Enneagram material, resources and books
I'm continuing with my little task of answering the oldest unanswered posts. How long I can keep this up depends on how long it takes for the coffee I drank to be metabolized. Actually, I might quit after this post.
The enneagram... I'm going through a phase in my life when I'm rejecting the enneagram, and I refuse to label myself as any enneagram type at all. It's partly because I discovered socionics and decided that socionics was able to explain a lot more to me than the enneagram ever did. I was struggling to use the enneagram for several years, and I kept changing my mind about what type I was. It's also partly because I am copying the behavior of a dual I admire, whose name shall remain unmentioned, who refrains from using the enneagram, but who instead tries to directly describe something about the person's overall mood or style without referring to an enneagram type.
The enneagram is a system that has been added on to and changed by many people over many years. It seems like people were always trying to 'patch' the enneagram to fix the parts of it that 'didn't work.' There's something we can't explain, so let's just add a new layer on top of the old layers.
For instance, the tritypes. It reminds me of the 'circles within circles' of the old astronomers. They used to believe that everything moved in circles, and so they would explain all the motions of the stars and planets as being circles within circles, and in a way, that's sort of true, except that they had to view everything as circling around planet Earth. I get the same feeling from the enneagram, especially the tritypes idea. If your main type doesn't describe you well enough, then we'll label you with a couple of other types, too, in addition to your main type, so that you have a different type depending on what you're doing or what mood you're in. It seems like the real problem is that your main type doesn't describe you well enough. And when people are creating lots and lots of subtypes, that tells me that something in the system might not be working well enough for them, and it might be better to go all the way back to the beginning and look at the original system.
This applies to socionics too. I wonder if someday, in the future, I'll be looking back at socionics and saying that I don't really believe in it anymore? More likely I will say that it's of less importance to me than it used to be. What will be the next great discovery after socionics? What will be the next new system or new theory? It's inevitable that there is one.
Okay, just another fluff post written out of restlessness rather than an actual attempt to talk about anything important.
Enneagram is completely useless as a typology when related to socionics. I always get a good laugh when people say stuff like "I don't think X is type related, its probably a 1w9 sx/sp thing", as if they were meant to be used in unison. Totally different playing fields.
ILI (FINAL ANSWER)
Before I completely gave up on using the enneagram, I went for a while trying to use it to explain the differences among people of the same socionic type. I believed that two people could have the same sociotype, but be different enneagram types; I also believed that each enneagram type was more likely to correlate with particular sociotypes. For instance, I thought it was very unlikely that a SLI would ever be an enneagram type Two, but they might be a Three, Five, Six, Seven, or Nine. I did not believe that all members of a particular sociotype were always a particular enneatype - I did not think, for instance, that all SLIs are type Nine (as some people have said elsewhere). I originally believed that the enneagram and socionics were describing two very different phenomena, and you could use both systems together to add on to each other.Originally Posted by Crispy
Strangely, now that I've learned more about socionics, I've moved towards the viewpoint that says yes, the enneagram types were an attempt to describe the same thing that the socionic types describe, and that the enneagram is 'missing something' that socionics has. Some people have simply compared the two systems and said 'The enneagram has nine types, and socionics/MBTI has sixteen types, therefore the enneagram needs to add seven more types because it's incomplete.' I never took that position, but actually, that's close to what I believe now - I do believe that the enneagram is 'missing something' and needs to 'add more types.' In the enneagram books that I read, they described a 'higher consciousness center' or something like that, in addition to the thinking, feeling, and instinctive centers, and so I might say that they could add 'intuition' as the 'higher consciousness center.' But actually, the whole system is such a mess that I just gave up on trying to fix it by doing things like that - I get much more understanding of people by simply using socionics and nothing else. I just don't even feel that it's worth using anymore.
However, it might be useful to go look at Ichazo and some of the other people who wrote about the enneagram in the past. I once looked at a web page that translated some of his original work, and a lot of it was stuff that I never saw before in any books that I've read about the enneagram. It looks like a lot of valuable material from Ichazo was left out and ignored.
Thats all I read, thats all I need to read, your posts are too long.
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