[Transcript] The Origin of Sin According to the Enneagram
Hello and welcome to the Barrcast. I'm your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a Wednesday morning. Today I want to talk about sin and the Enneagram, particularly how the Enneagram explains the origin of sin.
We're going to go esoteric, but I hope this will be interesting. It's certainly a way of drawing the Enneagram that you probably haven't seen before. If you watched my previous video, you saw a more traditional rendering of the Enneagram where we talk about the thinking triad, the feeling triad, and the doing triad. This is going to be a completely different approach, one that's more grounded in the origin of sin.
Eastern and Western Approaches to Sin
Let's ground ourselves in what we mean by sin before we go any further. I'd like to reference Adyashanti, who has a book called "Healing the Core Wound of Unworthiness." In it, he makes a useful distinction between Eastern and Western approaches to sin.
As I describe this, I don't want to defend any kind of actual geographic claims about East and West—that's not my project. Think of this as a spectrum of how we relate to sin. A Westerner can certainly be anywhere on that spectrum, as can someone from the East.
According to Adyashanti, the Eastern approach to sin is a lighter approach. It takes the origin of sin as a kind of cosmic joke or forgetting, potentially even a game in which this sort of awake awareness—this original deity or creator or Buddha—is, to its own surprise, separated from itself. There's a forgetting that happens, and the project is simply one of remembering one's own true nature.
You can see this in the Greek tradition of the River Lethe, which the dying cross. When they cross it, they fall into oblivion and their previous life is forgotten. Forgetting and remembering is the focus for the Eastern approach.
The Western approach, in contrast, is more focused on a separation that has a wound associated with it. Adam and Eve is the root text here, but we see it played out in our religious institutions and culture. There's a feeling of brokenness to the human experience and a wish for healing and recovery that is more rooted in psychology, authority, and judgment. Feelings of shame, guilt, and terror are more natural reactions to this feeling of having fallen out of favor with God.
Adyashanti's point is that for many Westerners, the Eastern approach alone might be insufficient for spiritual awakening. There may have to be some sort of reckoning with spiritual healing that Eastern traditions may not naturally afford.
The Enneagram's Perspective on Sin
Where does the Enneagram sit in this account? It turns out that the Enneagram actually has quite a lot to say about the origin of sin, though this is the more mystical, esoteric side that you're not going to see in popular resources as much.
This comes from Claudio Naranjo and, presumably before him, Ichazo and Gurdjieff. As is the trademark of the Enneagram, it bridges East and West. Remember, the Enneagram itself has roots in this kind of cross-cultural mission. The Desert Fathers developed the Enneagram when they were working on missions with Egyptian tribes, trying to get them to convert. The Enneagram came out of these different cultures meeting and trying to have a shared language for describing spiritual matters.
The Triangle of Sin: Three Core Passions
I'm going to quote here from Naranjo in "Character and Neurosis":
"Inspection of the Enneagram of the passions shows that three of them at points 9, 6, and 3 occupy a position more central than the others. Because of the symbolism of the Enneagram, according to which the different points along it correspond to degrees and intervals in the musical scale, psychospiritual laziness at the top stands as the most basic of all, being, as it were, the 'do' of the passions."
What Naranjo is saying is that laziness, the passion of the nine—which we could also call forgetting or numbing—is the first note of the Enneagram, the first note of human fallenness. That's very consistent with the Eastern approach, that the first thing that happens from the perspective of non-dual awareness is some forgetting.
He continues:
"The interconnections shown between these three core points constitute what we may call psychodynamic connections, so that each may be said to underlie the next in a sequence mapped by arrows between them in a counterclockwise direction. If we read the psychodynamic sequence starting at the top, we may say that a lack of the sense of being, implicit in the psychological inertia or robotization of sloth, deprives the individual of a basis from which to act and thus leads to fear."
So what happens? In forgetting your true nature, you may arrive at a groundlessness to experience, a lack of basis from which to act. This contact with groundlessness initiates fear.
Naranjo goes on:
"Since we must act in the world, however, as much as we may fear it, we feel prompted to solve this contradiction by acting from a false self rather than courageously being who we are. We build, then, a mask between ourselves and the world, and with this mask we identify."
From forgetting to fear, we move to falsity or a cover-up. I come into contact with something completely surprising for which I have no basis to act. That triggers fear, but I have to act. So I invent a solution—I make something up. What I make up is a false other and simultaneously a false self, and I attribute things to that false self and false other.
But for that to actually work, Naranjo concludes:
"To the extent that while we do this, we forget who we truly are, however, we perpetuate the ontic obscuration that, in turn, supports fear, and so on, keeping us in a vicious circle."
In other words, the cover-up doesn't work unless I cover it up even to myself. To do that, I have to forget my true nature or further forget my true nature. Thus, the cycle continues: more forgetting leads to more groundlessness and fear, which leads to more falsity and covering up.
Bridging East and West
This provides a dynamic system that contains both the Eastern and Western traditions. From the Buddhist perspective, it clarifies the dual meaning of ignorance in the East. There's small ignorance (the forgetting that happens in a moment, a divine mistake) and big ignorance (the willful perpetuation of obscuration, what Buddhism calls samsara—the whole world instantiated by efforts to maintain the obscuration).
So ignorance isn't just at point 9, though that's the starting place from the Eastern tradition. Ignorance is this dynamic system, this continuity of forgetting leading to groundless experience. Then, rather than awakening to groundlessness, we try to fix groundlessness through falsity and obscuration. To pull off that heist, we have to further blind ourselves.
Over time, we develop a massive evidence base that we're sure is real and solid, but it's completely groundless—just a huge knot built up from this circle repeating. That's ignorance, that's samsara. That's the Eastern story.
In the Western story, while I think the West ultimately has its home base in point three (the falsity and shame triad), it's not so simple. In the Adam and Eve story, you see them go through this cycle a few times. Eve already isn't quite able to repeat God's instructions verbatim—a little bit of forgetting. There's also the numbness of Adam, who is right there while the serpent is convincing Eve, yet seems asleep to the situation.
After they eat the fruit, their eyes are opened—there is this open-eyed quality to groundlessness, this fear. But what happens so fast is that rather than seeing the actual groundlessness, they see the threat. They quickly move to covering up and obscuration—both literally hiding from God and covering themselves with fig leaves.
The Three Home Bases
The Enneagram teaches that humans find a home base in one of these three energetic nodes:
The Forgetting Node (Type 9): We're ultimately cut off in our gut, not connected, roboticized or numb to our true self. This is the gut triad or anger triad.
The Fear Node (Type 6): Our home base is in the fear of groundlessness, so we experience continual panic or anxiety and see the world as threat. This is the thinking triad or fear triad.
The Falsity Node (Type 3): We experience profound loneliness that is never remedied by our efforts to build up our image. We're fundamentally confused and self-deceiving. This is the heart triad, the shame or image triad.
This is an alternate way to construct the Enneagram. If you think about it as a laser beam that starts to go a few degrees off, that's when you get the other numbers. Naranjo actually has a similar way of constructing those other numbers, which is the origin of the "stretch and release" points.
Conclusion
One of my favorite things the Enneagram offers is this diversity of human experience that we can find a home in. The Eight Evil Thoughts, or later Seven Deadly Sins, seem to originate as a handy way of helping somebody discover their home base—their passion, their addiction, their default way of sinning—and give them a personalized trailhead for healing.
Whether it's the Doshas in the Ayurvedic tradition, the Elements, or the Realms, there's plenty of material to work with. That kind of personalization makes sense—when debugging your own personal ego structure, it makes sense to use language familiar to you.
I hope you enjoyed this dose of Enneagram wisdom, and I'll see you next time. Thanks.
Nick Barr is a founder-turned-coach helping mission-driven leaders navigate inner and outer transformation. Learn more at nsbarr.com.
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