Ramble time
Originally Posted by Gilly
[Well I would keep a few things in mind: one, these descriptions are grossly exaggerated. Two, they are independent of instinctual orientation; thinking about it in light of sx as your primary fixation might make it both more realistic and palatable.]
Yeah, instincts are always at the greater forefront of my mind in this respect.
Originally Posted by Gilly
[One more big thing, I think we are kind of inherently supposed to be ashamed of enneagram related stuff. I can't quite feel the real nature of your visceral reaction, but I will say that when I first studied enneagram, type 3 was the furthest from what I ever thought I would see in myself. I've always been a "rebel" and tried to defy the expectations of others; at least, that's what goes on in my head. But when I really looked at my life, the decisions I'd made, etc, I realized that this self-conception was actually a kind of rebellion against myself, a way that I was keeping the balance inside. I don't know if that's necessarily the same for you, but I just remember feeling a kind of revulsion when I first started thinking about myself as a 3. But when I think about the things that set me apart from others, I realize that yeah, I really was silently obsessed with "being the best," and in a variety of ways, such that it manifested in the tiniest, strangest aspects of my personality.]
The nature of my reactivity here is thinking about triple attachment as manifesting in such a way that my core is, at its essence, an empty pit. I think about it like the Buddhist notion of emptiness, where nothing can possibly exist without the existence of other things before it. This is what I envision with 369, like they build up a massive exterior image when they interact with the world, but once you strip all that down there's nothing on the inside. It seems like a mindset where everything is inherently void of meaning, purpose, intent, and the individual is simply acting in accordance with whatever external circumstances they find themselves in without any internal, idiosyncratic drive that pushes them. In a way it's like a complete loss of ego, where the psyche is a completely nebulous, formless, intangible entity that can't be demonstrated to anybody else or pinned down without attaching some external framework to it.
As much as I hate extended metaphors, imagine a giant white board. Located near the bottom are a couple hundred people, each holding a different colored pen, and they all just start drawing on it. Some people just leave tiny little doodles. Others draw meticulous masterpieces. Others will just write "penis" or "cunt" a few dozen times, laugh amongst themselves, and call it a day. Some get on ladders and draw up on top when there isn't enough space at the bottom, others haphazardly wipe their sleeves over other people's drawings and invade what was once their proclaimed space. Eventually the entire board is covered in a rainbow of shapes and colors. When a passerby comes and sees the drawings, what does he make of it? He'll see the craftsmanship, or lack thereof, of each drawing individual drawing; conversely, he could take in all the drawings as a whole and try to develop some cohesive meaning to everything.
But what he will never notice is the board itself.
This is how I see a 369 mindset. Everything the 369 stands for or represents is not of his "authentic self," rather he simply accumulates information, stimuli, experiences as he lives his life from things outside of his control, blending all the things he's come to know in life into a psychic melting pot and synthesizing them into his ever-evolving self identity. His inner core cannot contain anything solid, because everything is blended together and thus nothing can be grasped onto. There's no place on a 369 where you can point to and say "THAT is what you are," because as soon as you've found something discrete to latch onto it just as easily slips away into the mind's chasm once more.
Actually come to think of it, as I've been writing this it's become a more and more empowering thought. If my entire ego is formless and without svabhaba, then that means it can pretty much be anything I want it to be. So long I quiet down the external impressions that people project onto my psyche and let whatever authentic impetus guide me, it doesn't matter what form the white board takes. It can really be an amalgamation of everything and the nature of the white board itself will always come through in some way. This is only well and good so long as I don't mistake whatever pops up on the board for the board itself; I do notice this happen every now and then, where in any given moment I may immediately color my perception of myself as a "failure" because I did one thing poorly, only to have that flip back around when I do something well. I guess it's important to internalize that as invaluable as outside experience may be, it's not a substitute for inner authenticity and must only be taken in context of everything else.
In a lot of ways I find myself actively trying to defy what external labels people try to put on me. This especially happens in typology, where you'll hear me playing devil's advocate saying "I'm not 'quirky', I'm not off-the-wall and forgetful," etc. It happens a lot in real life too: in my music whenever somebody tries to pin down my style I find myself kind of uncomfortable and want to prove them wrong; similarly, I find myself drawn to artists who are capable of completely re-inventing themselves at the drop of a hat, like dabble in one genre for a little while then completely shift gears as if to say "fuck your genre, Imma just be me". I even remember one little incident where I was cooking something in the kitchen and my dad came up to me and said "you're a chef!" I had a sort of mini panic attack in my head, like "who are you to tell me what I am?" Even people talking about me in simple character descriptions like "hard-working" or "witty" tend to fluster me, because I never think about myself in those terms. I wonder if this is some sort of E3 counter-image stance in the same sense of e6 counter-phobia.
Galen's Tritype Self-Identity Paradigm Shift
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