Overview
Type 7 is characterized by optimism, adventurousness, curiosity, and an opportunistic idealism.The main characteristic of 7’s is that they map and plan reality, trying to figure out what is optimal, through their minds. As a result, they are detached from direct experience, especially their emotional life.
Habitually, Type 7 avoids discomfort, excessively plans, and tries to explore as many options as possible to preserve a positive self-image. Type 7 is constantly trying to create a sense of orientation, but muddles this pursuit from the misunderstanding that constant doing, planning, and external exploration will provide the grounded direction they seek. In order to avoid facing the unconscious motivations behind their over-activity and distraction, they will often fall back on rationalizing their behavior and, in unhealthy expressions, find themselves prey to runaway impulsiveness and/or exhaustion. Type 7 also avoids the experience of inner lostness by over-focusing on the positive or deluding themselves into believing they are more well than they actually are. Because they strive to feel good, Type 7 fails to inhabit their immediate experience.
At healthy levels, Type 7 is engaged, tolerant, gifted at creative problem solving and synthesis, and offers an infectious exuberance, enthusiasm, and a child-like sense of wonder. Type 7 can be prolifically productive and brilliantly multifaceted. By going beyond personality and into the spiritual level of the Enneagram, Type 7 can discover the inherent bliss of reality itself.
Character Traits & Descriptions
Adapted from the work of Russ Hudson and Claudio Naranjo
The Enthusiast - "The Busy, Fun-Loving Type: Spontaneous, Versatile, Distractible, and Scattered" - Russ Hudson
Opportunistic Idealism – taking or offering dreams as reality, a schemer, seekers of variety, adventure, and surprise, interest in the magical or esoteric, avoidance of suffering, hedonistic orientation, lack of discipline and commitment, orientation to fantasy, plans, and utopia, seeking satisfied well being. – Claudio Naranjo
Pathways to Essence
Adapted from Keys to the Enneagram and Facets of Unity, by A.H. Almaas
Essential Endowment: Essential Pleasure: The Markabah
Essential Pleasure is a multi-faceted, dynamic vehicle of bliss. Uniquely, Essential Pleasure can experience the totality of the bliss of reality as well as each specific, essential flavor of pleasure or sweetness inherent to the spiritual ground of being. This quality is so profoundly pleasurable that most people have never experienced it. It can range from deep, abiding pleasure to buoyant, sparkling celebration. The Markabah understands through direct experience that the true nature of consciousness and reality is nothing less than ecstatic, dynamic, limitless, scintillating pleasure.
To learn more about the Pleasure Vehicle, you can explore the "Keys to the Enneagram" course or the chapter on Point 7 in A.H. Almaas’ book Keys to the Enneagram.
Ego Ideal & Avoidance
Type 7 idealizes positivity, planning, and enjoyment in avoidance of pain and an absence of direction.
Passion: Gluttony – A passion for pleasure, taking in, consuming what is pleasurable.
Virtue: Sobriety – Being firmly grounded in reality rather than being swept away by our inner drives and their fantasies.
Holy Idea: Holy Plan / Work / Wisdom – "Holy Wisdom, Holy Work, or Holy Plan is the Idea for Point Seven. When there is basic trust in reality, we not only perceive that things are fine the way they are and that what happens is optimal, but we also get a sense of how things are unfolding. We have a sense of what the evolution of a human being toward completeness is about, what the natural, spontaneous evolution of the human soul looks like. The Holy Plan, then, is God’s plan—the perception of the direction of the soul’s unfoldment when it is in contact with Being—the blueprint of what a human being is meant to become. From the perspective of Holy Plan, we see that the universe functions in such a way that human beings can become complete." - Facets of Unity, ch. 9. See also ch. 15
Specific Delusion: Separate Unfoldment – the belief that you can create your own time-orientation of the flow of your life—that is, that you can plan your life
Specific Difficulty: Lostness – The loss of the capacity to know what to do.
Specific Reaction: Planning – Trying to create orientation.
Dynamic Core Elements
Adapted from the work of Sandra Maitri
Ego Trap: Idealism – Clinging to the positive in an attempt to reframe the source of fear.
Anti-Self Action: Self-symbolizing – relating to one’s soul through the mind, through mental abstractions (symbols)
Ego Lie: False Imagination – imagined sense of what fulfillment looks like.
Defense Mechanism: Rationalization – apparent logical reasons are given to justify behavior that is motivated by unconscious instinctual impulses.