Fours and the Heart Center

The Enneagram teaches us that there are three Centers of Intelligence through which we perceive, process and respond to the world around us – and that each us will be dominant in one of these centers according to our Enneatype: the Head Center (Types 5, 6 and 7), Heart Center (Types 2, 3 and 4), and the Body Center (Types 8, 9 and 1).

This poem by Rumi (a Four himself) speaks beautifully to the wisdom of the Heart Center, “a freshness in the center of the chest”, “a knowing from within you, moving out”.

Although we are dominant in one of these three centers, EACH of them has wisdom for us – if we are truly listening for it. Gurdjieff talks about “The Fourth Way”, where head, heart and body are in harmony – producing a “fully developed human being…well-balanced, responsive and sane”.

How might your decisions look different if, in making them, you were able to integrate your highest wisdom from all three centers?

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There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid, and it doesn't move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

- Two Kinds of Intelligence

by Rumi

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