Читать книгу Enneagram For Dummies - Jeanette van Stijn - Страница 32

People are curious about themselves. They might ask, “Why do I react one way in this situation and you act in another way? Why are you in such a hurry and I'm not? Why was I bored in that meeting and my colleague was an enthusiastic participant?”

The way your thoughts and feelings work is interesting. People have been trying to gain more insight into this process for centuries. You may know that the ancient Greek philosophers spent a lot of time contemplating their thoughts and thought processes. Reality is so complex that people try to understand and clarify it. They do this by representing aspects of that reality in models. Humans, and how they work together and function, are so complex that it’s practically impossible to comprehend. Yet it’s a human peculiarity that everyone wants to understand themselves better, to get to know themselves. People needed models that could make their complex nature more comprehensible. They created models to observe and understand their mutual differences. This is part of reality, which is described in some detail in the Enneagram. But it’s just a model and therefore not reality itself. The reality is that everyone is a unique individual.

Although far apart in place and time, systems have been developed within different cultures around the world that are, upon closer study, amazingly similar at heart. Many people, for example, focus inward with meditation or prayer. For the purposes of this book, note that people in different places and at different times have come to the conclusion that you hinder yourself by adhering to familiar thought patterns and mental habits — patterns and habits that blind you to other points of view.