Two categories of Enneagrams refer to inner experience: one pertaining to egoic experience (reflecting fundamental spiritual ignorance), such as the Enneagrams of Fixations and Passions, and the other pertaining to essential experience (reflecting spiritual enlightenment), such as the Enneagrams of the Virtues and the Holy Ideas.

In other words, ego development and spiritual enlightenment are not two disjoint processes but parts of the same process. The understanding of the Personal Essence shows how they are linked. This point is a radical departure from the understanding of both traditional spiritual teachings and modern psychology. It unifies these two fields into one field, that of human nature and development.

So it is one process of evolution from the beginning of ego development to the final stages of spiritual enlightenment. We will explore this evolution as the process of the personalization of Being. It is how Being, impersonal and eternal, becomes a person, a human being on earth. So the process is a matter of Being, which is spirit, learning to live in physical embodiment.