“Upgrading” the Enneagram requires a shift in terminology, along with a shift in the interpretation of the nine-pointed diagram. In Enneagram 1.0, the nine points on the diagram mark nine personality types, or styles. Enneagram 2.0 reassigns those points to a different concept: perspective. I’m using the word perspective to indicate both worldview and place from which one views the world. It is one’s viewpoint, point of view (POV), perceptual position, or mental posture relative to oneself, others, and the environment.

These perspectives have a relationship to personality type that is developed more fully in my paper. The points on the hexad (the six-pointed star shape) mark the six perspectives modeled by Enneagram 2.0. The points on the triangle mark three combinations of two perspectives apiece.

To identify perspectives Seven and Five, I employ the NLP distinction between associated and dissociated experience. These are two different ways of projecting consciousness into the environment. When associated, we feel ourselves to be inside a situation, whether it is the situation we are currently experiencing or one we are only imagining. From an associated vantage point, we experience ourselves as if inside the scene, using our senses to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste what is going on around us and inside us. From a dissociated vantage point, we experience ourselves as if outside the scene, looking on, with less immediate sensory experience. From the dissociated space, we think about or get a sense of what is going on “out there.” We may even be able to imagine watching ourselves as if in a movie.

Perspective Seven, the associated position, is probably the first to develop. Initially, the personality is undifferentiated from others and the environment. As the individual matures and adds other perspectives, the Seven POV continues to provide a space for being one with our environment. It’s what allows us to be in deep rapport with another person. It allows us to enter into a problem to analyze and solve it as if from the inside. It allows, for example, the person giving a massage to “feel” his or her way into the muscles of the one receiving it.

Perspective Five, the dissociated position, introduces difference. Standing apart from a person, place, or situation, we achieve detachment. We can see patterns that could not be seen from the inside. We can remove our emotions from the scene and merely witness. We can evaluate “objectively.” Perhaps most importantly, from Five perspective we can observe ourselves from the outside, as if in a mirror.

Five looks in the mirror of his environment and begins to construct a separate identity out of it: I am not that, nevertheless I am somehow (like) that. This mirror identification with the environment is what makes personalities with a Five component so attracted to observing, exploring, and theorizing about the world: they are finding themselves in it. But always from a little distance.

Eight-consciousness appears to be centered in the middle of the body and is tethered to the other. Using perspective Eight, one forges an identity through interrelationship with others. I tend to refer to this action in grammatical terms borrowed from the parts of the common English sentence structure: subject-verb-object. The subject does something that involves an object. While holding subject position, we love, lead, follow, assert, motivate, convince, desire, see. In object position, we are desired, punished, rewarded, valued, taught, led, loved. The Eight perspective holds identity in place via the recognition of the other, and Eight’s motivation is to achieve and maintain that recognition. This perspective also has a pivotal role in channeling desire, as will be discussed later.

Perspective Two involves a shift or displacement away from being identified in relation to others, toward having what the other wants. Two prefers more distance from the other and so does not operate from the Eightish position of personally being that which the other desires. But Two still needs to make a connection, so she attempts to learn or intuit what the other wants and to give it to him.

Perspective Two is what NLP calls other position—projecting consciousness into the space of the other in order to know from the other’s point of view what he thinks. I tend to discuss this perspective in terms of the other’s desire, because I think the main thing we want to know about another’s thoughts is what he wants, and most particularly what he wants from us. Two-consciousness appears to be centered in the heart as well as in the other.

Perspective Four is a turning inward to ask, Who am I separate from other people, and what do I want for myself? This perspective promotes creativity since, without the other to show us what to want, we have to find some other reference point—the missing piece that we often hear about in connection with Fours. Indeed, the Four’s mental posture can be somewhat solipsistic. But the crucial function of perspective Four is this: to clear away enmeshments with the other, freeing ourselves to feel our own desire welling up within us.

The perspective of point One is an identification with principle. At One, I stand as an individual representation of some ultimate reality of beingness. This is the most abstract of the six mental postures. It doesn’t rest on sensory experience but posits itself on thoughts accessible only through language or some gnostic form of experience. Or not. I don’t want to be too explicit because I can’t imagine what’s possible for One beyond my own knowing.