Aushra's Dream

The day has gotten away from me so this is going to be really short but today I dug deeper than before in this page that gives a history of "the traditional Enneagram" . In the system there are 9 "holy ideas" and 9 "virtues" that correspond to them. Here is an interesting statement, related to these: "While everyone has the capacity to embody all of the Holy Ideas and Virtues, one pair of them is central to the soul's identity, so the loss of it is felt most acutely, and the person's ego is most preoccupied with recreating it, although in a futile, self-defeating way." This reminds me of the dynamic of the Suggestive in Model A. A person is always seeking to fill the void of their Suggestive, and for the most part they do it without understanding or mindfulness. I think I now understand enough about the Enneagram to say that its model starts with the idea of "otherworldly" realities, and asserts that human personalities are dist...

 Today is going to be one of those short ones. The main thing that happened today on the journey toward the dream fulfilled is that I've decided that for the time being I'm giving up on the idea of finding socionics or MBTI enthusiasts who can join in the personal transformation mission. I'm thinking of finding people who are passionate about self-discovery (i.e. the Jungian approach), and then seeing how I might be able to bring socionics principles to them in a way that is helpful for the main mission of helping people and bringing harmony to groups. I'm looking forward to getting my paper copy of Jung's book soon. In the meantime today I received a brand-new paperback copy of Let Us Dance! The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved , a book of poetry by Chelan Harkin. I found out about the book from the profile of the person who I've been meeting regularly with in the mornings on Focusmate. It is really good-- I am planning on using it as an aid to spiritual refl...

 It's funny the things you notice late. The title of today's post is the subtitle of Jung's Psychological Types . Somehow I hadn't paid attention to it before, probably because I have been focusing on articles that reference it without the subtitle. If you've been reading all my posts, you've seen that I keep linking the URL to the Google Books page for the book. It's where I've been going to do all the reading, so far, that I've been reporting on to you. But it's well over 600 pages long and I've been scrolling up and down the public domain scan of the original translation. So it's a sign of my seriousness, I guess, that this morning I sprung for a used paperback copy, on Amazon. I'm going to read the whole thing, I've decided! It'll be here in a few days. This afternoon I took my "sweet time" going food shopping and then chopping up a watermelon and then disassembling a cauliflower to roast it, and then mooshing s...

 Today I made my second monthly trip to visit my uncle in Trenton. We had lunch at a Greek place called Mikonos. He had spanakopita and I had a beef and lamb gyro platter. I had to try their baklava for dessert. I loved the spices in it. (I think I tasted coriander?) As always we had a lot of great conversation. It was a nice way to spent the afternoon on the first day of a three-day weekend.

 I am looking forward to the long weekend. With little scheduled after dinner tomorrow through the end of Memorial Day, I can move back to the daily tick-tocking of bedtime-waking-walking-showering, on the soothing rhythm of 10pm-6am. Repetitive comfortable routine is one of the hallmarks of Introverted Sensing (Si) . In my type,  ESI / ISFj  (MBTI: ISFP), this information element is in the position of Demonstrative, meaning that it feels like one is playing around when one exercises it. But I have started to learn to "play around" a lot more than I used to. There is something "lazy" or "easygoing" about Si. Routine removes some of the burden of making decisions, and it has been shown scientifically that making decisions drains the brain of energy. But it's smart to be strategically lazy by reducing the need for decisions around the difficult moments of transitioning to sleep and then back to waking. One does not overthrow a life of creativity and inno...

 Today was about standing still for a bit and taking some time to take stock of my bigger purpose. I may be trying out a weekly accountability arrangement with someone I connected with on FocusMate. When I contemplated meeting weekly or with someone working on a large six-month goal I realized I would need to move beyond daily brainstorming here on the blog. So what is the next step, of purposefulness? Just as I so long put off buckling down and getting to daily writing, I have been putting off embarking on a bona fide research project- my own project, done well, with companions. Actual research, that not only I would find compelling and worthwhile.  I think I’m going to take the plunge, and turn back to that article in Forbes  back in 2014 that slammed the MBTI, with references to research on reliability and repeatability. A good research paper in that area, is a worthy goal for the next 2-3 months. Start with a lit review-- just like they had us do in our capstone proje...

 I was thinking this morning about how I ended last night's post , explaining what my stance is going to be toward the MBTI and Socionics. I said (basically) that I will look toward the practitioners and devotees of the MBTI for allies in the vast U.S. market, and toward the Socionists with a humble acknowledgement that in terms of type theory I will be leaning heavily on their work. When I said that I had my eyes fixed on the two systems derived from Jung's work . But it would be foolish of me not to look for help from some within the Enneagram community as well. In terms of influence in the U.S. I would say it is comparable to that of the MBTI, and its system focuses less on how people's minds work and more on how their soul is. (My "from the hip" shot at a pithy comparison.) I only have about 15 minutes left to finish this post so I am going to let myself off the hook for writing a skimpy piece on the Enneagram today, and will just say that I am going to ela...

 My high school classmate Josh Spodek and I reconnected shortly after the 2020 lockdowns started, and we had a series of conversations on Zoom over the next few months. In one of the early sessions he told me that he had come to realize that if he wanted there to be a "Nelson Mandela for the global sustainability movement" it was going to have to be him, i.e., because he had looked around and had found no one who was leading in the manner he believed was necessary. I think of him as I state in public that I believe I am called to follow in the footsteps of the founders of the MBTI and of Socionics. The MBTI was created in the U.S. during World War II and still holds enormous sway here. The work leading up to the publishing of "The Dual Nature of Man" happened behind the Iron Curtain in the 60s and 70s. The time has come for a new system, one that has a global audience in view from the outset, and one that has as its aim a "truly harmonious, peaceful and creati...

 I have now swept over the map of Jung's Psychological Types , and I have a few preliminary things to report. In his Introduction he tells us there are two fundamental tendencies among people: introversion and extraversion. Introversion he defines as preoccupation with the subject (one's interior processes) and extraversion as preoccupation with the object (what is outside oneself). He calls these "the two mechanisms". Then he tells us that there are also "four psychological basic functions": thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. He says that he will be mapping the two "mechanisms" onto the four "basic functions", to yield eight "types". He then spends the first nine chapters surveying what people have said throughout history about types, before laying out his description of the eight types. He only claims (I think) to say there are eight "things" and then a "type" would be defined as one in whom one of...

 It was so exciting to be asked by a Focusmate partner for the URL to my blog, this morning. (Shout out to Ruth L. who is located "London-ish", based on the time zone info on her profile.) If she never looks at it and forgets about it forever, she will have done me a huge service. My blog is purely for myself, and it is also fully exposed to everyone on the whole internet. For an ISFj / ESI (Socionics) or ISFP (MBTI) this is an uncomfortable proposition, because of "Vulnerable  Ne " (Ne = Extraverted Intuition). Is it a coincidence that I am feeling unafraid about that dual reality, right after chatting with Ruth (who may  be an ENFp aka IEE / ENFP, with Ne as "Leading Function"? I think not, friends. Anyway, with my Ne given a shot of clean energy, I went roving on my blog Spreading the Word , and after browsing a little, hit upon the post "Shema Yisrael" (yes, I know now that it's more commonly/properly transliterated Yisroel). This is ...

 I cannot write a long post today (the system upgrade this morning went well, thanks for asking!) but I wanted to note that I have started in on the book by Jung that led to the MBTI and to Socionics-- Psychological Types .  I have made it through the translator's preface and Jung's short forward. I am going to have to face the fact that Jung himself seemed (according to the translator anyway) to have identified introversion and extraversion as the fundamental dichotomy, the "two types". But Socionics (some day I will decide once and for all whether the word should be capitalized or not) does things with his ideas that he surely couldn't have imagined, so I shouldn't get too hung up on it. Anyway-- more to come, after I've made my way through more of the book.

 Having slept on my sense of frustration about not knowing which way to go, this morning a new visual representation of the psyche presented itself to me. Rather than a two-dimensional arrangement of 8 squares, two across and four down, with each of the four pairs representing a "block": Ego, Super-Ego, Super-Id and Id, I envisioned a three-dimensional arrangement of cubes. Four cubes in a square arrangement, a plane, and below the plane a mirroring square arrangement of cubes. If you look down on the arrangement you see four squares, and each square has T, F, S, or N. T and F are diagonal from each other, and so are S and N. If you were to look "down" onto my cube you would see this: Fi Se Ne Ti If you rotated "left" onto the other side of the plane dividing the squares of cubes, and looked "up", you'd see this: Si Fe Te Ni This model has the F, T, S, and N cubes joined into pairs, across the plane. What does the plane represent? It represen...

 My uncle paid me the big compliment of reading my first few posts and running off to investigate socionics. He told me about the  International Institute of Socionics , which I know I came across at some point in the last few years. I find myself saying, up into the sky, "This means so much to me! There must be a way to convey it to others!" I go to the website of this institute, directed by A. V. Bukalov, and there doesn't seem to be anything to grab a hold of. Why is this? It is because I came to socionics from the MBTI. I fitted concepts I learned from Wikisocion into the personal story of self- and other-interpretation that started with Myers Briggs. It is a community of individuals who have been working for more than 30 years on socionics as a science. You can't get directly from here to training American coaches and O.D. consultants. So I have to stop trying to bridge the gap-- I need to find people near me. Near me physically and near me in their sense of miss...

After a wonderful anniversary day with my wife I have just enough time for a post. Marriage is another example of two individuals melding into something bigger or better than the sum of the parts. We worked together in the front yard garden and I learned about her, I learned about me, and I learned about us. After so many years it is wonderful to see the new things that we can accomplish together, the new things that happen when we work together and yield to each other. I love her and where we are, that's where home is.

The simplest definition of the term "The Socion" (which I used, in my blog header, to substitute for an awkward phrase the translating machine chose to describe what Aushra thought had to be understood, for a peaceful and creative society to exist) is: all 16 "sociotypes" (what the MBTI calls "personality types") described by the theory of socionics. If someone were to ask, "So what's the big deal about socionics anyway?" a decent answer might be that it is a typological system where the description of the relationship dynamic between each pair of types is a crucial element of the theory, not an afterthought. Unlike the MBTI, which essentially says "There are 16 types of personality", it says "There is one collection of types-- the socion". I didn't promise a brilliant post everyday, I just promised a post. See you tomorrow!

Part of what I think will be compelling about the book I’d like to write is the idea of a reconciliation between the two rival “children” of Carl Jung’s theories on psychological type: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Socionics. Jung wrote a book called Psychological Types, published in German in 1921 and translated to English in 1923. He introduces a theory that there are 3 dichotomies that can be used to analyze personality differences: “Thinking/Feeling” “Sensing/Intuition” “Introversion/Extraversion” I’m not going to go into what these mean today; for now it’s enough to note that when you use these to create pairs, you get 8 combinations. The people who created the Myers Briggs Type Indicator– Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs– said that each “personality type” (out of 16 possible) has four of the 8 combinations in a “functional stack”, going from Dominant down to Inferior. A. Augusta (Aušra Augustinavičiūtė’s name in shorthand), who founded th...

I have started daily blogging, two days after I "launched my book project". Virat in Delhi was witness to this event during our Focusmate session together (my morning, his late afternoon) on Friday the 13th. I'll be watching for his article in Photonics Focus in one of the upcoming issues. I dream of co-authoring a best-selling book about personality type and world peace, and my commitment to the blog will ensure that I write every day. I also think it will help gather around me the community that I need, to make the fulfillment of the dream possible. A topic for a future post will be the possibility of a translation into English of the entire article by Aušra Augustinavičiūtė, titled "The Dual Nature of Man". It was published in Russian in the journal "Socionics, Mentology and Personality Psychology" in 1996. There is only a machine translation of the full article into English , as far as I am aware, and I have searched a decent bit. Here is a hum...