Enneagram Part Two:
Heart Center
Gurdjieff and the Enneagram
Monday, March 2, 2020
My friend Russ Hudson and his writing partner, the late Don Richard Riso, give some of the history of the Enneagram in their book The Wisdom of the Enneagram:
The person responsible for bringing the Enneagram symbol to the modern world was George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866–1949). . . . The system that Gurdjieff taught was a vast and complex study of psychology, spirituality, and cosmology that aimed at helping students understand their place in the universe and their objective purpose in life. . . . [1]
Gurdjieff taught the Enneagram through a series of sacred dances, explaining that it should be thought of as a living symbol that was moving and dynamic, not as static. [His teaching is called “The Work,” meaning working on oneself.] However, nowhere in the published writings of Gurdjieff and his students did he teach the Enneagram of personality types. The origins of that Enneagram are more recent and are based on two principal modern sources [Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo]. [2]
Russ Hudson spent several years studying Gurdjieff’s “Work,” as did my colleague Cynthia Bourgeault. In her book The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, which draws on the teachings of Gurdjieff to more deeply explore the Trinity, Cynthia writes:
The enneagram of personality has captured the popular imagination, that’s for sure. And you have to admit that there is something brilliant and even damnably strategic in its design. Using that classic ego bait—“let me learn my type, some interesting new thing about me”—it draws people in, only to put in their hands basic tools for self-observation and nonidentification. . . . Progressing enneagram students rapidly develop the capacity to see that they are in fact not their type; it is simply an impersonal, mechanical pattern that plays out within them. [3]
