The writings here on The Law of Seven and Chief Features are from a series of posts in 2019 from a closed Facebook group, Gurdjieff Ouspensky Self Observation, led by David Tuttle.
As the enneagram predicts, manifestations of the Law of Seven govern the variety of human activities. Under the law of seven is the concept of human types, and the corresponding weakness or chief feature of each type.
Working against chief features is an important aspect of work in a school along Fourth Way lines. Ouspensky calls chief feature ‘the axis of false personality.’ Removing false personality is a step towards becoming more real, more conscious. The fairy tale of the Beauty and the Beast hints at the need for reconciliation with what is both most precious and most unpleasant in oneself.
Working with Chief Features
Chief feature is one’s mechanical emotional relationship to oneself. It’s how we feel about ourselves. By doing the work, we get surprising glimpses of this, although our chief feature is usually obvious to other people.
Individual chief feature can vary from the descriptions presented here. Gurdjieff, in In Search of the Miraculous, gave psychological descriptions of chief feature. One person showed a feature of being “never at home.” Another feature was always arguing with everybody about everything. A third had a feature of not existing at all, and a fourth had a feature of having no conscience.
To work against chief feature, or any feature, we need to study it and find the attitudes that support it. Then we can formulate small aims to minimize the feature. Every moment of work against a feature requires a flash of self-remembering. The system does not only adjust our human psychology, although this can be a side effect. It provides the knowledge of how to create consciousness, starting from the mechanical being that we are when we meet the work.
Chief Features according to Type
What are the chief features or major weaknesses of each type?
Tramp Feature
The feature of tramp is a common feature of our age and can be part of any planetary body type. Its approach to life is “nothing matters, it’s all the same — take it easy.” It has a easy-going complacency about everything. This excess of relativity doesn’t give particular value to anything, including oneself.
Work on this feature includes establishing a scale of real values—for the people, events, and things in our life—and then making the efforts to act accordingly. Tramp feature fulfills its obligations to get them out of the way, often doing things half-heartedly. If we instead fulfill our obligations patiently, with presence, we step away from this feature.
By building a hierarchy of values, and making efforts in proportion to the value of something, we can minimize a feature. “In order to struggle against the tramp, school discipline and a general inner discipline are needed, because there is no discipline in a tramp,” remarks Ouspensky in The Fourth Way.
Lunatic Feature
Lunatic feature, as its name implies, properly belongs to the Lunar type. It consists in taking a small matter and making it very important, blowing it out of proportion. Everything else has no value. Lunatic lacks relativity and scale. People with other features may find it ridiculous, or comical. We often see characters with this feature in modern cinema—sometimes as a comic figure, sometimes as a hero with a cause. Perhaps lunatic has come to displace tramp as the feature of the age, as this weakness can appear in just about any body type. In this case it is a feature in personality, perhaps built on top of, or covering up, other features that are more related to essence.
Naivete Feature
Solar types can have a feature of naivete. This consists in undertaking all kinds of projects without understanding the denying force and ending up frustrated and exhausted, not understanding why it didn’t work. This feature has its roots in the underdeveloped negative parts of centers, characteristic of this type. Solar types can also have a childish version of the feature of power, which people may or may not take seriously.
Pure solar types are rare. Solar often mixes in with other types. In this case, it gives a lightness, or playfulness not usually present in the other type.
Fear Feature
Fear as a feature is more common in the negative types (Martial, Lunar, Mercurial). This weakness makes a person hesitant and doubtful in relation to events and other people. Fear scans the environment for things to be afraid of. It frequently connects to negative imagination, a worry about what may come, even if irrational.
This feature is not the same as instinctive fear, which is a normal function of the machine. For some, it may be an emotional layer that has formed on top of that instinctive fear. In a way, it is a sensitivity of essence that has become transformed by false personality into a defense mechanism.
Dominance Feature
The feature of dominance is associated with the Saturnine type. Saturn types have perceptions of what would be good for others, but this easily becomes a feature. Dominance seeks to indirectly control other people and the environment. “Don’t you think we should…?” Or “It would be better if…” It will adjust the heat or light or volume so that it is the best for everybody, without asking. The fear behind this feature is that of losing control.
Vanity Feature
The feature of vanity is common in Mercurial and Jovial types, though any type can have it as a chief feature. In addition, it is a subsidiary feature for many people.
It can manifest itself as a need to express one’s opinion. The energy that it emits suggests to others that one is an authority on the subject at hand. Vanity also enjoys being the active force in conversations. It is a feature that can be quite successful in life. Sensitive to the unspoken hierarchy of who is more important and is always sensing its place, or lack of place, in the hierarchy, it fluctuates between a high and low opinion of itself.
Power Feature
The feature of power cannot resist being the active force, whenever the situation allows. “If I don’t do something, nobody will.” Or “Nobody is going to take care of this, so I had better.” It gives direct commands to others, or perhaps operates in a less obvious way. It can be quite successful in life. It likes to feel in control of situations and works well in a defined organizational structure. If structure is lacking, it is difficult for those with a power feature.
This feature is common in Mercurial, Martial and Jovial types, with a slightly different flavor for each. The quick and perceptive Mercurial may have a more manipulative power. The honest and adrenal-governed Martial has a more direct, forceful power. In the Jovial, it mixes with a certain good humor, but is nevertheless there.
Nonexistence Feature
Nonexistence is the feature associated with the Venusian type. With this feature, there are few ‘I’s when asked a question, or about something that is happening. The Venusian is gentle and slow internally, not prone to quick reactions.
The feature likes to go along with events, not resist them. It likes other people to be happy. Later, the feature may generate resentment ‘I’s: Why did this happen to me? It can come to blame the other person or the event, when the cause was simply not having the required ‘I’s in the moment.
Willfulness Feature
Willfulness is usually associated with the Lunar type. This feature enjoys resisting external influences. It can remind one of children of a certain age who will say no to anything. It might take the form of agreeing with how someone asks it to do a task, then just doing it the way it wishes. Because Lunar types focus on detail, the feature will manifest in small things.
A Matter of Choice: Work against Chief Features
Features are a set of interconnected attitudes and reactions that support our false personality. They present a defense mechanism for living in a world filled with other features and negative emotions. They deflect what the moment may truly require.
When we begin to work against a feature, it is anything but a neutral experience. It is like living with someone who is stealing from us or is constantly undermining what we are trying to accomplish. In decisions great or small, it seeks the upper hand and prevents us from being objective about ourselves. Attempting to struggle with a feature produces humility, as we see that we cannot control it. Rather, it controls us. Fortunately, it is a war we wage one moment at a time.
If one remembers oneself, manifestations of chief features provide an opportunity to have a moment of choice. The choice is not just to do things mechanically, not to follow the habitual pattern of our feature. In this way, we can use the predictable patterns of our features to increase our moments of self-remembering.
David Tuttle led www.facebook.com/gurdjieff ouspensky self-observation as a Fourth Way discussion group for many years. For other articles by David in FourthWayToday.org, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/author/david/.