Holy Ideas
Introduction
The Holy Ideas
20 Frequently Asked Questions
Comments & Pictures
Bios of Facilitators
Sample Study Questions
Music and Poetry by Type
Application
Links
Sample Study Questions

First Set of Study Questions

The first questions in our study together give us an opportunity to reflect on our own life journey and consider what has brought us to where we are now. By looking back at our early lives, we begin to recognize our formative experiences and how they contributed to particular qualities and liabilities as well as our loss of contact with Being.

The following questions will help you remember your early journey. Do not feel obliged to address all of these. Instead, use them as jumping-off points for your own reflections.

Think back to the earliest years of your childhood. What feelings, senses, thoughts come to mind as you explore:
•   Your connection with your mother in your first year of life?
•   Your later experience of noticing your separate self?
•   Your widening to include your father?
•   Further widening to others as your world got larger?

Then look at your childhood and adolescence.
•   What were the formative experiences?
•   Which family members and/or other individuals played a role in these experiences?
•   Who in your family did you try to emulate?
•   Who did you tend to relate poorly to?
•   How did these individuals affect your emerging personality and sense of self?


Second Set of Study Questions

Claudio Naranjo teaches that the origin of our personality structure is rooted in our "sensitivity" to one particular Holy Idea. In other words, when we are born, one of the Holy Ideas is tenuous for us. As our early childhood experiences and their impacts are filtered through this sensitivity, we lose sight of this particular Holy Idea and its way of helping us perceive things, and in its place we substitute a fixed and distorted perspective.

1. Consider the three core fixations of the Enneagram triads-the desire to connect (the heart triad), fear or aversion (the head triad), and self-forgetting (the belly-based triad). Which triad was most reinforced by your childhood and adolescent experiences?

2. Looking back to your childhood and adolescence, how early are you able to recognize the emergence of your Enneagram pattern?

3. What preference for a particular sub-type do you recognize as you reflect on the connections with your mother, father, self, and others?

4. Do you recognize the presence of either of your wing points? In what ways do they stand out?

5. Due to the positive or negative circumstances in your life during these formative years, did you tend to spend time in your stress point or in your secure point?