Interdependence

I read recently the excellent book 'We are the middle of forever' by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth which is a series of interviews with people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities about their view of the climate crisis and why we are in the mess we are in.

In it, Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians, quotes Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs but she talks of it differently as the 'hierarchy of maturity' and says that at the base there are the 'selfish people' then as you climb up you get to the independent people and at the top there are the interdependent people. She talks about how someone who is self-confident becomes independent but 'only when they go on to care for other people have they arrived at the point at which they are considered to be a highly mature individual'.

I thought this was very interesting because Western capitalist cultures tend to view independence as the pinnacle of our journey, as the height of achievement. Interdependence, I think, has been considered as somehow of less value - as of being not independent enough - if, that is, we have considered it at all. We have wanted, in a sense, to prove our independence and individuality, our ability to stand alone.

She goes on to say that the Native Americans were not only interdependent relative to their fellow humanity but also in relation to the natural world, 'to the animals, to the trees, to our Creator, to the Great Spirit that lives in everything'. That there was the understanding that 'all things are connected.

What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. We are just one strand in this intricately woven fabric'.

This makes me think of the separateness that the ego creates. The ego, in a sense, creates independence which is important and necessary at a certain stage of life to help get us out into the world to create our own life but it also gives us the illusion of separateness. If we aren't careful we can start believing that we can go it alone, with no need for anybody else.

Which brings us back to the Enneagram. It is worth remembering that we are made up of all the Enneagram Types. We are not one Type to the exclusion of all the other Types. We are all of the Types, it is simply that one of them is dominant. And that is where we separate ourselves - and feel our separation - from others and from the world. And that is where we suffer.