Enneagram Book

A very interesting article here comparing the Enneagram and Octaves (in music). This isn’t exactly light reading, but if you have about thirty minutes of downtime and want to do some interesting reading, this is the place to go.

An excerpt from the page is here:

The most commonly known form of the enneagram is the “Fourth Way” form taught by Gurdjieff in the first half of this century. It was claimed to be an ancient symbol being made public for the first time. 9 points in counting order are marked around a circumference, points 9-3-6 are connected in a triangle, and points 1-4-2-8-5-7-1- are connected in that order in a closed figure. The purpose of it was to model processes, part of the Fourth Way cosmology is that the world, the cosmos, is patterned after the octave or “Law of Seven” although the complexity of the way octaves interact usually prevents us noticing the octaves. To properly understand any process, cooking a meal, manufacturing chewing gum, creating a universe one must understand it as an octave or interaction of octaves. The enneagram as used by Gurdjieff is a diagram representing the “Law of Seven”. The inner lines show certain non-obvious connections between the points, one of the main reasons for analysing a process as an octave is to learn more about it by contemplating those inner connections. In “In Search of the Miraculous” by Gurdjieff’s disciple Ouspensky, for example, the passage of food through the human organism was mapped onto the enneagram while the inner lines indicated the circulation of the blood. The meaning of the inner hexagram would have been mysterious to people who didn’t know of the circulation of the blood…
In the case of the life-span enneagram looked at in the section below we are in a somewhat better position than these imagined students, due in part to the work done on the enneagram of personality-type.

See the full article here…

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