Where Are You?
The Genesis of Personality
(A Spiritual Metaphor)
Self-Awareness is tricky business. It is something that is frequently studied and discussed. Books and articles declare its importance. Yet, it remains mostly elusive.
As I write about at length in my book, a missing piece of the puzzle for developing our self-awareness is rooted in a lack of understanding that we are each incapable of developing true self-awareness while we remain ignorant to, or in denial of, our ego. Each of us, to one degree or another, is wearing the mask of “personality” (ego). So, when we are told to dial-up one attribute of a certain behavior, or dial-down another less-desirable facet in the name of self-awareness we are, essentially, trying to make adjustments to a mask we likely don’t even realize we are wearing. To become more self-aware means that we first have to be willing to see and acknowledge the masks we wear.
So, how do we do that? Well, among other things, the enneagram reveals to us one of nine dominant masks that we have unconsciously put on early in life as a strategy for getting our needs met. While these constructs were likely useful to us in the early stages of life (or we wouldn’t have adopted that approach), it often works against us in later stages of life, leaving us unsatisfied and less effective than we wish to be. Instead of freely accessing whichever point on the enneagram we need at the moment, we learned to over-identify with one dominant type and got stuck there. This happens because of several influences such as, genetic predisposition, epigenetics, our family of origin, environment, culture, and/or small traumas (for a more in-depth explanation, please see my book, “The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence”).
When we are healthy, we naturally move along the lines of the enneagram symbol. However, in “personality” we resist this flow, and our over-identification with a particular enneagram type is where we’ve gotten stuck. Once we identify which point on the system where we’ve gotten ourselves stuck (our dominant enneagram type), we can then work with the system to understand the stories and influences that held us there, and slowly learn to remove the mask, rediscovering the lost parts of ourselves that the mask has served to protect, to the detriment of living more authentic and complete lives.
I’ve been doing enneagram work for many years now. My mask is often still there, but I recognize it now. I usually know how to remove it, and I know when it’s asking me to put it back on (which I do on occasion). The work of building this awareness is both psychological in nature, as well as spiritual. Recently, I was gifted a new insight on this mask of “personality” through a spiritual lens while sitting in church listening to my pastor give the most compelling talk on the book of Genesis I’ve ever heard. I don’t know if you’ve ever read, or been taught, anything in the first book of the Bible, but if you’re like me it’s often been the cure of insomnia. I’ve often had a sense that I had to check part of my brain at the door, when someone waxed on about the origins of human life. However, the framing that I was now being given on this winter's Sunday morning, was something completely different than I’d been shown before - something I could now understand through a fresh first-century, non-english lens, and really appreciate.
Without going into any details on the intention, merits or criticisms of the book of Genesis (I am in no way qualified, or interested in, trying to persuade any reader of any particular spiritual or religious belief), I was struck by just how old and devastating the problem of personality actually is. After all, one of the earliest descriptions of the adapted, false self is found way back in Genesis chapter 3!
As theologian Crispin Fletcher-Louis points out in his commentary on Genesis (as was shared with us on that Sunday morning I just mentioned), “Adam and Eve’s sin is a departure from love and trust of their creator. The serpent offers them a fake deification; a tragic imitation of a divine nature they already have. They are already God’s divine image… They are the image-idols of the creator, but the serpent offers them a shot at becoming like gods. In apparent ignorance or forgetfulness of - or in rebellion against - their true identity, they fall prey to the serpent’s insinuations that their creator has deceived them. The tree that should’ve proved their discernment between wrongdoing and faithfulness to God, becomes instead a tree that leads to their experience of both evil and death. And in the same way that idolaters become like what they worship, the humans become like the (leaf-clad) tree… Their action strikes at the heart of their identity. In succumbing to the lie that they need something they already have, they annihilate themselves.”
1. Mike Erre, “The Test” Message - Journey Church, TN
In this single act of deception-fueled rebellion, these two characters completely lose their identity, represented at point 9 on the inner triangle of the enneagram symbol, and they immediately travel the arrow-line to point 6 on the symbol where they experience existential dread at having lost themselves. And in a failed attempt to hide themselves, they put on fig leaves, now imaging the false-self (the tree), represented at point 3 on the inner triangle of the enneagram symbol. In their attempt to compensate for their loss with true identity, they image the tree instead of imaging the divine (their true identity, or “essence”). Just three chapters into the biblical story, we see the moment when humans put on the false self to try to compensate for lost connection with the true self. And more than 3,000 years later, we are still trying to wear fig leaves, confusing our true identities with that of the proverbial tree.
One of the things I like best about this Genesis story is what the Divine says in response. Embodying what all great coaches do, he asks a question he already knows the answer to when he says to them, “where are you?” And the response is, “I was afraid… and I hid myself.” The illustrations below depict the dilemma for all personality types, as depicted by the inner triangle of the enneagram symbol. As you look at these illustrations, listen for the words, “I was afraid and I hid myself…”
When we move to the hexad portion of the symbol (all of which are variations of the inner triangle), we see the following:
2. Enoch and the New Perspective on Apocalyptic (redacted, emphasis added)
3. Adopted from Sandra Maitri’s work.
There are, of course, other spiritual traditions with their own compelling stories of the human condition. Whatever your spiritual beliefs and practices, or if you are agnostic about any of them, the common ground we all share (and likely why you’ve read this far) is an acute understanding that we are living at a distance from our truest selves - that to find our way again, we must lose the false self and reclaim our true essence (who we were before we hid ourselves among the trees, hoping to rid our fear and shame with falseness).
The good news here is that not only does the enneagram reveal to us our respective masks (who we are in personality, fueled by the emotional “vice” of our type), it also shows us what our type looks like when we reclaim essence (for a more complete explanation of vices and virtues, please read the blog I wrote with Steph Barron Hall of Ninetypes.co here).
From 30,000 feet we can summarize it this way, noting that our personalities are largely driven by what is known as the aforementioned emotional vice (or “passion”) of our type, which always expresses the exact opposite of our truest nature:
In Personality (False Self) In Essence (true Identity)
Type 1: Anger Type 1: Serenity
Type 2: Pride Type 2: Humility
Type 3: Self-Deception Type 3: Authenticity
Type 4: Envy Type 4: Equanimity
Type 5: Avarice Type 5: Non-Attachment
Type 6: Fear Type 6: Courage
Type 7: Gluttony Type 7: Sobriety
Type 8: Lust Type 8: Innocence
Type 9: Sloth Type 9: Right-Action
When essence is recovered:
Ones move from anger - a standing against what is “wrong” or imperfect, to serenity - a total acceptance of what is.
Twos move from pride - a need to feel important, and over-identifying with the idealized self, to humility - an acknowledgement of their value without needing to inflate themselves.
Threes move from shape-shifting - deceiving themselves and others that they are not adapting, to authenticity - a non-performative, emotionally honest existence found in slowing way down and just being.
Fours move from envy - an inner lack that perpetuates constant comparisons with others, to equanimity - a grounded, felt recognition that nothing is missing or deficient in them.
Fives move from avarice - a shutting down of heart energy in an attempt to guard against overwhelm and depletion, to Non-Attachment, an open-handed, groundedness in the body and fully present in the now.
Sixes move from fear - a continual need to mitigate risk and uncertainty through questioning and challenging everything, to courage - a willingness to trust themselves, to take risks, and accept uncertainty.
Sevens move from gluttony - the desire to try a little bit of all possibilities without any limitations or restrictions, of always calculating and planning, to sobriety - a full acceptance of all of life, including restrictions and negatively-experienced emotions as part of what it is to live fully and in the present.
Eight’s move from lust - a need to be bigger than they are, to guard against being controlled and to pursue intensity, to innocence - a powering-down of the ego to experience vulnerability and trust again.
Nine’s move from sloth - a psycho-spiritual laziness to willfully not know what is going on inside and pay too much attention to what is going on outside of themselves, to right-action - a willingness to engage with their deepest desires, and act on their own behalf, even when that causes internal or external conflicts in the process.
The path from personality to essence - from false to true - is a continual process of rising and falling, stepping forward and back, and your journey will vary from others depending on your particular story and needs. I am limited by this short form medium, and my only real purpose in writing this is to point out that we are contending with at least a three millennia long challenge that cannot be solved by becoming more familiar with the proverbial tree leaves we use to mask our fear and our shame.
Do you really want to build your self-awareness? Then allow me to ask…
Where are you?
