INTRO: Centers of Intelligence
Descriptions of the centers of intelligence (heart, gut, and head).
Welcome to my first installment of the Enneagram INTRO Series:tm: where I’ll be breaking down the main portions of the theory. The next post will center around the Hornevian Triads.
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The centers of intelligence are the triadic categorization of the psychic perceptual bases of the Enneagram. Three fixations with respective expressions are located in each one. This article serves as a representation of my understanding of it being shared with you.
The Body Center (8, 9, 1)
The body center is the perceptual base that is oriented towards the natures of reality, existence, and being. It has the ontological concern of “what is” and attitudes towards it.
These types are represented as a body because their perception resides on a dichotomy of totality to nothingness — the multitude of reality’s parts organize and operate to create a singular form.
It possesses innate knowing of how the separate parts of experience synthesize to function as an intelligent force. To illustrate: you do not need to tell your liver to generate protein nor your heart to pump blood. Functioning under this perception, it is the body center’s nature to let things be as they are. The fixations arise out of malformed reactions to this existential stillness.
Its associations with the conservational instinct and the emotion of anger is due to their sensitivity to when their ‘beingness’ is impeded upon. Their subconscious awareness of totality makes them concerned most with where with something ends and begins — sensing when another body has come into contact with it in a threatening way; this manifests as an automatic preoccupation on boundaries and autonomy. Protection is the parental function it is concerned with.
The body-centered ego uses its beingness and boundaries for a sense of self. It does not identify with the organs (heart and head), but the space between self and other. They notably have the most issues with questions of purpose: who am I? They know what they are and what is, but why they are is either supplementally answered from the mind (“I am because of my previous experiences”) or lends itself to its perceptual dichotomy of totality-nothingness (“I am any/all, I am nothing”). This can be externalized in the form of life seeming meaningless or where nothing can be sure to exist. The ideas of ego death, duality, and metaphysics are recurring themes that would come from body-centered egos.
The Body-Centered Egos (reactions to totality)
E8 is the active body-center type. Its fixation regarding reality is discerning the objective truth of what is. It is the expansive body that detects infringement by identifying forces they deem as trying to limit its way of being.
Organ wise: The head center is utilized for staying separate (E5 head) from other bodies while the heart center’s need for permission of existence (E2 head) is deprioritized (since that would hamper their goal). “What exists?”
E1 is the reactive body-center type. Its fixation regarding reality is uncovering what should/shouldn’t be and how allowed entities are to be. It is the subjective body that detects infringement by aligning with their sense of “yes” and “no”.
Organ wise: the heart center is utilized for an internal knowledge of how things should exist and react to their form (E4 heart) and the head center is only used specifically to rationalize why it ought to be that way (E7 head). “How, why, and should it exist?”
E9 is the sustaining body-center type. Its fixation regarding reality is maintaining its own existence first and foremost. It is the stagnant body that delays infringement detection in service of sorting out its own internal parts to figure out their form.
Organ wise: the head center is relied on for locating its innards (E6 head) and the heart center aids by discerning which organ was ‘donated’/‘borrowed’ and which is the self’s (E3 heart), all the while the body itself is impeded upon. “Do I exist?”
The Heart Center (2, 3, 4)
The heart center is the perceptual base that is oriented towards judgements, worth, and ethics. It has the axiological concern of “what matters” and attitudes towards it.
These types are represented as a heart because their perception resides on a dichotomy of meaningfulness to nihilism — what drives the soul towards beauty and endows one with the willpower to carry on.
With a fundamentally judging approach to life, it generates a selective sense of care for certain aspects and qualities of materialization. To illustrate: part of your soul is touched by watching a specific film and watching a different film of the same genre doesn’t move you as much. Because of this, the heart types are pre-dispositioned to curate manifestations that reflect such qualities. The fixations form as reactions to the absence of reflection — the horror of “I cannot see myself”.
They are preoccupied with the evaluations to be used for comparison against intrinsic scales of worth. Their subconscious awareness of meaninglessness leads them to force meaning either upon themselves or others; because their perception is fixed unto itself, another’s ‘improper’ interpretation (meaning-assignment) of their manifestation produces incongruence that is associated with shame and the relational instinct. Nurturing is the parental function it is concerned with.
The heart-centered ego uses its intentions and manifestation for a sense of self. The body is used as a form to act out what one is so they do not have to justify themselves (head) in how they find meaning. Questions of praxis are what tend to be hard for them ( “what am I doing?”) since they only know the meaning of why they are moving . Their underutilization of the head center creates a locked projective view of their own interiority. The ideas of morality, phenomenology, dignity are recurring themes that would come from heart-centered egos.
Author’s note: I’ve also noticed a distinct interest in psychology from heart types. I believe they’d like to get an idea of what’s going on in someone else’s head.
The Heart-Centered Egos (reactions to meaningfulness)
E2 is the active heart-center type. Its fixation regarding meaning is assignment of it. It is the forcing heart that decides what does and doesn’t matter according to what they value.
Organ wise: The gut center is utilized for asserting its own existence (E8 body) through embodiment of their worth while neglecting the heard center’s need for separating their sense of self from others (E5 head), instead supplementing with the heart’s sense of judgement for separation (E4) whilst resisting acknowledgement of the “bad” within themselves. “What matters? What is it worth?”
E4 is the reactive body-center type. Its fixation regarding meaning is asserting what should be meaningful against the values they are presented with. It is the judging heart that sees life through a lens of “good” and “bad”, with an orientation towards misalignment to locate where the “good” is.
Organ wise: the head center is only used as fuel for the heart to generate an ideal of value (E7 head), and the sense of separating its being from other is done with sensations of disgust (E1 gut); misalignment is formed through recognizing what is regarded as “good” (E2 heart) and the gap between that and their ideal. It also provides itself with a sense of worth. “How, why, and should it matter? Why is this worthy?”
E3 is the sustaining body-center type. Its fixation regarding meaning is in moving itself to where it is found. It is the forward heart that obtains reflection by making itself into what will undeniably warrant it.
Organ wise: the body center is utilized as the vehicle of guaranteeing a valuable existence (E9 body) and the head center looks at how others evaluate themselves (E6 head) to apply that to how they do not want to identify. The heart’s intrinsic meaning, however, is not contacted with. “Do I matter? Do I have worth?”
The Head Center (5, 6, 7)
The head center is the perceptual base that is oriented towards the natures of epistemology, survival, and causality. It has the spatial concern of “where is” and attitudes towards it.
These types are represented as a head because their perception resides on a dichotomy of inclusion to exclusion — cognition is what is used to identifying the many components of an object in relation to others.
They are constantly processing the components of their experience to adapt their orientation to one running on the new information. To illustrate: you know that a cup is not a plate because of the differentiation of their properties, and you know that the cups are held in a cabinet separate from the plates; when you need a cup, you act accordingly. (That is part of the reason why Ichazo saw it as the ‘doing’ triad). This perception lets them know what to do to reach an end or remain distinct from other beings within a space.
Author’s Note: Head types identifying with what they ‘do’ is different from E3’s identification with meaningful objects. E3’s doing is towards a result, the head center’s doing is driven by thought and knowledge.
This gives to a preoccupation with contradiction, temporality, and the organizational systems of phenomena. A sensitivity to when objects overlap is due to their need to locate themselves in real time. The unknown is darkness that obscure’s ones vision, so head types try to narrow in on what can be and is known. When in contact with something that is unknown, it creates a sense of fear that is felt as existential. Guidance is the parental function associated with it.
The head-centered ego uses its taxonomy to create exclusion of external unknown things. It identifies itself with its thoughts and what it does to survive. Problems with existentiality are compensated with through such thoughts, as things simply cannot be what it is, it must be something that can be navigated and explained. They are the furthest from embodiment since being would restrict adaptation. Sociology, the void, and consequences are recurring themes that are found in head-centered egos.
The Head-Centered Egos (reactions to inclusion)
E5 is the active head center type. Its fixation regarding spatiality is creating distance between self and other through control of what is known. It is the constrictive mind that is threatened by infiltration and navigates the route of highest exclusion. The unknown for E5 is what does not matter to them.
Organ wise: it garners information of the various forms that exist (e7 head) and filters through the heart center to distinguish what matters (E2 heart) among it. It adapts through repelling (e8 body) as interference would limit processing. “What and where are you?”
E7 is the reactive head center type. Its fixation regarding spatiality is making a large mass of itself to leave little unknown. It is the selective mind that will do what it needs to do to get to where and what it wants to be. The threat for E7 is unwanted information that delays navigation and adaptation. The unknown for E7 is anything it does not desire.
Organ wise: the sensitive reactive body’s sensations of “yes” and “no” are detected to determine the space it holds relative to the unknown (E5 head), with the heart center’s concern for worth suppressed and traded with the gut’s absolutism ( “All can be survived/learned from”). “How and should you be there and that?”
E6 is the sustaining head center type. Its fixation regarding spatiality is maintaining its own space first and foremost. It is the balancing mind that adapts through guaranteed survival routes and the active parsing of contradictions that lead to confusion. The unknown for E6 is anything outside of itself.
Organ wise: the heart center assigns labels and interpretations (E3 heart) to objects that could act as ‘threats’ towards the self whilst the gut center acknowledges a relation with another (E9 gut); this allows the ego to distinguish itself in space amongst other beings despite disconnecting its own sense of orientation. “What and where am I?”
Outlining the centers of intelligence is helpful for establishing a foundation for the types’ internal experience. I’d like to explore this concept further since there’s more potential here than is typically harped on. These are the ‘goggles’ of the types: I believe it could be a more important aspect than the fixations themselves. To summarize how each works in a concise way:
Once upon a time in a forest (where am I, spatiality, head center),
there was a little girl (what am I, being, gut center)
who wanted nothing more than to be a farmer (what is in me, meaning, heart center).
Thanks for reading, and see you in the next installment.
As you can imagine, I have a major reservation about essays like these, for they perpetuate the misconception that the enneagram is a system of personality types, or that its domain is human motivation. It's as if, while reading the menu at an Italian restaurant, I were to say, "The alphabet is set of symbols to describe pizza toppings". That would be absurd, and anybody would be right to call me out on my cognitive myopia.
Anyone can see from a cursory glance at my page that I write extensively about the enneagram, and yet I scrupulously avoid reiterating what every other author publishes. They have done a tremendous disservice to the discipline that created it, and not because their ideas are wrong, per se, or inaccurate. Incomplete would be closer to the mark. I can see why people regard the enneagram as just another MBTI or astrology wheel, either with dismissal or, worse, adulation.
Am I the only writer who does original work with the enneagram?
Of course I am well-versed in the main-stream theory, with its highways and byways, its wings, dings and flings, if you will. It all goes back to Claudio Naranjo's insight about the Seven Deadly Sins' overlay onto what you call the Centers of Intelligence. Therein lies the problem. Over 99% of subsequent writers have colonized that tiny island of thought as if it were the only dry land in a sea of possibility. As for the Gurdjieff foundation, its members cannot see past the seven-tone musical scale. They cannot describe any process or event beyond the note Do, even as they literally dance across a tracery on a hardwood floor.
If you spend years looking (as I did), you might discover a few experimental exceptions. They comprise less than 1% of the published word count. By now, the topic is become an echo chamber, with nobody even stopping to answer the question as to what is the enneagram, itself, independent of the ideas they attempt to stuff into it.
Therefore, I pose that question of first principles to you: What is the enneagram, itself?
Loved this article, can't wait to read more of what you publish!