The Orthodox Enneagram (Paperback)

It has been said that to know oneself is to know God. But how does one know oneself? The enigmatic symbol of the enneagram, applied to personality type, provides an answer to this question that is accurate, penetrating, and illuminating. In this book, Thomas Garrett Isham explores the enneagram within the context of traditional metaphysics and spiritual orthodoxy, drawing on religious, psychological, and literary sources to illustrate the remarkable properties of this mysterious symbol. Combining wisdom both ancient and modern, he sets forth a discipline of the soul that can be used to discover one's deepest and truest self, as well as practical methods to put this liberating knowledge to work in one's everyday life. "Metaphysics casts a shadow: where all is eternal principle, the particular, contingent human soul is obscured-and without an understanding of one's own soul, metaphysics may be intellectually grasped but it cannot be existentially realized. A psychology ignorant of metaphysics, however, simply mires us in contingency, providing no way out. The Orthodox Enneagram, as a metaphysically-based tool for psychological understanding, is a real step toward bridging this gap." -Charles Upton, author of Shadow of the Rose, Folk Metaphysics, etc. "The Enneagram has become big business, but its mysterious origins and transcendent function still largely evade most who concern themselves with it. What we do know is that it is an ancient and universal symbol, possibly as old as Babylon, which seems to have come to the West primarily through Islamic esoterism. It is lamentable that New Age proponents and others within contemporary spiritual and psychological circles exclusively endeavor to excavate their own Enneagram "type," rather than realize that their personality at any moment could be any one of its nine "numbers." The quest of the Enneagram is to become a "zero," and this occurs when the empirical ego or false personality dissolves into the Supreme Identity. This book will go a long way in challenging the psychologization of the Enneagram by returning it to the integral metaphysics found at the heart of all sapiential traditions." -Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, editor of Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion