USING TYPING to get to TRUTH
by Alan Sheets and Barbara Tovey
Typing now falls into the category of an "art form" rather than a "science". It is currently accomplished by educated guesswork, as evidenced by the inconsistencies we see among enneagram teachers and authors. At this time there is no guaranteed way to validate a person's type . . . no way to establish which enneagram teacher is correct.
From a scientific perspective (Alan is a former biochemist), enneagram typing inconsistencies are red flags indicating that parts of the enneagram paradigm are not fully understood, or, worse yet, are misunderstood.
Those involved in the hard sciences consider all of the behavioral sciences, of which the enneagram is one, suspect because of the extreme difficulty of proving any hypotheses due to the sheer complexity of the human being.
However, we think the issue of typing is a rare exception to this problem. We think the typing process would lend itself well to rigorous research . . . and that such research could elevate the enneagram to a significantly more respected position in our society. Even more importantly, we would be creating a much more valid and useful tool.
The typing process would lend itself well to rigorous research because everyone falls into one of nine distinct categories. In science, this is an "either/or" situation; the result is either black or white. There is no ambiguity. It means that each time we improve our typing hypothesis, we will be able to quantify the improvement by tracking the percentage of people everyone agrees is the same type. The higher the percentage, the better the hypothesis. Eventually this percentage of agreement should approach 100%.
Once consistent typing has been established, the enneagram paradigm could be more rigorously studied. We would have better ways of testing our theories about various types. We would be able to study inconsistencies.
There is no question but that Naranjo, Oaks, O'Leary, Riso, Rohr, Speeth, Palmer, et. al., are all highly skilled, motivated, and dedicated enneagram scholars. But they do not agree with each other. We suspect this is at least partially true because of the way in which this intriguing paradigm evolved out of the original information first introduced to individuals in this country:
Claudio Naranjo learned about the Enneagram from Oscar Ichazo at the original Arica training in Chili in 1970, in which the enneagram was only one of many tools that Ichazo used for his task of "ego reduction." Naranjo was later separated from the training by Ichazo. Naranjo then returned to this country and started teaching the enneagram, along with many other things, in groups which he called SAT (Seekers After Truth). Kathleen Speeth was in his original SAT group. A Jesuit priest named Robert Ochs also attended the early SAT groups, and was so taken by the enneagram that he took it back to the Jesuit community where the ideas spread very rapidly. In 1971, Robert Ochs introduced the enneagram to Patrick O'Leary, a Jesuit priest. In 1972, Helen Palmer was introduced to the enneagram by Claudio Naranjo. In 1973, Don Riso learned about it when he was a Jesuit seminarian in Toronto. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan, learned of it in the early '70s from a Jesuit spiritual teacher.
Don Riso writes in his book, Discovering Your Personality Type, on pages 109-110, "When I encountered the Jesuit tradition of the Enneagram in Toronto in 1973 as a Jesuit seminarian, it consisted of nine one-page impressionistic descriptions of the personality types along with several pages of Enneagrams labeled with the names of the ego fixations, the passions, the virtues, the traps and other material that had been transmitted more or less intact from the Arica tradition."
So, this was the manner in which the enneagram was introduced to individuals in this country. There not only wasn't a complete system to study, there was very little written material and no master or mentor with whom to study, even though historically this work must have been passed down by masters who had spent lifetimes studying it. Don Riso writes further on page 110, "A more fundamental reason for confusion (about enneagram interpretation) was that little of the theory of the Enneagram or of the description of the types had been worked out, at least in the Naranjo and Jesuit traditions."
Given the above observations, we do not see how it would have been possible for these scholars to avoid melding and intertwining their own personalities with their understandings of the enneagram paradigm. Thus, it follows that the truth and the great potential for this work has only been partially uncovered.
These observations are not in any way intended to find fault or to criticize. These people were the first, in this country, to sense and bring to popular awareness the hidden mysteries and fundamental truth in the enneagram, and the first to make great strides to shine light on its richness. They have done excellent work with very little information or guidance and we will always be greatly indebted to them. Gurdjieff said, quoted by P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 294, "The enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of the enneagram it can be interpreted . . . 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 . . . The enneagram is a schematic drawing of perpetual motion."
If one just thinks about the controversy surrounding typing today, even after all the study and research done by the many enneagram teachers, think what it must have been like for Claudio Naranjo, who had so little information and who had been studying it for such a short period of time. Typing mistakes by Naranjo and the others must have been common. There most assuredly are people walking around today who still believe the inaccurate type they were given in the early seventies. Even today there must be a large percentage of people who have been mistyped by enneagram teachers (perhaps up to 20%) or who have mistyped themselves (perhaps up to 50%).
This leads us to a very critical philosophical problem. Since the enneagram is discreet (you are one and only one type), being mistyped by someone is nothing less than being told a lie about yourself. One could argue that being mistyped might add a harmful degree of confusion to one's life.
In addition, the mistyped people who are unknowingly building their view of themselves around an untruth contribute to a lack of clarity that people outside the enneagram community can see and sense when they assess the value of the enneagram.
If one assumes the enneagram is a tool that allows us to identify our own essence and the essence of another, then we must be prepared to have its merits judged by the strictest of criteria. We all must learn how to separate out the fundamental wisdom of this system from our own personalities. We must learn to recognize both what we know and what we do not know, the latter being the more difficult of the two. Whenever we see an inconsistency or an unknown we must take it as a challenge to learn something new, and an indicator that we have not as yet completely uncovered our own true essence.
We believe the enneagram is not more widely accepted or more highly thought of because we, as a community, have not yet unearthed enough of its truth. It is important to realize that the differences we see among teachers are opportunities to gain clarity and thus help allow this highly insightful tool to become even more efficient at providing people with an opportunity to deeply transform themselves.
It is time to take the next step and strip personalities out of the teaching and uncover the greater truth that exists underneath. The process of systematically studying typing will begin the process of removing the inconsistencies and inaccuracies from the system. We think it is important that groups of enneagram teachers begin to get together to work on this problem. It would be easy to set up a rigorous protocol that could be followed every time the problem was studied so the data could be compared and combined until reproducibility was attained.
The following explains our motivation in making this proposal. When we were experimenting with various Aikido exercises in relation to the enneagram we discovered (in conjunction with Gina Catania) that different types assume unique, distinct postures when physically challenged to increase their "chi" or energy flow, and that these postures seem to have a strong correlation with the enneagram.
We believe the enneagram has an ancient heritage which is intimately linked to the nature of the human body. We feel that this body-based method could be used as a most effective typing tool because the body is much less likely to misrepresent itself, whereas the mind has many ways to fool itself and others. If time proves us to be correct, then the elusive issue of typing might have an easy, elegant solution which does not need to take into account cultural, environmental and psychological factors.
ENNEAGRAM OF THE BODY Procedure for Typing
Our procedure is based on the martial arts principle of energy flow or "chi." When this energy is flowing, the body is more vibrant, stronger and capable.
We have identified seven different places in the body from where energy flows which also seem to correspond with the nine enneagram points. (The energy for 3, 6 and 9 all comes from the same area of the body, but each of these three types has a unique posture and focus.)
Although this method is eminently reproducible, like the martial arts, it does require training. One needs to be experientially trained in the energetic postures of all of the types and also needs to be trained to feel the energy as it flows from another individual.
A person's enneagram posture is elicited by conducting the following procedure. First the person stands in front of the facilitator with one foot behind the other in a martial arts stance, with the back foot at right angles to the front. This is done because it is a strong position and the position of the legs is not relevant to the final posture. The person is asked to meet the facilitator's hands, palm to palm, with three instructions:
- Make yourself strong.
- Don't push back on me when I push on you.
- Don't do anything that hurts.
Then, the facilitator uses gentle pushes to enhance the person's energy flow until they have achieved a posture/energetic configuration that feels effortless to the individual, no matter how hard the facilitator pushes. At this point they will have assumed one of nine distinct postures. (This is somewhat akin to the energetic phenomena experienced in the martial arts practice in which you can make your arm unbendable by holding it straight, directing it toward something, and projecting energy or imagining energy flowing through your arm and out your fingertips towards the object. Once the energy starts to flow, a person, even one trained in the martial arts, will be unable to bend your arm at the elbow.)
