Personality and Essence
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day . . . we become seekers.
--Peter Matthiessen
The Enneagram tradition defines personality as the lifetime accumulation of mental and emotional patterns which constitute the persona, the person an individual believes himself or herself to be and presents to the world. These patterns include, but are not limited to, habitual ways of thinking, believing, perceiving, and feeling.
The words "personality", "ego" and "false self" are considered synonymous and often are used interchangeably in Enneagram teaching.The personality is said to be an imitation, a facsimile, of the "True Self". Personality is fixated. Personality reacts to the ever changing outer environment with identifiable, predictable and conditioned reactions. Thus, personality is said to be the "conditioned being" as opposed to the "real being".
Essence is considered to be the "real being", the True Self, and may be considered a process rather than a fixed identity. Essence flows, is changeable and responds freshly and appropriately to ever changing conditions in the outer world.
Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day . . . we become seekers.
--Peter Matthiessen
The Enneagram tradition defines personality as the lifetime accumulation of mental and emotional patterns which constitute the persona, the person an individual believes himself or herself to be and presents to the world. These patterns include, but are not limited to, habitual ways of thinking, believing, perceiving, and feeling.
The words "personality", "ego" and "false self" are considered synonymous and often are used interchangeably in Enneagram teaching.The personality is said to be an imitation, a facsimile, of the "True Self". Personality is fixated. Personality reacts to the ever changing outer environment with identifiable, predictable and conditioned reactions. Thus, personality is said to be the "conditioned being" as opposed to the "real being".
Essence is considered to be the "real being", the True Self, and may be considered a process rather than a fixed identity. Essence flows, is changeable and responds freshly and appropriately to ever changing conditions in the outer world.
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