The Paradox of Dominant Intuition

"No time but now."
"There is no 'now.' More precisely, there is nothing but 'now,' so no need to divide 'now' and 'not-now.'"
"This is it. There is nothing but this. Can you prove otherwise?"
"This has no purpose, no function, no essence. It just is."

Paradoxical or not, introspection-prone dominant intuition types, especially those with extraverted intuition (damn, I miss those symbols!), often come to an understanding of reality that seems to deny the very essence of their leading function.

Perhaps the best expression of this can be found in the world of non-duality. I find the male extraverted intuiter teachers to be most radical in their expression of non-duality, and most satisfying to me personally.

Specifically, Jim Newman and Fred Davis (both IEE, I believe). Take a look at them if curious. Some refer to this type of teaching as "Neo-Advaita" or "Radical Advaita." Among past teachers in the East, perhaps the most uncompromising was Nisargadatta Maharaj (ILE, I believe).

There are, of course, plenty of non-ILE/IEE non-dual teachers, such as Adyashanti (some rational type, maybe LSE), Rupert Spira (LII?), Mooji (SEI?), Eckhart Tolle (probably IEI) and countless others.

But also look at music. Dominant intuition types often gravitate to improvisation, and some of the best-known improvisers are extraverted intuiters like John McLaughlin (IEE) or Frank Zappa (IEE or ILE -- update 02.2021: I now think Zappa's type is EIE).

From a certain perspective, radical improvisation could be said to be a rejection of time: "I will consider nothing but the present moment. There will be absolutely no plan whatsoever, no consideration of how the music is supposed to unfold, no comparison to the way I might think it should be."

I also find a preponderance of extraverted intuiters in contact improvisation, which is the same as radical musical improvisation, but in the realm of dance and bodily interaction.

In the realm of language learning, I myself developed an approach which rejects the idea of preparation and looking towards a future time when you will have more knowledge than you currently do. You take whatever you know now and apply it in practice in the moment, while learning in the moment. Nothing needs to be learned other than what comes up in practice. This radical approach resonates with a small minority of language learners, but produces stellar results.

(Needless to say, I myself strongly gravitate to all these approaches, and always in their most radical forms which are unpalatable to most people. Apparently I am a radical kind of person. Not all intuitive types are by any stretch.)

Is this a rejection of intuition, a pull towards the suggestive function, or the maximal expression of intuition? Or something else?

Jordan Peterson's Socionic Type

Against my better judgment, I'm going to do that ridiculous act where you attach a label to someone's body-mind after several hours of deliberation for no reason at all other than a kind of empty intellectual satisfaction.

Preface: I like JP and his ideas a lot. He's brilliant and riveting, even moving.

Jordan Peterson: EIE

My initial thought was IEE, but inconsistencies quickly emerged:

- persona not disarming enough; too dark for an IEE
- generates too much passionate devotion in online admirers
- too verbally fluid
- shamelessly and without caveats categorizes (labels) people and groups of people, particularly ideological opponents
- systematically, calculatingly participates in potentially combative situations and seems to feed off the tension
- doesn't pursue relaxation in the moment, comes across as tense and brooding
- prefers formal attire and, apparently, employment in reliable formal structures (e.g. university)

Let's flesh out the typing.

Somatotype: high ectomorphy, fairly high mesomorphy, very low endomorphy. Translation: a loner preoccupied with being true to himself, managing an overactive nervous system, and achieving desired outcomes through focused hard work.

Somewhat more extraverted than introverted (at least in the popular sense, and according to his own words). Expansive gestures and movements. Tends more to "overdo" than to "underdo" things.

Very high IQ. That means very big ideas, especially for an intuitive type.

Other observations: rather high-pitched voice with typical male compensation (overusing the lower end of his vocal range to sound deeper) and resulting frequent loss of vocal range and quality.

Why not a logical type?

- passionate, moving, and devotional
- apparent logicalness can be explained by intellect and ectomorphy
- tends not to talk about things that will have no emotional impact
- all interests tie into the humanities, particularly to human nature and how to best navigate it
- very deep insight into psychology, religion, and the psyche
- skillfully harnesses anger during debates, and doesn't just address opponents' faulty logic
- comments broadly and authoritatively on general life issues
- he really cares about issues, and you can sense it; he cares more than you do!

Random observations:

- defends the inherent purpose of hierarchies ("aristocratic" vs. "democratic" style, so Beta or Delta quadra)
- needs an enemy or opponent to perform best; likes to get a bit riled up

It's Not Your Fault You're Unhappy (or Happy)

I would like to propose a sweeping explanation for why different people's lives turn out so differently. We'll start at the level of sub-minds and end up at the societal and demographic level, then return to the hopeless predicament of the individual, possibly introducing a ray of optimism (I won't make any promises).

Let's start with the idea of internal conflict or harmony.

Internal conflict can be understood as a situation where different sub-minds are fighting among themselves to gain control over the individual's behavior. Internal harmony is when all or most sub-minds are on board with what is happening. 

I'm taking the concept of sub-minds from the book The Mind Illuminated, by John Yates. Here's the definition he gives (p. 429):

"Sub-minds: Autonomous units that have their own specialty and function to perform within the mind-system as a whole… [In addition to sub-minds within the sensory mind], there are, for instance, sub-minds responsible for abstract thinking, pattern recognition, emotions, arithmetic, and verbal logic, to name only a few of the higher-level activities of the discriminating mind. Other sub-minds… are responsible for emotions, such as anger, fear, and love. The narrating mind is yet another sub-mind of the discriminating mind."

In another part of the book (p. 315) he states: "In the ordinary, untrained and un-unified mind, much of the energy generated by individual sub-minds gets used up in inner conflicts, many of them unconscious."

To develop our line of thought we need to accept as a given that: 

1. People are born with different stable traits or tendencies (though not all traits are stable, and not all stable traits are inborn or "genetic").
2. Traits and tendencies take the form of a particular configuration or relationship of sub-minds which persistently shape thought and behavior outside of conscious control (though in a minuscule percentage of cases there may be a conscious sense of "choosing").
3. External forces, whether physical, social, economic, etc., also shape thought and behavior.

Why does one person grow up with conflicting sub-minds, and another doesn't? 

The environment he or she grows up — family, community, society — "rubs" the person's innate traits and tendencies a certain way. The environment sends signals that "you need to think and behave a certain way." If that way (ways) are in line with your traits and tendencies, you get the green light and can largely allow yourself to "be yourself." If not, you get the red light and develop internal mechanisms for "overriding" those traits and tendencies. 

Of course, no one gets to fully "be themselves." We're talking about degrees here. One person might generally get to be themselves, and another generally does not get to. 

Each family has its own internal environment, which is a function of the traits and tendencies of the leading members of the family (usually parents), their particular state of internal conflict or unity, and community, societal, and economic pressures which continually exert an influence on them.

Now we can see that, through no fault of their own, each person grows up with a particular relationship to their environment in the form of: "I get to let these sub-minds to express themselves, but not this one, this one, or this one."

The "ideal" situation is when a person allows nearly all their sub-minds to be as they are and experiences very little internal conflict in their home, community, or societal environment. 

This doesn't have to mean being a "typical" member of society. If the parents have non-typical traits and tendencies, but belong to a subculture or community within society that allows them to express their natural tendencies to a high degree, then they will experience less internal conflict, and any children of theirs with similar traits will also grow up in a similar state. However, there will come a time when these children realize that their traits and tendencies are wanted within that subculture, but no so much in society at large. 

This "friction" with the environment — whether in the home, community, or society — is literally that. Instead of being spent on useful activity, the individual's energy is dissipated as mental "heat," or resistance. People experiencing lots of friction, and thus internal conflict (resistance), are simply less likely to reproduce. Look around and you will see that this is the case. More friction with the environment = less children (on average). Less friction = more children. 

Thus, society encourages some people to reproduce and others not to. High friction means high internal conflict which means conflict among sub-minds which means lowered economic, social, and physical productivity. On a sexual level it usually translates into either blockage of the sexual program, sex with no thought of reproduction, or reproduction with no thought of material responsibility.

And yet "conflicted" people continue to appear in this world. How is this the case if reproductive pressure is against them? Well, society is far from uniform and — despite all the messages it sends us — doesn't actually want everyone to be the same. It doesn't actually need everyone to be the kind of person who is happy working every day from 9 to 6, living in a separate home with their nuclear family, being outwardly rather than inwardly focused, spending their entire adult life consuming, providing, and nurturing like good members of society.

In general, yes, society wants 80% of people to be like this. But it also needs 20% to be different. Most of the people we listen to, watch, or follow belong to the 20% who are "allowed" to express their sub-minds in a different way — by being overtly sexual, aggressive, impulsive, critical, obsessive, creative, outspoken, spiritual, etc. 

Of course, each of these people faced a great deal of friction growing up. Few of them have the degree of internal unity that many of their listeners / viewers / followers do. Often they pay a heavy price for whichever part of themselves they have made dominant (sexuality, aggression, impulsivity, criticism, obsession, creativity, outspokenness, spirituality, etc.).

So how is it that some people with conflicted sub-minds manage to "make it" (materially? reproductively?), while others do not? Does "making it" imply that they've achieved unity of their sub-minds? Far from it! I'm not even sure a focus on "making it" is useful since it prioritizes biological success over happiness. 

Heck, if biological success were so important to you, you wouldn't be reading this blog.

Instead, how about a focus on achieving unity of sub-minds? But is this even possible on a large scale? What if all the 50% or so of society that experiences significant internal conflict suddenly achieved unity of sub-minds? 

Society itself would necessarily change as a result. The current "cookie cutter" would largely dissolve, no longer being fed by aggressive promotion or by active resistance to it. People would feel that they are no longer being asked to be a certain way in order to please an abstract "society." There would be a sense of tolerance and encouraging people to develop naturally that we can only dream of. 

But are these "cookie cutter" forces only cultural in nature? Nope. Cultural wars only lead to one cookie cutter being replaced by another. I suspect forces are mostly economic. The current economic-political-technological system — an impersonal system — hinges upon most people being a certain way. I cannot come even close to fathoming that system and why it is the way it is. I've know some insightful thinkers, but I don't think they completely fathom it either. 

And so we're left, as always, with our immediate reality. The reality of conflicted sub-minds pulling us in this or that direction to the chagrin of our "will," — or rather, our system of beliefs and values, our ideas about the way things ought to be — ideas that were inculcated in us before our critical faculties were developed.

Regardless of what is happening on the societal level, we personally want to experience inner harmony, or unity of sub-minds. We look for subcultures which are friendlier to our particular configuration of traits and tendencies. Hoping to find kindred spirits, we try to share the story of our own conflict with reality, which is rarely appreciated. We isolate ourselves from certain societal forces in order to create a world where we can safely be ourselves. We become interested in spirituality as a way to soothe, escape, or transcend inner conflict. 

Is there a solution, or are all these just band-aids? 

Non-duality as an Adaptation to Separation

Human psychology evolved for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but for many thousands of years most of us have not been living that life.

If you've ever been on an expedition or part of some intense team experience that lasted three days or more, you will probably have experienced a significant loss of "ego": far fewer thoughts about your "self" and your personal story and far more spontaneous responding in the here and now. Maybe you felt it at Burning Man, on tour, or during that week when your whole team was holed up in the office finishing off (or starting) a project.

Over recent millennia life has become more and more separate for most of us: the teams have become progressively smaller, the strangers more numerous, the cooperation less intense.

Chances are, if you're reading this, you are alone right now. The way you are living would cause profound anxiety to a hunter-gatherer, who would interpret the situation as fraught with danger.

You may even be living alone. That means cooking alone, washing alone, and cleaning alone. You've got a complete set of home conveniences which previously would have serviced a multi-generation household. And several generations before that there would haven't been any of those conveniences.

Things have gotten particularly "bad" in the past 70 years. Average household size in most countries is plummeting and will soon be below 2. In fact, household size is as good a proxy as it gets for how "modern" or "progressive" a country is. The larger the households, the more "backwards" or "traditional" the society.

In their unadjusted state, humans are bound to suffer in this unnatural lifestyle, like a polar bear at the zoo who endlessly paces back and forth in its cage.

But there is an upgrade, a "tweak," and it's been around for thousands of years — presumably as long as cities have been around: the experience of non-dual oneness.

Non-dual oneness is a shift in the experience of the self from a separate, localized self to a self which is impersonal and universal. It is the mental hack that frees you from the anxiety of living separately while being surrounded by throngs of strangers.

Without the mental upgrade, modern living is bound to leave you low in oxytocin, serotonin, and other neurochemicals, and high in anxiety. From a hunter-gatherer perspective, you are trying to get by on your own in a hostile universe. You're basically ostracized from your tribe.

But these feelings aren't based in reality. There is no one out to kill and eat you. All your needs are met. And nobody has ostracized you. But without the non-dual "hack" you cannot fully assimilate this truth. You may understand intellectually that there is nothing to worry about, but your subconscious doesn't believe it.

With the hack, you can continue your apparently "separate" lifestyle with no loss of neurochemicals and no persistent anxiety or stress.

Some of the first to systematically figure this out were hermit monks who would spend months living in inhuman conditions in caves to train themselves to produce oxytocin without human contact, serotonin in the absence of social support, and all the other neurochemicals they needed to feel good. Of course, to reach this level they had to first undergo extensive training — typically years of special mental exercises. An untrained person would wither and die from the experience.

Today interest in the "hack" is growing proportionally to the apparent dysfunctionality of modern life.

Could there come a time in the not-so-distant future when the non-duality patch comes installed by default?

p.s. There is at least one other "hack:" pets! :-) But it's not as complete a hack as non-dual oneness.

All the Serotonin You Ever Need

You can engineer your inner mental world to produce more of the neurochemicals you want. This is what enlightened people have managed to do.

What are "tranquility," "equanimity," and "mindfulness" if not a cocktail of serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, and other chemicals? — in combination with particular neural structures, of course. One without the other doesn't produce the whole effect.

Let's take serotonin as an example. Serotonin levels depend largely on the amount of respect you receive. Let's unpack this logically and find the hidden opportunity to switch on the inner fountain of serotonin in each of us.

Let's suppose you were a programmer tasked with programming serotonin-like pathways into a robot to get it to think and behave like a human. Your thinking might go like this:

Hm... I need to get this robot to evaluate respect and disrespect that is directed towards it. On a purely sensory level there are no signals that directly correspond to respect, so we're taking about a higher-order level of information processing. Much higher, actually. 

But the outside world itself is also an abstraction to the mental processing of the robot. The robot first has to be able to discern different entities or actors and keep them separate from itself, which is also a higher-order level of information processing. It has to then be able to perceive how much and what kind of respect these entities give each other, and compare that with what they give the robot. 

So what we actually want is a comparison mechanism on top of an entity separation mechanism and a 'respect signal identification' mechanism... 

But that's not quite enough to make it humanlike, because any negative outcome from a comparison would immediately send the robot into a permanent downward spiral where they behave as if they had less serotonin, receive less respect as a result, and then have even less serotonin. 

What we're missing here is a self-image. The self-image will be a kind of story or narrative constructed by the robot indicating how much respect it should be receiving based on past experience. Now the robot can compare how much respect it is receiving to how much it is supposed to receive based on the narrative of the self-image. 

This way, if the robot generally receives little respect, it can get used to it and be 'satisfied' enough with the situation to continue functioning with a low, but not too low, level of serotonin. Or, if it typically receives lots of respect, it can habituate to that respect and remain vigilant to possible threats to its status by not generating far too much serotonin.

So now we're already talking about four high-level processes:

1. entity separation, i.e. "I am not You, Him, or It."
2. respect signal identification, e.g. "She quickly looked away as soon as I opened my mouth."
3. comparison, e.g. "He smiled at her 5 times but never smiled at me."
4. self-image, e.g. "He should have smiled at me because... "

Notice that spiritual paths leading to enlightenment, union with the divine, or whatever else you want to call it reprogram these processes on a deep level. That's how they "trick" the body into producing neurochemicals when there is no "objective" (haha) basis for doing so.

Let's look at how these four processes can be undercut:

Vipassana, or "Insight" meditation teaches you to become aware of the lowest possible levels of sensory processing, undercutting process #2. You realize that "respect" is a complete mental fabrication based on multiple layers of interpretation. Cognitive-behavioral therapy and other modalities may be able to produce similar insights.

Disidentification with the false self, the "self-image," is an almost inevitable result of any genuine spiritual practice, undercutting process #4. If "I" is simply "awareness" or "aliveness" apart from all mental-emotional content, then that "I" is entirely immune to the vagaries of life.

Insight into "no-self," typically considered the foundational insight necessary for enlightenment, totally undercuts process #1. If my "I" is "awareness" and your "I" is also awareness — and the same awareness as "my" awareness, — and if I really believe that (not just as an interesting intellectual concept), then this whole idea of individuals exchanging signals of respect becomes an amusing game of appearances.

All this spiritual awakening, however, doesn't stop physiological systems from functioning. The body obviously continues to produce and depend on neurochemicals. However, the deep mental processing that tells the body how much serotonin to produce will have changed.

Here's what that processing might look like:

I am in me, I am in you and in everything. I give my "self" attention, which is the same as respect. Status and hierarchy are games of form which have no lasting significance. Today you have one status, tomorrow another. The status my physical form currently enjoys has nothing to do with me. I am awareness observing this game and acknowledging all awareness. Nothing can harm that awareness. I am invulnerable and invincible.

Some readers may be able to entertain these thoughts in their intellect. But for the nuerochemical systems to actually respond to them and start spitting out all the serotonin you ever need, you'd actually have to believe and accept this way of thinking on the deepest possible level. If you feel like, "well, those statements are interesting, but they're really not true, and I don't want to trick myself into believing things that are false," then you're clearly not there yet.

Why this Blog is Now Called "The Non-Ex-Socionist"

Six years ago I wrote a post called "Why this Blog is Now Called "The [Ex-]Socionist." Six months ago I wrote a post called "Ex-ex-socionist?"

From now on this blog will be called "The Non-Ex-Socionist."

The Non-Ex-Socionist Manifesto

There may be types. Actually, it seems like there are. We can pretend that there are. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn't.

The recognition that there are types (or appear to be, upon close observation) is more important than the particular choice of typology.

The close observation leading to the recognition that there are types (or appear to be) is even more important than the recognition that there are types.

A lack of awareness of types causes much bewilderment in the world. Many errors of judgment arise from a lack of recognition of types and from a lack of close observation into the nature of individual differences.

You can and probably should apply different typologies simultaneously. These typologies do not need to correlate. In fact, they will not. Attempts to map typologies to each other or somehow merge them are doomed.

Typologies are imaginary constructs and thus deserve to be treated lightheartedly. There is no good reason to get worked up about typology.

Treating typology as a non-imaginary construct (as reality) can and does become a source of suffering. The very inventors of a typology may be afflicted by it.

Strongly identifying with a type and defending that identification leads to suffering, though it may not seem so at first. At some point it will be useful to give up the identification.

Having relinquished your type identify, you will nonetheless notice type-related behavior in yourself and others. Now you're getting somewhere!

You are not your type. Your personality may seem to follow a type pattern. But even identifying with your personality is unnecessary.

Your interpersonal relationships and interactions appear to be affected by type. Actually, they are most strongly influenced by your identifications.

Your self-identifications can be interpreted in such a way as to seem type-related. This serves to strengthen the identifications, which contributes to suffering.

Changes in identifications and self-referential narratives cause changes in relationships. Show me a type-identified person, and I'll show you a person who is suffering in their relationships.

Nonetheless, there may be types. Actually, it seems like there are. We can pretend that there are. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it doesn't.