Episode 199 The Emergence of Peace: Finding Tranquility Beyond Circumstance

In this episode of The Real Enneagram, we delve into the profound topic of peace, a universal desire that transcends all Enneagram types and explore how peace is not merely a reaction to our circumstances but a deeper quality of the soul that can be accessed regardless of external chaos.

We begin by discussing Viktor Frankl's insights from his book Man's Search for Meaning, highlighting how he maintained a sense of peace even in the most horrific conditions of the Holocaust. This leads us to reflect on our own lives, where many of us struggle with anxiety and anger in response to the turmoil around us. Joe shares a personal story about losing his job and how he and his wife cultivated peace through gratitude, transforming their kitchen into a reminder of what they still had.

Scott adds to the conversation by emphasizing the importance of being present and how peace cannot be imposed but rather is an emergent quality. We discuss the challenges each Enneagram type faces in maintaining peace and the practices that can help, such as self-inquiry and mindfulness.

As we wrap up, we encourage our listeners to consider how they can cultivate peace in their own lives and relationships, especially in a world filled with conflict. We close with an inquiry for reflection: "How might you use your body, your breath, your posture, your stillness, as a doorway back to peace when your type's ego pattern disrupts it?"

Thank you for joining us today, and we hope this discussion inspires you to seek and nurture peace within yourself and your communities.

To learn more about the Institute for Conscious Being, visit: theicb.info

Transcript

Scott:
You are now listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O.

Nanette: Well, welcome back to The Real Enneagram, a podcast brought to you by the Institute for Conscious Being. I'm Nanette Mudiam, and I'm so glad to welcome you here today. With me today is Dr. Joseph Howell and Scott Smith.

Joe: Hi, Nanette. Hello.

Nanette: Hi, guys. I'm happy to be with you here today. Happy for our discussion topic today, which is going to be on peace.

Joe: Whoa.

Nanette: That's not a small subject, is it?

Joe: No. No.

Nanette: You know, Joe, I've heard you talk in the past about peace and especially with our focus at the Institute on finding our soul child, which we know we can move from ego to our soul. And that is really the aim of our work at the Institute for Conscious Being is to direct people out of the Enneagram of personality to the Enneagram of soul, right? As we talk about the Enneagram of Soul, what we have found is that there is a universal desire and it's for peace, correct?

Joe: I believe you're right.

Nanette: And that's not just for a type nine. That's for everybody, right? Right. Why is that?

Joe: The absence of the fear, the absence of the shame, the absence of the anger, because those are the three major things that plague us all. And, and we want to be without those. But our fixation always causes not just one, but maybe all of those simultaneously. And to be without that fixation is a wondrous thing, because rushing in to replace it is the peace of the soul.

Nanette: Right now, we seem to be living, and maybe this has been true for all time and all ages, but we seem to be living really devoid of peace. When we look around at our circumstances, whether that's national news or international news or local news, there seems to be a lot of strife in the world, a lot of the absence of peace. And so how can we find peace in the absence of it in the world around us? Is peace circumstance or is it something beyond circumstance?

Joe: Well, your question brings me to Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. He was a survivor of the Holocaust and had to endure horrific circumstances in his imprisonment. And he devised a way that regardless of his circumstances, he would be able to maintain equanimity, calmness, tranquility, peace, and a sense of meaning even with a life that was many times in solitary confinement. His book speaks about the actual spiritual practice and the mental set that enhances our peacefulness. And it is not a denial of the circumstances that are going on, according to Frankel. It is an absorption of those circumstances into a greater peace that we are in contact with in our own soul. So, for example, there he is, say, in solitary confinement, and he looks through the window and is able to see a tree. And instead of that tree being perceived as just one tree in a prison yard, scraggly and blown by the wind and scarred by people's bayonets or even maybe people being shot at it, he looks at that tree as a sign of enduring life. that life springs up even when things are awry, when things are desolate, when things are dark, because the life spring always continues underneath everything. So in his looking at the tree, instead of seeing it as a scraggly little one of a kind being that is probably going to not live long, he sees it as a reassuring sign that life continues, that life always springs up. And that plugs in to his own being, his own life, that he too, if he can keep the bodily contact with that sense of emerging life, that he will make it, that he will continue to think and create and absorb this life energy, and that the outer circumstances will not devour him.

Nanette: It's a powerful story to think about him in those circumstances. and being able to find peace in the midst of the most horrible circumstances. And yet I think that we have difficulty in just, you know, not being in those terrible circumstances to find that same kind of peace. Many of us are living with anxiety and frenzy and anger in response to the things that we see going on in the world. And so it's difficult to think about what practices might we cultivate in our lives to bring about this same kind of peace.

Joe: Well, I love that question, too. And oddly enough, I was thinking about that this morning, Nanette and Scott, and I remember a time when I was around 40. I lost my job. I was an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Alabama and taught medical residents and wrote and wrote articles, did research and had my clinical practice, taught the residents. It was my dream job. And our little family had put down roots and the small town and our children were in school. And the year before, we had bought a house and got a mortgage. And when the staff was called in to be told that our grant was not renewed, I mean, there were gasps. in the room, because everybody's life is important and it takes their career to keep that life going financially and also spiritually. So I never will forget coming home that night, having to tell my wife, Lark, that what we had thought was no more. And that if I was to continue with medical education, we would most likely have to move. And our little community would be no more. Our children would have to be uprooted. They would have to leave their grandparents. We would have to leave our home that we had worked so hard on. And mainly, we would have to leave our identities. It seemed as though everything in one fell swoop was taken away. And it got grim that night as we began to think of our isolation, the things that we were going to lose, the deprivation we would have to suffer, and not to mention how we're going to fill in that gap between one job and the next. But that very night, it seemed as though in hitting bottom, we said to ourselves, but we have not lost everything. Look at what we still have. We still have your parents. We still have my parents. We've got our beautiful children. We've got all of our memories. We've got our friends who live up the street and in many, many different areas. We've got our minds, we've got our abilities, we've got… And we started to write what we had and what we were grateful for in a notebook. And we tore the sheets out of the notebook and began to paste them on our kitchen cabinets. And before long, The cabinets were totally hidden because there was new wallpaper and the wallpaper, each one of the little sheets had on it some, some treasure that really was not at risk. It was something that we had then that was not going to be taken away. And then when we went from floor to ceiling with the cabinets, we started on the walls and then the doors. And that room turned into a little jewel box of reminders of what is going right. And whenever we looked at it, we would get the most wonderful sense of peace. Because we knew that things weren't devastated. They were just going to change. And that's a whole different way of conceiving the hard times that we're going through. Just being able to look up on the cabinets and see the people who supported us just gave our hearts new energy. It was transformational. It was powerful. to have our fear displaced with peace, simply because of the shift that was afforded through gratefulness.

Nanette: That's a beautiful story. And I'm sure some people may be covering their cabinets before too long, we might need to get some pieces of paper out. It makes me think, just just knowing you and your wife, Joe, you, of course, are an ego type six, and Lark, your wife is an ego type seven. And So, I imagine your security was really, really threatened. This was a peace disruptor for your life to certainly lose your job, which was your sense of security, right? So, all the egotypes experience peace disruptors. We all experience different things that might steal our peace. For an aid, it might be losing control. over a circumstance. For one, it might be feeling attacked by a critic or their own inner critic. What are some different practices you think that might be helpful? And maybe Scott could help us here too, because what is stealing the piece for a type five, you know, a lack of knowledge about something, a feeling that they can't hold their world with what they know. Is that a good description, Scott?

Scott: I'd say so.

Nanette: Okay.

Scott: In a way, it's trying to assert control. I mean, every ego type in its disintegration is trying to establish some kind of control over themselves, their environment, what have you. So for me, it's an endless task of trying to organize the self, trying to create competence. I mean, trying to carve out peace. I've come to feel you can't create peace. You can't impose peace, whether in a society or within the self. It's an emergent quality of the present. So when I'm very disintegrated and I'm up in my head trying to manage myself, I've got all my attention on me. Um, there's no room for the world, for the present, for the divine. So I find practices that help me get back into the present moment. And I mean, that's, that's every spiritual practice in one way or another. For me, the body's primary, and not just sitting up in my head and noticing my body from there, although that can be a good start. But ultimately, feeling myself as one with the body. and sensitizing to what I feel through the body, which is always the present moment. And as we talk about it in the Institute for Conscious Being, the divine suffuses the present moment. It's a felt reality that I can sensitize to if I can shift my attention from my abstract thoughts onto the sensational present moment and that again happens through the body in my experience.

Nanette: Well, I, you know, obviously this subject is, is, um, is core to, to my own, um, issues as an eco type nine, who's, uh, who, who loses her peace over conflict and the world is full of conflict, whether it's around or within. Um, and so I, I find the practices obviously for me are really are sacred action. When I start moving and stop feeling disabled. That I can't do anything or that I have to avoid. That helps me start to experience peace. And I agree, Scott. It is very much about being present. It is about knowing. that I imagine just in your own circumstance, Joe, and losing your job or thinking about Viktor Frankl in that space, you can't control the future. I mean, that's where our anxiety and loss of peace is coming from. It is very much we can find peace only in the present moment. I guess that could be our encouragement to all of our listeners, whatever your ego type is to find yourself in the present moment. Because the ego's strategies of trying to control and analyze and distract These are so common in our culture right now in responding to the circumstances that are around us all. And so obviously, we want to help our listeners, hopefully today, in thinking about ways that they can cultivate peace in their own life.

Joe: And then I just wanted to go back to something that Scott said, which I think is tremendously important. And that is the whole idea that you can't you can't impose peace on yourself. You know, that as a mental structure, it's not going to come. It can come through addiction or through altered states of consciousness through the ego, of course. Peace as a quality of the soul is there when we remove the obstacles to it. And so that's what I liked about what you said is that if we try to impose order, and I believe you meant that not only on ourselves individually, but collectively trying to impose peace is just counterproductive.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, our, our culture is a very egoic culture. It's a very top down culture and it has been for thousands of years. I don't just mean American culture. I mean, Western culture. So we mistake order for peace. You can't impose peace with military or police force. You can enforce order. But peace is a quality of community and mutual respect. Again, it's it's an emergent thing. It's a bottom up thing, which is to me a soul thing, not a top down thing, which, again, to me is an ego thing.

Nanette: It's so interesting that as we have this discussion on this little word called peace, that we recognize it is infinite in its possibilities, and yet it's so finite in our own experiences, that it is both individual and it's collective, that we cannot somehow have collective peace without first having our own inner peace, right? And it has to start there. I think it's so interesting when, as Scott was talking about that, how, you know, as many people know, I have friends in Ukraine. And so thinking about what peace means as we start to have peace talks, and how most of us recognize that that is so far off, and it still doesn't seem like it's going to solve anything, even if you try to. enforce that, that you have unwilling parties and you have things that cannot be negotiated. And somehow you feel very overwhelmed that peace cannot be enforced, that it cannot be manipulated, or it cannot be coerced. That somehow we recognize that collectively, what we are so desperate for is to see the world governed in peace. And yet, I'm not sure how we're going to get there if it doesn't start with us as individuals.

Joe: Well said. So that's why. we do this work, isn't it?

Joe: The work of this institute and other organizations like it that help us really come to terms with what blocks peace from us individually and for us to find it individually gives rise to communities that are attracted to each other because of it. And these communities reinforce this peacefulness. Even as conflict comes up in the community, if peace is valued, they will work through the inevitable conflicts. And then the more who join these communities, the more we have, and the more communities of peace we have, the more the collective is influenced.

Nanette: You know, as you were talking about that, it made me think about how in our own families, very often here in America right now, we're finding that families, for many reasons, don't have peace for whatever conflict is raging in them with personalities and egos. many families are being divided by political stances, or by opinions about things that, you know, we so, so called have researched, you know, that we are not experts on, and yet somehow we have an opinion on thanks to the World Wide Web. So how can we take this pursuit of this quality, this nature of peace, and somehow cultivate it, not only just in ourselves, but in the nearest and dearest to us in our relationships? because there aren't a lot of things that can be solved absolutely, right? They're going to have, they don't call it peace negotiations for no reason. We're going to have to negotiate. We're going to have to realize that there might be a third way, that it's not maybe blue or red or black or white, but somewhere in between. So I was thinking about how this, can be learned and cultivated in communities of consciousness. What are some strategies that you think can help us?

Joe: As you were talking about that, I dropped into my heart and what the image was that I got was of the hippies with their peace and love sign. I say their peace and love signs. I was in that era and had my own signs of peace and love, but that faded away as the 60s and 70s left. My understanding of why that arose, peace and love, make love not war, all of those things, is because we were in a war. This country was in a dire war, and it affected all of us. Those who were to be drafted, like me, and those who would be losing somebody to a war that we watched on television every night, and we saw body bags coming back. in these huge airplanes lined up at the airports and coffins or body bags or whatever. And even though they said that we were winning, we, anybody with any sense could see what the price was for winning. It was huge. And over 50,000 men and women. lost their lives to a country that we are now friends with and trade with and have reciprocity with. And, you know, yet it's a communist country. But in the 60s and 70s, we were told we could never let this country become communist, because if we do, there will be the domino effect. Well, in other words, all the countries will. And so that was enough to get a lot of people to throw their hat in the ring. I'm going to go fight. The thing about it was is that We could not, by war, prevent something that was a geopolitical force that involved many other countries, including China, that we could not affect. It wasn't just about Vietnam. And we can read about all this now, but then we didn't know it. We thought if we could just stop the hemorrhaging there, we would save democracy. And that was an error. So, in that agony, peace and love arose. I believe as a way for us to get through that terrible pain, for us to be reminded that peace does exist and that love does exist. Now to boil this down to the individual relationship, as you so beautifully brought up, there are people I have individual relationships with who I do not have peace with because we disagree politically, and that political disagreement has been highlighted because of recent issues in our country and globally. But there is one way that I'm able to be with these people who I disagree with politically, and that's the hippie's other sign, which is love. If I can love that person with whom I disagree, I have some kind of synteny with them. I have some kind of reciprocity, if you will. I have some kind of way to be with them that bumps our relationship to a higher level than politics. It bumps it to, I don't know, I don't care what you believe. I value you. I love you because you mean something special to me. And also you are an expression of the divine. I'm not going to turn my back on that. So peace and love, I believe the hippies signs, I think that they are interdependent on one another.

Nanette: A good reminder, a good life lesson from history for us now. Might be time to revive the peace signs and bell bottoms then. You know, Joe, as we start to wrap up this conversation today, we have talked about a practice that we have at the Institute for Conscious Being when we do our intensives with our students called inquiry. And we thought we would start closing our podcast with a inquiry, just as a way of really maybe taking home the lesson of the podcast discussion and maybe supporting this virtual growth of our listeners. And so first, can you just kind of tell our audience what an inquiry is, Joe?

Joe: Well, to me, an inquiry is self exploration. If we have a question, even if we have an answer, It can be exposed to self-inquiry and we can come to know more about the answer to that question or the question itself. The reason being is that at our core is our truth. And so often we do not operate from our core. We operate from a superficial layer of ego thought, other intentions, what have you. And we look, we'll oftentimes walk through the world without those intentions or thoughts being inspected in light of what our core is or what our core values are. And we can even walk in the world in illusions that something is true, when in fact, if we expose it to our core values, it's not true. So self-inquiry, which is taught in many spiritual schools, and was taught by Gurdjieff himself. And it's taught in the Eureka School, which is the school that came from Oscar Hichazo. It is a way with another human being to be asked a question and then give our answer to that question. but then be asked that question again after that first answer to see what our second layer of answer might be. And then after we give our second layer of answer, our partner asks the question again, and we give a third layer of answer. And this can continue in layers until we get to what is called our core, our inner nature, our core value. And the truth that comes from that, sometimes surprises ourselves, but we know it's valid. We know in our heart That it's genuine because it comes from our depths. It's not just a surface thing that pleases us or pleases the questioner. And the questioner is not there to make judgments. The questioner is there to just hold space. for the person who is doing the inquiry. And then the roles usually switch and the person who was answering becomes the questioner. And there are many forms of inquiry. Self-inquiry can take a form of being only with yourself. You ask yourself the question over and over again. And another form of inquiry is monologue, where you just speak maybe for 15 minutes on this subject to answer that question. And in your talking, you spiral down inevitably to your core truth, to your depths. There's another form of inquiry that has more than two people, three, sometimes four, and all of them take a turn in answering the question and they all go down together. It takes a longer time because there are more people. But it's a very powerful way to understand our own truth, our own true nature, and I usually have a lot of ahas when I'm doing that spiritual practice.

Nanette: Well, we're excited to share the spiritual practice. And I might add, too, that if someone is hearing of this for the first time, and maybe is still not sure because they haven't practiced with someone, they could they can also do this on their own, Joe, could they, they you can journal an inquiry question and just write and write and write until you really run out. It is a form of practice that brings you to a deep awareness of something you didn't know was there all along, an answer that you didn't know was there all along, right?

Joe: Yes.

Nanette: Okay. So we're going to close today. Scott, thank you so much. And Joe, for sharing your thoughts about peace today. And we do hope that these words have been encouraging. And so here's our closing inquiry for you. How might you use your body, your breath, your posture, your stillness, as a doorway back to peace when your type's ego pattern disrupts it?

Scott: Thank you for listening to The Real Enneagram, a podcast by the Institute for Conscious Being. To learn more about the Institute and its offerings, visit theicb.info. That's T-H-E I-C-B dot I-N-F-O. The music for today's podcast was composed and performed by ICB faculty member Drexel Rayford.

Nanette: Thanks for listening today. We hope you liked what you heard. If you did, please subscribe, leave a review, and share this with your friends and family.