciously, or it can become a straitjacket. The kind of self-cultivation that the Enneagram renders possible to us is the art of loosening the garment, not casting it off.
Patience is required, and kindness to oneself and to others. The hardest thing for some is learning to suspend judgment and just watch as they deploy their usual mechanism. The point is learning to appreciate the various facets of our response to reality until we can, as it were, catch ourselves in the act of “doing it again.” With practice, it becomes even possible to stop ourselves in the act and choose a better option. Sometimes we will surprise ourselves and the people around us by doing something that is partly out of character, because we have learned to accept other modes of being, thinking and acting as viable options.
This practice of self-reflection is also the process that leads to the development of what has been called the “inner observer.” At a deeper level, I may say that the inner observer is not really developed so much as it is discovered, because, at an even deeper level, we do not so much observe as we are observed into being. But this is neither here nor there at the moment. The point is that this inner observer can look dispassionately at what is going on, and although we may only get glimpses of this clarity, it’s through these glimpses that we are started on our quest of loosening the straitjacket of our personal mechanism and achieve greater balance.
