ASM162 Is the Enneagram Bullshit?

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is the enneagram [ \_\_ ] that's the question i'm exploring with annie diamond on a special issue of ask sciencemike [Music] science faith to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life with absolutely no qualifications whatsoever i'm your host mike mccarthy and this week with me is a special guest annie diamond who's an actual expert in the enneagram and we're going to talk to all you skeptics this week and figure out if it's a thing worth paying attention to or not i don't know could be fun what do you say let's get it started [Music] all right as i mentioned really weird show this week one of those amazing episodes where it's not just me talking which are actually my favorite believe it or not even though i love the sound of my voice i do get tired of listening to it exclusively but i want to let you know a couple of things coming up calendar wise where we could see each other first of all september the 25th that's coming up real soon after this episode drops i'm hosting a free webinar called making your mark for people who aspire to do creative platform work mainly centered around education or advocacy so that's going to be september 25th from 5 to 6 p.m pacific you can uh learn more by going to asksciencemike.com and then clicking the events button where you can sign up for that it is completely free we have some really exciting news in liturgist gathering world in addition to london which you know about october 5th and 6th tickets now are on sale for minneapolis on november 16th and 17th and nashville on november 30th and december 1st so the literature's gathering is tons of fun they pretty consistently sell out so don't wait too long to grab your ticket uh you can learn more by going to the liturgistgathering.com and then october 17th i'll be in placentia placentia placentia california i don't know how to say it uh for an ass lance mike live so if you're in the oc or l.a area i sure would love to see you at science mike live and uh october 26th and 27th i'll be at evolving faith which is hosted by rachel evans and sarah bessie i think there are tickets on stubhub uh in all seriousness it is so way sold out and then november 3rd really excited about this in greeley colorado i'm doing a two-day conference on centering prayer so if you'd like to get more into the practical application of mysticism if you'd like to see ways that uh spirituality can not only provide peace but help you live in harmony with others i'd love to see you in greeley colorado for that conference but enough rambling about road dates let's talk to annie [Music] so a strange thing happened in my life uh i was the host of a pretty popular podcast exploring issues of everyday life through the lenses of science art and faith and then we shifted into a lot of conversations about justice and equality and those were our most popular episodes ever and then we hosted an episode with ian kron and susan stabile on the enneagram and it became the most popular episode of the liturgist podcast by over a million downloads so since there's so much enneagram mania my friend annie diamond is here and we're going to talk a little bit about the enneagram and if you want to say hello so they know your voice hello hi annie's voice is hopefully obviously different than mine so you can keep track throughout the episode and we did a video course together for the liturgists yes we did about the enneagram so if you haven't seen that you can go to some url shop.alligious.com store.literacies.com something and you can see that course but we're going to talk about something much more pressing today in my opinion especially for all of you skeptics in the science mic audience the question i have for you today annie is the enneagram [ \_\_ ] well no but i'm just saying it because i want to keep my job no i'm just kidding why do you ask that's my question oh because i'm so i tweeted i think the best summary of my feelings about the enneagram where i said me the enneagram is non-scientific non-rigorous but sometimes helpful understanding of the self and community also me all caps are these people reading my thoughts and or personal diary so there's like a real dichotomy with me and that when i interrogate the enneagram through an empiricist lens or a critical lens uh it seems to evaporate in the light of scrutiny but when i use it to look at ways i'm stuck or hung up in life or difficult relationships with other people i often find really helpful insights that help me like cope and help me not just cope but come to a resolution with people in a way that is as palatable to them as it is to me so whenever i talk about the enneagram there are it's a strange dichotomy uh of course most of the liturgist audiences just loves the enneagram without reservation but uh i think it's about a 50 50 split in science mic land between the enneagram is like some ultimate understanding of humanity yeah or as bad if not worse than horoscopes and there's no yeah there's nobody like thread in the middle there oh i understand yeah trust me i make my work in this um yeah i guess i have a lot to say but the first question i have is what else in your life is not scientifically verified or empirically verified that you find to be valuable god yeah but what up like what about for people who don't believe in god because because the risk is that we say that everything not empirically valuable or validated is not valuable and i love empirical validation i find it to be really important i also find it to be really important that people be able to get into sort of what their life feels like to to be able to interact with the enneagram well i don't think anyone should take the enneagram hook line and sinker as an idea as like some validated idea that then they need to just incorporate without feeling around in their life sensing the actual data of their life and experience whether that's yeah scientifically or not so i guess for me there are things like like when i look at the idea of meaning science gives a lot of how answers i mean i'm not a scientist so please step in but science provides so many hows um and that's really important but the why is not necessarily something that science is trying to answer um for everything some things i think functionally science has a lot of functional answers for why um but then when you get to things like consciousness and we're just not quite sure what the f what's the function how do you talk about consciousness in a functional way um then then we start to have institutes at university of arizona like the center for consciousness studies or whatever which are interdisciplinary because we're in a purely phenomenological stage with this stuff like we are taking all of our resources as humans which are not just the scientific method we have other ways of knowing ways of assuming ways of orienting ourselves towards understanding that are not just the scientific method that help us make sense or move towards making sense of our experience so i think it's weird i think people have more going on when they say oh it's not scientific it's not scientifically valid i'm like okay yeah certainly but also there's lots of other reasons to be skeptical which is weird i wanna like i would rather push push back on that and say well i don't really care if it's 100 scientifically valid because think about everything that wasn't scientifically valid before we researched it like things are not scientifically valid until we take them through a process but we don't take things through a process until we go through the phenomenology of that thing like we heliocentrism yes intuitive before it was rigorous yeah and everything that's that's how we know as humans i think that's part of the human knowledge system we don't bring things up into our what i would call thinking center which is hilarious like hilarious from a scientific perspective but we don't take things to the analyzation figuring it out testing it um unless we a want to um and b have that want because we're in relationship with something that we're noticing that we're sensing in our environment and so i think we're we're in a sensing we're in a we're in a sensing mode we're in a maybe not scientific but figuring it out mode with the enneagram i mean it's new it's really new um and so i guess i say all of this not to prove that it's scientifically valid but to say sure i think there's parts of it that will become scientifically valid at some point but that doesn't feel like a critique that holds up in a if you live in time like there are so many things that aren't scientifically valid yet because we just haven't studied them and yeah so i guess to me part of being human and part of like a full-bodied cognition is to before you can sort of test something test it in your own experience before we can bring it out into the world and all test it together why not engage it in um and if and the question of why not to engage it is what's interesting here like because that's where the skepticism comes from and that is more than just it's not scientifically valid i think that's it's connected that's connected to other things like are we afraid of engaging things that we don't know everything about like or or for a lot of people and i don't know that these are your listeners but there's a lot of good reasons to be afraid of engaging the enneagram if you've experienced life with people who love the enneagram that's actually what i was about to ask i wonder like you mentioned it's newness which that's another thing with me in the enneagram like there's so many different stories about how old it is and where it came from um but astrology's been around a little while like yeah you know arguably probably as long as language right so skeptical people don't really rage at horoscopes because it's just background noise yeah you know what i mean right but i wonder if it's like this sudden emergence of the enneagram as such a popular topic is what's like the reticence from skeptics is not even necessarily that this is not scientific but this is a new form of like pseudoscience or pseudoscience or non-rigorous thinking you know i had one person after an event uh who was the head of a atheist society at a university he said i don't like you talking about the enneagram for the same reason i don't like you talking about christianity he said i'm fine with the way you approach the enneagram and the way you approach christianity but i don't think that's the way your audience approaches it which i don't agree with which is also a common criticism to me that's really interesting that you should approach things like other people approach them um well so i the the the part of the skeptical community that i am sympathetic with and the reason i in fact call myself a skeptic is this tension between exploration via lived experience and exploration via the scientific method most of the time doesn't matter in daily living but when it does approaching things to live to experience in one community leads people to say scientific conclusions about climate change are incorrect yeah so absolutely um so that what i'm what i what i think is happening among skeptics is they view the enneagram as a harmless symptom of a deeper problem yeah so that there are i think that there are personally helpful and socially responsible ways to engage in non-scientific lines of inquiry so the the things that i'll like go that i'll really make a stand on in public tend to be things that i have pretty rigorous information to back up but science uh one of the issues you're also putting them in a value system well that's what i was about to say so science can't make moral judgments right or offer that so i am passing that through a non-scientific process yeah of ascribing value to these data points so i have decided i don't like suffering so causing other people to suffer is unethical just based on i don't like to suffer and so when i look at climate change the reason i say this is important is because of the impact on human life and suffering but that's not a scientific conclusion that's like basically a humanistic conclusion but like you have to have a ethical framework to operate in the world right um but then there's other things like i am a spiritual person so i have all of these spiritual beliefs but i'm way less likely to so from a policy matter i'm fine passing a law that whether you like it or not limits your capacity to pollute with carbon yeah just just for i just i don't care when i do the math for future generations this it's just the same way i'm fine passing a law that's just you can't stab someone else you can't dump as much carbon or pollution as you want into the atmosphere um and so i'll lean into that with policy this intersection of science and what i've deemed to be kind of a reasonable ethic but i wouldn't pass a law about people have to pray like i pray they like i'm not going to pass a centering prayer law that we start every baseball game with eight minutes of contemplative silence right because that's like a thing that i found personally helpful but and even though there actually is research that shows centering prayer is good for the brain and all these other kinds of things you see what i mean like we're moving further and further from knowledge that i will lean into the public square with and so i think the healthy way for me to approach the enneagram is gosh this is really helpful sometimes um and so i'll use it when it's helpful but i'm also gonna be careful not to get fixated on it or obsessed with it or for someone like me who used to have like a really rigorous theology have it be like my new evangelical tool yeah like my new band-aid for loss of that certainty i once held yeah yeah there's a lot to say um i guess i wonder about the enneagram and control from all sides so the people who want to rigorously keep it out um again i'll just say i i want to know why and i think it's not scientifically valid isn't enough unless scientific validation is your ultimate good in which case it makes it really hard to live in the tension of the world because how do you even do research if that if you if things have to be scientifically valid how do you conduct research about them there's no space for not knowing um and so i think for the skeptics i think those are the most interesting people to have engaged the enneagram because they go in um and can be surprised there in interesting ways um but in on the other side of that just like you you said how you hold it sometimes in my work i encounter people who are obsessed with enneagram in a very particular way so um some people love it i and i love it i think it's really helpful it's an incredible um set of nine stories really 27 stories i'm into i'm into the subtitual subtypes um i actually really like those as well yeah um but it can become a there's a certain amount of control in that way too like using the enneagram as a way to explain everything and explaining everything becomes the problem explaining why the enneagram doesn't fit reality or does fit all of reality and being obsessed with the enneagram as an explanation instead of an invitation to explore the reality of what's going on inside of you and between you and other people and it's hard to hold things that we're not sure about as invitations or as interesting possibilities and so exerting control in either direction either to extricate and i would say like i'm not a huge horoscope person i'm not a horoscope person i know very little about it um but people's fear of the horoscope is really i mean i understand that it's associated with um kind of uh anti-realism like oh you can just believe whatever is whatever um but i think our deep fear is that we can't control how people use information like we can't control that people might find something helpful and something non-scientifically verified and we can't control that scientifically verified things or things that science creates can be used in really evil ways so like in every direction we have a crisis of meaning i think um and so we have stand-ins we make the enneagram a stand-in for meaning like oh i have like this makes sense of my world or like this doesn't make sense of the world and i think it's a problem in either direction like and and by problem i mean we're deeply vulnerable to needing security and there are really sneaky ways that our brain works to get us secure and we don't even know what's happening and that's okay um but it needs to be talk aboutable and that's why i think the skeptic is an important person because the skeptic brings up the question we and the problem um and then we just have to get really specific about why we're skeptical and i think i'm skeptical of just the simple well it's not scientifically valid i think there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical of that um while still maintaining that scientific validity is really important does that make sense yeah i mean so if science is a system wherein we assign confidence to beliefs which i think is a reasonable and succinct description of science i like that um there are a lot of beliefs i have that i can't ascribe much scientific confidence too that helped me navigate the world so if i think of like a big spectrum and on the far left hand side of the spectrum is harry potter which is a very non-rigorous map of human behavior one woman wrote it and it's literally fiction and then slightly to the right of that you have like myers-brigg type indicator which people love talk about mars break that isn't that is a super when it the unlike the enneagram the myers-briggs has actually been tested a lot by social scientists it has a real reproducibility problem so when people are assessed for myers-brigg their type changes in ways the model says it's not possible i have three types exactly there you go i've always been enfj which drives me crazy uh and then fascinating yeah although the e keeps dropping um you're an f okay i'm sorry i just wow can we take one of those tests after this we absolutely can so that so you've got harry potter and then just to the right it's a little more rigorous but not much myers-brigg then you take a big jump over to the far right of the spectrum and you get something like behavioral economics and behavioral economics is a very rigorous model for exploring human behavior basically if you do these things people will probabilistically respond in these ways um it does not tell you why at all right there's no theory it's literally just like well we've measured these things then we go further to the right from vapor economics we might get to biology wait can we stop for a second i think one of the just on that spectrum i think one of the problems with how people hold the enneagram is that they're still holding it in a behaviorist model and so they're like we haven't verified that it's true but but so much of our verification comes through the behavioral sciences and the enneagram is not a predictor of behavior it's it's a and this is the difficulty it names our d nine different deep vulnerabilities that we have um and invites us into nine but then billions depending on what your specific story is ways of engaging our freedom from within that vulnerability and so the difficulty is that you can't predict whether or not people will engage like their capacity to jump onto another neural pathway and it's really hard to predict from a systems perspective in a human life with a the diversity of history and trauma and these categories help but they have to be inserted into another whole story so you're combining stories so how to do the research you would need and to get the control that you would need in an experiment to talk about how the whole system works and actually that is aimed at helping there be more play in the system like that's going to be really hard to test i mean i i do there is there is work being done um on some of the like levels of the enneagram um different slices but and that are more behavioral but the problem is that the enneagram isn't really aimed at being behaviorally predictive in fact working with the enneagram you hope like i hope as i work with it that i won't see patterns i'm looking always for meaningful deviations in these patterns and i see them all the time and so i find it to be in a sense i while i it corresponds to reality for me in all the experiences i've had with people i'm also like not very hopeful that there's going to be really meaningful scientific validation with the enneagram like there are people doing work in the different centers of intelligence like we've talked about and like talking about these three centers the head heart and gut which you've given helpful names in the brain you want to say like i don't remember the chord that'd be the cortical the limbic and the hindbrain maybe that was i don't remember if that's what you said anyway watch the liner just uh video series if you want to see us get into this but we're not really getting into the specifics of the enneagram today it's more about like philosophy of and i think i have a skepticism just like everyone else that this is going to be scientifically validated but my skepticism comes from the inherent complexity of the system and how long it would take for that to happen um and also i feel really aware of through witnessing the freedom people have to deviate from the system and that's why i do it like the hope is that we're not trapped by our category right and it gives tools for ways to engage ourselves so that we aren't or ideas or ways of holding ourselves so anyway i just think one of the big problems that i see in that particular skeptic the particular skepticism that says like it's not scientifically validated is that often that's coming from uh over emphasis on what we're taught through the behavioral sciences and i think there's other ways of testing but that's that's just me i mean that said though one of the main the guy i learned the enneagram from who recently died david daniels um was a doctor and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at university of stanford stanford university um so it's not that these aren't this isn't a part of the conversation it certainly is and behaviors are a big part of who we are um but it's not it's not everything and it's weird to be human and to live with a consciousness that makes us both feel this metaphysical freedom and also deeply vulnerable to what our body's doing and what our like everything even in ways we can't think about or that we're not actively aware of we're hugely vulnerable as well so the categories help us name ways we're vulnerable and engage our freedom yeah i guess that's what i appreciate about the enneagram because myers-briggs dresses itself up in rigorous language and pretends to be rigorous when it's not yes and the enneagram doesn't pretend to be fundamentally a child of the sciences at all um well i mean i will say it did in the 70s when it when it came to berkeley um it came by way of claudio naranjo who merged it with modern psychology right and so it did enter into like psychology circles but those are deeply embedded and the tool the tool came from a um a spiritual like a more like a spiritual archetype history and of course there's lots of contested origin stories but um it was deeply spiritual from the start as well and so that's one of the things i really appreciate um about the enneagram is it is in a sense very interdisciplinary it's bringing together all these different ways of knowing and being interested in them and utilizing them um and yeah there is a skepticism from the enneagram community um not necessarily an anti-realism but a skepticism that all we are is like that there's no meaning that there's no real reason to be working with the freedom that we have like there's a real hopefulness um about being a human while also acknowledging a deep vulnerability and being really specific about the vulnerabilities and i appreciate that because that's just what it's like to be human that's what it it's just a helpful way of navigating the phenomenological experience of being a person anyway i interrupted your you were talking you were you got into uh you went to behavioral sciences i think that ship has sailed right all right all right well i just i think i just do think that that's important that we know and from the start that if this is about predicting behaviors then we've lost the helpfulness of the tool itself um but that doesn't mean that it doesn't need to correspond to reality which is why i think we need to hold it in a very particular way and have really good language around how to hold it the root of the skepticism is also around right how people hold it and a lot of people have and probably not your your listeners are probably not thinking about it in the same way but um a lot of people have been deeply hurt by the enneagram it's almost like at a par at a party you know someone walks in who knows the enneagram really well and all of a sudden they're like the magician like who's like oh you've seen a rabbit disappear watch me watch me make you disappear by putting you in this box you know right and then and so then maybe that's not hurtful to you but you've watched it be really hurtful and annoying and so you're like no not interested or maybe it was really hurtful and it took you someone was trying to connect or solve a problem in a relationship and all they did was disconnect you by making you into information to be sorted and fixed or as i've so often seen person x assumes they are type y and their friends believe they are type z and so people basically use this system to assault someone's conception of self yeah which i find really to be not a great practice right yeah so they're like whatever you whatever whatever of the types you believe yourself to be to me that's a big part of the system you know what i mean yeah i i don't know um if you can mistype yourself yeah the process of coming to type i think is really interesting all right so i teach in the narrative tradition and in my tradition we do typing interviews so i'll sit with someone for an hour and a half or two hours and just ask them a lot of questions about their relationship with their world and with themselves and with security and anger and worth and all kinds of questions and i i find the time to be interesting and helpful and and i don't even talk about the enneagram for most of that time um because this the sorting and the um x inner exploration is really interesting and then at the end i actually don't tell them what type they are i say oh your language and what i'm hearing today um i can hear this type and this type and maybe this type and here's why why don't you go look through see how kind of the story of the type fits with your experience of yourself and for some people that's a lot more profound than others some people have and especially some cultures have and subcultures have better language that resonates with certain people over other people um but i find that that process of self-selection is the important process which i think differentiates it from like a myers-briggs or a horoscope on two other ends it's saying like well this is what your behavior indicates but with the enneagram it's more oh interesting i've had a lot of questions about why i act like this or why i can't seem to access what i feel in any given social situation or whatever in the enneagram might help provide helpful language for that person to talk about why or to explore even more deeply why and so to me i guess fear about that is really interesting like because it's just a process of exploration and so i think you you can bring your skepticism right on into that you can explore your skepticism in that like why the skepticism um so i guess to me it doesn't feel like a there are lots of things to be skeptical about in the world and i don't to me it doesn't feel like such a threatening thing unless we're putting unless the enneagram is a stand-in for everything that's not scientifically valid already or unless the enneagram is a stand-in for any kind of personality test that you haven't enjoyed in the past or and so i think there's lots of reasons again to be close down to it but i think it's the most interesting part of that is why we're closed down to them because then we can start making interesting statements too about what we value and so why is it that we wouldn't value the enneagram that's an interesting question or what kind of answers or what kind of questions does the enneagram not answer that's interesting you know but we can't really get into those unless we believe the skeptic unless we hear the skeptic saying like no there's something wrong here great what is actually wrong is it personal is it social is it a matter of value i think those are all really interesting interesting questions and i would and i love the skeptic in my workshops is my favorite person because they're like i said there's a scary other side to this where you get so distanced from yourself because you're like yes yes yes and now the enneagram is me you're like wait what or like the enneagrams answering question i'm just stretching the enneagram to answer any question um and that's scary to me i see that a lot yeah yeah when it becomes people's like grand unified theory of humanity yeah it's become really overwhelming to me to work in communities where um it's the only thing anyone can talk about um for me that's often a signal of being really like distanced from the self and from the other people like um i'm sure those of you who are part of communities that know things about the enneagram you have been in a group of people where there's like a polarity you know one person's really excited to talk about it and interpret everything and then there's clearly people shutting down who like don't want to talk about it for any number of reasons but then someone continues to just talk about it and only talk about it and there's a problem there too like not being awake to what's actually going on in a situation with tools like this um i think you have to be so discerning and yeah i mean i guess discernment is a part of for me there's a real spirituality to discernment so make of that what anyone will but there's a listening that needs to happen on multiple levels in a situation um and the enneagram has surely been misused and used in ways that are totally not discerning um but then our rejection sometimes can be not discerning as well and i'm inserting like my values here right but i we have to um and this is the this is the scary piece you anything can become destruction like can be destructive without discerning and i just don't think science is the only way we discern right it doesn't give us a prioritization process science doesn't provide how we prioritize information always it might in some instances and so for the skeptic it's just important to notice as we're being skeptical what are we prioritizing and why um yeah i think there's a real shortcoming in skeptical communities to assume skepticism is an inherently rational and unbiased process yeah and i mean i guess that's part of the reason to reject the enneagram because what it's about is about our biases and how we posture ourselves towards the world and what we need to feel secure in our posture so is it the security of scientific knowledge that we need okay other people need other things right and i suppose i could get really like functional about this but like why privilege scientific knowledge over anything else like why not privilege just relationships it's like life is just about like being in loving relationships and feeling good in those relationships or about life is just about like contribution like what i contribute to the world and and why say that any of those are better or worse like how how could we ever ask or have interesting conversations where we say no i actually think your way of seeing the world is like missing this piece or whatever but sorry i was just imagining thinking or saying that to someone well no but but right i mean that's my own baggage yeah but think about like what you do here like you wouldn't you wouldn't be sharing the riches of your internal world with the world unless you felt like there was something important happening like you're doing something here and it has meaning and you can tell a story about why it has meaning and that doesn't mean you have to believe that the story is the story or the only story you can hold it differently but without that ability to [Music] like yeah that's not i don't know that your story is scientifically verifiable but it's true but that's scary because i would also say that there's other stories that are yeah like obviously there's histories of we want to be able to make judgments we want to say like nazi german germany is wrong and the reasons the like the hyper um hopefulness of like what and the sort of like progress-mindedness of the aryan race and nazi germany that's wrong right we want to say that's wrong but science doesn't i would say science doesn't give us a way of saying that would you say that that's true yeah science doesn't make moral judgments science doesn't make measures of beauty uh science doesn't um tell you how to use scientific insight almost by design yeah exactly and that's good i mean that's good so i would just say exactly the science doesn't tell you how to use scientific insight i think that's really helpful in holding the enneagram because i think there's plenty of things that we can know scientifically about the human person that correspond with what the enneagram does but the enneagram's like oh and here's how we might use that insight here's ways we get stuck in using that insight here's the kind of insight certain people privilege over others and here's some reasons people might do that and it's providing reasons and stories so it is not science the enneagram and engaging with the enneagram is not a scientific process because it requires more than our thinking no of figuring it out knowing that's where i was going with my spectrum is like past behavioral economics would be like biology and microbiology yeah and physics ultimately but an understanding of physics although it is by far the field of science that probably produces the highest confidence conclusions right like do this to a proton yeah this will happen this percentage of time yep take it to the bank it does not help me know what to do in a difficult conversation right even though it's like very rigorous knowledge and behavioral economics really doesn't always either although i am a person that have a very science-guided approach to conversations but yeah absolutely um like the the story that i find like most helpful in our current geopolitical climate is literally harry potter yeah you know what i mean yeah and then yeah so there's something about navigating mythologies and and a story structure that helps us make decisions um you know i think about the the parkland students and all the advocacy they do and how amazing it is students that young taking on that much ownership of the public square yeah but they grew up on harry potter and the hunger games and their protagonists stood up to unspeakable institutional evil yeah challenged and prevailed yeah so that that navigating mythology shapes them and so i think why i am an enneagram skeptic but also an enneagram user yeah a believer is this practice yeah i'm a practitioner because of that capacity to be a helpful navigating mythology something that is in many ways more accessible in day-to-day decisions i mean if you look at my bookshelf there's not like a shortage of books up there on scientific insights about personality cognition emotional behavior um and that's just it's extensive yeah the books up there are just like the books i'm using right now i have books stored elsewhere i have a lot of ebooks uh but there's something accessible about i understand myself as a self-preservation enagram 9. and that helps me understand why if there's some conflict among my friends that i just go find somewhere and lie down yeah and just stay there yeah indefinitely until the conflict is resolved i mean you know probably the most helpful navigating mythology in the world right now is the indian dog twitter account um really have you seen the idiot dog no i'm pretty bad oh my gosh all it is is like a type a situation and a gif of a dog doing something so it'll be like a type nine when you tell a type nine we need to have a serious conversation it's a dog that just falls over and lies down and so things like that like um they just help you get through the day yeah i think it's sometimes really scary and appropriately so to be so seen or um it's sort of jarring um and so when it when we experience that kind of like jarring or resonance with um a story about someone else that we resonate with or a story that's meant to be about ourselves like as the enneagram kind of presents these stories i think there it's important that we ask is that a true story or some people are looking for security in stories right and some people are like it's the opposite it feels really scary scary scary to have a story be true and sometimes it's somewhere in the middle right um but to me that the whole that whole process of resonating with stories um and testing stories feels like an important thing to do as humans like to use that freedom that we have to say like well but is this really true am i am i projecting something am i just um kind of resting in a fantasy of about a story that i want to believe that's either bad or good sometimes we have fantasies that like we we resonate with a story and call it a bad story and then we say it's us so we can self-reject or sometimes we need a really good story to tell so that we can feel good about ourselves and the enneagram doesn't present bad and good stories but you can hear them people sometimes people hear them as bad and good or someone presents them as bad or good and so i think um it's that freedom vulnerability element of being a conscious human being where there's a deep vulnerability when it comes to having a story be true about us and having that story maybe be true about other people it um it moves against this individualism especially that we live within western culture um but it also gives us a responsibility i think um and and so if you believe the stories or if you practice using the enneagram stories um [Music] then then you might resonate with that but then if you if you don't um you might have a fear like i don't want to be responsible to a story that might not be true but then i would just say you don't have to hold the enneagram that way you don't have to hold the enneagram as a predictor of your behavior because that's not what it is um because you are also we have varying levels of actual freedom in our world right like there are some people who physically are just not free um and we don't have freedom with regard to the kind of biology and bodies that we come into the world with there's a lot we don't have freedom to change how people have treated and mistreated us um there's a lot of unfreedom but then there's also some kind of freedom in us that allows us to respond to our vulnerability and we have to be responsible with that and i that's one of the big we have to and we get to like there are some ways that we are not beholden to our vulnerabilities that we think we are and there are some ways that we are that we want to pretend we live in a fantasy that we're not and so to me the enneagram is just about coming to reality and so that's why i like the skeptic i like the skeptic because the skeptic says is this real and that's a great question but we can ask it in lots of different ways not just scientifically so we want to have this conversation with you in person yeah uh so here's what i'm going to do if you go to mikemcarg.com enneagram bs uh there'll be a form that you can fill out uh annie and i would like to come to your community we just need a room and a way to get there and we can work all that out but if you're interested in that uh just go fill out that form if you think you have a room and a way to get us there and we can figure out those details together we'd like to kind of take this um on the road skeptical and open exploration of the enneagram uh because the the skeptics are so left out of the conversation at this point in our culture so it absolutely also if you'd just like to know how to engage annie moore she does some uh workshops workshops and coaching and retreats so where can they learn all about that you just go to enneagram for wholeness.com or my instagram which is at enneagram e n n e a g r a m for f o r wholeness uh it's amazing it didn't occur to me that someone might not be able to spell enneagram that's called the curse of insider knowledge well annie thanks for coming all the way up from orange county wow man let's just say i came from scotland that seems more feasible to me than orange county yeah um yeah thanks for talking i have really appreciated conversations about how to hold the enneagram you know the philosopher in me i studied philosophy and language before i studied anything else and i'm i'm interested in the systems that we hold this stuff with and i'm interested in the why um which is why i was never a great scientist but why i'm really interested in engaging um scientific inquiry because i think these are all just ways of trying to make meaning of our experiences in the world so let's let's talk to people about it invite us to your into your place and we will come talk to you i think that these conversations get more and more interesting the more that we have specific questions um because there's really specific reasons that we're skeptical and i think there's millions of specific reasons that come from people's experiences so it's fun ask science mike has been brought to you by the graciousness and generosity of my patrons on patreon if you'd like to join them just go to asksciencemike.com and click the patreon button you can learn more about it literally a buck a month really helps this episode was produced by greg nordeen and i've been your host mike mccard thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Music]