For myself, it's literally this feeling of intense connection. It's unconscious and the feeling also tones down in intensity when I recognize it or give it notice. It's like the flow of the moment was interrupted. A rock thrown into a river.
It's easiest for me to describe it in reference to people and conversation I'm having with them. It also happens with art for me; music, visual art, movies etc. any art that grabs me I will want more of. With people it's almost physical (maybe it is), it's a drawing in of the other person and I find myself never wanting the conversation (if it's interesting) to end.. even after hours and hours. I feel it most when the other person is on the same wavelength and the intensity is drawing them in too, if they're taken aback by it the 'merging' feeling dies, if it was happening at all.
I'll think more on this but now I have to go to work.
It gets to be extremely painful, especially when you are completely alone.
it's as tho you're in there with them...like imagine you're just a spirit or a ghost or whatever helps your visual and you walk into them and feel how they feel and who they are from the inside.
Cloud of Thunder said:
I think it also means to be prone to feelings of limerence.
Yes absolutely!!! I am so glad I am not alone in these feelings
I mean whether "merging" takes that to a new level, though.
I think that at least for me as an ENFP and 6w7, there is a huge idealization/unification that goes on. I am very attentive to atmosphere and energy, and I can easily pick up on the "feel" of something. I have a skill for putting together outfits based on an overall concept/feeling (eg, nighttime thunderstorm), and my mom asks how I can know this. I don't know. I just have the internal sense of all the things that a thunderstorm evokes and how it feels and what the nighttime evokes and how it feels and I see those things reflected in certain pieces of clothing and accessories and I get a sense of how they play off each other and how they create an overall mood.
It's almost less
merging and more
absorption, because it really has very little to do with me personally, short of my interest, and it's totally about the external concept or feeling or person or song or whatever and how I can totally delve into it and embody it. My relationship with food is sort of like this, I feel like certain foods embody certain "wholes" and eating those foods evokes that whole in me - like eating Middle Eastern food really creates in me an entire experience of the Middle East, music and colors and taste and spirituality and aesthetics and all those linked concepts - it's like I want to
become the Middle East. That's how I understand "merging". It's about totally becoming whatever your focus of interest is, delving into it completely and embodying it.
I almost feel like the identification with this variant and sex drive as an instinct is off, and it's more about necessary sacrifice of the self to obtain growth. Though maybe that's what sex and childbirth is, the sacrifice of the individual to partner and children for the gain of your genetic material continuing to live on.
Perhaps the sx drive is, in a way, about eternal life through the dissolution of the self.