Can cooking a potato illustrate personal transformation? Read on …

In this brief talk, Maurice Nicoll outlines a crucial meaning of the Enneagram. It depicts the process by which the higher transforms the lower. The outer points of the Enneagram depict movement up the scale—transformation. The inner lines depict how forces interact to move things along the outer path. “The apparatus of the Universe, so far as the Ray of Creation is concerned, is for the purpose of evolution. It is a vast distilling machine, to extract the finer from the coarser.” Commentaries, p431. M goes on to say that individual evolution, in the esoteric sense, is “seeing by long inner work, and then choosing the finer, and eventually willing and ultimately living the finer.” p431 Understanding, insight, perception from World 24 will be finer than anything we know in World 48. “You see hundreds of connections that you never saw before.” p431 Here, at this point, M introduces his teaching on the Enneagram:  

The inner lines depict how a higher, finer energy acts on the lower to raise it up the scale—the scale of evolution or being. The numbers in the diagram used by Maurice refer to a raw potato at energy level 384, which is acted upon by a higher energy (oven or boiling water, at energy level 96) to raise it up to the level of cooked food for humans, level 192.

The key insight is that the higher must exist for the lower to undergo transformation. Thinking about this in terms of the Ray of Creation, the Ray is a series of transformations of the finer into the coarser, from higher to lower. “This is not difficult to grasp, once the Ray of Creation in its naked meaning is emotionally perceived and privately acknowledged, for in it the higher forms the lower so that, if the lower seeks transformation, the higher is there awaiting it.” M concludes this teaching by noting that the Enneagram depicts a series of transformations from lower to higher, coarser to finer, and that a person (or potato) must be passive and must allow itself to be acted upon by the higher influence. And finally, from the diagram and this teaching, a person cannot be transformed into the level that is acting on them. We can only be transformed into our next stage. “If you reflect, you will see that there must always be something higher than any man, whatever his stage, if evolution is possible, and so there must be a highest that is unattainable.” Commentaries, p434

Note: All page numbers refer to Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Eureka Editions:2020) unless stated otherwise.