Ssaarav2

To understand personality and which personalities are generating the personality-trance which traps persons in an endless cycle of misery-producing thoughts ("mind"-chatter) and which determines subconsciously all words and actions, the Enneagram provides a tool that can uncover the subconscious drivers of thoughts and words and deeds and can reveal - on an exact scale - the degree to which each assumed personality is driving a person.

Thus, the tool that can assist seekers with seeing which personalities are driving them - and to what degree and with what consequences - was introduced yesterday.

It was noted that Ichazo used Enneagram analysis to show seekers exactly how "the ego begins to develop, [how] there is a transition from objectivity to subjectivity, and [how humans] fall from essence into personality."

Ichazo saw the Enneagram as a tool that can be used to examine specifics about the structure of essence and particularly about the ways in which the qualities of essence "become distorted, or contracted into states of ego."

In developing his Enneagram theories, he drew upon the teachings regarding "the nine divine forms"; the teachings of Plato; the teachings of Plotinus; and teachings by early mystics who focused their studies on "the loss of the divine forms in ego consciousness" (those forms including tolerance, humility, sincerity, gratitude, non-attachment, courage, patience, temperance, and discernment).

Therein lies the core Advaita message: when trapped in "an ego-state / personality consciousness" as opposed to being free as a result of awareness of the essence and the True Self, then tolerance, humility, sincerity, gratitude, non-attachment, courage, patience, temperance, and discernment will never manifest during the AM-ness.

The opposites of the "divine forms," in the course of their travels from Greece to Egypt over the course of a century, became distorted and reduced by religion to "seven deadly sins" which pointed at the means by which "the divine forms" became distorted into the so-called "sins" of anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth.

Ichazo's non-dual message that was delivered with a focus on personality and "personality-driven defects" also drew from the teachings of the Kabbala, but his key contribution as far as Advaitins are concerned was in discovering how these "divine forms" and their corresponding distortions connected with the already-existing Enneagram symbol and with human thinking, feeling, and instinct.

With that understanding, he showed how a person loses both awareness and the sense of pure presence, falling away from essence into the trance of the personality; how the loss of awareness becomes a person's ego-fixation; how the loss of contact with essence and Self eliminates tolerance, humility, sincerity, gratitude, non-attachment, courage, patience, temperance, and discernment;

and how the loss of contact with the essence and the Self sets the stage for persons to be driven by their "characteristic passion" (or "passions" or "personality traits"), including wrath and resentment and anger; pride; deceit; melancholia and jealousy and envy; greed and avarice; panic and cowardice; conceit and gluttony; lust; and indifference or laziness.

The link with the Advaita message is this: when one loses contact with the essence and with Self and falls into a personality trance, then the combined effects of

(1) that loss of contact with the essence and the Self

and

(2) the subsequent identification with body and mind and personality

become so acute that the person's ego-states become preoccupied with recreating the contact.

It is - at least in some cases - that "acute" search for contact with one's Original (Pure) Nature that drives persons to assume the role of "The Seeker."

That would be fine except for the fact that - without a Realized teacher as a guide or without being in touch with the inner guru - then the search unfolds in a totally futile and self-defeating way.

The masses are engaged in that blind search for their essence and for an awareness of the True Self, but blocked from seeing clearly by the sources of ambiguity and duality (rooted in programming, domestication, conditioning, acculturation, and their personality trance), they know not what they seek;