A Radical Reframing of Identity, Essence, and the Path to Freedom
Take a good look at the image below. A man sits alone on a prison bed. The bars are red, stark against the gray walls. A poster hangs on the back wall—perhaps an aspiration or a memory: a bodybuilder, a goal, a mask. The whole cell says something about who this man thinks he is.
This is how most people understand the Enneagram.
You are a self ensconced in personality and defined by a type: a Type 4 with envy, a Type 6 with fear, or a Type 8 with control issues. Your personality is your cell. It confines you and gives you identity and a sense of place. Your “work” is identifying your type, understanding it, and maybe evolving beyond it. But even that model assumes you are the one sitting in the cell.
But what if that man in the cell doesn’t exist?
What if you are not the one in prison, but the prison itself? What if the cell is not your predicament, but your identity?
This article will look at one of the most tenacious fallacies in spiritual and Enneagram work: the belief that a real, enduring self is trapped and must be worked on. The idea that your personality is something you are in, rather than something that has temporarily formed through you.
Because here is the truth that undoes the whole illusion:
The person in the cell is a figment.
A construction.
A hallucination made of memory and belief.
The inmate is not just who you think you are; it’s the lens through which you interpret everything: your beliefs, values, and spiritual aspirations. It’s not a self-image; it’s a worldview masquerading as a self.
The Inmate Is the Illusion
If I believe I’m the person in the jail cell—the one trapped in a personality type—then all of my energy goes into trying to evolve that identity. I seek to improve it, heal it, refine it. I try to make it more functional, more awake, more loving. But all of this assumes that the one being worked on is real.
But I’m still in the cell. Because I still believe the inmate is me.
One of the most fundamental confusions is the belief that we are separate from our personality or our Enneagram fixation, that we, as a self, can somehow work on it from the outside. But this is the illusion. We are not separate from our type—we are it, as long as we take ourselves to be a self. The Enneagram fixation isn’t something we have. It’s what we are when we are oriented as a separate identity.
The self cannot take itself to not be a self.
The Lens Is the Identity
Many use the metaphor that personality or fixation is a lens through which we look. Some say the self looks through the lens. Others say the true self looks through it. But both frames miss the more profound truth: in both cases, there is still a belief in a “self” as subject, still someone looking. The lens remains external, as if something to be seen through. But the more radical truth is that you’re taking yourself to be the lens. The whole perceptual field has collapsed around identification. The lens isn’t just shaping perception—it is your sense of self.
What Is the Self?
The self being addressed here is not a thing, not like a tree or a chair. It’s not an object in the world. It is a sense—a familiar, persistent felt continuity that shapes experience. This familiar sense arises from countless factors: the experience of the body (both internal and external), the patterning of thought, habitual emotional tone, memory traces, self-image, and more. We’re not confused about who we are when we wake in the morning. That familiar “me” is already there—subtle, unspoken, quietly threading itself into each moment.
And that’s precisely the problem.
That familiar sense of self is not questioned because it feels so natural. But we fail to see that the continuity we experience is not the continuity of an actual self—it is the continuity of the mind linking experience after experience through the idea of a self. The sense of “I have been here for 50 years” feels valid because the mind maps this familiar self-sense onto every remembered moment. It assigns existence through consistency.
But this self isn’t a real entity. It’s a memory trace, a resonance, a construction made by the mind connecting sensations, thoughts, and stories over time.
The self is not simply an object remembered, but a continual act of remembering. The mind actively sustains the illusion of continuity by stitching each moment to the idea of “me.” It is not a thing. It is an activity—a continuous momentum of identification.
Seeing What’s Actually Here
To make progress requires a fundamental shift from the conceptual to the phenomenological. We must leave the world of object relations and enter the immediacy of experience. This does not mean gaining more insight about the self—it means experiencing what is happening right now in the field of awareness and not thinking about the moment, not projecting understanding through mental imagery, but seeing in the true sense: directly, experientially, phenomenologically.
What we call ‘seeing through the self’ is not a conceptual insight or a new thought. It is the moment-to-moment experiential recognition that the familiar sense of self is not what is actually here. What is here is phenomena arising—bodily, emotionally, energetically—and the quiet awareness in which all of that unfolds.
As the immediacy of experience emerges more fully into awareness, the nature of seeing shifts. It becomes ontological rather than interpretive. This seeing discloses what is occurring and the quality of being itself: awareness, knowingness, and the subtle yet undeniable sense of existence. This is not who we are—it is what we are.
This seeing doesn’t produce clarity as a result—it is clarity. It’s not something added to experience but something revealed when conceptual filters fall away. You’re no longer a self navigating experience; you are experience recognizing itself, not as content, not as form, but as the bare, aware presence that holds it all.
Even the observer, the witness, the one who sees clearly, is often just another costume for the self. A subtler lens. A quieter identity. But still a self, still an inside looking out.
This is not a shift in point of view. It’s a shift in being—a movement from knowing as someone to knowing as awareness itself.
When the Self Falls Away
In a truly enlightened being—an embodiment of being—their subjectivity is no longer organized around personal history. The familiar sense of self dissolves, and what replaces it is not another subjective identity, but the subjectivity of Being itself. Everything in the perceptual field is part of that subjectivity. This is often called unity or oneness, not as an idea, but as a lived ontological fact.
There is no separation between awareness and what arises. There is no inner and outer, no subject and object. Experience is not “being aware of something” but Being as everything.
There is no longer a central self referencing experience. The mind continues to function but no longer organizes reality around a personal identity. It simply registers the immediacy of the impact of Beingness. The compulsive self-referencing that once shaped every moment falls away, leaving a presence that is both intimate and boundless.
The Spiritualized Cell
Look at the second image. The inmate now wears yoga clothes. The walls are softer. The poster on the wall shows someone meditating.
This is how spiritual work often goes wrong. The self becomes more refined. More spiritual. The language changes. The habits evolve. But the core structure remains. The prisoner is now a meditator working on an authentic self. The cell has become a shrine.
But identity still organizes perception. And so the illusion continues. Just more “spiritualized.”
Essence and the World of Lies
Many speak of essence or the “true self” as if they possess it; as if a part of them has awakened. But essence is not a state or an insight. It is the immediacy of Being.
The moment essence touches awareness, the mind reifies it. It turns it into conceptual memory. It tells a story. “This changed me.” “This is who I really am.”
It’s not that the mind occasionally misinterprets essence. Reification is its default mode. The moment something subtle or sacred touches experience, the mind turns it into content—be it image, memory, or concept.
So, the living presence becomes a dead image—a credential, a concept hung on the cell wall.
This is what the mystics call a world of lies—not intentional deception but the mind’s inability to let Being be. The moment we say, “I know,” we are already outside of it.
The danger is in mistaking memory for presence or transformation. The person believes they have been changed, but what has changed is the story they tell about who they are, not the illusion of self.
How the Enneagram Points to the Cell
Return to the image of the cell: the bars, the wall, the bed, the window, the poster. All of it is personality, not just behavior or defense, but the entire architecture of identity.
- The bars are your fixations.
- The walls are your emotional foundation.
- The poster is your ego ideal.
- The bed is your life orientation.
- The clothes are your presentation.
When used sincerely, the Enneagram doesn’t show you how to improve the cell. It points to the illusion that you are in it. It says: “Look. This is what you take yourself to be.”
If you look with enough depth and honesty, something begins to shift. The bars aren’t made of steel. They’re made of belief. Of habit. Of history. And they dissolve—not by effort, but by seeing.
So, How Do We Work With This?
You can’t just declare “I’m not that.” That’s just another thought. Another scratch on the cell wall.
Real freedom comes from experiential inquiry, from engaging directly with the felt sense of “me”—not to fix it but to see through it.
1. Seek the “I Am” — Not the Self-Image
Not “I am this or that.” Just I Am. When you land here, the whole identity structure begins to unravel. Not because it is denied, but because it is no longer needed.
2. Let Inquiry Be Experiential
Ask: Who am I taking myself to be right now? Don’t answer with concepts. Feel. Sense. Track the structure. Let it reveal itself.
3. Know the Difference Between Memory and Presence
Most people live from memory, not Being. Essence is not a past event. It is always now. If you’re recalling, you’re not present.
4. Use the Enneagram to Deconstruct, Not Reinforce
Your type isn’t your identity. It’s a map of your fixations. Let it reveal where you’re bound, not who you are.
5. Stop Trying to Be Free. Start Seeing There Is No One to Imprison.
The most radical insight is not that you are free. It’s that you were never the one bound.
If I’m not in the cell, what remains when the cell is gone?
Whether you’re an obedient dog or a disobedient dog, the fact remains—you’re still a dog. The same is true of the self. Whether you present as a spiritual self, a broken self, or an awakened self, the identification structure remains. Real freedom begins when we stop trying to train the self—and start to see that it was never what we are.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and human development student whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.