An invitation from Chris Doering:
“Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness… the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
Our world needs all the love that can be made, and it especially needs deep, abiding, unconditional love, and it especially needs it right now at this critical moment in Earth’s evolution. We cannot wait any longer to bring our capacity to love and to understand into balance with our power. In the nuclear age, in the age of genomic engineering via CRISPR, in an era where super-mechanized memory and computation gives the appearance of mentation, humanity’s power over the material world seems almost absolute. But without wisdom and love, power can only destroy. To repair the past, maintain the present and create the future, we human beings must restore the balance between our physical power and our capacity to love and to understand not only each other, but all the creatures with whom we share this extremely rare, beautiful and fragile planet.
Nice sounding words. How to bring this into the realm of practical tasks? In GC there are many opportunities: work with the guitar, with music, work in the kitchen and in the house, work on inner exercises… Relationship Dynamics could be another opportunity for some of us: an opportunity to develop a craft of relationship.
The Enneagram can be a very practical tool for exploring everyday processes that renew themselves in a cyclical fashion. In GC, the Enneagram makes its appearance in the kitchen, and informs some of the practices that we use to improve the work of the kitchen and deepen the experience of the cooks. In Relationship Dynamics the Enneagram has a similar function: it can help use see the process as a whole and in its different stages, and can suggest ways to improve the process and maintain its integrity as it unfolds in time.
I’ve eaten my share of meals, and made more than a few. I’ve also had two marriages, one that fell apart 25 years ago, and one that continues, for 18 years so far. Turning Into Each Other is an exploration of my experience using the Enneagram as an analytical and synthetic tool to generate understanding from raw events. I wanted to understand what went wrong and to avoid repeating the same mistakes. So I wrote a book about relationships on the Enneagram. I am pretty sure I’ve gone as far with this on my own as I can and so now I want to open it up to other people to see what comes of sharing in a group. My hope is that by sharing our truths as honestly as we can, we can grow in our understanding of the relationship process.
The vehicle for this is Substack — basically an enhanced blogging platform. The book is being serialized. There is a Comments section that can be used for reports. This can be put behind a paywall so that the people posting reports are those who have a real commitment and aim. So that’s the invitation – subscribe to Turning Into Each Other: Relationship Dynamics on the Enneagram of G. I. Gurdjieff (I find it necessary at the outset to be clear that this has nothing to do with the system of nine types devised by Oscar Ichazo in the 70s and subsequently popularized out of recognition). Read the posts. Ask questions. Report observations. Let’s see where this might take us.