Wolfgang W. Liebelt
Enneas*
The Enneagram of Gurdjieff
His universal systemic Process Model
* from Greek. “ennea" = "nine"
It was in 1995, when I was the instructor of a one-week project management seminar in Bad Godesberg (Germany). During one of my evening walks I discovered the Enneagram book by Rohr and Ebert, one of the first German book publications concerning the Enneagram.
Just riffling through the book in the shop intrigued me. So I bought the book and had to force myself at midnight to put the book aside, because I had a strenuous seminar to complete the next day.
If I was already fascinated in the bookstore, this feeling increased even more when I came across my personality type while reading in my hotel. What I read was so unquestionably correct and spot on that I was electrified.
Why do I remember the exact place, time, and circumstances of my first encounter with the Enneagram, and describe this more than 20 years later in 2017? Well, it was one of these key experiences influencing your way of life.
For me it was the beginning of an intense occupation with the Enneagram and, at first, with its psychological type theory.
So far in the book of Rohr and Ebert and later on in other books on the typology of the Enneagram, references to its mysterious origin, Gurdjieff, the Fourth Way and the Enneagram as a universal symbol could be found. Thus, through books by Klaus-Bernd Vollmar, Anthony Blake, P. Ouspensky, and Bruno Martin, I dug deeper and deeper into Gurdjieff's teachings and his central icon, the Enneagram.
Because of my professions as an organizer and project manager, which have a lot to do with creation of graphic models, I finally understood the Enneagram as a systemic-processual (even universal) model of representation, explanation, and learning.
"Generally speaking, one must understand that the Enneagram is a universal symbol. All knowledge can be summarized in the Enneagram and interpreted with the help of the Enneagram. And so you can say that you only know, or understand, what you can insert into the Enneagramm. What you can not fit into the Enneagram is not understood. "
This quote from Gurdjieff, delivered by Ouspensky in his book "In Search of the Miraculous", expresses the intention of this and other essays around the Enneagram. The Enneagram has indeed attained a great degree of familiarity by its typology; But this is only one of the many possible applications of the Enneagram.
I have set myself the task of exploring the logic respectively the grammar of the Enneagram as a systemic-processual model and make it applicable.
I started with some insights I already gained while studying the Enneagram very intensely for more than 20 years.
Nevertheless, I consider the publication of the printBook ENNEAS and its chapters, which I edited as eBooks, only as the very first step, with which every big journey begins. The Enneagram is not only a symbol into which one can put existing knowledge. I have also experienced it as a model, which promotes learning processes, so that after its application to a particular subject, you certainly know more than before.
This chapter is a first overview of the Enneagram’s application rules. The following chapters will go into further details.
Let's start with some basics. The quotations cited here are all taken from Ouspensky’s "In Search of the Miraculous".
"The symbol as a whole ... is a circle - a perfect circle. It is the zero of our decimal system whose numeric character is a closed circle."
Actually, the Enneagram is a decagram when the point "zero" is also counted. Then, the tenth point is the "nine", with the "0" covered by the "9" in the graphical model. However, it is present as the starting point of the process. But even if there are actually ten points, I remain with the traditional term chosen by Gurdjieff.
In Sefer Jezirah, an ancient Kabbalistic text*, this question is posed: "What do you count before the "1"?"
* It is very uncertain when exactly the Sefer Jezirah was written. Gershom Scholem assumes an emergence in the 2./3. century AD. But there are many indications that oral traditions have already been written down in the 1st century AD., especially because of the parallels to the philosophy of Philos of Alexandria (25 BC-50 AD). Either way, it is questionable whether the author(s) of Sefer Jezirah already knew the zero, since it was not until 300 BC to 600 AD, that the zero originated in India in combination with a decimal system of values and figures for 1 to 9, and afterwards was brought to Europe by Arab scholars.
This note is informative, but not decisive for the basic statement that the "zero" does not count or is not counted.
This is also evident from the etymological viewpoint. The German term "Null" (zero) comes from the Latin word: "nullus" (= none, not), while in other languages the translation is "nothing", in India since the 5th century "void"* (śūnya).
* See also: W. Liebelt: „Leere und Form“ (Void and Form). BoD Norderstedt 2016
The zero is neither positive nor negative, it is, so to speak, pre-existent. This is also the case with the Enneagram, whose circle by Gurdjieff is equated with the zero in the above quotation.
So long as the Enneagram is not applied, it is in a pre-existent state in the "void" and pure potential. The potential of the Enneagram is activated by means of an expression of will or the naming of a theme, and a cosmos is created.
More on this can be found in the next chapter "Cosmos and System".