Here's more from my class on The Self that I've been posting from. This segment is on "personality types," as outlined by a variety of brilliant, wise or channelling teachers.
See if you can see yourself.
PERSONALITY TYPES
Jung -Two basic attitudes: introversion and extroversion, and four mental functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting.
The introverted attitude is interested in exploring and analyzing one’s own internal world. This person is introspective, preoccupied with internal affairs, and may be withdrawn or aloof, unsocial and reserved.
The extroverted attitude is preoccupied by one’s interactions with people and things and appears to be more active and outgoing, taking an interest in what’s around him or her.
The thinking function consists of connecting ideas with each other in order to arrive at a general concept or a solution to a problem. It is an intellectual function that seeks to understand things.
The feeling function is an evaluative one that either accepts or rejects an idea on the basis of whether the idea arouses a pleasant or unpleasant feeling.
Sensation is perception produced by experiences that stimulate the sense organs - sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, as well as sensations that originate inside the body.
Intuition is similar to sensation, but differs in that one does not know from where the intuition came or originated. (“I just know.”)
Eight types of individuals: introvert-thinking, introvert-feeling, introvert-sensate, introvert-intuitive, extrovert-thinking, extrovert-feeling, extrovert-sensate, extrovert-intuitive.
Introvert-thinking type seeks to understand his inner being, thinking directed inwardly, the philosopher or existential psychologist; tends to want to be left alone with his or her own thoughts, not concerned about others accepting his or her ideas; also suppresses feelings and may become unapproachable and standoffish, or in extreme cases, out of touch with reality altogether.
Extrovert-thinking type devotes energy to learning as much as possible about the objective, external world, understanding and discovering laws, developing theories; the scientist; tends to repress the feeling side and may become autocratic, vain and impervious to criticism.
Introvert-feeling type has strong, intense feelings buts keeps them hidden from the outside world; may have a mysterious charismatic charm and be quite profound; inclined towards melancholy and depression, silence, and occasionally may erupt in an emotional storm.
Extrovert-feeling type goes with the flow of the moment, wherever feelings lead; subordinates thinking to feelings; may be inclined to be gushy, erratic and moody and form intense attachments and then break them off suddenly.
Introvert-sensate type is immersed in the experience of internal sensations and finds the external world uninteresting; may be inclined to have difficulty expressing himself except through art, but productions are devoid of meaningfulness of thought or feeling.
Extrovert-sensate type lives for the sensations that can be derived from life, sensual, pleasure-seeking, thrill-seeking, but without meaning or reflection; can be given to addictions and compulsions, and can become crude sensualists.
Introvert-intuitive type can have brilliant insights and inspirations, but others must follow up on developing them for this type can’t really develop the intuitions; the dreamer, visionary, prophet, often regarded as an enigma, a misunderstood genius that cannot communicate effectively.
Extrovert-intuitive type discovers and initiates new possibilities in the outer world and can be great promoters, though again, without the capacity for follow-up; can be easily bored, unreliable and unwittingly hurtful, while frittering away their potentials.
Broch (“Guide”) - Three basic types of human personality, predominantly governed by either reason, emotion or will.
Reason-predominant types conduct life mainly through the reasoning process and use the will in the service of the intellect in a premeditative way, through deduction, figuring, calculating, and assessing, not by using their emotional and intuitive nature. They can be quite planful and efficient and logical. People who predominantly come from reason tend to neglect the emotions, are afraid of them, thwart them, cripple them. They are afraid of losing control. Therefore, they don’t have much access to their intuition; they don’t have much real pleasure in life; they secretly look upon the emotional types as inferior, but they are afraid of them. They are proud to be so steeped in the reasoning process.
Emotion-predominant types mainly relate to life from their emotions and pride themselves on their capacity to feel. They can be quite intuitive. These types use the will chaotically and on impulse or in the despair of the moment. They secretly looks down on intellectuals. The emotional types can completely lose sight of reason. There can be an absence of responsible, conscious planning and deliberation. This person is afraid that by curbing his nature he might miss something valuable in life. If the emotional types were balanced enough to use the reasoning capacities more, they would have access to more wisdom, which is love plus the reason.
Will-predominant types are action-oriented, doers whose focus is on achievement. The will is supposed to be the servant of reason and emotion, but in these types the will is the master. These people look down on reasoning capacity and see people of that type as in their head and they despise the emotional types as out of control and weak, seeing both of these other types as not achieving anything. Only they are the achievers. They have a tendency to be impatient, to lose sight of caution, and it is difficult for them to gain real truth because they neglect the rational and emotional sides
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Gomez - Reich’s Three Cosmic Pulsatory Movements: expansion, contraction, rest.
Expansion in its harmonious form is movement as creativity, growth and building, forward movement, outgoingness, unselfishness, searching for union with anything outside of the self, for the other, the other you. In the negative, expansion manifests as aggression, hostility, quarreling, destructiveness, cruelty, impatience, ultimately in some cases, war.
Contraction in its positive form is assimilation, balance, introspection, inward movement, caution, patience, thoughtfulness, self search. In the negative it manifests as regressive, backward movement, resisting progress, selfishness, egocentricity, avarice, separateness.
Rest in its positive aspect is healthy passivity, preservation, a state of beingness, timelessness, gathering momentum for a new growth cycle. It is needed for fruition to take place. In the negative, it is stagnation, lifelessness, inertia.
Each human being is predominantly motivated by one of these pulsatory movements, but all three are present in everyone and ideally blend harmoniously. (If you just keep expanding, for example, if expansion didn’t work together with contraction, it would become destructive and you would lose grounding. People with tremendous will who force themselves to stay in expansion mode are blocking nature. These are the type A personalities who can get heart attacks.)
Roberts (“Seth”) - Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general and these generally govern the large areas of experience. Your emotional feelings are often transitory, but beneath there are certain qualities of feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical chords. While your day-to-day feelings may rise or fall, these characteristic feeling-tones lie beneath. Sometimes they rise to the surface, but in great long rhythms. You cannot call these negative or positive. They are instead tones of your being. They represent the inner portion of your experience. This does not mean that they are hidden from you, or are meant to be. It simply means that they represent the core from which you form your experience. If you have become afraid of emotion or the expression of feeling, or if you have been taught that the inner self is no more than a repository of uncivilized impulses, then you may be in the habit of denying this deep rhythm. You may try to operate as if it didn’t exist, or even try to refute it. But it represents your deepest, most creative impulses; to fight against it is like trying to swim upstream against a strong current.
These feeling tones, then, pervade your being. They are the form your spirit takes when combined with flesh. From them, from your core, your flesh arises. Everything that you experience has consciousness, and each consciousness is endowed with its own feeling-tone. The feeling tone, then, is the motion and fiber - the timber - the portion of your energy devoted to your physical experience.
Goleman - To some degree, we each have a favored emotional range. Temperament is a given at birth, part of the genetic lottery that has compelling force in the unfolding of life. Temperament can be defined in terms of the moods that typify our emotional life. Four temperamental types (per Jerome Kagan): timid, bold, upbeat and melancholy.
