Abstract
This dissertation explores how the Enneagram can serve as a tool for transforming our experience of self through deepening awareness. Using Participatory Immersive Ethnography, and drawing connections between Cognitive Science and Spirituality, the research examines how the Enneagram helps people apply awareness to their existential challenges. The study involves a broad group of Enneagram teachers, students, and practitioners. A central focus is the idea of "the inner witness" — the ability to engage fully with life while remaining awake to truth as an active process of Self-remembering (inspired by the Greek notion of aletheia, meaning "un-forgetting"). By expanding and integrating more layers of embodied and relational experience, people can deepen their sense of Being. The study develops an ethically reflective and interpretive way of investigating self-experience. It shows that people move from "seeing as" — using metaphors to make sense of themselves — to "being as" — living into new ways of being. This shift happens through reawakening the power of metaphor in human development. The dissertation warns against treating the Enneagram as a rigid system for diagnosing or labeling people. It challenges ideas that Enneagram "types" are fixed structures and instead promotes a sensitive, trauma-aware, and context-respecting use of the Enneagram. By weaving insights from neurobiology, cognitive science, and contemplative traditions, this research offers a new understanding of how models like the Enneagram can help heal self-experience and foster a deeper sense of existential coherence. The Enneagram is presented as a set of living heuristics — practical guides — that support people in the ongoing work of understanding their own being. In this view, studying and applying mature Enneagram teachings refines people's ability to make sense of experience across key dimensions: agency, embodied presence, relationships, and self-transcendence. Seen in this light, the Enneagram acts as a metacognitive technology that can guide people toward "self-awakened presence" — a fuller, unfolding encounter with themselves and the ever-unfolding present moment.