Amazing Benefits of Enneagram, I am Number 8, How About You?

The Enneagram of Personality Types is a modern synthesis of a number of ancient wisdom traditions, but the person who originally put the system together was Oscar Ichazo. Ichazo was born in Bolivia and raised there and in Peru, but as a young man, moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to learn from a school of inner work he had encountered. Thereafter, he journeyed in Asia gathering other knowledge before returning to South America to begin putting together a systematic approach to all he had learned.

After many years of developing his ideas, he created the Arica School as a vehicle for transmitting the knowledge that he had received, teaching in Chile in the late 1960's and early 70's, before moving to the United States where he resided until his passing in 2020. In 1970, When Ichazo was still living in South America, a group of Americans, including noted psychologists and writers Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly, went to Arica, Chile to study with Ichazo and to experience firsthand the methods for attaining self-realization that he had developed.

Ichazo's brilliant work was in discovering how these Divine Forms and their corresponding distortions connected with the Enneagram symbol and with the three Centers of human intelligence, Thinking, Feeling, and Instinct. He called the higher, essential qualities of the human mind the Holy Ideas, in accordance with western mystical tradition. Each Holy Idea also has a corresponding Virtue. The Virtues are essential qualities of the heart experienced by human beings when they are abiding in Essence. As a person loses awareness and presence, falling away from Essence into the trance of the personality, the loss of awareness of the Holy Idea becomes a person's Ego-fixation, and the loss of contact with the Virtue causes the person's characteristic Passion. While everyone has the capacity to embody all of the Holy Ideas and Virtues, one pair of them is central to the soul's identity, so the loss if it is felt most acutely, and the person's ego is most preoccupied with recreating it, although in a futile, self-defeating way. See the diagram below.

The Virtues, Passions, Holy Ideas, and Fixations

Thus, the Passions and Ego-fixations represent the ways that spiritual qualities become contracted into ego states. There are, according to Ichazo's theory, nine main ways that we lose our center and become distorted in our thinking, feeling, and doing, and are thus the nine ways that we forget our connection with the Divine. (The Passions can also be thought of as our untamed animal nature before it is transformed by contact from higher influences—awareness and Grace.)

Because of this particular relationship between the higher qualities of the soul and their corresponding ego distortions, a person could, by using presence and awareness to recognize the pattern of their distortion—their characteristic passion and ego-fixation—come to recognize the quality of Essence that had been obscured. By remembering or contemplating the higher quality, balance could be restored, thus accelerating the person's awareness of themselves as Essence. Knowing one's "type" was a way to direct one's inner work to facilitate the transformative process.

The Virtues describe the expansive, non-dual qualities of Essence experienced in a direct, felt way by a person abiding in their true nature. The Virtues are the natural expression of the awakened heart. We do not try to force ourselves to be "virtuous"—rather, as we relax and become more present and awake, seeing through the fear and desire of the ego self, these qualities naturally manifest themselves in the human soul.

The Passions represent an underlying emotional response to reality created by the loss of contact with our Essential nature, with the ground of our Being, with our true identity as Spirit or Essence. The underlying hurt, shame, and grief that this loss entails are enormous, and our ego is compelled to come up with a particular way of emotionally coping with the loss. This temporarily effective, but ultimately misguided coping strategy is the Passion. But because the Passion is a distortion of an inherent, essential Virtue, recognizing the Passion can help us to restore the Virtue.5

In a related way, the Virtue of each type can also be seen as an antidote to its Passion and as a focal point for the type's positive traits. By recalling the Virtue in a state of presence, the Passion can be gradually transformed. The restoration of the virtue and the transformation of the passion is an extremely important part of the spiritual use of the Enneagram.

The Holy Ideas represent specific non-dual perspectives of Essence—particular ways of knowing and recognizing the unity of Being. They are what naturally arises in a clear, quiet mind when a person is present and awake, seeing reality as it actually is. The loss of a Holy Idea leads to a particular ego-delusion about the self or reality, called the type's Ego-fixation. Through the ego-fixation, the person is trying to restore the balance and freedom of the Holy Idea, but from the dualistic perspective of ego, cannot. Again, understanding the perspective of our type's Holy Idea functions as an antidote to the ego-fixation. The non-dual perspective of our true nature is restored as we see through the particular delusions of our type.6