Mr. Gurdjieff is talking about the energy behind the Enneagram, which he called the fourth way, he said that part of the mission is that the wisdom of the East must come into balance and blend with the creative energy of the West. He said, if that doesn’t happen, our civilization will go backwards, it will regress. And we see evidence of that now. We’ve never been closer to really the kind of world that we all hope for, and we seem ready to just wreck it.
Russ Hudson is a renowned American Enneagram professional teacher, a bestseller Enneagram writer and is drawn to the middle east and Egypt.
He is presenting at the IEA conference in Cairo, “Remember what you are” in January 2024.
The title of his talk is “Lessons from the Ancient World”.
Russ Hudson in Enneagram Insights podcast
Listen to Flemming Christensen and Russ Hudson in this episode of Enneagram Insights podcast about:
✔️ Russ Hudson´s journey with the Enneagram and his lineage
✔️How the Enneagram actually point towards presence
✔️ How Russ Hudson´s own work with the Enneagram has impacted the way he teaches or relates to people or live his life
✔️ Russ Hudson has been guiding tours to Egypt for many years, why Egypt?
✔️ If Russ Hudson had to focus on bringing the Enneagram to A) young adults, or bringting the Enneagram to a group working with B) relationships and personal relationship or C) leaders of organizations and businesses to be more masterful in the way that they act. What would he choose?
✔️ Russ Hudson´s Wish for the Enneagram in the future
Russ Hudson quotes from the Enneagram Insights podcast
Ancient Egypt and the view of the world
Russ Hudson: “As you go further back in time, human beings seem to have a very different view of the world, they experienced the world differently.
If you go back to the ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptians had a different way of experiencing themselves and their role in the universe than we do now.
You can go back and look at the view of the ancient Egyptians and start to understand a little bit of how they saw things.
And I think it fills in some missing pieces of our modern experience. I don’t think we’re gonna become ancient Egyptians. I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think we could if we wanted to.
However, their way of looking at life, at reality, at what humanity is here for, they have some clues for us that I think could be very helpful in our journey into our future. Our future now, as we face the many problems that we face.
One thing I tell my students is, you know, they might say, “oh, well, you know, but Egypt fell, so how great could they be?” Yeah, they fell, but they lasted, their civilization lasted thousands of years.
Not hundreds, thousands of years. What of our countries have been anything like that? None. So, you know, you start to have respect, you know, and that’s a fact.
They obviously had something that was working. And so, why not learn from them?
And that’s really what I’ll be talking about in that and how those ideas relate to things we learned in the Enneagram.”
The wisdom of the East and the creativity of the West
Russ Hudson: “Mr. Gurdjieff is talking about the energy behind the Enneagram, which he called the fourth way, he said that part of the mission is that the wisdom of the East must come into balance and blend with the creative energy of the West.
Now that very interesting statement.
He said, if that doesn’t happen, our civilization will go backwards, it will regress. And we see evidence of that now. We’ve never been closer to really the kind of world that we all hope for, and we seem ready to just wreck it.
So I felt that we could not ever have that happen if we don’t know the Western tradition, if we only know the outside of it.
There are profound teachings in Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam, but most people don’t know them. They know the external expressions, which have their place, and there’s a reason they’re there. But there is this deeper teaching in all of them that’s known by very few people.
It went secret pretty early on. And it all leads you back to Egypt.
And Egypt, you can see the earliest stirrings of this particular way of looking at reality. I think in a certain way, one of my friends and mentors A. H. Almaas, he used to say that the Eastern traditions tell us about the ultimate nature of reality.
The experiential understanding of what is the ground of existence. And whether you’re talking about Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, they’re talking about that.
Western religion, and of course those traditions focus on, and if you know that, and if you live in a country, that’s not something you would believe in. How do you live? For example, if you become a Buddhist monk, the precepts of Buddhism are very important.
On the other side, the Western view is more about how do we live in a way that’s harmonious with the deeper purpose of humanity, with the divine order, however you want to think of it, and more focused on that, on right living.
And all of those traditions have explorations of the ground of reality. So they kind of balance each other.
But we can’t have that marriage if we don’t know the inner teaching. It’s encouraging to me.
I know a lot of people who are Muslim, for example, and many of them are my friends who will be at the conference in Cairo, who are really getting interested in Sufism and the real inner teachings of Islam.
Christians, too, really want to get beyond just go to church and sing songs. Fine, but there’s a deeper message to Christianity.
Jews learning about the Kabbalistic traditions and the mystical side of their religion. There’s been a growing interest of that, especially in young people.
And the Enneagram is part of that, where it gets out of religion as a club that you join and more into a guidance for remembering your inner life and how to live in the world while staying connected with what your heart loves, what is the deeper truth.”
