The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine Faces of the Soul by Sandra Maitri

Author:Sandra Maitri [Maitri, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2000-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

The inner sense of disconnection implicit in the loss of Holy Origin leads to a craving for what makes one feel connected—for what is original, authentic, creative, and direct. For this reason, Fours are drawn to the arts and other aesthetic pursuits as either creator or appreciator. Suffering and the artist have been perennially linked, and part of a Four’s clinging to her emotional states is because of this linkage. Intense emotional states lead to a particular sense of contacting oneself, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The depths of emotion take us to the edge of our holes, those places in our souls where contact with Essence has been lost. We experience a sense of depth and of meaning; and out of our suffering, creativity many manifest. There’s nothing like a tragic romance to stir the creative juices, as evidenced in the great love songs throughout time and exemplified in the sixties by the tragic love songs of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, surely two Fours.

Things and people who are truly original and creative connect the Four to those qualities, and through proximity she partakes in them. Her valuing of the refined and beautiful, however, may reach the point of preciousness, an exaggerated fawning over such things, or, to use that great British expression, they become bijou, treated like jewels. She may, for example, treat a work of art or piece of music with a reverence usually reserved for the religious. But, as Naranjo says,An inclination to refinement . . . may be understood as efforts on the part of the person to compensate for a poor self-image (so that an ugly self-image and the refined self-ideal may be seen as reciprocally supporting each other); also, they convey the attempt on the part of the person to be something different from what he or she is. . . . The lack of originality entailed by such imitativeness in turn perpetuates an envy of originality—just as the attempt to imitate original individuals and the wish to emulate spontaneity are doomed to fail. 11

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