Introducing the Enneagram

By Tom Condon

There is an organization called The Flat Earth Society that has a circle of members all around the globe. Through its literature and online presence, it advocates a medieval view of the world, promoting an elaborate thesis that “proves” the world is flat. The Society claims, for example, that photographs of the round earth shot from space are trick photography and part of a sinister worldwide conspiracy to contradict common sense. After all, any fool who looks at the horizon can see that the world is flat.

Early European explorers of the Americas knew better but, in their day, some uneducated people still believed that the oceans of the world flowed off the flat earth’s edge. Ships that ventured beyond known territory were thought to be swept over a huge waterfall and plunged into a deep abyss. Far down below they would smash apart on sharp rocks and hungry dragons would devour any surviving sailors. Many maps of the time still had the holdover warning “Here be dragons” written in their margins, originally to protect mariners from sailing to their doom.

Each of us is an unwitting member of a Flat Earth Society, in that we have a personal map of reality that is not reality itself, an inner subjective view of the world that only partially reflects the world around us. We don’t often experience reality, per se, but rather our reactions to it and what we internally believe about the world drives our behavior as much as does external reality.

Our inner map is based on everything we’ve experienced and learned, which includes our resources, strengths, and what got us this far. But since our map only reflects what has already happened, it is by definition incomplete — a flat version of the round whole.

Like the Flat Earthers, we sometimes mistake our personal horizon for the world's actual edge. Within our map, we unconsciously harbor beliefs about who we are and the extent of our abilities. We may even fear that venturing past the edge of our map will sweep us out of control and expose us to our personal equivalent of dragons.

The Enneagram itself is a map, a map of maps of reality. It presents a psychology of the inner outlook, describing nine personality styles and their central points of view. As such, the Enneagram maps out nine flat earths, nine versions of reality that people favor, nine ways the human unconscious creates and organizes subjective experience.

The Enneagram is a clear, exceptionally accessible version of what’s called “ego psychology” and the part of us that sees the world as flat is otherwise known as our ego. Most of us have an intuitive, seat-of-the-pants sense of our ego, though we may not realize its exact nature or depth of influence. We also may not know that our individual ego is similar to others, that there are species of ego.

The Enneagram describes its nine different egos in a penetrating way, detailing the inner life, thought patterns and basic beliefs of each one. No style is considered as better than another, and each has a range of healthy and unhealthy potentials — strengths, gifts, and advantages as well as limits, pitfalls, and blind spots. Although each Enneagram style has a distinct inner logic and worldview, all are designed to fulfill the same set of basic psychological needs. Your ego governs your map of reality, your sense of identity as well as your core motivations, values, and defenses. It controls a tight-knit cluster of guiding assumptions, offering you both a general sense of direction and immediate ways to proceed.

An Enneagram style is a lot like a nationality. Both define you, and yet within them you’re an individual. Both are deeply unconscious and shape your perceptions in involuntary ways. Both your nationality and your Enneagram style are simultaneously deep and yet shallow, parts of you that are apart from you at the same time.

While the Enneagram describes the sameness of people, each person is unique. You have a constellation of qualities that are particular to your makeup — a personal history, an emotional temperament, a genetic heritage, and a unique identity. Your Enneagram style is only part of the picture, yet, in another way, it’s a key to everything.

Through your ego’s inner outlook you accurately perceive a slice of reality – what author Richard Rohr has called “one-ninth of the truth.” To some extent, each of us then mistakes our fraction of the world for the whole and gets stuck in a fixed point of view. In the bargain, we accidentally delete the other “eight-ninths” of reality and this omission lays the groundwork for our difficulties.

Once on a boat I noticed a little girl turning pale with fright as the boat’s engines revved for departure. “What’s wrong?” her mother asked. The child anxiously replied, “Are we going to get smaller and smaller and then disappear?” Every boat she had ever watched from the shore had done that.

Our limited personal focus means that we are very good at some things less so at others, like someone on crutches who develops strong arms. While we excel at what we already know, our other potentials may lie distant and buried. The Enneagram maps out our strengths even as it reveals the worlds upon worlds of experience we are missing.

Tom Condon has worked with the Enneagram since 1980 and with Ericksonian hypnosis and NLP since 1977. The Director of the Changeworks in Bend, Oregon, he has been an adjunct faculty member of Antioch University and the University of California at Berkeley.

Tom has taught over 900 workshops in the US, Europe and Asia and is the author of 50 books, CD’s and DVD’s on the Enneagram, NLP and Ericksonian methods. He is a certified coach and Practitioner of NLP and director of The Changeworks in Bend, Oregon. He is Accredited With Honor by the International Enneagram Association (IEA).