Is it possible that there are patterns in the way that life works out? Can we see a necessary structure to what we go through, without cramping our authentic existence into some conceptual mold? The basics are that we are born as out of unconsciousness, fresh and new; then we grow up and form minds and purposes, which eventually deteriorate or ethereal- ize, until death finally catches up with us. Our minds are full of dreams of other lives: life after death, or previous lives, or existence in other worlds, or worlds of perfect communion. After all the labor of growing up and learning how to do so many things—does it all come to nothing or is it just something that has to be passed on to future generations, however best we can? Can we make the dream real? Can we have All as well as Nothing?
Sophocles warned: “Call no man happy until the time of his death. ” It is hard to see the whole while we are in the throes of life. We strive after meaning. Wejiave to make sense of what is happening to us and what we are doing. And we have to find what it is that our division into two kinds of bodies—two sexes—means for us. The search for meaning can become urgent at any time of life. It may rise in a cre
scendo of burning concern until it becomes the core of life, instead of a momentary disturbance. A life is like a kitchen, but we do not know what it is that eats what life produces. And we do not know if we are able to digest this produce for ourselves.
The Human Life Cycle
It i s t i m e to look at the shape of a human life through the eyes of the enneagram. This shape is a vision of itself We can quote the prayer of Saint Paul: “That I may see even as I am seen.”’
Making “seeing” the fundamental attribute of the enneagram is ex
147
tremely important here. It is all too easy to split the human condition
our productive activity; and so, ultimately, there has to be a kind of crisis point when the active life must give way. Different people take this in different ways: some people can persist in being active right up until the end; others deteriorate, because they are dependent upon external structures. Those people who live vitally right up to the end of their lives have managed to learn how to be self-organizing.
Continuing mental development is possible in old age: the brain by its nature as organ of information need not decline at all. But this is very far away from giving any substance to the idea of a breakthrough into a spiritual domain. And we have to admit that, as we look around, it is hard to find any living examples of the wisdom of old age. T. S. Eliot puts it clearly: “Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.
It is interesting to consider that growing up is also a kind of death—the death of innocence, perhaps as inevitable as the final exhalation. When we grow up, we find childhood hidden from us by a veil. Interestingly, the old find themselves remembering their childhood more vividly than their adult life (which is a hint of the significance of the 7-1 line in the enneagram). So we have two partial deaths in life, the death of innocence and the death of powers, as well as the final biological death.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebooks: “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.”'* The biological drive to seize hold of life is overtaken by the imperative: “Awake, the day of judgment is at hand.” In Gurdjieff’s scheme of things, the active sec
ond phase of life is for waking up, so it then becomes possible to die consciously. This requires an initial acceleration of artificiality, which may include the taking up of special practices. There is a door to another kind of life, which Gurdjieff portrayed through the figure of Prince Lu- bovedsky in Meetings with Remarkable Men, to whom he bids farewell in the Sarmoun monastery.^
In contrast to the West, Asian societies have established a pattern which echoes the three stages. Thus, for example, the orthodox Hindu will enter adult life (at point 3), marry and have children, and acquire a profession;
and then, when his children have entered their own adult lives and he has come to the end of his active career, he may abandon home and family to become a sannyasin, a wandering renunciate who devotes himself to religion (point 6). Point 2 represents the awakening of the sexual powers
and is a cluster of potentials. Point 4 is the domain of personal relation hence also includes professional accomplishment. However, it would be artificial to conclude that nothing is to be accomplished in the last phase
portant to him and will wish to serve instead of exploit.
It is from this perspective that we can regard the first octave as primar in spirit to the first. It contains the mature innocence of being born again.
150 The Hazard of Transformation
The two terms of the first phase of the enneagram center on growth and the awakening of powers (usually identified with puberty and adoles
cence). In the second octave, the first two terms concern human relations and external efforts. In all three octaves, the first term concerns stabiliza
tion. In the third, it is a matter of being at peace with oneself The second term of each octave concerns emergent phenomena and marks a kind of instability that invokes the next stage. The penultimate point 8 is that of a greater vision, a transcendence of all that has gone before.®
In the first octave, we see a rise in powers followed by their decline, just as in an ecological system we see rising complexity having to be balanced by a reduction to enable material to circulate. The second octave feeds into the social pool from which it derives: the ethos of a population.
The third octave feeds into the spiritual pool, the reservoir of spiritual energy from which the third octave derives: the “communion of saints.”^
We can speak of the second octave as arising fi-om outer society, while the third arises firom inner society. In the third octave we enter into a communion which is beyond the scope of external communication.
Meanwhile, serenely (or so we might imagine) at point 9 of the ennea
gram the hidden master of our lives sits and contemplates the whole—
seer first and doer only by proxy. This master is our essential will, the unmanifest point 10 being the spiritual medium in which this will lives.
Here we should emphasize that the “form of the whole” is not some abstract pattern but a dynamic generator of information. The essential will is not a blueprint for action but a gateway to seeing the greater whole in which we can participate.* We can think of this as a cosmic society, or the realm of higher intelligence. This top-down representation—in which the true self is supposed to be already there as some kind of absolute invariant almost totally detached from the troubles of life—is made sense of by the inner lines, the lines of learning. It is what is gathered along these lines that can remain.
Doris Lessing, in her book The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, portrays the essence of this in a most moving and convincing way. She does not subscribe in the novel to any theory of an immaterial individual soul, but envisions the making of a certain quality or essence, set fi-ee from time and space. This quality is able to enter into and guide living souls on other planets. It is similar to Gurdjieff’s explanations of the sacred rascooarno. The core of this picture of things is that a life can
make something which is not explicable in terms of succeeding memories claims of possession and identity which enable ambition and attachment to play their coercive roles. All such roles and attitudes stem from the energy to the evolutionary and regulative matrix through their sacred rascooarno, or deaths. It is hard to imagine what this means when we consider intentional, inner death and the making of soul.
Coming back to the enneagram (see fig. 10.1), the region between 6 and 9 has to be filled intentionally, from vothin. The interval firom 3 to
6—^which Keats calls the vale of soul-making—is to arrive at a capacity fruit which can be set free by the arising of consciousness in life, but it is
152 The Hazard of Transformation
10.1. The circle of a human life.
a task of being human to investigate what this might be. What can come into play in the third phase of the enneagram is always individual and not general. In spite of appearances, children and adults are not usually individuals at all but biological and cultural exemplifications. It takes a very great deal to wrench oneself out of the role of “being played” by the environment. Here is Gurdjieff’s response to the heedless nihilism that has led to the derangement of social man. This is our true ecological role in the functioning of the intelligence that spans the stars and worlds.
The World of Sex
One of the major powers that is awakened in the formative years is that of sex. In figure 10.1, sex belongs in the region indicated by points 4-2-8. It can be taken as a world in itself. As something pervading human life, it should afford an interesting illustration of my interpretation of the enneagram.®
First of all, we have to find some expression of the logos of sex. In D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, one of the characters gives a speech in which he says “the union of a man and a woman is an angel.” In Chinese tradition there is the concept of tsing, a substance created when
ever a man and a woman meet.‘° Religious people might say that a man and woman can become one soul in sexual contact. The logos of sex
probably has to do with overcoming the polarity of the sexes. The biblical point 6 can be circumvented by drawing on help from outside.
The primary process is physical. In our minds, in our feelings, in our commit to responsibility; and of point 9 as where we can become unified.
154 The Hazard of Transformation
In what follows, we shall build up a complex picture of sex by repeated though changing descriptions. We will be following the inner lines as well as the outer circle.
In the general experience of the majority of humankind, sex has the structure of courtship, copulation, and the consequence of conception.
In courtship, the man and woman come into closer and closer proximity.
In copulation, their bodies are joined, giving rise to intense experiences.
If conception results, then they enter the new relation of being parents.
We see that the conception and nurturing of a child appears in the place of the realization of the unity of the man and the woman. But what I have described is merely the functional aspect of sex, which has a structure in time. It is, therefore, only the material of the first octave of the complete enneagram.
We look for a second octave, beginning further on or higher than the first. This connects with the onset of copulation. It is fairly clear that this must concern the experience of the sexual act. Therefore, in comparison with the first, the second octave concerns the psychological and, specifi
cally, the erotic. The movement of this second octave is toward greater and greater intensity, just as the movement in the first was simply toward greater and greater proximity. We might question the positioning of this movement as starting after the first: sex in the imagination can be more powerful than actual sex. Most of the vast amount of sexual fantasy and associations wnich go on are largely outside the enclosure we have drawn.
It is only when there is a precise connection with an actual relationship that we have the new independent do. The accumulated program of sex
ual imagination has to be dovmloaded into the actual occasion. A fit has to be arranged between actual and imagined. That is why the sexual act is full of artifice.
More important, the second octave is linked with the inner lines. Quite simply, the act of sex is linked with what comes before and after. The erotic passions weave into seduction and responsibility for its conse
quences. The experience of actual sex feeds into the inner movement, which is stimulated by the release or sense of fireedom that comes in at point 3.
The third octave must, in its turn, begin further on than the second. It is neither physical nor psychological. Let us provisionally call this the spiritual octave. Just as the experience of the couple is within their bodies,
so the spiritual element is within their experience. Giving this octave the
acts as afield of realization. It does not make the realization happen. It is only in the third octave of sex (starting at point 6) that a man or woman can overcome the separation between their natures, because men and women differ both physically and psychically. In this realization, the man and the woman find themselves “in each other.” For a man and woman to realize their unity—that is, to both know it and make it happen—is a big thing. It means that they know each other not only as bodies and minds but as will. In this respect, the will of the man and the woman involved in sex is the same, and there is, and can be, no difference. They both gain contact with the triangle or logos of sex.
We can now suggest that the logos of the enneagram of sex can be expressed in terms of the threefold character of will. This means that it is constituted out of the interplay of the affirmative, receptive, and reconcil
ing impulses which govern all relationships. These are related to release, responsibility, and unification, respectively. It is usual in most cultures to take the man to be the affirmative and the woman to be the receptive in the relationship. However, this convention misses the point: what is in
volved is a transformation of a relationship in which both partners partici
pate. Both of them are affirmative; both of them are receptive; and it is through entering into the experience of each other that both of them can be reconciling. However, the word both changes according to which phase of the total action we are looking at.
The images of this changing relation, which we can find in literature, are nearly all biased toward regarding the man as affirmative. His task as a lover is to overcome the original denial of the woman—first through seduction and then through domination, until they reach the point at which she surrenders totally. In the extreme, the woman loses all separate individuality, while that of the man is enhanced. On the other hand, in erotic classics such as Pauline Reage’s Story of O, the submission of the woman is so powerful that she attains the individuality that the man forfeits by his sadistic acts. The picture of woman as a being of receptivity obscures the drama of the will. In place of this caricature, it is better to picture both the woman and the man as first becoming aware of some
thing missing or lacking in themselves. In the next stage, when they come into contact with each other, they feel powerless in front of each other.
After that, when they come together as lovers, what concerns them is giving to each other and then surrendering to each other. Beyond their
making love—that is, in the realm of love itself—they first give up them
selves and then give up each other. Step by step, they bring them
selves—by means of each other—under an increasing affirmation (they come to under-stand). They become able to bear a deepening transforma tensions and uncertainties that affect sexual relationships. It is fairly obvi
ous that a harmonious integration of all three octaves is a rare and un conceive of an entirely erotic path, unconnected with reproduction and social life in general. Whatever the case, there must be some form of cultural factors and subjective conditions to do with attractiveness and access which vastly narrows the field. There is also the question of profes
sionalism, in respect to which the role of the courtesan is significant.
At point 0, the common will of the man and woman is only a possibil
ity, and the ensuing process may well lead toward conflict. We may well cast the “war of the sexes” between points 4 and 5. But the fulfillment of our sexual nature does not end with erotic experience; it lies in the real
158 The Hazard of Transformation
ization beyond it. We begin with a sense of what we lack and come to understand that what we need cannot be taken but is given freely.
The possibilities in sex are similar, but not identical, to those we dis
cussed for eating food. It is usual to eat purely for the satisfaction of eating. It is rare to eat with an attitude of compassion toward all life. In sex, it is usual to aim for orgasm while ignoring the essence of what is involved in producing this experience.
Bennett argued that sex always involved the essence, the reality behind the social self or personality, and that it was irrevocable.*^ In a similar vein, the sage Pak Subuh said that sex involved the meeting of truly
“human forces.”*^ In such views, it is believed that something irrevocable happens, whether or not the participants themselves are aware of it. How
ever, it is common for most people to practice serial or contemporary multiple relationships. This is a shadow of the higher level, where sex may be considered as a marriage of wills, and the union of one man and woman is not a closed system but one able to provide a home for other wills.
The marriage of will is only possible through mutual sacrifice and is not ended by death. It is a paradox that what comes into being through rigorous exclusion can become all-inclusive. The psychological realm
The marriage of will is only possible through mutual sacrifice and is not ended by death. It is a paradox that what comes into being through rigorous exclusion can become all-inclusive. The psychological realm