Pick up a newspaper or magazine – turn on the TV. Go to church or listen to your neighbors and friends. Can you spot prejudice? Are you aware of yours? Have you ever contemplated the malady of prejudice that accompanies personality?
The Enneagram addresses the notions of conditioning, behavior patterns, attentional bias, obsessions, compulsions, passions, fixations, etc. Isn’t a conditioned person a prejudiced person, a biased person? Don’t predispositions and preferences imply prejudice? If the personality’s passions, obsessions, and compulsions aren’t prejudicial, then what are they?
It’s been a real hoot to watch this past year’s media madness present countless individuals who claim to be free from prejudice, bias, and racism. Call me a skeptic or a cynic, but you don’t have to call me psychic.
The Prison of Prejudiced Thinking
From The Commanding Self by Idries Shah
People think they are being spiritual, when their thought is so polluted by subjective psychological motives that they have lost all sense of what is really spiritual.
There are three major ‘prisons’ of thought which manipulate people, instead of their being on top of them:
- Demanding sequentialism in everything; there has to be timing and stimuli within periods of time stipulated by the ‘prisoner’;
- Expecting reward and punishment connected with spiritual ideas, irrespective of whether they are really involved;
- Thinking in terms of contract: ‘give me this and I’ll give you that.’
If you escape these, then there follows, closely behind, the curse of needing either the familiar or the unfamiliar. People seek the familiar for comfort or verification; the unfamiliar for emotional stimulus or excitement.
Excerpts from How to Argue and Win Every Time by Gerry Spence
“Peeping into a prejudiced mind is like opening the door to a room packed to the ceiling with junk. Nothing whatsoever can get in, and when the door opens, the junk comes tumbling out. Those whose minds are jammed with prejudiced have room for little else. Growth is dead. Learning is gridlocked.
The word root of prejudice, praejudicium, implies prejudgment. People are prejudiced for and against a
philosophy, a religion, a belief system.Our prejudices—we all have them—are part of our personality structure. The problem is that our prejudices may lie lurking at the bottom of the subterranean mind where they slowly ooze up and color our thinking without our knowing it.
The question is not, “Are we prejudiced?,” but, “What are our numerous prejudices?” We are prejudiced even against the word prejudice, for we are taught that it is socially and ‘politically incorrect’ to be prejudiced. People’s personalities, their likes and dislikes, their attitudes, their viewpoints, their prejudices come in clusters, as grapes come in bunches.”
Recently, I have been reviewing work I did years ago within my Diamond Approach group on The Enneagram of the Domains and Dichotomies. Whereas the Enneagram of Personality Types awakens you to a personal fixation with its accompanying history, the domains and dichotomies awaken you to a larger territory of the soul. The domains describe nine different environments of human experience. Each domain contains a spectrum of possible experience defined by a polarity. Two archetypal characters represent the poles within each domain. Each domain contains a recurring emotional theme or charge around which experiences within that domain cluster
Connecting the Prejudicial Dots Using the Enneagram
Point nine on the enneagram represents the spiritual domain. The polarity is between gullibility and skepticism. The characters are the Zealot and the Doubting Thomas. The recurring theme is prejudices.
It shouldn’t take a high-priced lawyer to awaken us to the fact that we’re all full of prejudices, polluted by unconscious subjective psychological motives. The work on the domains is highly experiential, you have to leave your notebook and prejudice for sequentialism behind.
The enneagram has many facets and many insights to reveal. Being a particular type, seeing other types in a particular way, liking or disliking attributes of type, working toward a high side, preferring a particular enneagram teacher, method, or orientation – a penchant for prejudice or what?
Disengaging from the JUDGE’s Prejudice
The structured, bounded mind of the personality is prejudicial, whereas the true nature of the mind is vast spaciousness — unstructured, unbounded, non-prejudicial. There is discernment, discrimination, and clarity without pre-judgment. Pre-judgment limits the moment, acting as a barrier to the spontaneous arising of true nature.
As one reads this article, the prejudiced mind is at work — whether you like it or not, find it intriguing or boring, or feel it’s too pointed or too confusing. The point is to look beyond prejudice as good or bad, right or wrong, and see it as an inherent dynamic of the relative mind.
Our mind contrasts and compares, seeks the pleasurable, is self-centered, and is oriented toward its self-interest. The personality’s mind operates exclusively in a mode of rejection, but that is another story. Judging ourselves and our prejudices reinforces the structured mind, extending our imprisonment and suffering.
Exploring our prejudices is a way to better understand our passions, compulsions, and obsessions. It’s a doorway into the more subtle workings of the mechanical, comparative mind.
Exploring Prejudice in the Service of Truth
The following can be used as a means to begin a personal exploration into prejudice:
- First, I recommend reading chapter six of Gerry Spence’s book for more insight into prejudice.
- Then, use a notebook to list your prejudices, using a separate sheet of paper for each one. Put the prejudice at the top of the page as a heading. It is not necessary to think on this—allow the mind, over the days and weeks, to simply offer them up. Allow curiosity and attention to do their thing. List specific examples and situations from your life that involve these prejudices.
- As a means of exploring your reactivity to prejudice and your experience of being on the receiving end of prejudice, you can repeat the above for other people’s prejudices.
- As you do this exercise, experience your body— sensations and feelings. Notice contractions, pains, emotions, and thoughts.
The most important part: DO NOTHING
Simply allow all of this into consciousness and awareness. Take no action. An exploration like this creates possibility. Being aware of our prejudices and the prejudicial bent of the temporal mind is an enlightening experience — a bridge from the relative to the real.
When we use the word “prejudice,” we don’t mean just its common restricted usage: having fixed ideas about a particular group, race, religion, or set of beliefs. Prejudice, as we are using it, means anything that distorts the objective perception of reality. In other words we consider prejudice anything that determines the attitude of a person that is not totally in accord with what actually is. – A. H. Almaas, Work on the Superego, pg. 1