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been influenced by the work of Peter D. Ouspensky and George Ivanovich
Gurdjieff; that there is also a distinctively Catholic commentary on the prop-
erties of the enneagram; and that traces of it can be found in the Vedas, the
most ancient Sanskrit scriptures, as well as in Sufism (Beer 1994b, 202-4).
Beer also mentions that while working on Project Cybersyn in Chile in the
early 1970s he had been given his own personal mandala by a Buddhist monk,
that the mandala included an enneagram, and that after that he had used this
figure in his meditational practices (205).
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Once more we can recognize the
line of thought Beer set out in “Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God.” The
enneagram appears in many traditions of mystical thought; it can therefore
be assumed to be part the common wisdom of mankind, distilled from varied
experience of incomprehensible realms; but its significance is performative,
as an aid to meditation, rather than purely representational.
So what? Beer recorded that in the syntegration experiments of the early
1990s he had acquired a new colleague in Toronto, Joe Truss, who had once
founded a business based on an enneagrammatic model, and that Truss had
then succeeded in finding reentrant enneagrammatic trajectories within the
syntegration icosahedron.
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Truss and Beer were both exceptionally impressed
by the fact that these trajectories were three-dimensional, rather than lying
in a single plane as in figure 6.21 (Beer 1994b, 206): “Joe came to my house
late at night to show me his discovery, and he was very excited. Well, all such
moments are exciting. But I was unprepared that he should say, 'Do you see
what this means? The icosahedron is the actual
origin
of the enneagram, and
the ancients knew it. Could it not be possible that the plane figure was coded
esoteric knowledge?' Obviously (now!) it could.” From this point on, if not
before, syntegration took on for Beer an intense spiritual as well as practi-
cal significance, especially as far as its reverberations along closed pathways
were concerned.
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Here, then, we have an example of the sort of very specific
and even, one could say, technical continuities that Beer constructed between
his worldly cybernetics and his spiritual life, with the enneagram as a pivot
between the everyday geometry of the icosahedron and meditative practice.
This immediate continuity between the secular and the spiritual contrasts
interestingly, as usual, with the separation of these two realms that charac-
terizes modernity. It points to the unusual “earthy” and hylozoist quality of
cybernetic spirituality, as a spirituality that does not recognize any sharp sepa-
ration between the sacred and the profane.
I mentioned earlier the appearance of the Great Chain of Being in Beer's
“Knowledge of God” essay, and that this reappeared in a truncated version
in his published discussions of the viable system model. We might doubt,
