Type 9: Down the Rabbit Hole
Everyone is sensitive in their early development to one of the Holy Ideas, and this sensitivity is what leads people to develop their ego around that idea. In order to understand type 9 as a whole, then, one must recognize that the type is centered around this dynamic: sensitivity to and loss of contact with Holy Love, repression of the pain and anger caused by this loss, and the adoption of attitudes and behaviors resembling Holy Love, which the 9 hopes will fill the void, in a sense.
The type can also be understood as a set of layers within the psyche, including repressed anger and an inner resistance to being deeply affected, of which the 9 may not be aware. It is important to see that the 9 is not simply the surface attitude and behaviors, that there are deeper attitudes the 9 wishes to repress, and that these attitudes have a significant impact even if the 9 is not consciously aware of them. Self-awareness is essential to growth. The only question is this: how far down the rabbit hole do you wish to go?
I. The Rabbit Hole
Illusion of Harmony
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Acedia & Inner Deadening of Feelings
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Anger/Frustration: "Nothing is worthwhile"
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Loss of Holy Love: "Love is not real"
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Holy Love
Illusion of Harmony
At the surface layer, 9's are looking for peace, harmony, wisdom, and happiness. They want to see value and goodness in all things and people, choosing to acknowledge their positive qualities over their negative ones. Consequentially, 9's tend to treat everyone with respect and are pleasant, agreeable, and accommodating. Because they are looking to recreate Holy Love, they may adopt philosophies around the concept of love, harmony, and noninterference ("live and let live").
But when they do this at the surface level, they are not necessarily experiencing true harmony. In reality, there is a deep inner resistance or blocking within them that prevents them from being fully present and affected. 9's have essentially created the illusion of harmony--it is not the same as Holy Love.
Acedia and Inner Deadening of Feelings
On a deeper level, 9's are far more apathetic than they may seem. They have put up walls which prevent them from being deeply affected, and have adopted an attitude of acedia (also known as accidia): having little concern for one's own position in life.
Dorothy Sayers in her commentaries to Dante’s Purgatory writes that accidia “is insidious, and assumes such Protean shapes that it is rather difficult to define.†It is not merely idleness of mind, but “that whole poisoning of the will which, beginning with indifference and an attitude of ‘I couldn’t care less’, extends to the deliberate refusal of joy and culminates in morbid introspection and despair. One form of it which appeals very strongly to some modern minds is that acquiescence in evil and error which readily disguises itself as ‘Tolerance’; another is that refusal to be moved by the contemplation of the good and beautiful which is known as ‘Disillusionment’, and sometimes as ‘knowledge of the world’.†(Naranjo)
9's do not want to be affected--to experience unpleasantness, stress, and pain. They avoid these things by mentally checking out, by not being fully present to their own lives. The attitude of "I don't care" can be a powerful one, allowing them to give up when things get stressful and difficult without feeling the loss of what they have given up on. They may lack strong preferences and opinions, preferring to see all sides of things, but really this is a manifestation of acedia. It is easier to not choose a side because the middle path is sure to avoid offending or devaluing anyone who has differing views. Acedia causes 9's to take the path of least resistance, or to ignore and block out stress so they will not be disturbed. They may put off dealing with things if it will cause them stress, and they distract themselves with nonessential things.
Type 9 is considered the least intense of all the enneagram types because their primary defense mechanism involves disengaging themselves and removing their attention from sources of pain or stress, and this may give them a calm and easygoing demeanor. But to the extent that they block out pain, they may also unknowingly become numb to positive emotions. Because of this, 9's may be prone to bouts of anhedonia: reduced capacity for pleasure.
The emotional numbing here may also be viewed as a defense mechanism to protect the ideal self image of being peaceful by repressing their "dark side", as is explained in the next two paragraphs.
Anger/Frustration: "Nothing is worthwhile"
Hidden deep within the subconscious is a well of anger and frustration at being cut off from Holy Love. If love is not real, then nothing is worthwhile. Nothing feels truly meaningful or significant. 9's are incredibly frustrated that they have been going along with life merely "pretending" to care. They have not really invested themselves in life and seem unable to feel deeply moved. They may not have been able to find anything that makes life feel truly worthwhile, yet they keep on living with the hope that someday things will be better. Someday they will wake up and everything will be magical and filled with the peace, love, and harmony they have wished for.
If hope is what drives 9's, then it makes sense that their dark side which they try to repress is disillusionment. Deep down 9's may have a side that is quite cynical and dark, rejecting the value of all things and rejecting hope because nothing ever changes. But 9's do not want to see this side of themselves because its existence is in direct opposition to the self-image they've cultivated of being peaceful, caring, and seeing the good in all things. 9's fear this side of themselves, perhaps more than anything else. They fear being loveless--that they can neither give nor receive love.
Loss of Holy Love: "Love is not real"
The source of emptiness and disillusionment, hidden very deep within the psyche, is the loss of Holy Love. At some point in childhood, 9's developed the belief that love is conditional. If they do things others like, they will receive love and approval. Love, then, is simply the consequence of surface behaviors or characteristics deemed worthy or acceptable by others. Some 9's may even have felt that their parents' love didn't mean anything because it was simply the natural consequence of their parent/child relationship. If love is conditional, then what about it is truly meaningful? This isn't the kind of love 9's had longed for. If that's all that love is, a simple action-reaction formula, then 9's feel the kind of love they idealized must not be real.
Holy Love
Within the deepest part of the 9 lies the capacity for Holy Love. 9's are so sensitive to this concept that it has formed the basis of their ego. They may have felt that Holy Love was lost, but they were not able to accept this and so they built these layers around it. The surface layer is actually a reflection of this innermost part of them, and they have shaped and cultivated it in an attempt to reconnect with Holy Love.
Holy Love is perhaps best described by Almaas:
Holy Love is not the feeling of love, nor the essential aspect of love. Holy Love is a quality of existence that makes that existence lovable. Its loveliness and lovableness is what generates in our hearts sentiments of love, appreciation, value, enjoyment, pleasure, and so on. So we are talking about the quality of lovableness of reality when it is seen without distortion, rather than through the filter of the ego. In other words, Holy Love is the fact that objective reality has an intrinsic quality of being wonderful and pleasing—it is intrinsically lovable. This is Holy Love— whatever it is that makes it lovely, enjoyable, lovable, whatever it is about it that we can’t help but appreciate. When reality is fully perceived, one cannot help but enjoy and appreciate it. One cannot but respond with awe when the Holy Truth is fully apprehended, and one cannot but be full of wonder when Holy Perfection is realized. One cannot but melt in appreciative sweetness when beholding Holy Love. Holy Love brings you the experience of love, but it is not the love itself; it is something much more comprehensive. It is a quality of reality as a whole and is very difficult to fully define. We could say that Holy Love is the intrinsic quality of the reality of Being that is nonconceptual positivity. It is pure and unalloyed blissfulness. It is the value-saturated quality of truth. It is pure goodness, the Good of Plato.
While 9's may be able to understand the concept of Holy Love and try to incorporate it into their views, they lack the energy to truly stay in touch with it. This is because their energy is going toward blocking out unpleasantness. Growth for the 9, therefore, involves getting past this habit of tuning out the unpleasant and becoming grounded and open to experiencing the fullness of life.