Sojourner Truth Personality Traits

[Pelagio Bosch]

Socialtransformation is limited by the extent to which people have themselves been transformed. Without engaging in a crucial (and oftentimes uncomfortable) process of addressing the areas in our own lives desperately in need of healing, we lack the capacity to imagine a desired future that includes the interests of all. The wounds we carry limit our vision, as our work increasingly reflects our own grievances.

The Enneagram teaches that each personality type has certain compulsive behavioral traits. Without critical awareness to these motivations, we succumb to the same ruts that have long pre-determined our choices for us. In developing an ability to see these patterns and make conscious decisions, we can move from self-interest to collective-interest.

Most people present themselves in a series of complex layers, designed to conceal their deficiencies. With each role we play in life, we carefully choose the right mask to successfully hide what we are afraid to reveal to others. In choosing comfort over real connection, we stay on the surface level of full humanity, and cast a shadow over what Thomas Merton referred to as our "true self."

Far from a neatly labeled box in which you are forever forced to reside, the Enneagram provides a framework to liberate yourself from old ways of being. In The Road Back to You, Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile emphasize that the challenge for most folks is to "identify your personality type but not identify with it." Once we've developed the ability to see our old worn-out way of being in the world, it can be easy to cling to these broken habits. Here's the good news: We are not confined to this reality. Instead, the Enneagram extends an invitation to transformation.

The construction of the Enneagram forms a web of relationships connecting each type. The process of personal growth and increasing maturity will move you through this web. This process is referred to as the "path of integration." In this journey toward integration, we interact with and appropriate the positive qualities of other types. In disintegration, we take on the negative qualities of other types. It is an ongoing process and we never fully arrive. (This is true individually and communally.)

Relationships between people reflect the individuals themselves. They are dynamic. They ebb and flow, growing and evolving with time. We are complex creatures, and our journey toward wholeness and togetherness is a living process. To stagnate and stop exploring the depth of our interconnectedness is to cease living.

Transformation, whether offered through the Enneagram or elsewhere, is limited by the courage of those who receive it. Like someone who looks in a mirror and immediately forgets what they look like after departing, knowledge is futile unless taken accountability for. We can close our eyes and pretend circumstances or negative behavior patterns don't exist, but we can't passively will our way into a new reality. Personal growth happens as a result of intentionality and a commitment to doing hard work.

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Source Description:

(title page) Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828.

(cover) Narrative of Sojourner Truth

Truth, Sojourner, d. 1883

Gilbert, Olive

144 p., ill.

Boston

J. B. Yerrinton and Son, Printers

1850

Call number 326.92 T874N (Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University Libraries)

The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CHdigitization project, Documenting the American South.

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O the 'fantastic tricks' which the American people are 'playing before high Heaven!' O their profane use of the sacred name of Liberty! O their impious appeal to the God of the oppressed, for his divine benediction while they are making merchandise of his image! Do they not blush? Nay, they glory in their shame! Once a year they take special pains to exhibit themselves to the world in all their republican deformity and Christian barbarity, insanely supposing that they thus excite the envy, admiration and applause of mankind. The nations are looking at the dreadful spectacle with disgust and amazement. However sunken and degraded they may be, they are too elevated, too virtuous, too humane to be guilty of such conduct. Their voice is heard, saying--'Americans! we hear your boasts of liberty, your shouts of independence, your declarations of hostility to every form of tyranny, your assertions that all men are created free and equal, and endowed by their Creator with an inalienable right to liberty, the merry peal of your bells, and the deafening roar of your artillery; but, mingling with all these, and rising above them all, we also hear the clanking of chains! the shrieks and wailings of millions of your own countrymen, whom you wickedly hold in a state of slavery as much more frightful than the oppression Page viiwhich your fathers resisted unto blood, as the tortures of the Inquisition surpass the stings of an insect! We see your banner floating proudly in the breeze from every flag-staff and mast-head in the land; but its blood-red stripes are emblematical of your own slave-driving cruelty, as you apply the lash to the flesh of your guiltless victim, even the flesh of a wife and mother, shrieking for the restoration of the babe of her bosom, sold to the remorseless slave speculator! We catch the gleam of your illuminated hills, everywhere blazing with bonfires; we mark your gay processions; we note the number of your orators; we listen to the recital of your revolutionary achievements; we see you kneeling at the shrine of Freedom, as her best, her truest, her sincerest worshippers! Hypocrites! liars! adulterers! tyrants! men-stealers! atheists! Professing to believe in the natural equality of the human race--yet dooming a sixth portion of your immense population to beastly servitude, and ranking them among your goods and chattels! Professing to believe in the existence of a God--yet trading in his image, and selling those in the shambles for whose redemption the Son of God laid down his life! Professing to be Christians--yet withholding the Bible, the means of religious instruction, even the knowledge of the alphabet, from a benighted multitude, under terrible penalties! Boasting of your democracy--yet determining the rights of men by the texture of their hair and the color of their skin! Assuming to be 'the land of the free and the home of the Page viiibrave,--yet keeping in chains more slaves than any other nation, not excepting slave-cursed Brazil! Prating of your morality and honesty--yet denying the rites of marriage to three millions of human beings, and plundering them of all their hard earnings! Affecting to be horror-struck in view of the foreign slave-trade--yet eagerly pursuing a domestic traffic equally cruel and unnatural, and reducing to slavery not less than seventy thousand new victims annually! Vaunting of your freedom of speech and of the press--your matchless Constitution and your glorious Union--yet denouncing as traitors, and treating as outlaws, those who have the courage and fidelity to plead for immediate, untrammelled, universal emancipation! Monsters that ye are! how can ye expect to escape the scorn of the world, and the wrath of Heaven? Emancipate your slaves, if you would redeem your tarnished character--if you would obtain forgiveness here, and salvation hereafter! Until you do so, "there will be a stain upon your national escutcheon, which all the waters of the Atlantic cannot wash out!" '

It is thus that, as a people, we are justly subjected to the reproach, the execration, the derision of mankind, and are made a proverb and a hissing among the nations. We cannot plead not guilty; every accusation that is registered against us is true; the act of violence is in our hands; the stolen property is in our possession; our fingers are stained with blood; the cup of our iniquity is full.

In this great contest of Right against Wrong, of Liberty against Slavery, who are the wicked, if they be not those, who, like vultures and vampyres, are gorging themselves with human blood? if they be not the plunderers of the poor, the spoilers of the defenceless, the traffickers in 'slaves and the souls of men?' Who are the cowards, if not those who shrink from manly argumentation, the light of truth, the concussion of mind, and a fair field? if not those whose prowess, stimulated by whiskey potations, or the spirit of murder, grows rampant as the darkness of night approaches; whose shouts and yells are savage and fiend-like; who furiously exclaim, 'Down with free discussion! down with the liberty of the press! down with Page xithe right of petition! down with constitutional law!'--who rifle mail-bags, throw types and printing-presses into the river, burn public halls dedicated to 'Virtue, Liberty and Independence' and assassinate the defenders of inalienable human rights? And who are the righteous, in this case, if they be not those who will 'have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them;' who maintain that the laborer is worthy of his hire, that the marriage institution is sacred, that slavery is a system accursed of God, that tyrants are the enemies of mankind, and that immediate emancipation should be given to all who are pining in bondage! Who are the truly brave, if not those who demand for truth and error alike, free speech, a free press, in open arena, the right of petition, AND NO QUARTERS? if not those, who, instead of skulking from the light, stand forth in the noon-tide blaze of day, and challenge their opponents to emerge from their wolf-like dens, that, by a rigid examination, it may be seen who has stolen the wedge of gold, in whose pocket are the thirty pieces of silver, and whose garments are stained with the blood of innocence?

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