- Home
- Preface
- Introduction
- Three Zones and Nine Sectors
- Wings and Moves and other functions
- Biblical Journeys
- Prayer
- The Enneagram
- From the Enneagram to the Strategy Board
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The diagram
The distinctive diagram that is the enneagram first appears in the work of George Gurdjieff in the early twentieth century.
Gurdjieff’s followers Ouspensky, Bennett, and Blake describe ‘the enneagram of process’ – and reject the later work linking the diagram with nine ‘types’ of people. There are, however, two intriguing links with the later work: Gurdjieff identified three ‘brains’ or ‘centers of function’ similar to head and heart and gut – the intellectual, the emotional, and the instinctual; and Bennett is credited with having arranged the lines of the Lord’s Prayer around the diagram.
For the purists, ‘the enneagram of personality types’ remains just one of many enneagrams – just one of many uses of the diagram. The difficult part is tracking down those ‘other uses’: no writer on ‘the enneagram of personality types’ discusses them – and the work of Gurdjieff and his followers is almost impenetrably obscure. But in the midst of this obscurity there are clues – especially the idea of clockwise motion representing a ‘process’ round the outer circle, with NINE as the starting and ending point and THREE and SIX as ‘shock points’ or ‘energy points.’
The rest – Appendix 1 above – is entirely new work by the present author, asking the question ‘what is going on here?’ and determining to work it out. The concept of ‘the point of no return,’ the idea of ‘the static enneagram,’ and all of the examples – including their correlations with the strategy board – are entirely new work. The most significant examples are probably the enneagram of the Trinity and the cycle of reflection and action – although the analyses of contemporary politics and the church year proved worthwhile, and the analysis of retail road vehicles has proved to be a remarkably reliable ‘first big clue’ to an individual’s home base on the strategy board.
Extravagant claims have been made for the wider potential of ‘the enneagram’: made but never substantiated. Appendix 1 above uncovers and makes available some of that wider potential.