Seix Blindness - everyone is it.

[Kalach]

Extraverted sensing's a good one because everyone thinks they do it. I mean, open your eyes, you're extraverting sensing, right? If you weren't, how could you drive a car? How could you consciously thread a needle or call someone beautiful? How could it not be sensing in the extraverted attitude?

Perhaps eating too much and feeling full would be introverted sensing.

My point? There's not a whole lot of awareness out there of just how rigidly your personality type does restrict your cognitive processing. Like, did you know a P is just as rigid as a J? The terms of the rigidity are different, but they're there and scrupulously enforced. And the caring, sharing, open-heartedness of Fs? Yeah, not so much, since the terms are just as strict as any T's. And so on.

But people do mature into their function use. And this surely does not mean they tend toward the X. Maturing into function use means moving more fully onto [one side of a] dichotomy and exploring both [the] depths and limitations [of that side].

Labellistas, that was a Te expression of some Ni content. (That is, it was a model-based insight rendered into language for testing, but not really very much testing because the model isn't meant ever to be wholly scrapped. Such testing as does occur is meant to be constructive.) You're not supposed to understand. You're welcome to screw around with it as much as you like. After all, you've got to satisfy your own type preferences before ever even approaching some Ni conceptual structure of your own. Or did you think that disagreements stem from pure issues of extra-personal truth?

My real point? There probably is some way to un-poison the well. Actual communication with other people appears to require major compromise but does appear to be possible. If somehow one manages to provide another with the right amount of the kind of information they usually prefer and the right amount of time for processing toward the kind of judgment they usually prefer, then communication perhaps can be called full and complete.


If you didn't run on rails, could you have any personality at all?

 

[Heart&Brain]

This is a very important point, I think: the road to individual maturity and social understanding goes through strengthening what's already strong in your personality, not through weakening it by approaching a 'happy middle'.

We use to think that 'communication' is about compromise, all parties giving up on their most individual and eccentric expressions of themselves and gravitating towards some common ground.

This regime of communication is based on everybody's more or less voluntary 'amputation' of their strenghts: to enter into the social code implies - within the usual understanding - to surrender to the lowest common denominator.

But really, why accept that the condition for meaningful social cooperation is that everyone must withhold their greatest gifts? It seems we'd end up with a social understanding based on everyone being less than they could be, everyone turning themselves more 'stupid' (not IQ-wise but cognitive preference-wise).


It seems a far more respectful and more fruitful idea to regard maturity as gaining more and more competency of one's preferred cognitive functions: Exploring the depths, the limitations, the complexities and the potentials of what you really *are* (thus, are capable of) and not 'softening the edges' by weakening one's stronger functions and end up with only weak and inferior cognition in all & none directions.

What if we could reach each others' differences through contributing with the best differential complexity we can muster, not through submitting to the simplest commonality or shallow ressemblance we can find?