Levels of Development (again)

One of the most important aspects of the Enneagram as I have said before, is the Levels of Development. Part of why it is so crucial is that it acknowledges that we behave in many different ways - the best of which can be open, empathetic, magnanimous and trusting and the worst of which can be careless, negligent, cruel and violent, In the documentary 'Living in a Time of Dying' which you can find on Youtube, Stan Rushworth, a Native American elder reflects on the damage that human beings have done to the planet and what we can do about it. In it he stresses the importance of understanding how we got here, that we need to understand what 'makes us fallen by nature [and] the ideologies that make us fallen by nature' and that we then have to come back to believing in ourselves as human beings because, as he says, 'it's not human beings who have made things colossally dire, it's a particular way of thinking which Jack Forbes called the wetiko' (see my previous post). The Enneagram teaches that the worst of human nature is not confined to someone else and neither is the best. We each operate on a spectrum dictated by our personality with certain attitudes and behaviours coming online depending on factors such as environment, stress, how secure or supported we are in life and our level of self-awareness. Although upbringing and opportunities, circumstance (and therefore luck), may dictate where we are on the spectrum by the time we leave home to carve out our own lives, after a certain point it is down to us, it is we who have responsibility for ourselves and our actions. The Levels of Development can be very instructive in helping us to identify our Type and revealing to us our own changes in attitudes and behaviours as we move up and down the Levels. Our own nature becomes less of a mystery as we see that that there is an inherent logic that runs through our behaviours from best to worst - from integration (towards our best self) to disintegration (towards our worst).