The Enneagram of personality describes nine different personality or ego types, each with characteristic mental, emotional, and behavioural patterns. It also describes, if properly understood, how and why these patterns arise as we lose touch with our spiritual depths in early childhood. Additionally, it describes the affective and behavioural transformation each type will undergo if engaged in serious spiritual work that results in gradually reconnecting with thoses depths. While the Enneagram has a psychological focus the Enneagrams's deeper function is to point the way to who we are beyond the level of the personality, a spiritual dimension of ourselves that is infinitely more profound, more interesting, more rewarding, and more real. The origins of the nine-sided symbol of the Enneagram are shrouded in mystery handed down orally through the generations until recently. The Enneagram is a sacred geometric symbol allowing us to reconnect with our Divine life purpose.
Divine Love is the perception that reality, when seen without the filter of ego, is inherently loving and lovely, delighting and delightful, pleasing and pleasurable, full of wonder and wonderful. Divine Love points to the fact that Being is both the source of love and love itself, and that all of existence is a manifestation and embodiment of that love. Divine Love does not refer to the feeling of love itself, but rather to the perception that Being or True Nature is inherently positive and affects us in favorable ways.
In the course of working on ourselves, we learn in time that when we stay on the surface of ourselves, which is to say when we are identified with and operating from our outer shell, our personality, we suffer. The more asleep we are to the reality beneath our outer shells, the less we feel that life is fulfilling, meaningful, and pleasurable. Or, in the language of the Enneagram, the more fixated we are, the less we partake of the loving nature of reality, for we have lost our connection to Divine Love. Our suffering is not the result of being alone or of being in the wrong relationship, is not because we don't have enough money or because we have too much of it, or because of anything of the sort. Nor is it because our outer surface doesn't look as pretty as we think it should or because our personality isn't as pleasant as we think it might be. We suffer because we are living at a distance from our depths, it's as simple as that. The more our souls are infused with Being, the better we feel and the better life seems to us, no matter what our outer circumstances happen to be. Maitri, (2000), The spiritual dimension of the Enneagram.
