Intelligent Enneagram

A number of years ago Mushtaq started pointing me away from the personality enneagram. Wow! It has remained a dominant influence in contemplating almost everything. My favorite book, so far:

I've tried to explain to myself what the enneagram does, but never very well. It allows communication using a different language. I spotted this Gurdjieff quote at the very beginning of The Intelligent Enneagram and realized that it says it all very nicely:

In expressing the laws of the unity of endless diversity a symbol itself possesses an endless number of aspects from which it can be examined and it demands from the man approaching it the ability to see simultaneously from different points of view. Symbols which are transposed into the words of ordinary language become rigid-then, they grow dim and very easily become "their own opposites" confining the meaning within narrow dogmatic frames, without giving it even the very relative freedom of a logical examination of a subject.

-Gurdjieff speaking in In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky