What is the Enneagram?
by David Gray
The Enneagram is a model of human nature – a typology made up of nine interconnected personality types represented as points on a geometric figure called an enneagram (from the Greek ennea, meaning “nine”, and gramma, meaning something “drawn” or “written”), a symbol which elucidates connections between the types.
Rather than being another man-made system designed to explain human nature, many view the Enneagram as a discovery about an organic reality that applies to human beings, universally, at a cellular level of psyche.
Each type is fundamentally different from the others, from the roots up. The types can be viewed as dynamic psychic structures — blueprints of nine inner mechanisms which spin off animated psychological processes. The Enneagrammic map is 3-dimensional, allowing us to see deep into the background programs of human motivation.
G.I. Gurdjieff~ “For the man who is able to make use of it, the enneagram makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary. Everything can be included and read in the enneagram. A man may be quite alone in the desert and he can trace the enneagram in the sand, and in it read the eternal laws of the universe. And every time he can learn something new, something he did not know before.”
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© 2013 David Gray
