THE ‘THIRD DIMENSION’ OF THE ENNEAGRAM （九型人格的u201C三维u201D）.pdfVIP

THE ‘THIRD DIMENSION’ OF THE ENNEAGRAM There was always a practical thread in the Gurdjieff approach which was centred on what we could ‘do’ rather than on what we could ‘think’. In the design of the brochure Gurdjieff put together for his proposed but never realised ‘Institute’, we find the enneagram flanked by angel and devil, impressed with the four symbolic figures of the evangelists and, beneath it, showing paraphernalia such as sewing machines, telescopes and so on.1 The dark and the light, the balance of perspectives and technology are brought together. One of Gurdjieff’s sayings was: “Trust devil, angel - he always want to become archangel”. A self-avowed materialist, Gurdjieff was always one for immersion in the concrete; which goes along with his insistence on the necessity for us to bring our bodies into our understanding. When people have looked at the numerology of the enneagram, they have been tempted - like angel - to float off into considerations of cosmic laws. Gurdjieff himself was acutely aware of the necessity for an ‘objective language’, a language that would enable people to exchange information about the ‘inner world’ in an exact way, so that they could really benefit one another and make progress in their understanding of the phenomenon of being human; but the numerical abstractions he played with during the Russian period were by way of experiment and later abandoned. He himself said that the best method in symbolism required the combination of numbers, letters, symbols and words and anyone of them in isolation would not work.2 We can understand this in terms of combining abstract and concrete, the linear and the holistic. The construction of the enneagram is ingenious. It embodies two of Gurdjieff’s favourite ‘laws’ or fo