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3.8: The enneagram

The enneagram, Gurdjieff’s diagram of nine points, has been subsequently adopted by all kinds of people to classify supposed relationships between things, not always with any obvious connection with the diagram as originally set out. 

I am principally familiar with it as a diagram of the relationships between the various body types, and as a way of understanding our different essences it is as good as any. Classifying ourselves and each other in this way can help in understanding our ‘mechanics,’ why we do things in particular characteristic ways, that we are not unique, and that our differences from other types need not result in selfdeprecation or negative judgements of others. We are what we are. 

Rodney Collin claimed that there is a circulation within the enneagram, such that each body type tends towards the next one in the flow of the diagram. Thus a lunar type, during the course of spiritual evolution, will tend to become more venusian, venusians will become more mercurial, and so on. This is another of those ideas that seem to lack evidence. 

A curiosity is that the flow inside the enneagram is the same as the decimal expansion of one seventh, that is, 0.142857 recurring: all the digits except 3, 6 and 9.

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