Enneagram Holarchies?

I’ve held this suspicion that you can use non-personality type Enneagrams to study holarchies.

For example:

When Gurdjieff writes of those curious "three brained creatures" does he allude to this kind of holarchy?:

Can you really even use the Enneagram in this manner? What about taking it a step further and plopping the True, the Good, and the Beautiful (It, We, I) on top of it?

E-Prime

My introduction to E-Prime came from reading Robert Anton Wilsons “Cosmic Trigger III”.

The subject later came up on the sufi-studies list, and I started to make an effort to implement it in my writing. I still try and use E-Prime as much as possible, although I have not had much success using it orally…. yet.

1. It changed the way I perceived certain things
2. It helped stop me from treating people as things
3. It helps with “Right Speech”
4. It helps control inadvertent transmission of undesirable memes
5. It helps see how language forms cultural stuff

6. It makes me think before I speak/write

Daily Pictorial Note Pad

During 1998-1999 I drifted further and further from printing off a “to-do” list, or a daily calendar for each day.


But I still had a drive to print a “page-a-day” (front and back, well, actually more left and right.)


I really just loved scanning and printing pictures that appealed to me.

So I did that every day for a couple of years.


I would leave some areas open on each page to jot down notes and stuff.

10x Counts Introduction

I started this particular habit in Oct 1998 and have kept with it ever since. And I have questioned the value of doing it ever since. But I haven’t stopped.

The inability to keep my attention focused on the “one task that one must never forget” drove (drives) me nuts.

I could meditate in the morning and afterwards feel very focused. But, that session did not sustain it throughout the day.

I always fall back asleep during the day (and night, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time)

So I started working on a methodology to make me pause throughout the day, stop my mind, and return.

As always, I tend to use my breath as the anchor. So I decided I would try to take 10 breaths in complete present moment awareness.

I wanted to track two things:

1. The frequency of the exercise
2. The quality of each attempt

I’ve measured the quality in a number of different ways since 1998, but pretty much use the color-coded scale I've shown in the picture above.

Cultivating Awareness

For me, the path towards having more lucid dreams meant learning how to overcome “the waking dream”. I spend more time asleep at the wheel during the day than I care to admit. Remaining “awake”. Learning how to remain awake.

If I do nothing else in this life, let me at least not sleep through the rest of it.

Kabir Helminski wrote something (A Rumi passage) in the introduction of his book Living Presence, that sums up this idea for me:

The Master said:
There is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever.

It is just as if a king had sent you to a country to carry out a specified task. You go and perform a hundred other tasks; but if you have not performed that particular task on account of which you had gone to the country, it is as though you have performed nothing at all.
So man has come into this world for a particular task, and that is his purpose; if he does not perform it, then he will have done nothing.

DISCOURSES OF RUMI (TRANSLATED BY A. J. ARBERRY)

So I continue to try and use as many tools as I can to help me try and fulfill that task:

1997 Daily Pages

Once I got a scanner and a color printer I started wandering off on a little tangent with my habit of printing a daily page. I found myself scanning all sorts of stuff and printing it as part of my daily organizer/schedule/to-do list page. In fact the organizer/schedule/to-do list aspect kept shrinking and shrinking during 1997.

Quadrants in Triad Form

I have taken Ken Wilber’s quadrants and adapted it to an Enneagram. I assign values to aspects of the Enneagram that symbolize concepts described by Wilber.

Ken Wilber assigns a certain perspective to his UL quadrant and a certain perspective to his UR quadrant.

I assign that UL perspective to the I->It segment, and the UR perspective to the It->I segment of the I-We-It triad.

And similarly the LL and LR quadrants:


So the Enneagram triad provides for 6 different perspectives:

I-It The subjective inner experience (the meditation experience)
It-I The objective measurements (measuring a meditator)
It-We Observing/studying social/cultural behavior
We-It Experiencing social/cultural customs
We-I It takes a village to raise a child
I-We What the greatest human beings of all time passed on to us

That provides me with 6 perspectives for building some sort of integral practice.

7/2/2005 - 18154 days old

In 1997, as I continued to try and develop lucid dreaming skills, I ended up looking for books about the brain. Easy to read books about the brain.
Peter Russell's The Brain Book found it's way into my library. Ultimately this book provided my introduction to Mind Maps more than anything else. But I did pull it off the bookshelf today to look at the contents:

An experiment. I want to see the resolution of a more detailed mind map:

Hmmm. I dunno. I guess that doesn't work very well. Oh well.....

I also did a Google search , found Peter Russells web site, and browsed around a bit. I found the little "your age in days" calculator there. I also plucked his Passing Thoughts section to my PDA to read a little later on.

Enneagram Pieces

I use the non personality type Enneagram as a sort of symbolic modeling tool.

cat – we assign those letters to represent a cat. The map isn’t the territory.

a+b=c – We assign ‘a’ to something, like 7 green lizards. We assign ‘b’ to some other quantity. And then we say that ‘c’ represents what happens when we do something (+) to ‘a’ and ‘b’. Manipulating equations allows us to see all sorts of interesting things.

The parts of the Enneagram allow me to do a similar type of thing. I assign stuff to the different components and then describe relationships between the components.

Organizing

I've gone through various approaches for organizing my interests in ways so that I get stuff done. It seems like I have always had a bottomless to-do list that every few months or so starts to overwhelm me. Over the past 10 years my methodologies have taken lots of twists and turns as I try to engage various technologies. This became even more complicated as I started "inner" work. But I started 1996 with a certain new found enthusiasm. Each day I printed off a page of stuff and used that page for my notes.
























In the summer of 1996 I got my first color printer, and a scanner. My daily pages evolved to incorporate that technology.