I think the attempt to stick with one definition in MBT is difficult, the MBT only tells you where your comfort zone is. I prefer the enneagram which offers a more differentiated description of personality.
the online versions of the Myers-Briggs and the big five factor personality tests are subjective. They tell you what you think of yourself. One can access that through introspection. Perhaps at best they clarify what one thinks of oneself if one doesn’t know. If you have a link to an online enneagram test that you think is helpful please share.
I have realised that I took a German test, which was available online. The only English-speaking test that I found is here:
https://www.testgorilla.com/test-library/personality-culture-fit-tests/enneagram-personality-test-test/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Campaign_Personality_Values_Bing_World&utm_term=enneagram&msclkid=877a993abb9714f62314c68e6387f5e8
A chart is found here:
cocreativejourneys.com/enneagram/chart
Some interesting facts about enneagrams here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality. “…contemporary Enneagram theories are principally derived from the teachings of the Bolivian psycho-spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo from the 1950s and the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo from the 1970s. Naranjo’s theories were also influenced by some earlier teachings about personality by George Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way tradition.” So far I’m having trouble accessing test on that site without paying $$.
Thank you! I took the test. It labeled me the Challenger or the Boss. I don’t recognize myself in the description of that profile. Maybe the test is inaccurate. Or perhaps it’s so deeply diagnostic that it detected my unconscious or barely conscious shadow self. Shrug! I’ll send the test to friends and see what they think. Thanks again. Fun stuff!
To experience the riches of the soul one must be open to her polytheism. Psychological monotheism has tended to denude and disenchant the imagination of its Pantheon of Divine images. We must leave the safe shore of the normative ideals of health as balanced wholeness and launch into a sea foreign and unnatural to the ego. I showed above how the Gnostic vision of the Cosmic Christ integrated the gods in the form of planetary spheres into Christ. As the Logos, Christ became the reality of every positive thing.
Indeed I ask myself again and again what the idea of wholeness represents in the context of the evidence of human imperfectability. No doubt it’s the ideal. But, what kind of attraction does an unattainable ideal have?
As archetypal psychologist James Hillman points out the psyche has the ability to create “illness, morbidity, disorder, abnormality and suffering,” and to experience and imagine life through this deformed afflicted lens. By pathologizing our spiritual and natural selves are transformed into a fragmented fractured and deformed psychological ego. Ironically this too can lead to individuation as the soul is freed from its identification with ego and it’s life and the upper world of heroes and high gods who provide the ego with its models and bring us into a one sided suppressive narrow way of life and living. Wholeness requires balancing the properties of chaos and order.
I opened the Red Book and found Jung struggling with similar issues. He says
He starts out tightly to pre-conceived order and thinking he is greater than God who is only part of himself. Thus, he tried to keep his God in a box.
Than he realizes that his conscious thoughts are greater than he knew, less orderly and controllable and less fathomable.
Eventually he realized that his conscious ego stands like a donut between the chaoses of inner and outer worlds. Thoughts have an autonomy of their own. We don’t have them. They have us. We must contemplate them from every angle. Understand them. Overstand them. Stand beside them this way and that. Still we do not exhaust their meaning.
So my question about thoughts is what effect do they have? Do they strengthen you or weaken you?
I approach the mandala of wholeness through struggle. It is dynamic and profusely populated with images including my thoughts. I can view them as divine gifts to my consciousness. I don’t despise whatever their origin even if they come from popular media insofar as they give me strength. Whatever gives you strength is good insofar as it does that. If they don’t, I just let them go.
Next Jung deals with symbols of transformation. Rationality and absurdity are interdependent. The white serpent and the black serpent don’t destroy each other. They transform each other. Elijah above becomes Mime below. Enantidromia is at work.
"…you should know that Ein Sof emanated its sefirot, through which its its actions are performed. They serve as vessels for the actions deriving from Ein Sof in the world of separation and below." [Moses Cordevero]
The world of hypnagogia is a one of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. It is the one that Jung entered through active imagination. Notice that Kafka’s protagonist becomes insect-like upon awakening before rising from bed. There is evidence that his story emerged from a hypnagogic state in that detail.
Hypnagogia is separate in the sense that it is an awareness that is separate from the sensory world and below in the sense that its content is the images of psychic depth.
The pattern of patterns is a fractal in which symbols are reiterated infinitely all the way up and all the way down. The outward reiterates the inward. The inward reiterates the outward. There’s no way to appreciate what this means that isn’t conscious. We are embedded in existence-- a world of separation above and below.
I scored as Individualist, but I had already garnered that via my life’s experiences. But not quite spot on…
While I was at it I also read up on Jung’s shadow personality traits, which affirmed to me that I had never gone below the surface of the self… though I may have skimmed the surface of the fine line that divides them.
_
Ier’s trinity of the psyche template… of the ideas from body, from mind, and from spirit, where my recent bout of low spirit/energy proved to me that all three are indeed required, to be and feel whole.
When one arrives at that place, where constant improving finally pays off, and that place of infinite maintenance is reached, is good.
I plan to look further into the enneagram test. My girlfriend took the test and scored as an Observer. I can see that to an extent, but it hardly summarizes her personality for me. nor can I relate directly to the test result that I got. Do you think the category individualist reflects well who you are?
I can definitely relate to what I think you are saying about constantly improving or at least improving our situation. Would we do anything if we didn’t think it would make the next moment better than the present one in some way? And now my phone is about to die so I’ll improve the situation by putting it on its charger.
What you really have to look into is how strong your “wings” are (7+9), because they influence you in varying degrees too. I am a five but spent periods in my life as a four or a six which are very strong with me. You may also have a high score elsewhere too, which means that it can influence your behaviour as well. As an eight, you may be helped by becoming a bit more like fives now and again and you may tend to be stressed by twos. That is taken from the book by Richard Rohr.
When I read Jung, I get drawn in and often lose track of time. My mind goes off and opens up doors and windows in my mind that were closed. This idea of wholeness was with me even when I was with the Evangelicals, which wasn’t appreciated. It has consequences that impede our acceptance of some of the tasks that society may ask of us. It also explains the physical and mental wrecks that come back from active duty. Our society hasn’t yet grasped the reality of being a human being, but is instead caught up in the material world.
From what you say there, reading Jung may be putting you in touch with hypnagogic consciousness. That’s the consciousness that Jung himself sought through the technique he called active imagination which is primarily one of working with dream images, dialoguing with them. I think that’s how he produced the Red Book.After his split from Freud before the beginning of World War I, he was overtaken by psychic imagery. He feared he was losing his mind. But instead of running from it, he worked on understanding and processing the imagery and it inspired his research for the rest of his long psychological career.
Archetypal psychology as I understand it, seeks to follow the same path. The way I’m seeking is the way of my own soul. That is, getting in touch with my own internal imagery. Our soul is primarily unconscious, it speaks to us in the imagery of our own mind. It’s about paying attention to that imagery, working with it, dialoguing with it, letting your own soul become your teacher.
I agree with what you say. Our knowledge doesn’t encompass who we are. To see that is to pierce the first level of illusion. What we have are images and resting on those–words. The words are given to us by our culture. They only roughly approximate the images which we can only express through the arts to the limits of our skills in those areas. The images are both visual and auditory. They are what Jung refers to in the Red Book as the “spirit of the depth.” On the other hand we have "the spirit of the age. That spirit can totally overwhelm us and take us away from our own depth are own soul. That why we need our spiritual practices to get in touch with and live in our own depth.
In spite of my advanced age, I feel like I am a total beginner at this. “Beginners mind” is in itself a humbling experience. Jesus said we have to become like a child. I have no laurels to rest on. Past spiritual experiences are useless except insofar as they are images upon which we can work in the present.
Wholeness I see on two levels: psychological and ultimate. The mystical apriori is this “Atman is Brahman”. The ground of my being is one with the ground of Being Itself.
“Memories, Reflections and Dreams” was an eye-opener (or a mind opener). I have had times when I thought that I’d lose control, struggling with an assuredness that shocked me. It resonated with Jung saying he didn’t believe, he knew. Today, I notice that the volume of knowledge that has amounted within me (Ennegram 5) has to be put aside. I use meditation for that. Just being in the presence helps me regain that assuredness and calms my spirit. It does put me at odds with the world occasionally, but I’ve come to accept that.
Our soul also reacts within our body. I’m sure that the burnout I had a while ago was may soul telling my head to slow down. The psychiatrist said I was drained of serotonin, and needed a break, but the physical symptoms brought my attention to that. After I stopped working and started meditating more, it went away.
Beginners mind was also a big discovery for me and helped me in my interactions with people. I used it especially in my advisory capacity and people noticed and spoke to me about it. They hadn’t had a boss who approached things that way. I see us deeply interconnected, including our environment. I believe that we need to have nature wherever we are and people around us. We need to see that the wholeness we feel is when we are part of the whole. Conflict is just a different perspective that needs to be cleared up.
O to be a beginner in everything!
Seeing and hearing and touching the world through fresh eyes and ears and flesh.
The questions of knowledge and truth, the nature of humanity nature and God, questions about moral values questions, about aesthetic values questions, about the bases and purposes of organized society all appear fresh to me.
The meaning of the images that flash before my mind, the meaning of my dreams, the experience of being embodied, the routines and the skills enacted by my hands and feet are like new to me.
Like a baby discovering herself for the first time.
Beginning again renewed every morning, every hour, every minute, every moment.
Present moment–wonderful moment!
Very thoughtful and thought provoking!
I have had a look at what you mentioned about Pageau and his take on A. Jones.
I think his intention wasn’t to declare Jones as acceptable, his side remarks show that Jones’ ranting is all over the place and he mixes one kind of Symbolism with another, but he does show that society is going down a certain road with the depletion of trust in institutions. Jones is a typical voice in such times.
His mistake, as far as I’m concerned, is to underrate the influence Jones has on people and the danger he poses. Having said that, he is a symptom, not the illness. The postmodern tendency to pull down institutions and sow doubt causes this kind of reaction. Anyone on the conservative side of the spectrum would see their trusted institutions in danger, with nothing trustworthy to take its place. Remember, the way that Peterson points at, is the middle way, between order and chaos. Both, on their own, can cause upheaval and all the worst things that civilisations have gone through. The danger is from right and left, the right demanding a strict order and the left raising doubts about everything.
People are not talking to each other, they are not making sense of what they are experiencing and their visions of the way ahead are short-sighted. Pageau has given himself the task of translating what is going on, which I think he does well. He does make mistakes, but I think he does make valid points. Beginners mind is important, but we must be careful not to ignore the ground sliding away under us. That is what I think is happening at present.
I’ve developed a new bible launching device called the bible basher.
It is modeled after a scorpion cross bow.
The shaft fits the width of the bible perfectly.
Bob, how far have you gone with meditation?
I’m not one who understands meditation as a way, down which one goes. I understand meditation as an oasis in which we gain refreshment, where we find peace and, very lacking in todays world, silence and solitude. It is where I open myself to spiritual confrontation, it is a “parlour” into which Jesus sends us to be confronted by what we call God.
I recently did a test with a guy i know.
I felt that his aura was indestructible, to my great surprise.
Then we talked about it, and he considers himself an extention of the divine.
So I decided 2 things.
He has a superpositioning soul, which is in God and in his earth body all at the same time,
and that technological magic is inferior to divine magic.
God may be trying to tell you something.
I think it is often an added detail to an already held belief.
Being able to talk with God is an attempt that the praying folk made.
But how about hearing God, instead of just praying one way.
Prophets were exceptional, maybe something genetic,
to where they could hear God’s words.
I find it incredibly difficult.
But maybe someday I’ll get it.