The next chapter in the story of the Enneagram centers is about Gurdjieff’s model of human structure and development.
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff is credited with introducing the Enneagram symbol to the western world around the turn of the 19th century. Not unlike Evagrius, Gurdjieff worked with inherited spiritual theory and practices to devise a new philosophy of the human condition and new ways to alter that condition. Gurdjieff’s philosophy relied heavily on the Enneagram symbol as a source of knowledge and understanding. Gurdjieff observed that historically there had been three different pathways available to people who were attempting to progress spiritually. Gurdjieff described the way of the fakir, who works with the physical body; the monk, who works with emotions ); and the yogi, who works with thoughts. Building on this typology of three different developmental paths, Gurdjieff described a pattern of spiritual progression in which a person begins as “Man 1” who experiences themself in terms of the physical world; “Man 2”, who experiences themself as existing in the emotional world; and “Man 3”, who experiences themself as existing in the world of thoughts.1
Describing Gurdjieff’s typology of three different kinds of humans Riordan writes, “One person may depend more on his head than on his heart, for example, while another may allow emotion to sway him where logic fails. Everyone is born with one ‘brain’ predisposed to predominant over the other two… Man Number One has his center of gravity in moving and instinctive functions, Man Number Two gives more weight to feelings, and Man Number Three bases his actions on his knowledge or theoretical perspective”.2
As with the work of Evagrius, I am not aware of any research showing that Gurdjieff ever depicted his three types of man in terms of the inner triangle of the Enneagram. Rather, as I did with Evagrius’s work in the previous post, I am using the diagram above to show my mapping of Gurdjieff’s model of the human structure onto the contemporary Enneagram diagram.
“Gurdjieff” by Kathleen Riordan, in Transpersonal Psychologies, edited by Charles T. Tart, Harper & Row, NY, 1975, pp 281 – 328.
ibid, p 301