The Good Life Part 5
November 19, 2024
The Good Life Part 5
It’s easy to be tricked by our culture’s fascination with the good life. Look at advertisements that feature young and beautiful models. They stand against the backdrop of elegant estates in front of fabulous automobiles, clad in haute couture with elegant jewelry. Such advertisements suggest that this is their life, and we can have it too. It elevates riches and privilege to a supreme value in our culture. It’s as if the people in the commercials have it all — youth, beauty, riches, and everything those things supposedly bring us. But if we were to go to the photo shoot when the ad is being filmed, we would likely find a rented Maserati, a castle booked for the day, and “borrowed” clothes and jewels. The model would be a struggling youth with a modest bank account and a family who, like all families, is dysfunctional. Even the truly rich and truly royal are humans with the same issues as everyone else. Nevertheless, the advertisements continue because they work — they appeal to the undying desire to attain bliss which our ego translates as being attainable through the material. However, these things cannot bring the authentic joy for which we yearn.
So again, we ask the question: How can I live the good life without the trappings that society deems essential to that lifestyle? This query brings us back to the notion that for those who live the spiritual life, the truly good life is not equated with youth, the cultural standards of financial or family privilege. Instead, it is a life that bears spiritual fruit. Yesterday, we reflected upon the Apostle Paul’s Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5: 22-23 and how each of the nine corresponds to a point in the Enneagram. Today, we continue.
Point Four: Joy. The unhealthy Type Four is anything but joyful. They lament, brood, and dwell on their deprivations, defects, and tragedies. The ego’s melancholy gives the Four a sense of substance amid feeling unseen, inauthentic, and insignificant. When they left their soul child and forgot their Holy Idea of Holy origin, Type Four soul children lost the connection with their ground of being. But at least the fixation of melancholy gives Type Fours something, and more importantly, someone to be. Pain, despair, and disappointment became their identity. But when Fours go to their Holy Idea of Holy Origin and embrace their soul child, they are reunited with their divine identity; they remember their origin as a child of God, with a specific purpose and value. In this reunion, they have no doubt they are an inherently authentic child of God. When Fours shift from ego to soul, theirs is a palpable joy. It is a pure joy. We, too, can have the purest of joy when we, like the Four, displace the worries of our fixation with the joy of our essence.
Point Five: Peace. In their unhealthiest state, Type Fives live in chaotic fantasy worlds of their own making. Their soul child went under the crust, and their egos detached from their essence’s pure wisdom. They forgot their natural transparency to the Divine. This left them feeling empty and deprived of their life force. Their unhealthy ego coping mechanism is to withhold themselves and their gifts from others, hoard all they know, and insulate themselves from connections to others. But they still feel empty and afraid of being robbed or deprived of their desire. They try to get peace by being reclusive and attaching to their inner store of information, which doesn’t work. But when Fives go to their soul child at Point Eight, they embody their essence’s inner power and outward movement, return to their true self, and are relieved of their chaotic inner life. They get to their Soul Point by reconnecting to their Holy Idea of Holy Transparency and Holy Omniscience. These concepts remind Fives that they are full, not empty and that they do not have to live in fear of deprivation because all they need is constantly accessible to them. Five’s peace is of the purest kind because it is the result of relinquishing their unbearable fixation on withdrawing and withholding. Reconnected, they enter the flow of life again.
Point Six: Faithfulness. In their unhealthiest state, Type Sixes are afraid. They think they lack the strength and faith to move forward. SO they overcompensate by being overly faithful. They say to themselves, “I am safest in a group, and I will be unconditionally faithful to it and the leaders. Stuck in self-doubt, their egos detach from their essence of steadfast strength and faith. Instead, Sixes attach to the pursuit of security. The faithfulness they display when unhealthy is not genuine. They are being faithful out of fear of what would happen to them if they were not. Returning to their essence at Point Nine, they relinquish their fixation of Cowardice and believe in themselves once more. Healthy Sixes purge their faithfulness of the self-seeking aspect it expresses in its fixation. What’s left is pure — and undistorted faithfulness.
Spiritual practice and self-inquiry: What of the three fruits above do you most relate to? Who receives your purest faithfulness? Journal about why you are so purely faithful to them.
Dear God,
I am so thankful that “great is thy faithfulness.” Amen
