Everything you know about intuition is wrong

9:27 PM 1/27/11

I worked today and I got home around 5:00. Maybe a little earlier or later than that. I remember that I ate something from Dairy Queen and I also drove to look around the location of a place where I'm going to apply for a job.

I was 'getting the file out.' After reading Mark Forster, I use that phrase to mean that I was doing one small task to get myself started on a large task that I was dreading. It's similar to 'the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.' If somebody was going to make mixed idioms (or mixed metaphors or whatever they are), those two mean about the same things. You tell yourself that you're not really going to write the whole term paper, you're just going to get the file out and look at it. Then you do, and you find that you can start on doing just a little bit of work, but not the whole thing. And then you find that you're able to do more than you ever could have done if you tried to tell yourself that you were going to sit down and do four hours of work on the term paper, because you don't feel that pressure making you freeze up and refuse to do it. And at any time if you feel you have to stop working, then the next 'getting the file out' could really be the time when all you do is get the file out and then set it down again.

I have to apply for a second job because I lost the job at Weis and I'm not getting enough hours at McDonald's. I am dreading applying for a second job.

I came home and took a nap. They woke me up a few minutes ago and I'm confused. I don't understand how it can only be 9:30 PM. I feel like I slept longer than that. Some of that might be because I am quitting caffeine again for the hundredth time. I've had a couple cups of decaffeinated coffee in the last two days. Decaf is probably not a good way to do this, because it has a tiny amount of caffeine and it makes me go into withdrawal again and again. I need to eat food instead of drinking coffee.

My personality will change slightly as I quit caffeine. I will be observing the changes, but this time, I have a model of what to look for. I am using the Jungian Function Attitudes to understand myself and other people. Did I mention in my blog, or was it somewhere else that I mentioned this, that I dismissed the Jungian Functions for a long time because, years ago, I read a comment from someone saying that the whole belief system was wrong - it was reductionistic or something - and I believed it. So I went all these years thinking that Jungian Functions were a 'mistaken belief system,' only to find out now that actually, they are extremely, amazingly, wonderfully, excitingly useful, and I am observing myself and others with them.

Because of the Jungian Functions, I can finally understand small talk! I was at work today and some people were standing around talking, which is something that I can't do. I *can* do it, if I'm using 1. caffeine, and 2. St. John's Wort, or else if the SJW residues are on my clothing going through my skin, and 3. 'They' are controlling me and forcing me to say things and make small talk. Usually, in the real world, I just stand there silently. I never, ever say anything about anything at all. I just quietly feel feelings. The ISFP is described someplace as 'sees much, says little.' That would be me in the real world (when I say 'the real world,' I mean, this IS the real world, but what if I weren't being controlled as a puppet).

The people talking were using Si, introverted sensing. This is a function that remembers things that have happened in the past, and compares and contrasts them to things happening now, or things being talked about. People making 'small talk' are often doing that. They are probably SJ Guardians.

***
www.cognitiveprocesses.com

"Introverted Sensing often involves storing data and information, then comparing and contrasting the current situation with similar ones. The immediate experience or words are instantly linked with the prior experiences, and we register a similarity or a difference - for example, noticing that some food doesn’t taste the same or is saltier than it usually is. Introverted Sensing is also operating when we see someone who reminds us of someone else. Sometimes a feeling associated with the recalled image comes into our awareness along with the information itself. Then the image can be so strong, our body responds as if reliving the experience. The process also involves reviewing the past to draw on the lessons of history, hindsight, and experience. With introverted Sensing, there is often great attention to detail and getting a clear picture of goals and objectives and what is to happen. There can be a oneness with ageless customs that help sustain civilization and culture and protect what is known and long-lasting, even while what is reliable changes."
***

I heard one of them using comparative adjectives. She was saying something like 'more than they did last time.' I don't remember the exact words. That jumped out at me because Si is about comparing one past experience to another and seeing how they're different, how they're alike or different, how it's more of something or less of something.

With the way my mind works, I don't want to just stand around talking about things. I want to *do* something. I am focused on the job. However, I enjoy the cameraderie of doing something with other people if we are all doing the same thing, but it has to be something fun, because I didn't really enjoy working at Weis when we'd all be in a group working together and talking - I liked it a little bit but I still felt left out, and also I didn't like the jobs I had to do at Weis. And I want to feel the cameraderie of all of us working on something challenging or something fun.

At Weis I worked in the food service department and I had to do things like make a bunch of sandwiches to put them out on the shelves. We threw away a huge amount of food that didn't sell. I'll have to talk about it some other time but that job was very demoralizing for me, and not just for me, but for everyone. But it was an SJ job - all the SJs were able to do it much better than I could.

It was just now pointed out to me that 'they could do it much better than I could' is a comparison. Or a contrast, or whatever.

Doh!!! LOL! I'm reading their page about creativity. It's www.cognitiveprocesses.com/creativity.html. The very last one, introverted feeling - I read that and started laughing out loud. What was I just talking about a minute ago? This thing used to seem worthless, but all of a sudden I've discovered how valuable it is! I was talking about how exciting it was that I went all these years thinking the Jungian Functions were a 'mistaken belief system,' and that the only thing that was useful was the 'personality types,' the MBTI, and Keirsey, but it wasn't useful to look at the individual functions because that was 'reductionistic' and that 'isn't how it really works,' or something like that, whatever it was that I believed. Now I'm all excited because I have found that something useless and wrong is actually amazingly useful and I wish I had known about it all this time!

"By changing the importance or finding new congruencies with personal values - e.g., finding value and committing to something that before seemed worthless." That's what made me start laughing out loud.

So if you see people who are excitedly picking up some idea and saying, 'I wish I had known about this years ago!' and they're all focused on learning the new thing and talking about how amazingly valuable and useful this is, they are using introverted feeling, and they might possibly be an INFP or ISFP, both of whom have that as their dominant function.

I can use the functions to see what people are DOING.

I have something which is brewing in my mind because 'they' suggested it and I haven't resolved it yet. They suggested that 'motion' or 'movement' needed to be added to the Jungian Functions system. 'Movement,' or 'The Instinctive Triad,' is something 'valuable' that comes from the enneagram. There is no equivalent of it in the Jungian System. If it's in there, it's implied by something or contained in something else or expressed by something else or just doesn't exist at all.

They were going over this idea with me the other day. I was imagining what if we built a robot which was programmed to have the eight Jungian Functions. If you only used those eight, would they be sufficient to make the robot move around and do things? Would the robot need to have some kind of 'movement function?' Is 'movement' already implied by those existing functions? Would the robot just 'sit there thinking?'

When I went home to WV before Christmas, we watched TV together a little bit. There was a Star Trek Next Generation episode, the one about the Exocomps. They were little robots meant to fix things by using artificial intelligence, but they seemed to come to life more than their designer expected them to. They started avoiding dangers and trying to survive. That was a survival instinct. 'Instincts' such as survival - this might or might not be the same things - Ichazo - I need to read Ichazo again. Instincts - social, self-preservation, sexual - are those instincts 'contained in' the 'movement center?' Are they already expressed by that? No - that's not what I mean.

Some websites assign a subtype to the enneagram types. You are a Type Three, self-pres/social. Those two instincts are your strongest instincts. I am saying that I'm not sure whether those 'instinctual stackings' are somehow associated with the 'movement center' or 'instinctive center' or whatever. All of this needs to be reconciled, and I don't think it will be as straightforward as simply saying that each enneagram type somehow exemplifies a particular Jungian Function, simply because the number 8 and the number 9 are close to each other (there are 8 functions, and 9 enneagram types, so hey, let's combine them! they must be the same! What if there were actually 27 enneagram types? or some other random number. You wouldn't think that the numbers could possibly be talking about the same thing.).

I feel that the Jungian functions are somehow 'too cognitive' or 'too intellectual,' that it's all up there in your head, that the little exocomp would just sit there thinking and meditating. I *like* the idea of a movement center or instinctual function.

So that's introverted feeling that I was using. Again, from that quote: finding new congruencies with personal values. Congruency: a matching between two things. Something is congruent if it matches. I was trying to say that I was using introverted intuition, but I think that's not true, I wasn't using that.

"By changing the representation or conceptual vision for a new holistic view - e.g., imagining another direction for perfection." introverted intuition

When I say that the Jungian functions seem 'too cognitive' or 'too up in your head' and have no connection to the body, instincts, or movement, or action - well, that's connected with my values: I think it's 'good' for a belief system to be connected with the body. That came from reading Nathaniel Branden. He said that rejecting the body is a big problem in psychotherapy. And, ugh, if I have to, I can quote Judith Swack too, whose method is called 'Healing From the Body Level Up,' and I say 'ugh' because I don't trust her, since that's when I started getting attacked, when I did her therapy. But yes, I am interested in: the acupuncture meridians and other things that connect the body with the mind. (All of a sudden my thought process just vanished after I mentioned Judith Swack. I forgot everything I was about to say.)

There is a big mistake going on - lots of people are being mistyped as intuitives, when actually they are very rare, and when they do things and say things, it is very abstract. Lots of sensors are being called intuitives and not understanding the extremeness of how abstract the intuitives really are. They are so extremely abstract that their words are meaningless to sensors. 'Imagining another direction for perfection?' This is something that a sensor finds very hard to understand. Why would you want to do that? It's such a huge, vague, general, holistic view. You would have to understand that this whole belief system is going about things the wrong way (or 'a particular way, whether good or bad') and describe WHAT it is that it's doing, and then imagine doing the whole thing differently. 'Perfection' is a concept that I don't think of very much anymore. (That was only one example of something that introverted intuiting might do.) But that would be like talking about a belief system or about values or the whole way that a culture or religion or business was going.

If you can learn to use those other functions they will help you. I can see how deep it is and how hard it is to use them. Every time I try to use one of the other functions, I find myself using introverted feeling - I'm judging this idea to be valuable and useful. (Or, alternatively, if you instantly react with 'This is pointless! Why bother?' That would be using the introverted feeling function: you respond with a value judgment about whether it's worthwhile, or not, to do some activity - not enough time, not important enough, not useful, not interesting, etc.)

Functions don't work by themselves. Each function works with a supporting function. The thinking function doesn't sit there thinking about nothing - it thinks about some data given to it by either sensing or intuition (concepts).

I was wondering how people 'see' concepts. If you're an intuitive (who isn't actually a mistyped sensor), then 'concepts' are your PRIMARY way of seeing things. Everything you look at in the real world becomes a concept. I was wondering how that would work in reality. Your eyes are a sense, and intuitives still use their eyes to see. (And words are a symbol, and sensors are able to read words and make the leap of understanding to know that the words 'represent' something or 'mean' something.) But how do they see?

I started imagining what it would be like to 'see in concepts.' There's actually another web page that I was looking at which described some of this. http://www.darionardi.com/functions. But before I read that page I was wondering about it. If you were a baby destined to be an intuitive, how exactly would you 'see concepts?' You still can see the material world and physical objects.

I started imagining somebody 'evil.' I started imagining a person who is like a military leader and they don't mind killing thousands of individual, real people, because those people are just an abstraction to them. I imagined that when they looked at people's faces, they didn't see any features on the face, even if their eyes were tested at 20/20 vision. Human bodies would be a stick figure, a symbol of a human, a round featureless head and stick body and stick arms and legs. They have no individual identity. (Again, this isn't all intuitives. I was just trying to understand a 'military dictator' or 'military leader' type of person. Someone who gives the instructions and strategies for killing thousands of people.)

But then (the fantasy continued) you walk up to the leader's desk and you put down a piece of paper that says 'I graduated from Harvard and I work for the government in Department So-And-So.' Suddenly the military leader looks up at you, and individual facial features magically appear on your face which was blank before. You now have an identity. You are an 'important person' who might have money and power to give to him or share with him. (This person probably has the 'social/self-pres' instinctual stacking too.) Now you are a 'recognized individual.' But you didn't exist as a recognized individual until you gave them the piece of paper with the magic symbols on it, 'I graduated from Harvard, blah blah.'

(*Note, I think this is all wrong. I was still talking about a sensor, probably an ESTJ, not an ENTJ. I don't know how you would use the 'magic symbols' to convince an intuitive that you exist as an individual and not just as an abstraction. I think that that description of a 'piece of paper saying you're from Harvard' is more of an SJ phenomenon, not an ENTJ phenomenon.*)

So then I started imagining if somebody hacked that. All you have to do is write the magic words and you suddenly become an important person who exists. Then you can undermine the military dictator and act against him to end the regime.

Well anyway, that was how I tried to imagine 'seeing concepts.' Human faces would be a meaningless blur, a peach or brown colored oval with nothing on it, just random shadows, no eyes, nose, or mouth, no identity, no individuality, no specificity. All you see are large groups of faceless stick figures moving around. If they group together, they become threatening. If you see any of them talking together in groups, pay attention to what they're saying because they might be conspiring against you.

I wish I had some nicer visions of what it's like to 'see concepts!' Not all intuitives are military leaders who see humans as killable, disposable abstractions who don't matter in the real world.

And I think all of that fantasy was wrong - it's probably nothing like that at all, when you see concepts. I was probably still stuck in the sensor world. It's like one of those nightmares where you try to turn on the light, but no matter how many different lights you turn on, it's still dark - that's from lucid dreaming - 'they' were suggesting that to me because of reading about Jared Loughner recently and so everybody's reading about lucid dreaming lately. No matter how many lights you turn on, no matter how you try to imagine what 'intuition' is to an intuitive, you're wrong. Intuitives are *almost* another species of human.

This is useful for me in many ways - it would help me create book characters. Creating characters, and giving them dialogue, was impossible in the past. Now I can create characters by building from their functions, but I have to thoroughly understand what the functions are really doing, and distinguish them from things that resemble them. Because I myself have a tendency to use 'introverted feeling,' then every time I try to use another function, or look for the other functions, or imagine what it would be like to use them, I find myself automatically going back to using introverted feeling again - value judgments about whether this is good or bad.

I want to create good role models of all the types, too, because the 'evil military leader' isn't the ONLY manifestion of ENTJ type Eight. I'm sure there are ENTJ Eights doing good things out there.

You know how it is when you want to tell a celebrity what they ought to be doing or believing instead? If you see a celebrity and you think, if only I had what they had, if I were famous and rich, if I were able to do the things they can do, but also keep the knowledge I have now, then I would be able to fix everything. Like if I could be inside of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of Korea, and guide him by my values, while knowing what I know, and knowing what he knows. (I guess that qualifies as a 'celebrity,' lol.) He could be an ESTJ too, I don't know anything about him. In the fantasy I was trying to imagine an intuitive, which is why I said ENTJ, because the 'seeing concepts' thing is inconceivable to me. Kim Jong Il could be ESTJ and I don't want anybody to think that I actually know what I'm talking about. That's the whole point, I don't have a clue about any of this and I'm just guessing, so don't take my word for it.

But also I need to do more work on understanding the 'movement center' and how it fits in with the Jungian Functions.

This idea: that if you try to understand them, you really, really, REALLLLY don't understand them. No matter how hard you try, you're actually thinking of the wrong thing, and find yourself back to where you began. It's reallllly really hard to understand and when you think you know about it, you actually don't. It's like struggling to learn how to do a spell at Hogwarts. This really is a lot like magic. Using another function, seeing things another way, finding it inside you, finding that this function is there and it exists and you can do it, is like magic. But you have to identify it correctly. (And the web page that said that JK Rowling was an INFP might be wrong. She might be an ISFP. I'll have to find that page. I'm trying to say that if you think you know what an 'intuitive' is, you don't. You have to try really, really hard to understand it, and when you think you know it, you're wrong.)

I have complaints about the Myers-Briggs test. I want to see a test like this:

1. You go to a party. What do you do? Check ALL the answers that apply.

a. Go to a party? I wouldn't do that. Alcohol is bad for you.
b. Go to a party? I wouldn't do that. I never fit in.
c. Do I HAVE to go to the party? I'd eat but not drink...
d.
e.
f.
g.
h... and then some answers that are totally not you:
i. I'd greet my ten friends and we'd get drunk and do karaoke.
j.
k.

You know, a very detailed question about a real world situation. There would be lots and lots of possible answers and you check ALL that apply. None of this 'distinguishing between two closely related things...' you know it's like identifying the criminal. They did a study that showed that when you identify the person you saw in a crime, when you look at two similar photos it's bad, it doesn't work that way. The best way to identify the criminal is looking at his face in a crowd of people who look different from him. It's not natural for you to look at two people who look almost exactly alike and try to figure out which one is the suspect. But you could identify the suspect if you saw him in a crowd of people, where he wouldn't be standing next to four other people who looked almost exactly like him. I want the test designed that way.

The real Myers-Briggs test is actually like this:

1. Do you like things to be
a. open, or
b. closed?

Okay, so that's kind of an exaggeration. But it's abstract. And the instructions tell you to 'just answer the first thing that pops to mind.' Yeah, that worked really well. I got 'INTP,' then 'INTJ,' then 'INFP,' for years. There are hundreds of mistyped people who think they're intuitives because they like 'possibilities.' Possibilities? I love to think about 'possibilities!' I love thinking about 'what is possible' instead of 'what is actual.' I can list a dozen different ways of doing something instead of the usual way that it's done. I always have some idea for how things should be done differently. But I'm not an intuitive. The words don't mean the same things to different people. I go around all day long thinking that everything on earth needs to be done differently than the way they're doing it, so I called myself an intuitive. To me, that's a dislike for 'what is actual.' I can't stand the way they do things around here. I can't stand anything! But that doesn't make me an 'intuitive.' I think thousands of people are mistyping because of that same thing. 'What is possible' versus 'what is actual' has mistyped thousands of people as 'intuitives.' The whole test needs to be revised!

It's easy to criticize something you didn't create. It wouldn't even be there if it began with criticizing. There is something rather than nothing. The test exists. This is Edward de Bono, black hat thinking. Black hat thinking didn't create the test. It can revise it, but not create it. And by the way, don't anyone go trying to correlate the Six Thinking Hats with Eight Jungian Functions or Nine Enneagram Types, because they're different! lol. (The Twelve Days of Christmas could be rewritten and each number is a number of something in the personality systems.)

I <3 Jungian Functions. Jungian functions are 'in.'

I need to go eat.

It's really weird to know about the functions and struggle to use other functions besides my preferred one, or even to understand *what they are*. It's weird when you find yourself going back to your normal way of doing things while you're trying to imagine doing something differently. Everything always goes back to that original way. Then you think 'I was using intuition' but actually you were using introverted feeling.

I wish they had taught me this in elementary school. They probably teach it at Hogwarts.