07-22-2010, 02:46 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-22-2010, 02:48 PM by Questioner.)
The Enneagram can take us directly to a core question of life experience: what do you believe about God?
Let me use God in the broadest possible sense. As far as I know this is an original definition from me: Your God is whatever you feel certain exists, and has a greater ability to influence how your life turns out than anything else. What you really believe about God is demonstrated by your behavior, not be statements of faith.
For a monotheist - Christian, Jew, Muslim - God is a person who is like our human personalities in many ways. God can have loves and hates, joys and sorrows, expectations and disappointments, actions and reactions, opinions that can be changed by others and self-determinations that can't.
Unlike people, God is the creator of the universe from nothing, can make any arbitrary change in the universe at any time but usually doesn't, and will one day judge us for whether we did what fulfilled and delighted God's hopes in us. If we performed well enough we join God in heaven, if not we are condemned to continue our separation from God in hell.
For a Hindu, God is the ultimate force of creative life pulsing and expanding through the entire universe and inside the human heart. God is not a person as we understand personality, but God is loving and gracious enough to provide a variety of personality manifestations so that we have a personal metaphor of God that we can relate to like a person. These deities or avatars let us relate personally to God, while we remember that they are ultimately only illustrative metaphors about the ultimate reality of God beyond a human personality's comprehension.
For an animist, God is the total summation of all the individual deities that are throughout the world, controlling its operation and approachable as individual personalities.
For a deist, God is the force that set the universe in motion and then sat back to see what would happen without further hands-on involvement.
For an atheist, God is the sum total of random chance and circumstance.
For a communist, and members of other political cults, God is their vision of how government could ultimately be involved in the lives of all people to fulfill an inevitable historical march towards justice.
We all strive to do whatever we can to influence God's involvement in our own lives, and to protect ourselves from whatever we imagine even God can't change. If God is the most powerful force to influence our lives, then there may be quite a bit about our lives that has no single point of influence and therefore can't be affected by our actions.
What we imagine about God, about humanity, and about our role in relation to God and humanity, has this interesting fact about it: for most people, these are all completely unconscious, feeling-based associations that became fixed in our lives long before we learned to talk, or to use logic. Therefore, it's as hard to put them into words as to explain just what it means that the sky is blue.
Most of those associations came from our perinatal, birth or infancy experiences; and from what happened when we were very young; or what happened at any time in our lives that we were helplessly vulnerable to a force greater than we could control, or perhaps even greater than we could comprehend. Those in turn defined what we truly believe about God.
If we believe that someone else blasphemes against our God, that is a terrifying situation for us and for the other person. Blasphemy attempts to undermine or destabilize our connection with the most powerful force in the universe. If the threat isn't dealt with, then we may lose our ability to relate to God and influence God's actions towards us. This is why the apostate, heretic and heathen always has to be killed, whether they disrespect Krishna, Marx, The Prophet, or the Current Scientific Paradigm, depending whose sacred ox is getting grilled for dinner.
The Enneagram describes, among other things, nine different visions of where God is found and what we have to do to be at one with God's best for our lives.
I'll demonstrate this, in my next post, with types 3, 6, and 9.
GW, I only referred to an afternoon in the hammock. The morning is yours to do as you like, and the evening is for dinner and watching ET's hello lights.
Let me use God in the broadest possible sense. As far as I know this is an original definition from me: Your God is whatever you feel certain exists, and has a greater ability to influence how your life turns out than anything else. What you really believe about God is demonstrated by your behavior, not be statements of faith.
For a monotheist - Christian, Jew, Muslim - God is a person who is like our human personalities in many ways. God can have loves and hates, joys and sorrows, expectations and disappointments, actions and reactions, opinions that can be changed by others and self-determinations that can't.
Unlike people, God is the creator of the universe from nothing, can make any arbitrary change in the universe at any time but usually doesn't, and will one day judge us for whether we did what fulfilled and delighted God's hopes in us. If we performed well enough we join God in heaven, if not we are condemned to continue our separation from God in hell.
For a Hindu, God is the ultimate force of creative life pulsing and expanding through the entire universe and inside the human heart. God is not a person as we understand personality, but God is loving and gracious enough to provide a variety of personality manifestations so that we have a personal metaphor of God that we can relate to like a person. These deities or avatars let us relate personally to God, while we remember that they are ultimately only illustrative metaphors about the ultimate reality of God beyond a human personality's comprehension.
For an animist, God is the total summation of all the individual deities that are throughout the world, controlling its operation and approachable as individual personalities.
For a deist, God is the force that set the universe in motion and then sat back to see what would happen without further hands-on involvement.
For an atheist, God is the sum total of random chance and circumstance.
For a communist, and members of other political cults, God is their vision of how government could ultimately be involved in the lives of all people to fulfill an inevitable historical march towards justice.
We all strive to do whatever we can to influence God's involvement in our own lives, and to protect ourselves from whatever we imagine even God can't change. If God is the most powerful force to influence our lives, then there may be quite a bit about our lives that has no single point of influence and therefore can't be affected by our actions.
What we imagine about God, about humanity, and about our role in relation to God and humanity, has this interesting fact about it: for most people, these are all completely unconscious, feeling-based associations that became fixed in our lives long before we learned to talk, or to use logic. Therefore, it's as hard to put them into words as to explain just what it means that the sky is blue.
Most of those associations came from our perinatal, birth or infancy experiences; and from what happened when we were very young; or what happened at any time in our lives that we were helplessly vulnerable to a force greater than we could control, or perhaps even greater than we could comprehend. Those in turn defined what we truly believe about God.
If we believe that someone else blasphemes against our God, that is a terrifying situation for us and for the other person. Blasphemy attempts to undermine or destabilize our connection with the most powerful force in the universe. If the threat isn't dealt with, then we may lose our ability to relate to God and influence God's actions towards us. This is why the apostate, heretic and heathen always has to be killed, whether they disrespect Krishna, Marx, The Prophet, or the Current Scientific Paradigm, depending whose sacred ox is getting grilled for dinner.
The Enneagram describes, among other things, nine different visions of where God is found and what we have to do to be at one with God's best for our lives.
I'll demonstrate this, in my next post, with types 3, 6, and 9.
GW, I only referred to an afternoon in the hammock. The morning is yours to do as you like, and the evening is for dinner and watching ET's hello lights.