WAKE UP!
To The Subtle Violence of Personality
A friend (point 8) commented to me once about “the bad rap eights get”. This was in response to an article on the enneagram of personality types that had appeared in a major metropolitan newspaper. The article quoted one person’s viewpoint that “eights are awful to be married to!” As an eight myself, I could relate to both my friend’s concern and the person quoted in the article because I too was married to an eight and it was the worst 18 months of my life!!! Those eights are they too much or what?
I have attended a number of enneagram functions and have many friends and acquaintances within enneagram circles. Invariably, I hear comments about how eights are the worst. In studying the enneagram, I learned that no particular fixation is better or worse than any other. Why then do we continue to hear comments like this?
I think it is obvious: point eight is probably the most aggressive and openly hostile in the discharge of their energy. We live in an era and a world where it is impossible to not see the negative effects of hostility and aggression. Conflict, war, rape and child abuse abound in the news. It would be easy, yet tragic and ignorant, to see point eight as the embodiment of all of these ills.
I believe that the biggest wound and the greatest source of suffering for all of us is the disenfranchisement from our True Nature. This separation is the genesis of all emotional and psychological pain and suffering. Hurtful behavior reflects a fundamental disconnection from our true nature or essential self. Hurtful, hateful, violent behavior encompasses territory far more subtle than that of aggression and anger.
The human soul is the most sensitive, delicate and impressionable medium of experience in all of creation. What society might consider normal behavior can be a tremendous violence to the soul. Have you ever witnessed the trauma caused to a child by a parent’s intentional withdrawal of their presence (not necessarily physical)? This is often done “for the child’s own good”.
I’ve noticed with interest how the withdrawn types on the enneagram find it easy to judge and condemn aggression, but don’t seem to be able to acknowledge the pain and suffering and violence they spread through their withholding, unavailability and withdrawal. How about deceit & manipulation, judgment & seduction? How often are we wounded to the core by these agents of violence?
One of our greatest challenges is how to be and do. Is it possible for our doing to become an extension of our True Nature?
A big problem with ego is that it is always trying to do things: to get better, to correct error, to get real, etc., etc. Most (99.9999999%) of this doing is reactivity. It is constrained and defined by our conditioning. Ego’s doing is based upon our ego ideal and is motivated and driven by the superego (inner critic, anti-libidinal soul, anti-life force); which itself is fueled by hatred.
The enneagram is a two-edged sword. The personality can have a wonderful life of doing and can continue to perpetuate violence, albeit, in more and more subtle forms. Iron chains or gilded cage, does it really matter how you are imprisoned?
Some say, that in returning to essence, you lose more than you gain; that the process is more one of giving up and disappearing than it is of getting or attaining something. They say that the personality becomes transparent and permeable to the spontaneous arising of True Nature and that reality itself is then doing – pretty esoteric stuff.
Here’s what I know: It is necessary to open oneself up to experience and forces beyond the personality in order to return to the impressionable sensitive self of soul. The enneagram reflects certain truths and patterns of this return process, but the personality cannot do it. It cannot reverse engineer itself into freedom and wholeness. It can, however, allow itself to be acted upon and to awaken to the truth of its limitations.
The enneagram can help us to awaken to mechanical conditioning; to our fixation of attention; to our character structure; to our survival (coping) strategy. Unconsciousness is violence to the soul. For as long as we remain unconscious, we will continue to be purveyors of violence; to ourselves and others.
Your notions of inflicting pain through withholding, deceit and manipulation or other (non-physical) forms of abuse need to be elaborated on, because they are precisely the aggressions that have had a free ride in our society/time. (point 5 friend)
The most pervasive form of violence to the soul is personality itself. The constraint and limitation of our essential self within an identity based on image and history is violence. The deepest wounding to the soul is the loss of self; the self-forgetting that each fixation reflects in a different manner.
You sleep
you forget yourself
and forgetfulness
brings no fruit but regret. – SARMAD
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