The Forming of the False Self

Forgetting Unity and the Impact

The spiritual teachings of the Enneagram are based on the understanding that early in life we lose awareness of our Unity with all things. It’s not exactly clear when this happens but it seems to occur gradually between birth and about two years of age. Our early experiences of Unity are something we may still feel in fleeting glimpses, and they may encourage us on the path. Those remembered glimpses may even be the spark and starting point for our spiritual journey.

Photo by Azzedine Rouichi on Unsplash

The loss of our awareness of Unity is a fundamental existential wounding, as if the Divine Itself has pushed us out of the nest. We go from knowing we are part of the Whole to feeling we are completely alone and on our own with no support. For an infant this is particularly terrifying as our very bodily survival feels at stake. Naturally we have a strong reaction to this, a reaction that is consistent for each of us. These teachings outline three stages in this reaction:

• First is this loss of awareness of our connection to the Divine, to Unity and each of the qualities pointed to in the Holy Truths. This loss is likened to falling asleep to our individual and universal True Self, falling asleep to the Divine and our relationship with It.

• This gives rise to fear as we now feel cutoff, abandoned, exiled and alone. In fact, I would call this more than fear, I would name it abject existential terror.

• This terror demands a response to this tremendous loss. Our response is to develop something we feel we can replace the True Self, something we feel we desperately need to survive and navigate life and so we each form our False Self.

The False Self is a fractured self. Having lost its sense of wholeness and awareness of the Holy Truths, it’s pieced together from feelings and ideas and approaches to living that we desperately grasp onto. This grasping follows predictable patterns and each person’s False Self is constructed from the same building blocks.

The basic building blocks are the core emotional reaction to this loss – the Passions – and our core mental stances we assume – the Fixations. We’ll take a closer look at these in subsequent posts.

Thank you for reading this post, I welcome your comments and questions below. Please do share this with anyone you think may be interested. If you’re interested in classes, one-on-one consultation, or a conversation to help you clarify your likely Personality Type, please contact me at keith at theawakenedenneagram.com.