Buddhism, the Enneagram, and Neuroscience

I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind
I saw so much I broke my mind
I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in

 —words by Mickey Newbury, vocals by Kenny Rogers

The “human condition,” according to at least three sources—Buddhism, the Enneagram, and now, neuroscience—is that we’re all operating on autopilot, asleep at the switch, in a “consensus trance,” staggering through life like zombies. We humans have been advised as to what condition our condition is in for 2,600 years or more. There’s not much left to debate about it.

But if that’s the human condition, why can’t we just go with the flow? Why not simply accept things as they are? Why should we care or make the effort to become more aware? Buddhism, the Enneagram, and neuroscience, while in agreement on the nature of the human condition, have slightly different answers to the question of why we might want to do something about it.

Buddhism: We Want to Get Out of Jail

We’re stuck inside this prison we ourselves constructed, and we want to locate the exit.

Most traditional spirituality and religion, including Buddhism, really, is really about … How do we get the hell out of here, and how do we get away from the Earthly mess, or the limitations or the conditioning? How do we rise above it, how do we go through it, move through it, how do we evolve beyond it? —John Welwood

This is more or less an attempt to escape the human condition or at least escape the suffering and unhappiness it gives rise to. In Buddhism, you escape from this prison by achieving Nirvana, either in life or after death. The perspective is that much of “the Earthly mess” is illusion and we can free ourselves from its pull—and from the cycle of life and death—by waking up to that reality.

You are already enlightened. All you’ve got to do is stop blocking yourself and get serious about attending to what’s going on. You are not lacking a thing. You only need to stop blocking or interpreting your vision. —Steve Hagen, Buddhism Plain and Simple

Buddhism gets it right that we create much of our own dissatisfaction, suffering, and unhappiness. But it gets it wrong about why and how we do that, as well as about how much power we have to stop doing it and to get in touch with so-called reality. Perception is not reality. Our inherent and limited perceptive abilities constrain us from making direct contact with “reality,” and there’s nothing we can do to change that no matter how enlightened we may be. That’s also part of the human condition.

There is a lot more to Buddhism than this, of course. Perhaps its greatest contribution has been the attention it has given to developing awareness, both self-awareness and awareness of the world around us.

Enneagram: We Want to Be Authentic

We’re at the effect of our compulsions and aren’t acting freely or making free choices and we want to locate our true selves so we can act authentically.

The wisdom that is foundational to the Enneagram propels us out of that stuck place where we are caught in the cares and anxieties of life, and it guides us toward our souls. The Enneagram reveals the relationship between our souls (or true selves) and the experience we have of ourselves daily, which we usually name personality and which, in reality, is a combination of our true personality with our false personality (emphasis theirs). —Kathy Hurley and Theodorre Donson, Discover Your Soul Potential

According to most teachers, writers, and practitioners of the Enneagram, operating on autopilot keeps us out of touch with our essence. When we’re at the effect of our type-related compulsions, we’re not acting authentically. But if we can recognize and transcend the automatic behavior of our Enneagram type, we can get in touch with—and act from—our essential nature.

By helping us see how trapped we are in our trances and how estranged we are from our Essential nature, the Enneagram invites us to look deeply into the mystery of our true identity. It is meant to initiate a process of inquiry that can lead us to a more profound truth about ourselves and our place in the world. —Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, The Wisdom of the Enneagram

This is an attempt to strip away the veneer of the human condition (our false personalities) to get at something that’s deeper and truer, but a bit hard to describe and contact. What is our true identity? Is it our soul or is it something else altogether? And what profound truth are we being led to? How will we know when we’ve found it?

Searching for our true, authentic identity seems to be a bit of a fool’s errand, given that in recent decades, psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists, and people in many other fields have reached the conclusion that rather than being one self, we are actually many selves.

The esoteric elements of the Enneagram seem to fascinate the majority of people who work with it. It hasn’t been around—or at least hasn’t been known—as long as Buddhism, but it has given rise to a number of variations just as Buddhism now takes many different forms.

The Enneagram tends to be spot-on when it comes to identifying the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and even motivations of the different types. In that regard, it’s an incredibly practical and useful tool for identifying our autopilot, asleep-at-the-wheel behavior. But things quickly become muddled when we start trying to identify and home in on that nebulous thing called essence or soul.

Neuroscience: We Want to Understand How Our Brain Actually Works (or Do We?)

Regrettably, some people want to understand how the brain works in order to manipulate people into doing one thing as opposed to another or into buying whatever they’re selling. But that isn’t unique to this day and age. And some are hoping brain research provides evidence to support their particular beliefs and positions so they can be proven right.

Most of us are satisfied with our theories about ourselves and accept them with confidence, but we rarely see those theories tested. Scientists, however, are now able to test those theories in the laboratory, and they have proven astonishingly inaccurate. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

All these theories were based on an assumption—that human behavior was the product of knowledge and conscious intention. We believed that if you educated people, and provided them with accurate information, and offered them the right incentives, and threatened them with suitable punishments, and appealed to their better natures, and marked the exits clearly, the errors would vanish. Bad outcomes had to be the product of stupidity, ignorance, and bad intentions. —Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain

Inevitably, what we have learned from neuroscience in the past few decades has undermined a lot of what we previously thought and believed about the mind and brain. I think the biggest revelation has been the discovery of the extent to which we are quite irrational yet fail to see and acknowledge this basic fact of life. Blinders firmly in place, we operate as though we are rational and we expect other people to be rational, too. But rational acts are the result of conscious (System 2) thinking, which is generally in short supply and often misapplied. Our belief in our rationality is not supported by the evidence.

This isn’t just opinion; it has now been repeatedly demonstrated and the reasons for, and the underpinnings of, our irrationality have been explained in great detail. No matter how much we want to believe otherwise, we are not rational animals. We do not act rationally. We do not think rationally. It’s not just that guy over there who’s irrational or the members of that other political party. It’s you and me, too.

The preface to the book Beasts by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (ex-psychoanalyst and former director of the Freud Archives) is titled “Can the Human Species Wake Up?” It begins with this quote:

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. —Stephen Hawking

Moussaieff’s book is an examination of human nature, particularly in regard to our propensity for cruelty, violence, and war. Whereas we often describe people who behave badly as “beasts” (of the animal kingdom), no other animals demonstrate the type and degree of violence humans do, to each other and to other creatures. Yet we continue to see ourselves as rational beings, superior to those “beasts.”

The main thing we can wake up to, according to the findings of neuroscience, is the full extent of our limitations. This is quite a different message from the ones we get from either Buddhism or the Enneagram. It doesn’t feel like good news. It’s not easy to accept. But the fact that, bottom line, we are all irrational beings explains quite a bit about humans and human nature. And the implications for us as individuals, groups, nations, and the entire human race are nothing short of enormous.

The second part of the quote from John Welwood (in the section on Buddhism) is this:

And I think the problem we’ve seen over time, over the centuries, is that spirituality then is completely cut off from daily life, and our spirituality and religion is not transforming daily life. You can see after thousands of years, we’ve had thousands of years of Buddhas, people who’ve been waking up and having beautiful, transcendent realizations, but how much of it percolated down into daily life, and into the human realm of our lives and what’s going on on the planet? Not very much, I have to say. So I think the time is calling on us to say, if we want to survive as a species here, you’re going to have to really bring the largest truth down into the very heart of how you relate to other people and how you relate to yourself in a personal way as well.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the “largest truth” turns out to be the one now being illuminated for us by neuroscience?

What Can We Do?

Buddhism, the Enneagram, and neuroscience all have practical tools to offer us for approaching and dealing with the human condition. Each tool is certainly useful by itself, but combining them creates a synergistic effect, enhancing all of them, and giving us the best chance of transcending those limitations—at least a little.

Buddhism: Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a great practice for increasing awareness and quieting the mind. Instead of being completely at the effect of what is going on around you or inside your own head, you can stop for a period of time to simply be present and aware of those things, non-reactively.

Mindfulness meditation has a slew of physical, mental, and emotional benefits, including:

• Lowering stress
• Reducing chronic pain
• Improving sleep
• Treating heart disease
• Alleviating depression and anxiety
• Improving recovery outcomes for substance abuse

It can even change your brain for the better.

Mindfulness is a specific application of System 2 attention, and since System 2 attention is limited, you can’t be mindful either all or most of the time. It’s not so hard to maintain a mindful state if you live cloistered or in a monastery. The fewer things you have to mind, the more mindful you can be. But if you live in the world as we do, and have the brains we have, you simply can’t be mindful all the time.

If we attempted to be mindful—that is, pay conscious attention—to every single thing from the time we woke up in the morning, we would quickly deplete our reserve of conscious attention. Then, if a situation arose that required conscious attention, we might not be able to think clearly because we wouldn’t have enough attention to devote to it. That’s an example of being “brain dead.”

We have to allocate our System 2 attention to various activities throughout the day, and there’s no point in allocating it to insignificant activities we can perform on autopilot given that we do need to use it for more complex activities.

In Living the Mindful Life, Charles Tart says:

We can have levels of mindlessness, ranging from simple inattention to the immediate physical world through insensitivity to our interactions with others we care about to a deep and fundamental mindlessness about our most important values and real nature.

I think it’s a mistake to think of these as simply different levels of the same thing (mindlessness). What he calls inattention to the immediate physical world is simply System 1 doing its thing. There’s nothing wrong with it per se and there’s no way to stop it.

What we can do is aim for practicing mindfulness meditation (or any form of mindfulness) on a regular basis instead of trying to be mindful all the time. Practicing mindfulness meditation will allow us to detach from our monkey mind, at least a little, and allow us to slow down, breathe, and notice some of the things we usually tune out of our awareness.

Enneagram: Develop the Habit of Self-Observation

The Enneagram shows us how each of us is asleep by describing our automatic reactions (or compulsions). It’s possible to spend an inordinate amount of time in a fruitless search to discover the underpinnings of our recurring patterns of behavior. Why do I do this? What causes me to react this way? The antidote for that is to see ourselves described in a book by an author who doesn’t know us, and to learn that a multitude of other people we’ve never met, with entirely different backgrounds from ours, share those patterns of behavior with us.

While we can certainly observe our thoughts, feelings, and reactions without knowing anything about the Enneagram, knowing the characteristics of our Enneagram type can save us a lot of time by providing us with some direction as to what to focus on or pay attention to. If we want to stop being at the effect of our autopilot behavior, it’s helpful to have some understanding of what that behavior actually is.

If we know we tend to have a particular reaction or pattern of thought, we’ll find it much easier to begin recognizing it when it shows up. If we don’t know what to look for, we’re in the position of trying to find multiple needles in multiple haystacks.

When you strip the esoteric and spiritual elements away from the Enneagram, what remains is an extremely practical and valuable tool for seeing our own autopilot behavior clearly and understanding other people—without judgment. The danger from a little knowledge of the Enneagram is a tendency to use it as an excuse for our behavior and/or as a rationale for stereotyping other people. Combining mindfulness with self-observation puts the brakes on those tendencies.

What we can do is learn the particulars of our Enneagram type and then develop the habit of observing those thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and reactions in ourselves. The Enneagram doesn’t explain every single aspect of every person. It’s not a Theory of Everything. But it does give us a context for our behavior. By observing what we tend to do, we can begin to see some of our own limits and limitations. We have to know what we’re doing now before we can do something else.

Neuroscience: Face the Facts

This is our basic human situation. Most of us sense that something is amiss with our lives. But we haven’t any idea what our problem really is, or what we should do about it….All the pain we bring to ourselves and others—the hatred, the warring, the groveling, the manipulation—is our own doing. It comes out of our own hearts and minds, out of our own confusion. Furthermore, if we don’t see exactly what the problem is, we’re going to perpetuate it. We’re going to teach our children our confusion, and we’ll go on, generation after generation, doing more of the same to ourselves and to each other. —Steve Hagen, Buddhism, Plain and Simple

Although this quote is from a book on Buddhism, it applies just as well to what we’re learning about the human condition from neuroscience. As long as we don’t understand how our brain actually works, we’re going to keep doing the same things, making the same mistakes, and passing the whole mess on to the next generations.

Practicing mindfulness and developing the habit of self-observation can alleviate some of the pain and discontent. But that’s not enough. As long as we fail to acknowledge how irrational we are, our irrationality will color everything we do, both individually and as a species.

What we can do is get to know how our brain works and be mindful—non-reactively—of the limits of our perception, our control, and our rationality. We can loosen the reins on our craving for certainty and for being right. We can observe—non-judgmentally—our own cognitive biases, prejudices, and flawed reasoning. If we can accept these things in ourselves, we might have a chance of accepting them in others.

Continuing to operate under the assumption that we are rational beings—when, in fact, we are not—has consequences in almost every area of our lives and in nearly every problem we face on this planet. There may be nothing more important than coming to terms with this basic fact of life, the condition that our condition is in.