In traditional Christian teaching, Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic philosophers said that people normally do not consciously choose evil, but they choose something that appears good inside of their framework. We have to expose our frame of reference early on if our spiritual journey is to go anywhere. Our egos naturally put together a construct that explains why the things we’re doing

SEVENs once knew God/Reality as total foundation and utterly satisfying. Russ Hudson explains that “SEVENs originally experienced their soul as a place of absolute freedom with no walls, no limits, and abundant resources, all of which gave them great joy. . . . As they lost connection with Presence, they lost all this and it was unbearably painful.” [1] The

SIXes have chosen an entirely defensive posture against their primal knowing, which was true and perfect Presence. Russ Hudson calls it “the quality of awakeness in which you can feel very directly this Presence all around you and within you that gives you an unshakable courage to take your place and walk your walk in the world.” [1] When SIXes

The primal experience of the FIVE was of the absolute power and genius of God in controlling all the parts in one working universe. The FIVE’s real power is in the now. Once separated from that, they experience a sort of emptiness, which the ego tries to fill with knowledge. Today I’d like you to hear from Russ Hudson, with

This week we will continue describing the Enneagram types, focusing on the ways the ego tries to falsely protect what it thinks is itself. As Russ Hudson says, “We all want something real; we’re just going about it in a way that can’t work.” [1] FOURs once lived serenely as an essential part of a united and beautiful world. But

TWOs, THREEs, and FOURs make up the heart triad. They are “other-directed” people, whose wellbeing depends on how their environment reacts to them. Their continuous activities secretly have no other goal than to be confirmed from the outside. We all have this same concern to some degree. It grows out of the mirroring we received or didn’t receive as a

For the rest of this week and the next, we will explore each of the nine individual Enneagram types. We’ll see how all of us begin life in union with God, as our True Self, totally in Love. Each Enneagram type has a uniquely gifted way of being connected with the Real. It reveals our original “soul space.” Our Enneagram passions or sins come

NINEs once knew that reality was all about love, all connected, operative, and effective. They knew a kind of optimism and motivation that all could be worked out and fixed because God is Love. Love changes everything; love resolves everything. Russ Hudson emphasizes that the core of the NINE is about being itself. The primal knowing of the NINE is that “I

With EIGHTs we return to the domain of the gut, which embraces EIGHTs, NINEs, and ONEs. The EIGHT’s primal knowing was that God/Reality was warmth, food, protection, empathy, relationship, and total understanding of how weak, needy, and hungry we all are. Feeling separate from such a nurturing God leaves the EIGHT vulnerable and needy. To seemingly “fix” this dilemma, the

For teaching purposes, the nine Enneagram types are arranged clockwise in a circle. They are clustered in three triads or groups of three: the belly center (sometimes called the gut or instinctual center), the heart center, and the head center. We need all three centers to be awake and integrated in order to do our inner work and to truly