What is Mindfulness?
The Story of Mindfulness
Most people who are drawn to mindfulness likely have some understanding that the modern practice of mindfulness originated with Buddhism. Siddhartha Gotama, who became the Buddha and originator of Buddhism, constantly extolled mindfulness as the very foundation of the Buddhist path to liberation from dukkha, the unconscious psychological conditioning that leads to much unhappiness and dysfunction in our daily lives.
Perhaps the most important and practical of all the Buddha’s many teachings is his teaching on the Way of Mindfulness, which begins with his proclaiming:
This is the only way, O bhikkhus, for the purification of beings, for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation, for the destruction of suffering and grief, for reaching the right path, for the attainment of Nirvana, namely, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness.1
How did Siddhartha come to this astounding realization?
Siddhartha’s Story
India in Siddhartha’s time, around 500 BCE, was in the midst of major turmoil, not unlike our present day. Political upheaval around the rapid urbanization of what had previously been mostly an agricultural way of life was leading to ever accelerating economic hardship and a breakdown in norms of belief and behavior. In India the ancient religious traditions of the priestly class and the rigid social castes seemed increasingly irrelevant in addressing this level of suffering and uncertainty.
At the time of the Buddha, although there was already a long spiritual tradition in India that promised a transcendent liberation from suffering, the ways to achieve that liberation seemed too dependent on complicated and increasingly stale religious rituals and mediation by the priestly caste. Many newer approaches and teachers were appearing who promised liberation from the suffering of daily life through all kinds of spiritual practices. From extreme denial of the physical body, to sophisticated subtle mental disciplines, a wide array of teachers promised all kinds of paths to liberation.
Siddhartha was born into a life of great privilege in the warrior caste, his father a chieftain, ruler of a small kingdom. Legend has it that Siddhartha’s birth was accompanied by a prophecy from a local sage who declared he would either grow up to be a great king or a great, but poor, wandering teacher. So his father went to great lengths to shield his son from the normal vicissitudes of growing up, surrounding him with pleasure palaces and over-indulgence, hoping he would never even think of becoming a poor homeless teacher.
Yet, as he entered manhood and its responsibilities, Siddhartha began to sense that something fundamental was missing in this luxuriant life. He felt a gnawing restlessness that no amount of over-indulgence could quell. He insisted he be allowed to explore the world beyond his privileged, protected pleasure palaces. What he discovered shook him to his core.
Siddhartha Encounters Old Age, Sickness, Death . . . and Hope
Siddhartha encountered three basic forms of suffering that had heretofore been completely denied him: first an enfeebled old man, then someone suffering from severe illness, and lastly a charnel ground where dead bodies were deposited. He was traumatically confronted with the inevitability of old age, sickness, and death. He was forced to see that his compulsive pursuit of pleasure was a complete denial of the reality of how most people lived and to which he, too, would some day succumb. It made his own life now appear even more hollow and purposeless to the point of unbearable. Deeply disturbed, in a state of shock and despair, he could never return to the fake artificially induced “endless happiness” of palace life when he could clearly see where his life - and all life - was ultimately headed.
Siddhartha then happened upon a wandering monk who was seeking enlightenment - not uncommon then, nor now, in India. Not unlike many others in those times of religious upheaval, Siddhartha sensed that this radically different life of renunciation - completely the opposite of his life so far - might somehow offer a way out of his overwhelming despair at the horrible inevitability of suffering - of old age, sickness, and death. He snuck out of the palace one night, cut his long luxurious locks, exchanged his expensive clothes for rags, and, at age 29, began the life of the wandering seeker.
The Long Search
Siddhartha proved to be a natural at learning spiritual techniques, including practices for deep concentration that would prove useful later. He was such a quick study that his various teachers each in turn would end up begging him to be their successor. But he was not looking for a guru, nor to be one. Each time, Siddhartha would learn all he could then become disenchanted and move on, his persistent inner restlessness to understand and transcend suffering still unsatisfied and roiling his soul.
After six years of constant fruitless search, Siddhartha finally gave up on teachers, went off on his own, and bore down even harder than he had with them. With five companions he wandered deep into the wild forests and resolved to lead as sparse and ascetic a life as possible, denying his body to the extreme. He ate so little for so long and became so thin that he could see his spine sticking through where his stomach should be.
One day, near death from this extreme self-denial, a memory arose from when he was a young boy, sitting under a tree on a beautiful fall day during the annual harvest. He remembered having fallen spontaneously into a deep rapturous feeling of complete, effortless clarity, peace, and contentment - all without having to starve or deny himself in any way. This state had been inherently pleasurable, without having to compulsively pursue pleasure as his father had encouraged. As he now sat near death from starvation, he realized that all his striving had not only not gotten him any closer to his aim, but he was literally slowly killing himself with asceticism. What was he doing! Much to the disdain of his five equally starving, self-denying companions, Siddhartha not only began eating normally but even accepted food from a young woman - something a righteous monk would never do!
Undeterred by his friends, Siddhartha began recovering his health. One day he happened to overhear someone receiving a music lesson on a stringed instrument. The teacher was instructing his student on how to tune the strings. “Not too tight, and not too loose,” the teacher said. Immediately, it dawned on him: “what I need is balance - not too tight and not too loose, like a properly tuned string - a middle way - not extremes.” What he needed was not extreme asceticism and self-denial, nor the pursuit of intense pleasure as in his youth, but a capacity for living an attuned, balanced life. This was not just some mid-point between extremes, but a sense of dynamic balance, an ongoing attunement in the midst of the flow of life, moment by moment, like surfing on a surfboard or learning to ride a bike or dancing with a partner. Perhaps, by attuning to this sense of balance, he might then find his way back to this effortless clarity, bliss, and peace he’d experienced as a youth so long ago.
Siddhartha Discovers Mindfulness
Siddhartha had discovered the practice of mindfulness. He sensed that only through the cultivation of mindfulness could he begin to discover the answer to this dilemma of inevitability of life’s suffering.
Siddhartha resolved to draw on everything he had learned over his past six years of seeking. He had learned from his teachers how to calm and concentrate his mind and body, but now he realized the importance of doing this in an attuned, balanced way, with gentle mindfulness - like he had begun to do that time as a boy. In this way he simply but persistently and tenderly began to open to and explore the reality of what was happening, moment by moment. In rediscovering - and beginning to value - his basic capacity for mindfulness, Siddhartha had finally left behind his conditioned unconscious belief - perhaps inherited from his warrior caste family - that he was supposed to force his way, to somehow storm the gates of heaven by forcing or controlling his way into seeing through the nature of suffering, through complicated mental concentration techniques or extreme self-denial.
As legend would have it, after many days of practicing simple mindfulness sitting under a fig tree, one night he finally saw through to the true roots of dukkha, unnecessary suffering: its nature and its cause, and realized complete liberation from that cause and the path to liberation. He had discovered - in all three centers of intelligence: body, heart, and mind - the “Four Noble Truths” of liberation from suffering and achieved complete transformation in his relationship to suffering. He had become the Buddha, which literally means: one who is “awake.”
The Four Noble Truths
The Four Noble Truths are the core of the Buddha’s entire teaching - the sun around which all the planets of the Buddhist teachings and practices revolve. The Enneagram too revolves around these same core truths. As with the Buddha, through skillful, persistent, balanced, loving, mindful attention - and not a little help from our friends - the Enneagram will begin to reveal the nature of the deep unconscious conditioning that causes our particular forms of unnecessary suffering. And, as with the Buddha, this insight - this clear mindful seeing into the nature of this conditioning with all three centers of intelligence: body, heart, and mind - can lead to radical liberation from our particular conditioning that causes unnecessary suffering and blocks access to our deeper capacities for happiness and fulfillment.
Know thyself!
From the entrance to the Ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
Karen Casey
The First Noble Truth:
Recognizing the Nature of “Suffering” (Dukkha)
To fully benefit from the Enneagram as intended, it is not enough to simply learn and appreciate one’s type or other people’s types. One must see and experience deeply - with the intellect as well as in one’s heart and gut - how one’s type, and all the types, experience dukkha, unnecessary psychologically based suffering. Using mindfulness to deeply understand and experience the nature of dukkha is a vital first step in effectively using the Enneagram for real spiritual transformation and accessing our deepest potential.
The first of the Four Noble Truths was the Buddha’s deep insight into the nature of dukkha. Before you can treat an illness, you have to be able to clearly recognize and fully understand everything you can about the nature of that illness. The Buddha’s “insight” wasn’t just a mental kind of knowing, but also a deeply experiential ”knowing” in his body and heart - a balanced knowing involving all the centers of intelligence that the Enneagram represents.
The meaning of this crucial word “dukkha,” and recognizing what it actually is, is essential in Buddhist practice. The word “dukkha” is difficult to translate, mainly because its meaning has to be experienced - again, in all three centers - for it to be useful. It’s usually translated in English as “suffering,” or “unsatisfactoriness,” or even “unhappiness.” But associating the meaning of “dukkha” with these common English words is a bit like trying to explain how it is to taste an apple by comparing it to a pomegranate, without having tasted the apple itself. It may look slightly similar on the outside, but it actually looks and tastes very different on the inside.
Most people are used to dukkha translated as “suffering.” Siddhartha’s quest was to understand the nature of suffering and how to become free of it, but he wasn’t just interested in alleviating physical or emotional pain. As living beings, enlightened or not, our bodies inevitably experience pain as long as we’re alive, and if our nervous systems lose the capacity to experience pain (as can actually happen with certain illnesses) we’re in big trouble.
The Buddha’s First Noble Truth does not imply that mindfulness helps liberate us from experiencing pain, nor is that even useful or desirable, since some awareness of pain is needed to function in life. This is a frequent misunderstanding about dukkha and what mindfulness can do for us. A key aspect of the Budhha’s insight is that dukkha is not just physical or emotional pain. It is the unnecessary suffering brought on by our conditioned psychological response to pain. Mindfulness practice fundamentally shifts our relationship to pain, because it is the relationship to pain - our psychological conditioning - that causes unnecessary suffering - dukkha. Basic physical or even emotional pain happens as long as we have a physical body. Dukkha is optional and can be completely unlearned.
Shooting Ourselves with Two Arrows
One of the most popular analogies about this from the Buddha is the “two arrows.” Jack Kornfield puts it this way:
It’s like two arrows, the Buddha said. The first arrow is the initial event itself, the painful experience. It has happened; we cannot avoid it. The second arrow is the one we shoot into ourselves. This arrow is optional. We can add to the initial pain a contracted, angry, rigid, frightened state of mind. Or we can learn to experience the same painful event with less identification and aversion, with a more relaxed and compassionate heart.2
As research around mindfulness-based stress reduction has repeatedly demonstrated, the intensity of pain may well recede through mindfulness practice - perhaps in a major way. But, unlike drugs that temporarily simply interrupt our capacity to sense the pain (often with unfortunate consequences), an increased skill with mindfulness fundamentally transforms our capacity to be more fully with the pain. Our body, heart, and mind learn to be with the pain in an entirely different way, completely free of dukkha - our conditioned response of “suffering.”
If the notion of “increasing our capacity to be more fully with the pain” makes you cringe, you’re probably not alone! Until recently the Buddhist view of what causes psychological suffering seemed counterintuitive to our medical culture’s assumption we should avoid pain at all costs, mainly through dependence on drugs. How could being more fully with pain possibly reduce the pain? Yet this is precisely what the last several decades of psychological and biological research into mindfulness practice has demonstrated. Mindfulness essentially increases our body’s natural capacity for pain tolerance. But, as we shall see, it can go much further even than that.
The Second Noble Truth:
The Root Cause of Dukkha
The Buddha’s Second Noble Truth goes even more deeply into the nature of this response to pain, to its very root, the “ridgepole” holding up the whole house of the deeply conditioned ego fixation that causes the “second arrow” response.
Biologically, from amoebas to humans, we are of course fundamentally wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Sometimes, the First Noble Truth is rather unfortunately summarized as “Life is Suffering.” What this really means is, not that there’s no escape from dukkha, but that the tendency to avoid pain and seek pleasure is built into our very biology as living beings. But the great good news of the Second Noble Truth is that we can transform even our relationship to this core hard-wired biological response if we come to really see and know it - with compassion. This level of seeing, understanding, and compassionate caring is, in fact, the “long pole in the tent” for eliminating dukkha entirely.
Because it’s so difficult for most people to remember that “suffering” is not the same as “pain,” “dukkha” is now more often translated as “unsatisfactoriness” rather than “suffering.” But there’s an even deeper, more fundamental, reality to “unsatisfactoriness” revealed by the Second Noble Truth that leads to becoming completely free of dukkha.
The root cause of dukkha is what the Buddha called fundamental “thirst” - tanha. Tanha - in modern terms - is our biologically programmed craving after pleasure (or avoidance of pain) that is, by nature, fundamentally unsatisfying. Although eating that chocolate cookie or taking that first drink may be immediately pleasurable - and what’s wrong with that? - the pleasure is always fleeting and never permanent - nor even completely satisfying.
Hungry Ghosts
There is a basic biologically-programmed blindness to this that mindfulness practice can help us see more clearly so that we shift our relationship and enslavement to it. We do know that craving can lead to addiction if over indulged, and it can dominate our psyche, causing tremendous misery. But we often overlook that all craving - not just addiction - shares in this shadow side. The satisfaction of craving is always transitory. In other words, there’s a built-in “unsatisfactoriness” in our usual experience of both the alleviation of pain and the fulfillment of pleasure. Though we can’t see it, we’re like what Buddhists call “hungry ghosts,” or the zombies of The Walking Dead; no matter how much we consume, it’s never enough. A crucial aspect of changing our relationship with our automatic biological programming is to fully mindfully be with and see the truth of this situation as it’s happening.
The best explanation I’ve read of the nature of dukkha as “unsatisfactoriness” is actually from - of all people - an evolutionary biologist! In his book Why Buddhism is True, Robert Wright explains how the ancient understandings of Buddhism both inform and validate much of what evolutionary biology has theorized.
Think of natural selection as a “designer” and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense:
1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
2. The pleasure shouldn’t last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn’t subside, we’d never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That’s no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
3. The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you’ll be full of ennui and wishing you’d majored in philosophy.
If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.3
In addition to evolutionary biology, modern psychological studies over the past several decades have explored even more deeply the nature of this biological trap of unsatisfactoriness around the never ending seeking after pleasure and avoiding pain. Beyond basic “hungry ghost” biological craving and aversion - something we share with all sensitive life - we humans also crave a (mostly) false sense that we cause - and should be able to control - what happens to us. As the Buddha said, biology is already shooting us with the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” - normal biological suffering - and then we have to go and shoot ourselves with the second arrow: the illusion that it’s somehow our fault!
Blind Spots
From our very beginning as infants, our forming fragile little nervous systems respond and adapt to the pains and pleasures of our environment and caregivers based on our particular innate developing talents and temperaments. The Enneagram points to nine key variations of these innate tendencies - nine types of psychological “locks” that keep us trapped in the prison cell of our ego. These tendencies to respond to pain and pleasure in particular ways as infants then solidify as our personalities, our ingrained habits of thought and feeling that form at such an early stage we aren’t really conscious of them. They become “blind spots” that actually get in our way.
These blind spots - what psychologists call “psychological coping mechanisms” - nevertheless rule our lives and deepen the dukkha and unsatisfactoriness of our daily living. As coping mechanisms they are like psychological “pacifiers” - particular to each person based on their temperament and natural endowments - that we grab and suck on for dear life when faced with the terror of our needs not being met.
The Enneagram: Nine Archetypes of “Control”
The Enneagram thoroughly describes the core nine archetypal ways we construct an artificial sense of a self that’s “in control” of whatever pleasantness we’re eagerly grabbing for or whatever unpleasantness we’re desperately trying to escape from. We’re not actually “in control” of much of anything, as infants or adults, even of our own thoughts and feelings and actions, much less the external environment. Instead we have this psychological pacifier we’ve unconsciously created and suck on, the illusion that there’s actually somebody here who knows what’s actually happening and is somehow going to get that thing we want or make something we don’t want go away. As infants this at least temporarily allays the terror of being an extremely vulnerable powerless little infant.
Unfortunately, what may work for us as infants to temporarily stem the overwhelm of our delicate little forming nervous systems tends to become a very ill-fitting suit later on as we mature into adulthood. The price we pay for believing we can be in control is that it inevitably leads to the “second arrow” of self-judgment when things don’t turn out as the in-control “self” intended. If I buy into the illusion that I can control something, then, when it doesn’t usually turn out the way I intended - logically - I must be to blame.
So “unsatisfactoriness” is not just embedded in our biological response to pleasure and pain, but also in the unconsciously self-constructed sense of self that can never let go of the illusion that it should be able to be in control but somehow rarely can. “I’m supposed to be able to control this. I can’t, so there must be something really wrong with me,” is the fundamental conclusion we keep coming to, and it torments us time and again. Or it does until we start to discover, through mindfulness and the Enneagram, that this whole way of seeing ourselves is a trap and that we can escape.
We’re so used to swimming around unconsciously in this self-constructed psychological soup of our personality that we don’t know and can’t see it, even when it no longer serves us in the situations we find ourselves in as mature adults. We’re so used to the ill-fitting suit left over from childhood, we assume it’s normal. At some point life intervenes and forces us to begin to question this state of affairs, or we receive rare tastes of what’s possible if we weren’t confined by this unseen ill-fitting suit of clothes. As we said before, the Enneagram provides a powerful map to begin to see our particular “lock” that confines us to our particular jail cell of unconscious psychological conditioning that creates dukkha, the never fully slaked thirst/tanha for pleasure and avoidance of pain and then blaming ourselves when that happens.
The Third Noble Truth:
Freedom from Dukkha
O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too.
My mind has now attained the unformed Nibbâna
And reached the end of every sort of craving.
The Buddha (at the moment of final enlightenment)
Fortunately there is good news! In seeing through to the reality and fundamental nature of dukkha the Buddha finally realized his quest to become free of dukkha. In seeing this he himself achieved total freedom from unsatisfactoriness - biological and psychological. He attained complete clarity that dukkha need not continue forever (or throughout many lifetimes if you believe in reincarnation). In doing so, he recognized his essential true nature, his Buddha/Awakened Nature. The Third Noble Truth is that we need not be caught in this pointless trap of unsatisfactoriness. Beyond the prison cell of our unconscious conditioned personalities is our own deeper essential awakened Buddha Nature, an entire mansion of rooms with many unknown capacities to be explored and developed.
The artificial sense of an in-control self, that keeps getting in our own way, is constructed, so it can be deconstructed. Through the cultivation of mindfulness, we can learn to see, feel, sense, and then let go of and throw away the fake dried up tit of our psychological pacifier that we compulsively suck but doesn’t satisfy. Once we can actually learn to see clearly the deeply unsatisfying nature of our cravings and aversions and illusion of control, why hang onto them?
Buddhism does not require anyone to “believe in” anything. In this sense, it is more a science or art than a religion. The Buddha famously said, “Ehipassiko” - “Come and see for yourself.” Like with modern science, he realized that magical thinking (i.e. one can actually benefit from simply believing in something or someone) is ultimately a trap that blocks the work required on our developmental path. Buddhist perspectives and practices - and the Enneagram - are best viewed as a rich set of tools to experiment with, to help us craft the unique key to our unique lock that imprisons us. But if there is anything close to a fundamental underlying “belief” in Buddhism - and with the Enneagram - it is that we have, and we are, at our core, Buddha Nature. Buddhists don’t insist that you must simply believe in Buddha Nature. The concept is a mere finger pointing at the moon; not the moon itself. You still must embark on a path of discovery to taste Buddha Nature directly before you really know what it is.
Buddha Nature
Exactly what Buddha Nature is tends to be undefined by Buddhists, because it is so different from our usual experience. It really has to be experienced to be understood - like actually eating an apple, not just talking about it. Yet, we’ve had hints of it all our lives, from our earliest moments of life. We sense it when we observe little infants. Their unbridled moment by moment joy and hunger for discovery, their capacity to be in distress one moment and then completely letting go into joyful discovery the next, touch some memory of what it was like to have been so unconditionally happy and open long ago. Even after a little bit of meditation practice or time on a retreat we may tap into deeper capacities for feeling fully alive like this in our experience of the present moment.
The Buddha was once asked to sum up what it is like to be enlightened, and he responded, “In what is seen is only what is seen. In what is heard is only what is heard.” Imagine seeing and hearing and touching and tasting everything that comes through our senses with the immediacy of an infant! We may experience this momentarily when we walk in nature, when we take in the vastness of the ocean or the night sky. Or we may feel it when we find ourselves “in the zone” - in a “flow state” - playing ball or music or in creating a work of art or even, at times, at work. We momentarily sense with wonder that another way of being is possible - more effortless, spontaneous, energetic, creative, fulfilling. We sense deeper untapped capacities that are just waiting to emerge. We might even sense that we fundamentally aren’t so separate and alone and needing to be in control, but that we’re somehow loved and held and even at one with a larger reality, or with Mother Nature, or with our beloveds.
These are all intimations of our Buddha Nature - our essential true nature, who we really are - peeping through. Our deepest happiness, the freedom from dukkha, from the sense of unsatisfactoriness that haunts us from infancy, is simply a matter of uncovering our Buddha Nature, which we have - and are - already and just don’t know it. Dukkha is a matter of mistaken identity. As my favorite bumper sticker says, “You’re not what you think.” We think and are constantly feeding ourselves stories that we are these separate vulnerable individuals who ought to be able to control what happens to us, but somehow never really can and are therefore failures in some way. Instead, we are actually individual manifestations of an ocean of Buddha Nature, on which we are but temporary waves on the surface, that already “knows” moment by moment what to do without having to control anything. We experience this as infants before it is educated out of us and before we have a chance to develop personalities and capacities that serve our true nature rather than obscure it. The key to liberation from dukkha is to recognize dukkha for what it is - the first two Noble Truths - and thereby let go of the unconscious illusory pacifiers that never really work, and allow the Buddha Nature that’s already there at the center of who we really are to naturally organically emerge on its own.
All conditioned phenomena are impermanent. Their nature is to arise and pass away. True understanding of this brings deep peace.
Ancient Buddhist Chant
Nirvana
Like “dukkha,” another frequently misunderstood term from Buddhism is the word “nirvana.” The Third Noble Truth - stated most succinctly - is that “freedom from dukkha is nirvana.” But nirvana is not “heaven” nor some eternal bliss in this life or the next. “Nirvana” literally means “cessation,” the ending of something, not its beginning. It’s also about letting go. It’s not something you have to get to or make happen or to earn by being in control, but by seeing and letting go into something that’s already here. The core of the Third Noble Truth is thus: “freedom from dukkha is letting go.” The vast treasure of views and tools of Buddhism and the rich map of the Enneagram help us do just that: recognize the true nature of dukkha, its root cause, and, by doing so, let go into our birthright, the liberation of our essential Buddha Nature.
Like Buddhism, the core intent of the Enneagram is to uncover and allow to flower our true essential awakened Buddha Nature. The Enneagram not only provides a detailed map of the kinds of prison locks of dukkha we inhabit (without knowing it), but also maps the rooms beyond the prison cell, the vast mansion of our Buddha Nature once we’re liberated. The Enneagram shows how each of us tends to be imprisoned by a particular kind of lock, which we need to explore and understand so we can fashion the particular key that unlocks it. But the Enneagram goes far beyond just describing the particular nature of our imprisonment, the detailed description of our particular manifestation of the first two Noble Truths. It actually takes us into the many rooms beyond our prison cell, particular to our type, that we will be able to explore and enjoy once we’re liberated, the domain of nirvana, the Third Noble Truth. The Enneagram indeed takes us even more deeply into that domain and further shows that the very make-up of our imprisonment is the key to “cessation” and our liberation. As the Zen tradition says, “We come to nirvana by way of samsara (illusion).” The core insight and promise of the Enneagram is that the very material out of which our prison cell and lock is fashioned is the key to fashioning the key itself. As infants we construct our artificial “in-control” pacifier self by unconsciously leveraging - and distorting in the process - our particular natural talents and temperaments. By understanding and properly leveraging the true undistorted nature of our particular talents and temperaments of our Buddha Nature they become the key to our liberation.
Most people are afraid of suffering. But suffering is a kind of mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow. There can be no lotus flower without the mud.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The Four Noble Truths are sometimes compared to the standard medical model and the Buddha to a physician:
“The Buddha is often called the Great Healer. He is the ultimate physician, providing medicine to cure the human disease. His four noble truths follow the classical medical model of diagnosis, treatment, and cure. In their classical formulation they are: 1. The truth of suffering (diagnosis); 2. The truth of origination (cause); 3. The truth of stopping (cure); 4. The truth of the path (treatment)” 4
The “treatment” for the “diagnosis” of dukkha is to follow the Eightfold Path. Beyond just mindfulness practice, the Eightfold Path covers three basic sets of disciplines - orientational, ethical, and inner-practice-focused - that ensure a complete holistic transformation. This involves not only all three centers of intelligence - mental, emotional, and bodily - but all domains of life, inward and outward, including interacting with other beings and with nature. As we explore each of the nine Enneagram types - and subtypes based on the instincts - we will discover how the Eightfold Path manifests differently for each type. They each have a unique egoic orientation as well as a particular latent spiritual potential that makes each Eightfold Path distinctly different.
Recall the “Two Arrows” teaching of the Buddha. At the core of the Eightfold Path is a different way of living one’s inner and outer life centered on a radically different orientation to the “first arrows” of life - the inevitable difficulties of having a physical body and being a social animal. By practicing this Path we will learn not to shoot ourselves with the “second arrow” of our dysfunctional psychological conditioning but instead - paradoxically - benefit from the difficulties that come our way. As Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says, the inevitable “arrows” of life - the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as Shakespeare so poetically put it - can become transformed into the “mud to help the lotus flower of happiness grow.”