Lesson 43 – The Duality Of Your Four Thinking Styles
“In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.”
SHEKHAR KAPUR
THE TWO POLAR AXES OF YOUR PERSONALITY WHEEL
According to the psychological methods of Carl Jung’s system of thought, which described the operations of the Frontal Being, or in his terms, the personality or psyche, he felt that the human psyche is best understood in terms of internal duality or polar tensions.
Jung identified two different principal polar tensions that come into play. He claimed that there were two primary ways in which evaluations or judgments could be made, and they were mutually exclusive. When expressing your temperament along one of the polar axes, you cannot express it simultaneously along the other axis.
The first polar axis (A/C) concerns how you evaluate your daily life circumstances. The second (B/D) concerns how you perceive and interpret your experiences.
THE A/C AXIS:
The A/C axis of your Personality Wheel Profile contains two opposing functions:
1. The first function is “thinking”, the logical, analytic process which measures a situation by rules, laws, principles or standards. There is objectivity and consistency in the method used by “thinking types” as they arrive at their evaluation.
2. The polar opposite is what Jung called “feeling.” This involves more subjective evaluations based on personal values rather than the more external laws or criteria of the “thinking” function. The “feeling type” judges or evaluates based on the uniqueness of each circumstance. Things are more situational. Memories and feelings that the circumstance evokes are influential.
As you return to your Thinking Style profile, you should examine your scores on the A/C axis. Keep in mind that no matter what your results may be, both poles are represented within you. The question is, which of the two is most featured by your temperament? If you scored high in quadrant A on thinking, it does not mean you are insensitive and never feel anything. Instead, it implies that you are more comfortable with or inclined toward objective, logical evaluations. If you scored high in quadrant C, it does not mean you are a feather-brained person who can never think straight. Instead, it indicates a preference in style for how you meet and measure life.
If your score is reasonably balanced between the two quadrants, one of three possible conclusions could be drawn:
1. First is the possibility that the questionnaire did not ask quite the right questions to draw a proper reading to disclose your temperament on this polar axis. Perhaps from the description of the poles, you get a sense of which one you feature more often, even if the questionnaire results are inconclusive.
2. Another possibility is that this is a transition time in your life when you shift from one pole to the other. The apparent “balance” indicates change, like catching a glimpse of yourself sitting on the top of a mountain from the adjoining mountain. Such transitions in temperament may happen occasionally, but they are not frequent in most people’s lives. Many people go through their entire lives and maintain a single temperament style.
3. The third possibility is that this polarity is relatively balanced because these two functions are what Jung called “auxiliary functions,” and the distinctiveness of your temperament style is not created by this polarity but instead by a clear difference in the other polarity, the B/D axis (sensation/intuition).
As an example, let’s say that you have scored significantly higher in quadrant B (sensation) than in quadrant D (intuition), and at the same time, you have scored in quadrants A (thinking) and C (feeling), which are similar. In Jungian terminology, your “primary function” would be sensation (that is, sensation is the primary descriptive term to use to describe your temperament). Your “inferior functions” would be thinking and feeling. Some people will find that this fits their thinking style profile; others will find that each of the two polarities yields a distinctly predominant function.
The question of balance is essential to consider. It does not appear from his writings that Jung felt the ideal would be identical function scores on the profile. In other words, the individuation process or the living of your soul’s mission can be accomplished even if you are a particular temperament type.
A problem arises only if you are alienated from one of the psychological functions and cannot call upon it when needed and appropriate. This would occur when you have measured low in any one of the quadrants or have what we call an avoidance tendency within a particular quadrant. The scoring scale utilized on your profile would give this a 3 rating.
The ideal, therefore, might be clear access to all the functions and familiarity with them, even though in daily living, one or two of them are especially prominent in your personality.
These ideas about the thinking/feeling polarity also hold for the second polarity that Jung felt was central to the personality make-up. This one concerns how you make perceptions in life. The first mode of perception is what Jung called “sensation.” This pole entails the use of the physical senses to perceive life. It is exclusively concerned with what is “here and now” as concrete physical reality. When you perceive life with this function, you deal with life in a very present-oriented kind of practicality. Its polar opposite is what Jung called “intuition”, not merely psychic perception, but more broadly the use of creative imagination to perceive the possibilities of life. Intuition, in this sense, is future-oriented; it can perceive what is coming or what might be, but that which is not yet manifest physically.
IN CONCLUSION
Sensation and intuition (B/D) have to do with the way we perceive our experiences:
A person with a highly developed sensation function (B) perceives experience through the sense organs and interior sensations. This function is sometimes called reality since it is alert to factual detail. It tells us that something exists.
On the other hand, the intuition function (D) operates almost as a “sixth sense.” This function perceives almost instinctively . . . perceptions are mediated to the intuitive function unconsciously. It is not as alert to the sense data, but it perceives the meaning and possibility of a situation.
Thinking and feeling (A/C) determine the manner in which we judge or come to conclusions about our perceptions:
The thinking function (A) uses a logical process to link ideas together and then lead to a conclusion. It is an intellectual function that seeks to understand something.
The feeling function (C) uses a process of evaluation that leads to like or dislike, acceptance or rejection. Something is accepted or rejected depending on whether it arouses a pleasant or unpleasant feeling.
RELATING THE FOUR FUNCTIONS TO YOUR SOUL’S PURPOSE
It is essential to understand the operation of your Frontal Being and its habitual ways of functioning. The discovery and living of your Soul’s Purpose rests largely upon freeing yourself from your Frontal Being’s mechanical, automatic habits.
This is not to say that once you have found your mission in life, you will cease to have a Frontal Being. Nor is it to say that you must radically alter your personality temperament to live your Soul’s Purpose.
Instead, the problem that you and every seeker face can be summarized as follows:
Your personality has certain strong predispositions for perceiving and evaluating life. There is nothing inherently wrong with your thinking style (your personality type). Your Soul’s Mission can be lived with that predominant feature.
However, by heavily using those predominant functions, you have slipped into habitual ways of seeing and reacting to life. You have become hypnotized into a sleeplike existence based upon routine rather than the conscious use of your will. This may have worked well to produce a comfortable, predictable life, but it probably does not result in a creative, dynamic life experience that will be fulfilling.