Understanding the Enneagram involves understanding the meaning of specific words used in its own context.
- Enneatype – The person's personality type, designated in the Enneagram by a number between 1 and 9.
- Subtype – The result of combining a person's dominant instinct (self-preservation, social or one-to-one) with their personality type. In this process an “alchemy” takes place that may reinforce some personality traits or, on the contrary, weaken certain characteristics. As a result, people of the same enneatype may show notable differences.
- Passion – The emotional quality that characterises the personality. These are intense, compulsive emotions that end up representing the core of each enneatype's suffering. For example: anger, self-deception, sloth, avarice, etc.
- Fixation – The obsessive, repetitive, automatic and fixed mental pattern that justifies the main emotional pattern of the personality. For example: resentment justifies anger, self-deception justifies vanity, indolence justifies sloth, stinginess justifies avarice…
- Virtue – The virtues are pure, non-reactive emotions of the higher or essential level of each enneatype. They are inner attitudes and orientations that act as guides to bring us closer to our essence. For example: serenity, truthfulness, right action, non-attachment…
- Defence mechanisms – The defensive action of the ego. These are unconscious psychological strategies the mind uses as buffers to justify the fixation and the passion. For example: opposition to the uncertain, identification, narcotisation, isolation…
- Holy Ideas – At birth we have a direct connection with objective truth. As we grow and develop our personality we gradually lose that connection and develop mental and emotional patterns that distort the truth of what we are in essence.
The Holy Idea gives us back a view of reality as it truly is, free of the fears and defences of the ego, to remind us who we are in essence. For example: Holy Perfection, Holy Harmony, Holy Love, Omniscience…
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