The Enneagram Teacher Dr. Khaled ElSherbini is a guest in “Enneagram Insights Podcast – On Awareness, Presence and relationships”. Khaled is the founder of the school Enneagram Egypt. He talks to Flemming Christensen about how the Enneagram found him. And how the Enneagram for him is a tool for awakening.
This is a conversation about how the Enneagram can be used in a very rich and a professional and profound way, but also the darker side of the use of the Enneagram where you actually hurt people.
Interview with Khaled ElSherbini
In Khaled ElSherbini´s Enneagram Egypt School he is teaching different principles for how to conduct your life and how to live a meaningful and purposeful life.
The Enneagram is part of this, which he shares in this episode.
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The Enneagram is a tool, not a goal
Khaled ElSherbini sees the Enneagram as a core tool for awakening.
In the podcast he says:
“So the Enneagram is a tool.
And we should always remember, it’s just a tool.
It is not the goal in itself.
My main program is called Awaken Through Enneagram.
And I keep reminding people, if you look at the name, the goal is awaken.
The goal is knowing ourselves.
That’s the first sessions, know yourself, wake up, enlightenment, finding the truth, breaking the barriers, breaking your boundaries, breaking the chains that have been limiting you.
That is the goal.
It’s a journey of awakening. And the Enneagram is the core tool, the main tool.
It’s not the only tool.“
The Enneagram opens our eyes
According to Dr. Khaled ElSherbini the Enneagram points to deeper psychological and spiritual truths.
“It’s as if it opens your eyes, you get a map, you get a frame, you know the path.
It shows you what to look at.
It points to the stuckness.”
Khaled mentions in the Enneagram Insights Podcast that Dr. Frederik Coene, a Belgian Diplomat, has a nice metaphor:
“He says, when you’re playing a video game and you’re trying to go from one level to another, and then sometimes along the level you find a jewel.
The jewel gives you extra powers and the extra powers just boost your journey to pass the level.
Well, the Enneagram is that jewel, is that extra power.
It is true.
It saves years and years and years of contemplation and meditation and study just by reflecting about the deeper meanings of the types.”
The many Enneagram layers
The Enneagram can be studied at so many layers according to Khaled ElSherbini:
“It can be taken from the behavioral layer, from the motivational layer, from the wounded layer and from the higher meaning layer, the virtues, the holy ideas, the essential qualities.
And even I have studied it way to the divine attributes.
And the deeper you dig in and you take the Enneagram more seriously, the more it facilitates this awakening journey.”
Our journey is to get back to unity again
In the second podcast interview Dr. Khaled El Sherbini talks about his take and focus on the Enneagram.
Khaled talks about a journey from unity to multiplicity and back to unity again:
“I never thought one day I’d be an Enneagram teacher or even a mindfulness teacher or a consciousness teacher.
All this, I was spending time with myself to know myself.
And the Enneagram, immediately I saw it as something that can take me deep into not just my meaning and purpose, but the meaning and purpose of this entire journey.
It opened up a collective union. I like to talk about our journey on earth as an individual, as a species, even as the universe itself, as a journey from unity to multiplicity and back to unity again.”
To be part of the One
Dr. Khaled ElSherbini stresses in the “Ennegram Insights Podcast”, that the return journey and the destination unity is very different than the initial unity:
“The initial unity, which can be the metaphor of an infant in a womb of a mother, where really it is not separate from the mother.
It is a unity where I have no idea that I even exist.
I have no individuality in that unity.
I am part of the one.
It’s like the big bank state where all energy is just one.
And then complete multiplicity on the other side, on the other polarity is where we feel complete separation.”
The complete seperation
Dr. Khaled ElSherbini elabotes on the complete multiplicity and the complete seperation:
“This is the end of Khaled and this is the start of Flemming.
And it’s in this state where ego has its biggest shape.
It is ego here and its meaning to me would be who I define myself to be.
And I define myself by this identifying from everything that is not myself.
Complete separation.
And that would be the lowest point or the furthest point on the pendulum.”
The return to unity
Dr. Khaled ElSherbini explains that the return to unity carries a new gift in it, a new jewel in it, a new consciousness in it.
“Now I am coming back to unity while maintaining the sense of individuality.
I am one and separate at the same time.
Just being able to say, I am one with everything else, includes this I and this oneness.
It is a seperation and a connection at the same time.
It’s an enneagram to me somehow, even I didn’t know it at the moment, but that’s what I saw in it.
I saw in it the separation and the connection. It shows me who I am as a separate individual, but it also shows me how I am not separate from everything else.
And at that moment, from a Sufi perspective, I connected it to the names and attributes of Allah as defined by the Sufis in Islam, which on a broader sense can be today called the archetypes, the higher archetypes, the simpler archetypes.”
“The Enneagram types are archetypes”
Dr. Khaled ElSherbini view the enneagram types as archetypes.
“We are just all fashioned from these higher archetypes.
And the archetypes are fashioned from these higher qualities.
So again, it became this thread that connects everything together and gives meaning and purpose to our entire journey on earth.
And all my teaching of the enneagram comes from this frame, how we are the same and different.”
Dr. Khaled ElSherbini Author, philosopher, teacher, mystic Dr. Khaled ElSherbini is the author of programs: - Awaken through Enneagram - Integral Enneagram - Conscious Coaching The Enneagram Egypt´s core Programmes: https://courses.enneagramegypt.com/
Listen to the interview with Dr. Khaled ElSherbini on Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeart Radio or your favorite podcast app.
Relevant ressources:
Dr Khaled ElSherbini is coming to Denmark in May of 2023:
Enneagram Egypt: https://enneagramegypt.com/dr-khaled-elsherbini
Training with Flemming Christensen: https://www.flemmingchristensen.com/training
This interview has also been aired in Flemming Christensen´s Danish Podcast Enneagrammet Next Level.
