"Bad" Days and the Enneagram

My thoughts on death pretty much parallel those of drLove. In her testimony A Child Dies, she writes:

Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. From life to death, this incredible energy within each and every one of us is liberated into the entirety of existence. ... I don't believe there will ever be an "I" on the other side. Not even a "We". There'll be something, but not anything that I could comprehend in my human mind right now. ... That is what I believe happens upon death.

Me too! That's what I believe about death.

Children should outlive their parents. Children should be allowed to grow up to adulthood. Children should not die. Parents should not have to bear this burden of grief.

I certainly "hope" for all these things; but I don't believe them. 

Now, drLove realizes that beliefs like these doom her to feeling pain:

Lots of shoulds and should nots cry out in the face of a constantly changing world, where beliefs get swept up in the windstorm of a silence that is deafening.

So one obvious question is: Why believe these pain-ensuring things?

I believe that the answer to that question is, as drLove suspects, party genetic in origin. Toward explaining this, I believe that the Enneagram is an accurate descriptor of human personality. In an earlier recipe called Motivating Without Anger, I provided a link to a book I wrote arguing that emerging brain science seems to dovetail nicely with the Enneagram.

Like most all personality models, the Enneagram describes a certain number of different "types". It also describes "development" within each type. That curve of development runs all way from insanity at the one extreme, to enlightment at the opposite extreme.

Under the model, each of us is always only one of the types. But from moment to moment, we can be on different points of the development curve -- even touching upon insanity at times, or experiencing fleeting moments of enlightenment at other times. But most often, we're muddling around somewhere in the middle of curve.

I believe that this whole mushy description above can be boiled down to levels of activity in the amygdala region of the brain -- with insanity correlating to excessive activity; enlightenent to negligible activity.

With all that said, I suspect that personality type is almost purely genetic, whereas personality development is almost purely experiential. The truth is probably more muddled than that. But that seems a useful approximation.

Anyway, with that belief of mine, I'd say that drLove's "should" beliefs above are characteristic of one of the Ennegram types (specifically, the "One" type). If true, that would seem to make those beliefs sort of genetic in origin.

But since I'm writing this testimony six days after drLove posted hers, I will bet you anything that drLove's grasp on these pain-guaranteeing beliefs of hers has loosened somewhat by now. This "loosening over time" dynamic references the fluid "development curve" discussed above.

Put simply, each of us has "good" days and "bad" days. On our bad days, we slip into the old, familiar, well-worm grooves of the pitfalls of our type. For drLove, that pitfall seems to look like despair over the cruelties of life. For me, my bad moments look like rage over not getting what I want (think: 2-year-old having a tantrum). 

But these are only fleeting moments in a life. Over the course of a self-observed life, these bad moments dwindle in terms of frequency, scope, and amplitude.

Although these bad moments can dwindle like that over time, I'm not too sure that, short of living like a monk in seclusion, we folks living in this world of ours will ever reach a "nirvana" in which we will be totally free of these "bad" moments.

So, being an optimist, I say: Let's cherish the good moments, and celerbrate the bad ones too.

I'm not a Christian in the normal sense of the word. But I do give big props to the following aphorim: "The Lord giveth and Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord."