Knowing and Being

As a sexual 9, it has been part of my experience to be profoundly merged with every type on the Enneagram at some point or another in my life, as a result of my slothful efforts to erase myself and be anyone other than who I really am. Because it came from a place of self-forgetting, this is a dubious honour, but it did allow me to get some insight into the energetic experience of each type. I spent a considerable amount of time merged with the energy of Type 7, Type 8, Type 4, and Type 6, but without a doubt the type I have been the most entangled with in my life is Type 5. For a long time, I was convinced that I was a sexual 5, and even now listening to an interview with a sexual 5 it is disturbing how many life experiences I’ve shared with that subtype. My energy mix up with Type 5 was long lasting, real, and very unhealthy. Even now there are ways in which I struggle to clearly distinguish type 9 from type 5 because my experience has been so blended between the two. I was recently able to expel the 5 energy from my gut and having brought that very long chapter of my life to a close, I wanted to share something that I was able to learn from it.

Something I was taught and which I try to keep in mind, is that the Passion and Fixation of every Type is pure stupidity. All intelligence lies in the virtues and holy ideas, and the Passions and Fixations are utterly devoid of it. Especially in the case of Avarice, the Passion of Type 5, this can be confusing (at least while I was merged with Type 5 it certainly was to me) because 5s are constantly learning things, and so it is counter-intuitive to think of this as stupid. Surely being more erudite is a sign of intelligence? In fact, it turns out that this is not at all the case. While it is true that the avarice of 5s cuts them off from abundance and truly living life, and this is clearly a big problem, the true stupidity of Avarice is that it also cuts them off from any real knowledge. Even the one thing that 5s cling to in their avarice is itself ashen, impoverished, and empty. The reason this is the case has to do with what Gurdjieff described as the “line of knowledge” and the “line of being.” Put simply, this means that the enrichment of our knowledge, and the enrichment of our being have to proceed together, and there are points where our knowledge and understanding cannot develop to further insight without first developing our level of being and awareness. The stupidity of avarice is compulsively thinking that knowledge can be substituted for being, when in fact being is the most fundamental requirement for the advancement of knowledge. Although I am certainly not a 5, I can say on reflection that I did experience avarice in the following way: Whenever I would think to go do or try something, the thoughts would suddenly enter my head “What if I learned more about this first?” “What haven’t I thought about this still?” “Where could I get more knowledge about this?” and I would go off researching and studying and pondering for hours on end. The result was that this would prevent me from ever doing or experiencing the thing in question. In fact this excessive intellectual activity would actually cause many areas of my life to stagnate and atrophy, and it was actively harmful to my personal and spiritual growth as a result. Every Type is in their own way slothful, and in the case of Type 5, this comes from the laziness of trying to interact with everything by way of knowledge and learning, instead of meeting it on the real terms of life.

Seen recently on r/enneagram

We can understand this in very basic everyday terms. For example, there is the experience of observing and studying about a martial art, and then there is the experience of going and truly practicing the martial art, sparring gaining muscle memory, and so on. Clearly, the martial artist who has done the work will be in a better position to know the nature of the art than the simple observer. But what Gurdjieff was trying to explain about knowledge was something more profound than just this distinction. As Ouspensky records in In Search of the Miraculous:

“There are,” he said, “two lines along which man’s development proceeds, the line of knowledge and the line of being. In right evolution the line of knowledge and the line of being develop simultaneously, parallel to, and helping one another. But if the line of knowledge gets too far ahead of the line of being, or if the line of being gets ahead of the line of knowledge, man’s development goes wrong, and sooner or later it must come to a standstill.

“People understand what ‘knowledge’ means. And they understand the possibility of different levels of knowledge. They understand that knowledge may be lesser or greater, that is to say, of one quality or of another quality. But they do not understand this in relation to ‘being.’ ‘Being,’ for them, means simple ‘existence’ to which is opposed just ‘non-existence.’ They do not understand that being or existence may be of very different levels and categories. Take for instance the being of a mineral and a plant. It is a different being. The being of a plant and of an animal is again a different being. The being of an animal and of a man is a different being. But the being of two people can differ from one another more than the being of a mineral and an animal. This is exactly what people do not understand. And they do not understand that knowledge depends on being. Not only do they not understand this latter but they definitely do not wish to understand it. And especially in Western culture it is considered that a man may possess great knowledge, for example he may be an able scientist, make discoveries, advance science, and at the same time he may be, and has the right to be, a petty, egotistic, caviling, mean, envious, vain, naïve, and absent-minded man. It seems to be considered here that a professor must always forget his umbrella everywhere.

“And yet it is his being. And people think that his knowledge does not depend on his being. People of Western culture put great value on the level of a man’s knowledge but they do not value the level of a man’s being and are not ashamed of the low level of their own being. They do not even understand what it means. And they do not understand that a man’s knowledge depends on the level of his being.

“If knowledge gets far ahead of being, it becomes theoretical and abstract and inapplicable to life, or actually harmful, because instead of serving life and helping people the better to struggle with the difficulties they meet, it begins to complicate man’s life, brings new difficulties into it, new troubles and calamities that were not there before.

“The reason for this is that knowledge which is not in accordance with being cannot be large enough for, or sufficiently suited to, man’s real needs. It will always be a knowledge of one thing together with ignorance of another thing; a knowledge of the detail without a knowledge of the whole; a knowledge of the form without a knowledge of the essence.

“Such preponderance of knowledge over being is observed in present-day culture. The idea of the value and importance of the level of being is completely forgotten. And it is forgotten that the level of knowledge is determined by the level of being. Actually at a given level of being the possibilities of knowledge are limited and finite. Within the limits of a given being the quality of knowledge cannot be changed, and the accumulation of information of one and the same nature, within already known limits, alone is possible. A change in the nature of knowledge is possible only with a change in the nature of being (64).

This last paragraph most clearly underlines the stupidity of Avarice. At a given level of being, the possibilities of knowledge are limited, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and any knowledge-seeking that persists in ignorance of these limits is mere “accumulation of information.” The attempt to substitute knowledge gathering for work on one’s being is both futile and actually harmful. We see in the tech trends of recent decades towards “big data” and “artificial intelligence,” the apogee of this avaricious stupidity willfully persisting in the accumulation of massive corpuses of information without any regard for the importance of levels of being. It is not simply a matter of forgetting one’s umbrella, it is a matter of forgetting all consequences that are outside the narrow horizons of Avarice and its insatiable hunger to “know” without actually knowing anything of substance or consequence. “Artificial intelligence” often ends up acting as little more than an entropy pump, converting enormous amounts of resources to waste heat, spurious ‘information,’ and sloth. Gurdjieff explicitly draws the connection between overreliance on the line of knowledge and sloth as follows:

“A modern man lives in sleep, in sleep he is born and in sleep he dies. About sleep, its significance and its role in life, we will speak later. But at present just think of one thing, what knowledge can a sleeping man have? And if you think about it and at the same time remember that sleep is the chief feature of our being, it will at once become clear to you that if a man really wants knowledge, he must first of all think about how to wake, that is, about how to change his being (66).

What can we expect from knowledge machines that are created by people who are asleep, based on indiscriminately and avariciously gathering up the thoughts of those who are asleep, and whose outputs are consumed by people who are asleep and ever more inert through gorging themselves mindlessly on this stew of soporific entropy? Gurdjieff offers a clear warning:

“In the history of humanity there are known many examples when entire civilizations have perished because knowledge outweighed being or being outweighed knowledge” (67).

All we can do is remember that all true knowledge and wisdom come from above, not from below, and that ascension to higher levels of being is the only hard-won way to really know and be at the same time. This should be obvious if consider the Virtue and Holy Ideas of Type 5: Non-attachment, Holy Omniscience, and Holy Transparency.

In the first place, it is most important to remember that Holy Omniscience teaches us that God, or the universal mind, or the supreme reality, or whatever you might call the truth of reality already knows everything at all times. Not just some things and not others, all things are known by it. Reality itself is already its own database. There is no need to “create” artificial intelligence, because reality is already inherently intelligent. Why do we suppose that we are the ones who have intelligence and reality does not? It is a very stupid and prideful assumption.

In the second place, we should remember that Holy Transparency teaches us that all things are inherently observable, knowable, and connected in a perfectly transparent way. In other words, we might say that reality is not only its own database, it is also its own data analyst. Things are not only known, they are also comprehensible and comprehended.

Because these things are objectively true, Non-attachment is essential to the higher Heart Center. In our Essence we can simply receive the knowledge that corresponds to our state of being at any given time from the universe, in perfect transparent connection to what is. There is no need to accumulate information and hold on to it avariciously, we simply can know what we need to know when we need to know it, and let it go when we don’t. This free and easy relationship to the abundant intelligence of the universe is something we can only achieve at certain levels of being, and going willfully in the opposite direction will get us no closer to achieving it.

While this concept of knowing may seem far-fetched and alien to everything we have been taught about education and learning, Gurdjieff offers a way to observe it in action:

“In ordinary thinking, people do not distinguish understanding from knowledge. They think that greater understanding depends on greater knowledge. Therefore they accumulate knowledge, or that which they call knowledge, but they do not know how to accumulate understanding and do not bother about it.

“And yet a person accustomed to self-observation knows for certain that at different periods of his life he has understood one and the same idea, one and the same thought, in totally different ways. It often seems strange to him that he could have understood so wrongly that which, in his opinion, he now understands rightly. And he realizes, at the same time, that knowledge has not changed, and that he knew as much about the given subject before as he knows now. What, then, has changed? His being has changed. And once being has changed understanding must change also (68).

Gurdjieff specifies that this has to do with activating all three Centers of Intelligence, and we can equally emphasize that this different understanding does not come from any new information or data, but simply being more awake to the intelligence of reality that is always inherently already there. We do not “take” it, nor do we hold it, and often times we often do not even notice that we have received it, but nonetheless it comes to us when our being corresponds to it and leaves when it does not and we forget. Gurdjieff also emphasizes that it is possible for the line of being to overshoot that of knowing, and therefore we need to have curiosity and receptivity to knowledge, but that is inherently a part of Non-attachment. We can understand this when we remember that all things are Love and therefore knowledge is also Love. With all our Centers of Intelligence open to Love, we are necessarily also open to knowledge. So let’s love knowledge and being both, with open hands, open hearts, and open minds.