I wonder if like me, you are drawn into the habit of considering what your New Year resolution might be for 2017?
Dieting is popular, along with giving up booze or some other avoidance aim.
As with so many endeavours of this kind, they often fizzle out unless we reinvigorate them along the way. Maybe we add in some exercise too lose weight, or join a support network.
In Enneagram terms both serve in the notion of “Striking a Do”, a reference to beginning a musical octave. The law of seven is derived from the sequence of 142857. It also relates to the seven notes of an ascending musical scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la , si.
Your New Year resolution starts at point 9 as the first Do and proceeds clockwise. In the teaching of Mr Gurdjieff a new Do has to be struck at point 3 for our endeavours succeed, otherwise we just end up back where we started.
Point 3 is the first conscious shock, and relates to the mi-fa interval that is required to move from points 2 to point 4. When we add a new Do, like an additional activity or goal to dovetail with our original aim, we experience the first conscious shock, and strike a new Do.
Whatever path we choose towards some kind of enlightenment, whether it is mindfulness practices, inquiry, self-observation or studying our Enneagram type, we inevitably encounter greater complexity. Our ideas of an inner peace that is devoid of external conflicts, challenges or confusion are swept away by the shear awareness of an embodied Presence of Reality.
What we are developing in our Work is the capacity to be with greater complexity and uncertainty. Simple solutions and binary thinking that compartmentalise the world into good and bad and right and wrong become shades of greys, and interconnected systems. This is the nature of point 6 as the second conscious shock manifest from the dissonance of two scales diverging.
Our ability to be with complexity and uncertainty requires presence in all three centres.
When this occurs, and maybe this is your experience of the coming New Year, the resolution comes from being fully present to it. Third force requires the ability to be with the ambiguity and paradox.
Third force is outside of the known octave and process. It arises from the Do-Si interval of each descending scale that reverberates anticlockwise around the Enneagram.
Every Do of an ascending octave has it’s corresponding descending scale as a Ray of Creation. The first interval follow immediately after the Do, thus creating a multitude of descending octaves.
Resolution does not came from eliminating the dissonance by choosing one over the other. The resolution is experienced when the dissonance becomes a harmonic element within a more expansive chord.
We don’t have to add a new scale. We trust in the process and the grace of the descending octaves. We learn what it is to trust in the present moment, and become open to the unfolding grace of Great Nature.
Happy New Year.