Type 9 + Rodney Collin + David Gray

Post from David Gray:

A couple of weeks ago, John Luckovich mentioned Rodney Collin as a source/influence for Oscar Ichazo's development of the Enneagram of Personality (what we now simply call The Enneagram).

So I took a look at some of Collin's writing/ideas on the Law of Three and 'meta' aspects of 3/6/9... and then had some subsequent musings.

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Rodney Collin- “…A more general example may, however, explain the idea better. Think of trade, commerce. Man exists in the world: and there exist also all the objects which he grows or makes out of the materials that surround him—goods. Man is active, goods are passive. But with these two forces alone very little interchange can take place, and it was necessary for a third force to be invented which would enable the other two to work together in an infinite number of combinations. This third force is money. The triad, men, goods, money, gives rise to the general activity of trade.

This example brings us to another very interesting aspect of the law of three forces. For money is invisible. Certainly, paper or gold is visible; but the power of money is invisible and with the growth of commerce and development of banking, money always tends to grow more invisible, more abstract, and to correspond less and less with any tangible reality. And this exactly echoes the explanations of the law of three given in ancient philosophies, which always emphasized that the entry of the third principle remains invisible to man on his usual level of perception. The third principle thus represents the unknown, unrecognized, determining factor in each situation.”

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Me:

Among other things, abstractly speaking, 9 is an invisible thing that wants to be seen but isn’t conscious of the fact that it wants to be seen, so it mainly remains invisible, unacknowledged, in a state of dormancy as regards commitment to its own deepest desires and essential fulfillment.

Imagining further into the experience of this entity, it doesn’t know about the world of seeing, and again doesn’t know that it doesn’t know; similar to the stage when an infant or animal hasn’t opened its eyes and begun to exercise their use. From the perspective of life cycles, it embodies a larval or fetal stage, inhabiting the experience of a being that hasn’t yet fully taken on a personality mask and grown the striped or spotted fur and clothing of a creature in the outside world.

Personality is a necessary artifice if one is to move around and participate in the outer world as a separate differentiated singular self, as opposed to remaining as an undifferentiated egg among billions of similarly shaped/colored eggs in a figurative collective nesting ground where all the eggs of a given species spill out their endless fecundity-of-Sameness.

This thing (9) is choosing not to choose, and is thereby, at a deeply unconscious level, identifying with, and inadvertently attaching itself to, Everything, in various subtle and overt ways.

To choose or design or self-style a mask would mean deciding on a particular color of the mask (or several colors), a fixed facial expression for the mask (an emotional pose that’s attractive to the ego), the specific shape of the face, the lips, nose, eyes, etc. This represents a considerable amount of active individuating and separating, and when worn would assure being seen as a unique, or at least somewhat significantly differentiated, entity.

This thing, however, doesn’t know the world of eyes, the world of labels which differentiate things from other things, beings from other beings. It may however sense its nearness to that original source-spark that spawned its life… and all life. Cinching itself up, as it’s prone to, into the ‘potential of life,’ not yet entering the ‘kingdom of names’ (the to-and-fro of the world of individuated personalities, walking and talking with others), in some sense has this creature sensing backwards into its connection to the base elements of the universe and their indescribable potency to produce the multiplicity of forms in existence.

But this subterranean connection and relationship to the energy, size, infinitude of the universe/existence inevitably feels too big, too powerful for this being to rightfully manifest or match through the cipher of an individual personality, so the thing again holds onto an indecisive midpoint for fear of unleashing a big bang and thereby, with a terrifyingly awe-inspiring burst of light, illuminating the clear face of an unseen creator – itself.

This also renders Type 9, in the abstract, as representive of a strong yet unseen/unacknowledged Trickster capacity. What better way to trick than to be invisible… and to not know that one is invisible would mean that the trick is being played on the trickster as well.

A ghost that imagines itself as an evident part of your family – picture the havoc in a household: objects move around, lights turn on and off at seemingly random times, disorienting sounds from the other room. The family cat is the only one who sees this scene accurately, staring strangely (strange to us) at walls, peering into another dimension – gazing into the larger ‘wallflower 9’ principle, from which ghosts emerge; the blooming and burgeoning fractal vortex on the other side of the metaphysical gateway formed from the structural frame holding up our living room. The Creative Spirit over there, on the Other Side, swirling up fresh forms and hybrids, sharpening angles that slice old forms into ineffectual machines, employing the bones and metal of the old in the architecture of the spectacular new.

One thing that this means, on a more practical level, though still abstract, is that the problem that 9s have in typing themselves is itself a confusion generator for the collective -- 9s are incidentally redefining certain enneagram types (to fit themselves), but are completely unaware (unseeing) that they're doing this.

Since 9s don't know that they're a chaos trickster, they remain largely in sacrosanct denial of the confusion they're causing, not seeing what we're even talking about when we point out their self-mistyping.