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| ISBN-13: | 9780895565174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Gateways Books & Tapes |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2005 |
| Series: | Consciousness Classics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 190 |
| Sales rank: | 898,469 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Enneagram of Society
Healing the Soul to Heal the World
By Claudio Naranjo, Paul Barnes
Gateways Books and Tapes
Copyright © 2004 Claudio NaranjoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89556-517-4
CHAPTER 1
Passions, Pathologies and Neurotic Motivations
Practically every culture has its legend of paradise: the idea of having "fallen" from a better life condition, of having lost a state of original or primordial happiness and harmony.
Whether the idea of a paradise at the beginning of our history is true or not, there is some sense in thinking of paradise as a principle outside of time, a mythical illo tempore with respect to which our neurotic state constitutes a fall.
Western religion has spoken to us of the fall as the consequence of a sin, and has correspondingly spoken to us of redemption through the purification of our sins. Original sin, however, is not only that which has come down to us from original times by means of an emotional plague (or karmic continuity) through the generations. Two notions overlap in the notion of original sin: the idea of transmittable sin and the principle of sin, its "source" in the special sense of principle (arché) or fundament — an essence of the fall beyond the diverse manifestations of awareness in its exile from paradise.
Saint Augustine said of this meta-sin that original sin consists of an aspect of ignorantia and another of dificultas. Today, we would translate this as: a disorder of awareness and an interference with action. A non explicit element in this Augustinian dichotomy, though one commonly understood as an essential aspect of sin, is what theologians (such as the Venerable Bede) called "concupiscence" — equivalent to what Buddhists have also seen at the heart of sin: a hyper-desire (trishna, attachment).
Little is said nowadays in the modern lay world concerning "sin," and those who still preserve the term in their vocabulary are suspected of being traditionalists or guilt-ridden. On the other hand, much is said of pathologies. We apply the language of medicine to the problem of consciousness, and by doing so we inadvertently rescue the original sense of the word sin that had almost been forgotten after the contamination of the notion of wrongness as a dysfunction with that of wrongness as evil.
The psychiatric perspective has invited us to think not so much of evil acts or destructive behavior as of dysfunctions, confusions or deviations of the impulses. And it is in this last term that we find the original meaning of hamarteia — a borrowed term from archery used to designate sin in the gospels, and whose original meaning was not hitting the target.
Here, original theology meets with today's psychopathology, because since Freud we also understand the faults of the psyche as deviations of energy — impediments that interpose themselves between spontaneity and action, causing an overflow of psychic energy towards secondary ends.
The difference between sins and pathologies is, however, the locus of responsibility: in so far as "sin" accuses, making the individual responsible, "pathology" excuses, making past or present causes beyond the individual himself responsible. While we are victims of mental and interpersonal pathologies, we are responsible for our sins.
Obviously, each of these perspectives has its use and thus they complement one another, since we are at the same time physical beings subject to a causal universe, and beings — more than animals — made responsible by a spark of freedom.
Is it appropriate then to talk about certain basic aberrations of psychic life — call them sins or pathologies?
The Christian tradition replies affirmatively, and offers us its teaching with respect to the capital sins — differentiated forms of expression of the single sin that are at the head (caput) of all that we can do wrong in our relationship with others, with life, and with ourselves.
What then are such sins?
While pathologies have been described by psychology mainly as constellations of symptoms or characteristics that belong to the sphere of action ("character traits"), sins such as pride or envy point towards the sphere of motivation.
We may say that these are destructive desires, exaggerated desires — "passions" — even when they are sometimes not forms of attraction but rather of repulsion, and some may be described as a passion for being dispassionate. Love gives, while passions constitute forms of insatiability: a neurotic need cannot be satisfied except transitorily, because deep down it demands something that doesn't exist. Carefully considered, the passions reveal themselves to be a thirst for Being, ultimately based on a loss of contact with the Being — i.e., spiritual confusion.
It is clear that the doctrine of the seven capital sins (as well as that of the Trinity) is not to be found in the gospels. Scholars believe that they both reached the heart of Christianity through the Hellenistic cultural context in which early Christianity developed and in which spiritual doctrines from Babylonian esotericism survived. Yet although we find no systematic mention in the gospels of the seven sins, we do find them (with the greedy as the "inebriated" and the lustful as "fornicators") even before the gospels were written — in one of the epistles of Horace, each in relation to a particular antidote.
Fervet avaritia miseroque cupidine pectus: Sunt verba et voces, quibus hunc lenire dolorem Possis, et magnam morbi deponere partem. Laudis amore tumes: sunt certa piacula, quae te Ter pure lecto poterunt recreare libello. Invidus, iracundus, iners, vinosus, amator, Nemo adeo ferus est ut non mitescere possit Si modo culturae patientem commodet aurem.
[The human heart burns with avarice and miserable thirst; there are words and formulas to calm this suffering and to cure, at least in part, this ill. You are bloated with vanity: there are certain expiations that can revive you if you read a certain book three times precisely. The envious, angry, indolent, inebriated, sensual — none is so savage as not to be able to be tamed, as long as they have the patience to dedicate themselves to learning.]
The first written testimony we have regarding sins in the Christian tradition seems to me to be the most perceptive of all — assuredly a reflection of the subtlety of the desert fathers and of their participation in a living tradition. Among the hermits (who constituted the core of Christianity in the first centuries), Evagrius (born in Greece) was the first to leave us writings. It is thought that he was the first to bring together in a coherent system the teaching of the desert fathers with respect to the life of prayer. Ascetic life for Evagrius is "the spiritual method whose aim is to purify that part of the soul that is the seat of passions."
It has been said that the desert fathers were able to elaborate the theory of sins because they also had the practice. Evagrius was heir to Origenes and to Gregory of Nyssa, as well as a direct disciple to one whom Dante, in his Paradise of the Contemplative, calls "Macarius the Great." Bamberger, in his introduction to The Praktikos Chapters on Prayer says that Evagrius was the first "anatomist of the passions of the psyche, both in its manifestations in behavior as well as in its intra-psychic activity."
Citing Evagrius:
Fear of God fortifies your faith, my son. Continence, in turn, affirms this fear. Patience and hope make of this virtue something solid and implacable and give birth to apatheia. However, this apatheia gives rise to ágape, which guards the doorway to profound knowledge of creation. This knowledge is finally succeeded by theology (by which I mean, naturally, wisdom or gnosis) and supreme beatitude.
It is interesting to note that in the formulation of capital sins in Evagrius — the very first — the list comprises not seven, but rather eight. Of equal or greater interest is the fact that Evagrius does not call them sins, but rather deals with them as "thoughts" —"bad thoughts" (today we would say "destructive thoughts") and later on as "passionate thoughts."
Evagrius' list includes, apart from pride (which heads the current Gregorian list, but was the last in his), vainglory. He describes it as a subtle sin that is easily developed in souls who practice virtue, and that it leads them to want their efforts to be publicly known, since they seek acknowledgement. In addition to the seven sins that our Gregorian system recognizes, Evagrius recognizes the fault by which the devil is sometimes recognized when he is called "the lord of lies." Even before Evagrius, in the Testament of the Patriarchs, the "lying spirit" is spoken of and it appears that Evagrius inherited a more ancient tradition that recognizes the "lying spirit" as something underlying the other seven. An expert in human characters might perhaps nowadays find the expressions "falseness" or "inauthenticity" more appropriate. This is why, strictly speaking, one should not think of a different doctrine when subsequent theologists talked of the seven capital sins. It may be said that the recognition of this heptad, of this spectrum or of this rainbow of sin is common to the preceding and subsequent epochs.
For someone with practical, living knowledge of the psychology of sins, it will be easy to recognize that the tristizia (sadness) of Evagrius has been replaced by envy: envy is associated with sadness, since a feeling of a lack of value cannot avoid being a sad feeling, in the same way as the false abundance of pride makes this a cheerfulpassion. Evagrius' authority is of particular relevance in the description of acidia (indolence), which he called the "midday devil", and whose action in the inner life of the ascetic (i.e. one who seeks hesichias, apatheia or spiritual peace) is that lack of care (chedia in Greek) in which there is such a need for encouragement — since the temptation is great for one's concentration on the divine to be distracted and even for one to leave the cell itself. Evagrius tells us that indolence is the greatest of afflictions, and thus the occasion for the greatest purification.
It would appear that the desert fathers truly knew what forgetting God was (the curse of spiritual sloth) while monastics of subsequent generations — undoubtedly more extrovert and more active — gave the term a simple meaning of "sloth." This shift in emphasis involved also the forgetting of the original meaning of acidia, which reflects a deterioration in the tradition. As has been the case so many times in the history of Christianity, a fanatical orthodoxy ended up being cut off from its sources and losing first hand knowledge. When originism was considered heresy, Evagrius himself became a heretic, and this certainly contributed to his being silenced and relatively forgotten — although this did not mean that he stopped being a most important link in the tradition.
Although it appears that the living understanding of capital sins had become lost in the heart of Christianity, we have seen a revival of interest in moods and the study of moods as fundamental as envy and pride in the world of psychology.
I mention envy first, since Melanie Klein is remembered more today than Karen Horney, who left us hervision of neurosis as a selling of the soul to the devil in exchange for glory. Although for Horney, pride and the "tyranny of should" appeared to be fundamental in all neuroses (sustained by the need to maintain the idealized image that pride demands and sustains), I do not believe that Melanie Klein has explicitly left us a doctrine of envy as a fundamental psychopathology. However, it seems to me that she does do so with her view of envy as a sort of original sin: an ill that reaches us genetically, as an aspect of a death instinct inseparable from our nature.
After many years' experience as a psychotherapist, it seems to me that to interpret neurotic behavior from the viewpoint of envy or to interpret it as an expression of a fundamental impulse of pride is useful, and especially useful for people in whom one or the other constitutes the dominant sin or passion. It is natural since envious people (and by the way, I acknowledge these or them to be some of the most common characters in the world of psychotherapy) may see themselves much better in the light of an interpretation that reflects their envy at each step rather than in the light of an interpretation from the viewpoint of fear.
I say of fear and not something else, because fear has been the most common interpretation in psychology since Freud: it may be said that anxiety (irrational fear) is to the theory of Freud what the lying spirit is to that of Evagrius, namely a fundamental ill, the root of the unhealthy consciousness.
A colleague of mine in the psychiatric clinic at the University of Chile reproached psychoanalysts for using anxiety to explain everything. And I believe rightly so, since anxiety is used (and in second place, hate) to explain the acts of a person more often than pride, envy, and other specific forms of motivation deficiency. Sincethis interpretation is frequently the correct one, it fosters the temptation to overgeneralize.
The fundamental explanation of neurosis in psychoanalysis is thus childhood fear, which arises from the defenselessness and dependence of the child in the face of his or her parents' authority. This is the fear that has inhibited us, counteracting the force of our instinctiveness. Freud titled one of his books Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, with which he announced the idea that anxiety incites the inhibition from which symptoms arise (nowadays, we would prefer to say "neurotic suffering").
It is curious that Christianity, which has so extolled the blood of the martyrs, has not included cowardice among its sins. Or rather, it is not so curious. Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morals, left us the theory that our ethos is derived both from the Jewish people, who escaped slavery only to return to it again with their exile, and from early, persecuted Christianity. Nietzsche reproaches Christianity for what he called "the moral of slaves," the moral of castrated men — we would say in these post-Freudian times of ours — that has become concentrated in the virtue of humility, neglecting the acknowledgement of the old arete of the pagans. (The Greek term arete translates as virtue, but has the connotation of courage.)
It seems coherent to me that the recognition of fear as the fundamental individual problem has coincided with an epoch of great revolutions through which the world has been freed from a large dose of authoritarianism. It is logical to think that an authoritarian society, whose fundamental structure is one of imposing itself via fear, bases itself on secrecy. That is exactly why the recognition of the inner enemy has been therapeutic, as in some fairy tales where the enemy characteristically disappears when the hero pronounces his name.
Anyone who has surveyed all the terrain I have cited with respect to sins will surely be interested in a psychological theory that encapsulates all this while at the same time surpassing it, such as the theory that has inspired this book.
I refer to the application to the personality field of the "enneagram" — an emblematic expression of universal processes that has come down to us from a spiritual tradition preserved in Central Asia. It was through Gurdjieff that news publicly reached us for the first time of this esoteric Christianity with Babylonian, pre-Christian roots (an influence transmitted through Iranian spirituality) and which he characterized as a "fourth way" among the forms of classical spirituality.
The enneagram is a symbolic geometric construction characterized as emblematic of this tradition — and is the equivalent of an abstract expression of universal laws: the "law of three" and the "law of seven." Without going into this in depth, I shall only say that, applied to human characters, the chart suggests that behind their multitude (nine in this view), there are three aspects of the psyche from which all the rest derive. And, moreover, one of these is the fundamental one: we shall conceive of it as an active unconscious.
Naturally, this has been rediscovered in psychology — and the unconscious is the fundamental idea of Freud, for whom the psychology of neurosis is the psychology of the unconscious. It would be more appropriate to stress the verb than the noun, however, and say "unconsciousness," the will to not know. Nowadays, the fundamental role of self awareness in the path of transformation has been recognized — at alllevels, from the body level, through behavior (particularly interpersonal behavior), to the emotional level, to thought and even to the awareness of awareness itself, which underlies spiritual traditions.
I do not know how many of my readers know the ideas of Gurdjieff through the testimony that Ouspensky has left us of his conversations, ideas, and activities. When I asked the people who came to me in California (where I was active in the 1970's) where they were coming from spiritually-speaking — what had been their sources, what things stood out in their spiritual autobiography — Gurdjieff was mentioned by at least half of them. Although until a short time ago his name was little known in the world, he was especially present for many seekers with a good sense of "smell," or as he would say, "with a well developed magnetic center."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Enneagram of Society by Claudio Naranjo, Paul Barnes. Copyright © 2004 Claudio Naranjo. Excerpted by permission of Gateways Books and Tapes.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword to the Spanish Edition,Foreword to the Latin American Edition,
Author's Preface,
I. Passions, Pathologies and Neurotic Motivations,
II. The Circle of the Nine Basic Characters,
Symmetry and polarity in the enneagram,
Enneatype II: Pride,
Enneatype VII: Gluttony,
Enneatype IV: Envy,
Enneatype V: Avarice,
Enneatype VIII: Lust,
Enneatype I: Anger,
Enneatype IX: Indolence,
Enneatype III: Vanity,
Enneatype VI: Cowardice,
Facing the truth,
III. The Disturbances of Love,
The unnamed mystery,
Enneatype II: Passion-love,
Enneatype VII: Pleasure-love,
Enneatype V: Lack of affection,
Enneatype IV: Sickness-love,
Enneatype VIII: Domineering-love,
Enneatype I: Superior-love,
Enneatype IX: Complacent-love,
Enneatype III: Narcissistic-love,
Enneatype VI: Submissive-love and Paternalistic-love,
IV. The Ills of the World In the Light of the Enneagram,
An enneagram of society,
Authoritarianism,
Mercantilism,
The inertia of the status quo,
Repression,
Violence and exploitation,
Dependence,
Asocialness and anomie,
Corruption and the light attitude,
False love,
By way of conclusion,
Glossary,