Essence of Type Five – Deep Knowing, Understanding
Imagine that we each come from one of nine lands, the land where the essential quality to which we are sensitive reigns supreme. For Fives, this land is one of deep knowing and understanding.
Type Five is called the “Investigator.” In their souls, Fives are sensitive to deep knowing and understanding, the intelligence operating in the universe. Above all, they want to live in a land of truth, reason and clarity, and know they are part of this conscious intelligence.
To enter Five Land, imagine a Garden of Eden where everything operates rationally, where every creature is safe because there is an intelligent system operating. Your soul knows that you too are part of this intelligent universe.
To understand the experience of Fives in the world, imagine the “fall” from this Garden of rational, higher intelligence, the impact of encountering a frightening, dark and random reality, a world where chaos seems to reign. For type Five, expulsion from Paradise feels like being cast into a dark and senseless abyss.
God’s in his heaven – all’s right with the world.
- Robert Browning
Understanding The Essence of Deep Knowing
We can all relate to the idea of reasoning, thinking, and knowing or understanding something - we spend much of our life learning, reading, and doing mental work. We could call this our ordinary thinking. We can also relate to the idea of genius or perfect understanding even though we don’t usually experience this ourselves. You could say that in studying the Enneagram, we are thinking, learning and trying to deeply understand how the system works, which seems to be in a mysterious way. Here we get closer to the essence of Five - knowing the truth, deeply understanding reality.
We say that God is “All-Knowing” or Omniscient. Philosophically, this is because the concept of an all-powerful God requires knowledge of everything. God can’t be the greatest most powerful Being and yet not know something. This idea of being All-Knowing or Omniscient is one way of understanding the essence of Five. We conceive of a perfect intelligence that knows and understands everything, including how everything makes sense. So, our human perception that things are random, chaotic, dark and scary is based on our limited intelligence - we just don’t see or understand the bigger perspective of God or an All-Knowing intelligence. We say “God works in mysterious ways” rather than imagine everything is random.
In non-religious language, we conceive that there is some form of vast intelligence operating in the universe. Science continuously discovers the laws that govern everything and explain reality on ever deeper levels. Perfect understanding of how reality works is the ultimate objective - the more we discover, the more we can explain, the more the system seems to be rational. So, we can think of deep knowing and understanding as something attainable by the human brain and we can also imagine perfect understanding as a state belonging to God or a higher being - even an alien from a more evolved planet.
Albert Einstein exemplifies the genius and essence of Five. When Einstein was around five years old, his father gave him a compass. As an adult, Einstein said that he could still remember how seeing the needle always mysteriously turn to the north made a deep and lasting impression on him. He felt that “something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”
Einstein was obviously one of the greatest minds ever to live and his brain was apparently physically different - his brain was rather ghoulishly preserved and autopsied. But, for us, what is important to consider is the way Einstein tuned into the feeling of mystery and sought some deeper understanding of how things work, including on a spiritual level. Einstein famously said: “I want to know God’s thoughts, the rest is details.”
Sudden insight is one way we experience deeper knowing, we can relate to having a “stroke of genius” an “aha moment” or an “epiphany.” Something about how an idea can suddenly come out of nowhere when we are not directly thinking about it - Archimedes in the bathtub or Isaac Newton watching the apple fall - gives us the sense that intelligence is working away in the background and can break through when we are not consciously thinking.
Spiritual teachers speak of a kind of direct knowing, an immediate insight, that can occur when we are present and connected to Being. This is the knowing sometimes called Gnosis - knowing spiritual truth directly. It requires being present, connected to our heart and being grounded in the body - our sensation- not simply in the head. This might also be what we experience as moments of enlightenment or awakening.
We also use the word “realization” - which means "coming to understand something clearly and distinctly” in a spiritual sense. We say someone is “realized” to mean enlightened. Now we are understanding the essence of deep knowing as a matter of consciousness - our connection to higher consciousness. These are different ways to reflect on how we can know reality and truth beyond our thinking mind.
Rather than try to nail this idea down, it is better to just see what you notice when present to your own mind. For example, when you meditate, can you sense an open, spacious mind that is different from thinking, thinking, thinking? Do you relate to ideas and insights coming in when you are in some sort of flow state, connected to knowing more intuitively, through being grounded in your heart and body as well as having an open, spacious mind. This is the way we can get a taste of the essence of Five - our Being as consciousness.
