"To study the Enneagram is a very helpful prelude to becoming a more aware and sensitive human instrument in creation, someone through whom life/Life can flow. We become more aware through the Enneagram of what our dynamics are. What are the themes that re-occur in my experience because of who I am? A genuine understanding and appreciation of the Enneagram demands that one be on the journey. We need to be seeking life in order to approach the Enneagram intelligently. We must be willing to ask the questions and receive the answers more and more from our experience: How do I frustrate myself? What clouds my perceptions? What blocks the flow of my energy? What paralyzes me? What sends me into compulsive, automatic, addictive stimulus and response? What is natural to me? What can assist me? What can captivate my energies for growth? What is my unique gift?
"The Enneagram is a tool on life's journey that shows us how we can — and how we do — make ourselves the enemy of who we are capable of being. It introduces us to ourselves more and more and aids us in our friendship with and understanding of ourselves. This is the prerequisite for openness and compassion toward others. The Enneagram allows us increasingly to let in the reality we learn early in life to deny. It enables us to go beyond narcissistic navel-gazing to the self-confrontation that leads us to the humble word we are meant to be.
"The Enneagram provides an atmosphere in which we can be taken up and taken over by life/Life. As this happens, we are also helped to observe, listen to, and understand other people from their various vantage points, outlooks, and stances different from our own. These awarenesses lead to patience and demand humor. They require that we reveal ourselves so that others can know where we are coming from. They involve the admission of our limitations, knowing that neither ourselves nor others have all of life experience at our disposal.
"As we accept and forgive and are reconciled with the limitations in us, we become more reconciled with and allowing for those limitations in others. We are more able to forgive the human frailty, the creatureliness, we see in ourselves and in others. We become more accepting persons of all who share in the human condition. We grow in the ability to communicate ourselves to others and receive communication from them. Our defensiveness and resistance toward our own and others' reality lessens. Boundaries gradually melt away and we become persons of love, unity, and oneness. We flow ever more with all of creation. We increasingly are living pray-ers, living prayers. We become the contemplatives that all conscious human beings are meant to be, and in doing so fulfill our destiny. Of course, all of this can happen whether or not we have ever heard of the Enneagram. Nevertheless, the description this approach offers of our giftedness and our sabotage of that giftedness, can serve as a powerful help along our Way."
