I first became acquainted with the Enneagram 16 years ago, in the midst of an existential crisis brought on by the sudden death of a family member. Distraught and looking for solace, I enrolled in a course called Jewish Spirituality. Although I dont remember the exact description, the basic idea was that we would study nontraditional, non-God-oriented ways in which Jews connect with an experience of transcendence, something I desperately needed. Whatever the wording in the brochure, it was most assuredly not a description of the actual course.

The actual course, it turned out, was about whatever the teacher felt like talking about that night. A charismatic rabbi with a devoted following, he taught the course continually, in an unending loop of eight-week sessions attended by an enthusiastic group of regulars, many of whom both wrote down and made an audio recording of everything the rabbi said while he discoursed freely on whatever happened to be on his mind. And what was on his mind during that eight weeks was the Enneagram.

I sat there, reeling from loss, hardly able to take in what I was hearing or, rather, seeing, which was this drawing:

Get it? Neither did I. But according to legend, in the early 1900s, the famous Armenian choreographer Gurdjieff drew it on the walls of a cave where he had retreated to enjoy hallucinogens for a bit and study mysticism, emerging to bring to the world the Enneagram drawing, a secret code that implied a deep truth.

Now, I have a nearly physical aversion to non-logical (to put it mildly) theories like this. As soon as people start talking about ancient secrets and codes and mysticism, its just a hop, skip and a jump to Dan Brown and the Illuminati. For Gurdjieff and his adherents, on the other hand, the thing was a work of genius, a profound utterance that could not be expressed otherwise. It wasnt until about 30 years later, around the middle of the 20th century, that South American psychologists Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo worked the shape into their theories of psychology, a set of ideas that later became codified as the Enneagram personality types.

This theory is now expressed in wildly different ways by a variety of warring psychologists, each of whom claim their version is correct. But as I understand it, basically, the theory is that all of us are splinters of a larger cosmic whole, which, when it broke apart, created life. According to the Enneagram, our personality type is determined by the particular manner in which our own splinter longs for reunion with that wholeness. These types are described generally as:

1.The Reformer or Idealist, motivated by perfection

2.The Helper or Giver, motivated by generosity

3.The Achiever, motivated by ambition

4.The Artist, motivated by self-expression and beauty

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Why I am obsessed with the Enneagram Personality Test