shijing
The Living Force
I found this book completely by accident, when I was walking through a bookstore and I just happened to see the word "Enneagram" in the midst of a bunch of books in the Religion section. I picked it up just out of curiosity, and after reading the first part I decided to buy it and read the rest.
The authors are a Franciscan and a Lutheran minister, both of whom have a strong bent toward Christian mysticism (their writing is not really unlike Needleman's in some ways, although it's a bit more rigid). The book itself is written in a Christian context, so that has to be borne in mind when reading and, as with Mouravieff, that gloss has to be acknowledged and stripped away in places to get the most out of it and avoid being turned off, if Christianity (even the mystic tradition) does that for you.
The biggest caveat has to do, ironically, with the main thrust of the book. The authors use the Enneagram as a kind of personality typing, in the same way that people use horoscopy. I didn't realize until I did a search on Amazon that this particular use of the Enneagram seems to have become a virtual cottage industry -- the majority of the books available on the Enneagram seem to use it for this purpose. I have to admit that I have no idea how the Enneagram is really supposed to be used -- Ouspensky's brief mentions of it in In Search of the Miraculous don't suggest that Gurdjieff used it this way, although it was supposed to have a very wide application.
That being said, when I read the main body of the book about personality typing, it did seem to be at least somewhat accurate. There are two parts to it -- the first where personalities are split into three broad categories (mind, heart, body) which correspond to the three Gurdjieffan centers -- and the second, where these three categories are further subdivided into nine types, one for each point of the Enneagram. The types are discussed individually, including strengths, weaknesses, and how identifying your type can help with contemplative self-transformation; they are then discussed in relation to each other, using the Enneagram to show how certain types connect directly and influence each other.
If you did choose to try to apply this framework, the biggest danger would probably be the temptation to go around analyzing everyone and putting them into boxes. I happened to have this with me at a recent fundraiser meeting, and the leader noticed it and said that his ex-wife was a big believer in this use of the Enneagram, and she would drive him crazy when she and a mutual friend would get together and start pigeon-holing everyone. The authors themselves argue that in identifying your own type, you should do so not with an eye toward identifying with it, but rather gradually free yourself from it by integrating aspects of the other eight types.
The most useful part of the book for me, however, was actually the first third where the authors discuss the fallen state of the modern Christian church and the spiritual needs of people that are currently going unaddressed. They propose various ways to rectify this situation, and in many parts you could replace "Christian church" with "FOTCM" and end up with something that is fairly consistent with the aims of FOTCM -- I'd actually recommend this part of the book more strongly than the main part on the Enneagram itself.
One sidenote is that the authors assert that the Enneagram "is genuinely Christian, dating at least to the Desert Fathers, with pre-Christian sources" that also predate its use in Sufism. The amount of discussion they devote to this point is somewhat disappointing, however.
