The Unseen Sea – 4: Nine Steps to Knowing

Part Four of The Unseen Sea: adrift in the enneagram

I am not equating LUCA’s enduring sense of self-protection with our own consciousness as a living, brain-possessing being, with all its complexity of feeling, thought and emotion. But anyone drawing a line between the two would, in my opinion, be correct.

The ascent of the separated and self-determining cell created the entire future of the tree of biological life – and the consciousness that emerged as it evolved.

The idea of ’emergence’ as a separate branch of science is now well established. It developed shortly after that of Chaos Theory, which showed us the anti-intuitive truth about how life becomes more sophisticated with time, and takes evolutionary leaps ‘far from equilibrium’.

Emergence consists of a set of behaviours that arise when ‘lower level’ entities work together. The ’emergent’ behaviours look, and may be, in their own ways, intelligent.

An example of an emergent behaviour is the way a flock of migrating birds are able to navigate and move as a single unit. The birds lose none of their individuality, but are strengthened by the unity within the group.

We may think that we have yet to see examples of emergent behaviour at the moral level. But they are not hard to find. Being of a ‘higher’ order, they manifest in a way which appears miraculous and leave their mark on all present. An often quoted example from the ‘Great War’ is the way British and German soldiers crossed their own front lines to play football together on the frozen mud of the French trenches during the Christmas of 1914.

The authorities worked hard to prevent a recurrence of such unstructured peace.

The Ego is an authority, too.

Assisted by a knowledge of the enneagram, we can observe the behaviour of its falsely-premised existence and its continued control over the behaviour of its ‘host’: the truthful and honest world of LUCA’s evolved, physical body.

How this ‘mini-tyrant’ has taken over our psychological lives is the story of the enneagram of personality – one of an interacting family of enneagrams that describe, and provide the keys to, our existence.

The enneagram is, in its own way, both a cell and a member of an emergent body. The emergent body is a higher level of group consciousness on the Earth. The enneagram of the individual human has preset interfaces to this emerging ‘next step’. These are to be found at points three and six on its circumference, and their role will be unraveled as we travel around the circle and through the story of LUCA.

The enneagram is a servant of evolution, for it not only helps a woman or man to come to know themselves as they truly are – stripped of false personality – but also shows the role that our intelligence can play in the ‘unfolding of the now’, as we become conscious of the potential power of our own emergent behaviour.

From her dramatic beginnings, LUCA’s story looks like a tree, growing upwards in complexity as the Life took on varied forms to suit its widening landscapes.

We might, perhaps, think of another tree, one not of the physical, growing down in consciousness as LUCA’s life-tree struggles upwards to bring something to matter which it did not have before. Whether this was by design or accident depends on your viewpoint of separation.

If you see our human life as separated from the order in the universe, then the random arising of LUCA may appeal. If you consider that all life is a wave, breaking, rhythmically, on a billion shores, then LUCA may be seen as a very special moment in the story of the whole of Life.

End Part Four.

Read the previous parts of this series:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three,