Excavation area, underground spring waters.
photograph by the author
"Attention is the conscious force, the force of consciousness. It is a divine force. The search is for contact with an energy coming from the higher parts of our centers. At times we have an intuition of it that is less strong or more strong. This intuition is the action on us of higher centers from which we are separated by our attachment to our functions."
This quote couldn't sum it up better.
What is perhaps most interesting is the manner in which it defines the divine inflow, the inward flow of higher energies, which are actually received from God—de Salzmann made no apologies whatsoever in identifying them as such.
We are, as Swedenborg said, receptacles for divine energies; and to the extent that we honor that through an effort of attention—no matter how small— we align ourselves with divine influences (the inward flow) in such a way as to benefit from them even though we may not directly see or understand the consequences.
In the traditions, this is called Providence: the protective care of God.
We are the apertures through which impressions of reality can flow back to God through the source; the entire "secret" of the enneagram, with all its complex iterations and perhaps impossibly complicated meanings, is embodied in the principle of this one comprehensive action. The action may be complex in its details, but it is simple in its entirety; and perhaps the mistake we make is in trying to understand it by taking it apart. When the action is whole and understood as whole, without the interference of the mind, it becomes clear.
We think consciousness is ours, that we can invoke it or create it; that we somehow manage it. We don't understand that we open to it, which is entirely different. We are not managers; we are receivers. Yet we insist on perceiving ourselves as managers, creating management structures, exercises, schools, organizations.
How little time, in the end, we devote to opening. Instead we trouble ourselves with worrying about opening. To what do we open? How do we open? When do we open? And so on, never seeing that these endless questions are the product of the obstacle itself.
Where is the trust? There has to be trust, and a willingness to let go within. The "attachment to our functions" that she speaks of here is the investment in the partiality of our individual centers, functioning alone and out of context, and naively trying to do the work of the other parts.
The intuition can do its own work, if we let it.
May your should be filled with light.