I still wonder, as peacebaby does, what is actually going through your minds?
Answer:
... I can't tell you how much of my existence has been spent doing absolutely nothing -- just sitting in this zoned-out state of what I'll call musing, contemplating, one impression or another popping through my head, sometimes simultaneously, and if I'm really anxious about a specific thing, in that moment it feels like a mess of craziness up there, it's like I 'wait' for things to settle of their own accord or something... letting things sift around and flow around.
Affirmation of Answer 1:
Does this resonate strongly with other Ni doms?
I know it does for me: regarding both my own mind, and the external world...
Yes, this is how I think. Here's where it gets tricky: if I
try to think, my thinking sucks. The information isn't there. I keep
pushing the same bits of info around and they just don't fit. I can't do anything with it.
However, if I don't
push, but instead just let the thoughts flow ... if I just "not-think", instead of think ... THEN I get results, and it feels like magic. The ideas/thoughts
reorient themselves without my pushing, and suddenly they fit together. Sometimes this self-reorientation is comical, ludicrous, absolutely silly ... but sometimes it's a huge insight that gets me what I need. This is where the judging function comes in, especially the extroverted judging: the judging differentiates the nonsense arrangements from the insightful ones. The new insights are "insightful" precisely because my judging determines them to be so, not because Ni does something magical.
Well why don't you be a cool INTJ like Edgar or Uumlau and actually explain it to me.
Marm thinks I'm cool!
That's how I think. I refuse to think there's absolute truth in one theory, meshing things together and trying to look at what is common inside of them is what works for me. I lean more toward function theory, but I never claimed to be an expert.
This more Ni than Ne. Ne will take lots of disparate events/objects/observations and see "patterns" in them. Often there is a goal of uniting all of these observations into a single pattern, a single theory, that describes all of them. Ni is more about wanting to understand a particular thing in many different ways, comparing perspectives.
You know what? I think other people's observations matter.
Se :hi:
Go jerk off or something, pop a prozac, go away.
More Se
ah well I generally want more info so that suggests N I suppose
I'd disagree. This continuous pretension that having a curious mind (thus implying an intelligent mind) implies N, and that it's converse implies S is nonsense.
The S vs N dilemma is rather clear in you, Marm, because on one level, you are very interested in the abstract, but at the same time you'd like to cut through the bullshit and have a concrete explanation. This really feels like Se vs Ni, to me.
As you continue to relate, here:
though I feel a need to add this addendum that was a response of mine to someone else another thread: "Part of the reason why I find it so obnoxious is because I don't think my type of thinking is quite as abstract as yours (I SUCK AT ALGEBRA) and I feel like you're making fun of people who aren't as abstract as you are"
I don't know if that means I'm still N but *less N* than some others, or just that my way of thinking is Ne instead of Ni. Or if it has nothing to do with being N or S, or I'm just a big huge feeler that way.
I mean...like when Tater said I don't want to reason things out for myself ... I was annoyed with that because I think about this stuff a lot, it's not lack of reasoning, and very well could be lack of understanding. Cognition is pretty abstract as compared to observable behavior. Of course I question motives myself, but going deep down into processes that are deeper than life philosophy or world view...it's a bit difficult to grasp, kind of like thinking about how big the universe actually is, or about eternity.
Exactly. Translating abstract concepts into concrete concepts is difficult in the extreme. The whole concept of infinity is a good example. In abstract terms, infinity is very simple: it's an unbounded set. It's just a way of saying "goes on forever." No more, no less. Translating it into Se terms is where it breaks down, because then infinity starts meaning nonsensical things, like "infinity is the highest number" or "parallel lines intersect" or "really big, no, I mean really really big".
I'm not trying to make fun, here, but rather trying to give specific examples of turning a basic abstract concept into a concrete concept. The abstract concept needs to stay in the abstract space, the concrete concept needs to stay in the concrete space. So if we take the meaning of "infinity" w/r to Ni, and translate it into Se, it doesn't become "really really big", but rather it becomes, "OK, I don't need to worry about reaching the end of this any time soon," or "Hmm, I just did some bad math, because it says I should have infinite money, now." Similarly, the Se concept of "this seems to go on forever" translates into the Ni-abstraction of "Hmm, this may very well be infinite, unbounded."
As for Ne vs Ni, let me relate a long discussion I had last night IRL with an ENFP of our mutual acquaintance. She was busily digesting the contents of several books, including "A Course In Miracles," "The Four Agreements" and the "Tao Te Ching." Curious, I pointed out a section of the Tao and asked what she thought. I expected she'd take 15-30 minutes going over it and tell me what thoughts the text invoked.
Nope.
She read it in about 60 seconds and said, "Benevolent detachment."
I just looked at her funny. "Um, sort of, but there's a lot more to it, than that."
"It's all just benevolent detachment. You see it here, and in the Four Agreements and in Buddhism and several other religions. You just split off yourself from the real world, and then you see the truth."
"Um, no. It really isn't just that," I replied. "There are so many ideas here, in this section of the Tao. For example, the 'Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.' What does that mean to you?"
"Benevolent detachment."
As Ne, she is pulling ideas in from all over, and synthesizing them into a single concrete understanding, trying to find the unifying truth in all of them.
As Ni, I chose that particular line about "Practice not-doing," because that is
exactly what I do when I think. When I don't
try to think, my thinking falls into place. If I try to think hard, it just doesn't. By "not-thinking," I get my best thinking done. And this attitude works in other aspects of one's life.
E.g., a dancer dances (Se), but doesn't actually "think" about dancing, doesn't actually "try" to dance, but she just dances, seemingly effortlessly; the dancer
is the dance. If she were trying to dance, or thinking hard about dancing, you'd see the flaws. It would look wrong. Instead, she reaches a level of understanding/skill that she is "not-dancing", and thus dances very well. (I point out this Se example to show how it is quite compatible with the Ni perspective.)
Yet Ne glosses all of this over, looking for its version of the "underlying pattern" and gets "benevolent detachment."
I hope this helps you with your self-insights, Marm, and gives the rest of your a better understanding of what Ni "really is."