The Enneagram: A Lecture by Gurdjieff

A lecture by G. I. Gurdjieff on the enneagram and on symbolic language generally. It opens with the claim that the human mind, dazzled by the multiformity of appearances, misses the underlying oneness of all that exists, and that the philosophies and religions of history are monuments left along the path toward that unity — radii converging on a single center. Because knowledge that has become part of a man's being cannot be conveyed in ordinary words (as toothache cannot be described to one who has never felt it, or color to one blind from birth), ancient teachings transmitted their understanding through symbols and formulae, which are more exact than conversational language and which yield their meaning only to someone already prepared to receive it. From this premise the lecture develops the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm — 'as above, so below' from the Emerald Tablet — and the fundamental laws of three and seven, of active, passive, and neutralizing principles, showing why the study of the world's structure necessarily becomes self-study and why 'Know Thyself' is itself a symbol of the knowledge of truth. It works through the transmutation of the binary (yes and no, pleasant and unpleasant) into the quaternary by opposing one's 'I wish' to the mechanical 'it wishes,' toward the construction in oneself of the Seal of Solomon, with accompanying diagrams. This is the source text underlying the Fourth Way presentation of the enneagram, distinct from the later personality-typology use of the figure.