The Next Two Stages on the Enneagram

The Middle, where the work is done, where hazards appear; Fulfillment, where promises come true in unexpected ways.

The Middle Period: Transformation & Transmutation

‘Alas!’ quoth he,
‘but newly born in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I.
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals;
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls;

Robert Southwell, The Burning Babe

If the parties get the help they need to forge a commitment, to become partners, another dimension of relationship opens. In the first stage, “relating” means, “being together, getting to know about one another, then ‘seeing’ one another. In the second phase, relating means change, first in the partners’ outer personalities and behaviors (transformation), and secondly in their inner essences and identities (transmutation).

The flow of events may be quite similar before and after commitment, especially today when many couples live together before marriage. But the experience of those events, the meaning that the partners create for themselves, changes drastically. It is the act of commitment that makes this change, that turns the people in the relationship from the kitchen, from separate social atoms, into the food, into parts of a common “meal” that will be changed forever.

It’s rare to find people today who understand that living through a loving committed relationship involves irreversible transformation in outer personality and behaviors (the strategies and habits of living we’ve picked up from our family of origin and our sociocultural background). Rarer still are those who accept the need for a transmutation of their own essence and individuality (the core of how we see and interact with the world). This lack of understanding is one of the factors that make the middle stage the “hard part” of the relationship process.

In fact, the differences between us can be powerful drivers for the process of transformation and transubstantiation. Without a committed relationship, there is no interpenetration of another’s world, another’s way of seeing and doing. We remain locked in the world we were given as children, ways of seeing and doing that we think of as our own, but that were handed down (with some modifications) by the generations that came before us. This world, this way of living, is comfortable but not dynamic. It can satisfy the personality but not the essence, not the soul that needs to grow and change. “Vive la difference,” say the French and we can also recognize that it is the differences between us that allow us to live, change and grow. This is especially true when the differences become difficulties.

In the first and third stages, there is contact with all three dimensions of the relationship process via the inner lines. In the middle stage, the focus is on the personal dimension, and the “filter” changes from one point to another. Point 4 is connected only with the social and the personal dimensions: the transpersonal aspect of relationship fades from view. At point 5, contact with the social dimension is lost: we are concerned only with the personal and transpersonal dimensions. This is why the transition from outer to inner is so marked during the middle stage of the process.

Third stage: Fulfillment & Sharing

Having achieved and accomplished love ... man ... has become himself, his tale is told.

D. H. Lawrence

Is transubstantiation really possible? Is it more than a mythical, mystical activity that may or may not happen at the church altar? Neuro-scientists are exploring and demonstrating “neuro-plasticity,” which says that the brain itself can be changed by the way it is used. This can happen through external circumstances such as accidental deafness or blindness: in these cases, researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain associated with sight or hearing are reallocated to processing other kinds of information. It can also happen as a result of deliberate intervention: in some experiments, volunteers who spent as little as ninety minutes in the dark registered measurable changes in brain functioning. Other experiments have documented the changes in the brains of experienced meditation practitioners.

Someday, the balancing of the brain and the re-training of destructive emotions may become part of the standard educational curriculum. In the meantime, it is rare to find people who have managed to use the process of relationship as a way of opening themselves to love. Such people have reached the third stage in their relationships. They have opened that part of being human that corresponds to “the diners,” and as a result are truly fulfilled by a committed partnership. They are genuinely realizing the possibility that was glimpsed in the beginning stage. Because the “cooking” required to make this happen takes a long time, such people tend to be older, and in our society the wisdom of older people is often ignored in favor of the energy and passion of youth.

Exercise 5: