Posted by BlueLamp on February 25, 2000 at 16:42:06:
In response to a request from Tiggy seconded by Cory here is an
Enneagram circumplex. The difference between an Enneagram
circumplex and the conventional Enneagram is that opposite
personality types are actually placed 180 degrees apart on a
circumplex. What this does is actually create two paths from
type 1 to type 9... one path goes 1-2-8-9 and the other one goes
1-4-3-7-5-9. Making the 2nd path 1-3-4-5-7-9 is the initial reason
I'd like to have types 3 & 4 and types 5 & 7 swap numbers.
Swapping 3 & 4 also creates a 3-6-9 equilateral triangle, a nicer
1-4-2-8-5-7 pattern and puts the "mystical twins" 7 and 9 next
to each other... it also does nice things for the triads but I'll
get to that at some future time... This circumplex matches with
one used by a Canadian personality test called the Capability
Snapshot. The Capabilty Snapshot uses Present & Future in
place of my Care and Discover axes names and uses Inward and
Outward in place of my Perfection and Growth (companies into
perfection look inward while companies into growth look
outward). The Enneagram is thus a path to get from a
perfectionistic ego to an open "egolessness" looking to grow.
This does not mean NJ or TJ are bad or that SP and FP are
good... the personality types of the Enneagram are like math
is to physics, the personality types just relate to what is
actually a spiritual journey that can be described using Jungian
Christian quaternities or the Buddhist Wheel of Life.
No one ever says from a personality point of view that one
should change their personality according to the order of the
Enneagram numbers, the Enneagram is not numbered for
personality change just a spiritual change. I'll get into
spirituality (and physics) later... for pure personality one just
wants to "mature" in all the Enneagram types... this maturity
won't cause your test scores to change, the test measures a
bias that is not supposed to change. The bias makes it
easier to mature in types you are biased towards and harder
to mature in ones you are biased against. The environment
can also make it easier or harder to mature for a given type.
What is it like to be totally mature in a type?... well
supposedly one comes to the realization that everything is
one big connected something... the different types have
different ways of seeing this though. This circumplex is
one of three circumplexes... one can actually use the other
two circumplexes to do two more 9 point "Enneagrams"...
The conventional Enneagram is known as the Enneagram
of Process... the two new ones I call the Enneagram of
Consulting and the Enneagram of Development and I'll
get into them later... John