Posted by jfive on February 29, 2000 at 02:05:55:
A great thing about the egram is the way
it can provide a bridge between the core
of esoteric spiritual ideas in the world's
religions and the modern western discipline
of personality psychology.
The 3 meta-groups of head, heart, gut fill
the role of 3 interacting basic forces
creating reality that also find expression
in the proton, electron, neutron and
synthesis, antithesis, synthesis, also
the Christian Trinity, etc.
Now, the law of 3, and I might as well
quote J.G. Bennett here, "...exists in very
many traditions, East and West. We can
read about it in the Tao Teh King; but perhaps
the oldest expression of it is to be found
in the Sankhya philosophy of India, which is
more than two thousand five hundred years old. The Sankhya teaching about the 3 gunas, or
qualities of nature, had a profound effect
on all of Indian thinking. It describes the
nature of the three gunas -- rajas, tamas,
and sattwa -- in various ways and says that
there is a primal state of purity in which
they are all One. From this One come the mixing
that produces all the diversity of the world."
A person who does not make spiritual inner efforts is generally blind to the working of the 3 forces, being only able to see 2 of them
at a time and hence sets up endless
false dichotomies. Bennett again, "Because
of this, he never sees how things really work,
how they come about, how they can change.
He is always in a world of pushing or
resisting and does not see the reconciling
force. It is only when we can perceive
through our head, our heart, and our body
together that the law of three becomes a
reality for us."
That seems to be an interesting key,
a kind of Rosetta stone providing a
workable way to use the egram to connect
Jung/Freud/Object relations theory with
the millenia deep religious traditions.
Accept momentarily as a hypothesis that
we all have access to 2 of 3 egram centers.
This is similar to the Jungian idea that
we have easier access to our dominant and
secondary functions but the third is tougher
and the fourth, inferior function is pretty
much beyond our conscious reach as it carries
our shadow and connection to the objective
psyche.
By applying the egram and MBTI to ourselves
we might discover a way to re-incorporate
some sort of understanding of the relationship
of all three of the egram centers AS THEY
MANIFEST IN OURSELVES, and hence can activate
the third or shadow force moving through our lives. The egram then acts as
a kind of spiritual map or radar to let us
have awareness of what is missing in our
conscious orientation to our lives and that
otherwise is invisible to us in every situation
in our lives where we are blocked and
frustrated by some invisible oppositional
force that we can't comprehend. What is
actually blocking us is our mistaken
dualistic understanding of reality.
By studying the egram and using it as a
self-transformational tool we can rebalance
our inner nature in such a way that we
can become aware of all 3 forces, at which
point the deeper implications and possibilities
of the egram become open to us.