With ennea-type One, the specific difficulty is the feeling or conviction that something is wrong with you, that you are imperfect in an intrinsic way, that you are fundamentally flawed. It is not that you did something wrong and you feel guilty about it, as in Point Eight, but rather that there is something inherently wrong with who and what you are. The presence of the specific difficulty always puts you on the lookout for flaws. You observe yourself, scanning for any imperfection or wrongness so that you can correct it. If you are involved in spiritual work, the self-observation that is usually part of it is latched onto by the ego so that you can figure out what your problem is and change it. You check out your level of understanding and development, and compare it to others in the Work. You compare your current state to what it was when you thought you were more enlightened. You measure yourself against your standard of how a truly evolved person is supposed to be, and where in your spiritual development you should be now. There is incessant mental activity. You cannot leave yourself alone. You are always picking on yourself, believing that if you were different, then you could rest. But rest will never come this way, because there is really nothing at all fundamentally wrong with you. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
The loss or inadequacy of holding in childhood, reflected through this delusion of vanity, leads to the specific difficulty of ennea-type Three. The specific difficulty, as we have seen with each ennea-type, is how the environmental inadequacy in holding in early childhood is reflected in one’s personal experience. Here, there is the belief that one is a separate and independent doer, and at the same time, the experience that the environment is inadequate and unsupportive. You feel abandoned, rather than held and supported, and you have the sense that no one is taking care of you adequately. While feeling the deficiency, difficulty, and suffering of your experience, there is the growing conviction that you are a doer, that you can act. In other words, the inadequacy of the environment cuts you off from the experience that everything is occurring harmoniously without having to do anything yourself, while at the same time, you begin to believe in yourself as a separate doer. You take the inadequacy in the environment on yourself, believing that you should be able to take care of yourself, since through the delusion, you take yourself to be a center of action. So instead of seeing that the inadequacy is in the environment, you come to believe that it is within yourself. Since you aren’t able to provide for and take care of yourself, you not only take it to mean that you can’t do these things on your own, but you also take it as a failure, and feel unable, inadequate, and incompetent. If you did not believe that you are an independent doer, it wouldn’t make sense to believe that you are inadequate or a failure. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
As we have seen, when this sense of omniscience and transparency is absent, there is a distorted perception, the delusion of being a separate entity. This delusion of separateness is the seed of the ennea-type, giving rise to its experiential core. For those of this ennea-type, the specific difficulty resulting from the loss of the sense of holding is experiencing oneself as small, isolated, cut-off, empty, and impoverished—it is a state of deficient isolation. This sense of feeling isolated, alone, and abandoned as a result of the loss of holding results from the belief in separateness, the specific delusion of ennea-type Five – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
The specific difficulty of ennea-type Six is the experience of the inadequacy of the holding environment as reflected through the filter of cynicism. In other words, it is how you experience the lack of holding from the perspective of cynicism. The lack of a sense of holding, or the holding being negative or inadequate in some way, plus the lack of belief that there is real goodness within oneself and in the environment, leads to a lack of trust that reality is supportive. So the sense of not being held adequately, seen from the cynical perspective, makes you feel that it is not possible to be held adequately. No one is going to be there for you out of selfless and caring goodness, and real loving and true support and nurturing are not possible. So not only do you feel that holding is not present, you also come to believe that it is not possible to obtain. The loss of the Holy Idea, the loss of the holding, and the development of distrust are all components of the same process, and they happen simultaneously over the course of the first five years or so of life. The sense may be that my mother is there for me only because she’s my mother and it is her duty and responsibility—not because she loves me. Or the cynicism might be more extreme—that she’s not there at all. In either case, the feeling-state that results, the specific difficulty, is a fearful kind of insecurity. You feel insecure and scared at the same time. There is an underlying and intrinsic sort of insecurity that is constantly present because you don’t feel held, and since you don’t feel that you’re going to be, you feel constantly edgy and scared. This fearful insecurity reflects the belief and the feeling or sense that the world is a dangerous place inhabited by self-seeking people, and that there is no inner essence to support and guide you in this frightening world. Your soul feels insecure because the world appears as a scary jungle and you don’t have inner strength to deal with it. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
For this ennea-type [Seven], the specific difficulty, the experience of the absence of holding seen through the filter of the specific delusion, is the loss of the capacity to know what to do. The feeling state is one of disorientation and a sense of being lost, the sense that, “I don’t know what to do,” or “I don’t know which way to go.” Knowing what to do implies that you know which way to go, which in turn implies that you know what is optimally supposed to happen next. In the absence of the sense of holding, a state of deficiency arises in which you feel that you should be able to know what to do, based on the delusion that you can direct your own process, but that you don’t know because something is lacking in you. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
As we saw in Part One, the loss of an Idea is the same process as the loss of a sense of holding in the environment and the loss of basic trust. So the loss of Holy Truth leads to the specific delusion of duality. Loss or inadequacy of the holding environment results in the painful egoic state that we call the specific difficulty. Here, the loss of holding, filtered through the delusion of duality, results in the specific difficulty of a sense of badness, guilt, and fundamental sinfulness. You sense that what is most true and precious has been lost and destroyed, and that someone or something is to blame. Through the filter of the delusion of duality, one thing becomes perceived as being in opposition to another, and one side is guilty. The loving and perfect truth has been lost, and so someone has committed a crime or a sin here, and must be found and punished. This is the position of the ennea-type Eight, which has been called Ego Venge. Ultimately, you blame yourself for no longer being divine, and later this blame is projected onto others in order to protect yourself from the self-hatred that would otherwise result. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
So the belief in the conditionality of love and the sense of it being localized are two sides of the same deluded perception of reality. This delusion forms the seed out of which the ennea-type Nine grows and develops. The core of each ennea-type is a complex, as we have seen, made up of the specific delusion, the specific difficulty, the specific reaction, and the dynamic interaction among all of these. This notion of the core being a complex is particularly relevant to Point Nine because its core is what is called, in psychological terminology, the “inferiority complex.” The loss of the Idea of Holy Love and the difficulties in holding are colored here by the delusion of the localizability of love, resulting in the subjective state of feeling inferior. In other words, when the loving holding in the environment is lost or inadequate, a belief arises that love and lovableness are conditional. When you don’t feel held, you feel that you are not loved because you don’t have what is lovable. Obviously, to feel that you are not lovable involves the delusion that lovableness can be a local phenomenon, that it’s not within you, and that it must be located somewhere else. Ego intrinsically feels inferior. No matter what it owns, what it has, what it does, or what it can do, it will continue feeling itself to be inferior. As long as you allow the possibility that intrinsic goodness can be located in one place and not another, you allow the possibility that it can be located somewhere else. If you are identified with the ego and anything goes wrong, you immediately assume that it happened because what is good is not inside you. The slightest criticism, the slightest negativity, and right away you believe what is good is located somewhere other than inside you. This is why all children begin to believe that there is something wrong with them as they come to identify with the ego. If this difficulty is not understood and worked through, it will remain even if you are experiencing Essence. You cannot fully see or feel the beauty, importance, value, and loveliness of your own nature, which is Essence or Being, of your functioning or creativity, and of your existence or life. The issue here is not disconnection from Being—that is the particular difficulty of Point Four—it is, rather, that you are not in touch with its blissfulness even as you experience it. You can be in touch with Being, but cannot feel or see its loveliness, as though the essential presence were covered by a membrane or a veil shading its ecstatic luster. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas
While it is useful to know and to have explored one’s ennea-type, this is not the basic orientation of this study. Our orientation is that the nine Holy Ideas are representations of one reality, each highlighting a different facet of its direct perception. The nine delusions are principles inherent in all egoic structures; they underlie the totality of egoic existence. Understanding the delusions inherent in one’s experience is useful not only to penetrate and understand one’s own fixation, but more importantly, it is useful for understanding the principles that form the foundation of egoic experience. Regardless of one’s particular ennea-type, it is important to observe all the nine cores in one’s experience, and to penetrate experientially into all nine delusions which keep one’s egoic experience going. In our experience, this is more important than recognizing one’s particular delusion, because the deeper we penetrate into what determines our experience, the more the universal principles and the barriers to realizing them are recognized in their entirety. At that point, one’s particular ennea-type becomes less significant. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas