FROM A SITE VISITOR: Hello, Floyd. Art here (I’ve written before but not in a long time). After further reading about a series you wrote on nine personality types, I came across a term referring to three instinctive subtypes, sexual, social, self-preservation. I am lost. It seems from what you say, we need to be rid of the self to “live naturally” but if self-preservation is instinctive, wouldn’t that make it natural? (I know—maybe too much analysis but it’s only for fun anway, right?)
F.: As surely as the masses are driven by personality, so all persons (all of the non-Realized) are also driven by one of the three instinctual variants (or subtypes) of personality: self-preservation, sexual, or social.
Most persons display the traits of multiple personality types, and many can be driven by more than one subtypes; however, one of the three instinctual biases typically operates from a dominant position in combination with a dominant personality type.
When the two work in tandem, imagine the (relative) force of the “mind” as it exerts control over the setting of priorities as well as over the thought-word-deed continuum.
Many site visitors who have written lately have used various wordings to complain about one real relative issue, namely, continuing to be trapped in a repetition of the same, often destructive, patterns of behavior.
How can persons possibly be grounded in the very essence of being if blocked from an understanding of their fundamental nature and an awareness of what natural living really looks like? Programming and conditioning and enculturation create the blockage and result in relative behaviors being driven by personality and personality subtypes.
While the subtypes are often labeled as “instinctive subtypes” or “instinctive variants,” they are associated with, but not the same as, natural instincts. There is a natural, instinctive drive for sex, but the instinctive sexual variant of personality is an unnatural drive that is the product of programming and conditioning.
When the instinctive sexual personality variant is driving behavior, it is often mistaken by persons to be the natural sexual instinct that is driving behavior, but that is not the case.
Consider the man referenced in yesterday’s post. Though it might appear that having 300 affairs was related to that man’s strong and natural sex drive (which was his macho “spin” on his activities), that conduct was really rooted more in personality and in the personality sexual subtype. Here’s part of the description of his case offered earlier on the site:
“…his most basic identity amounted to ‘I am my body.’ Driving his conduct, however, was also a ‘mind’ and multiple personas. The male sex drive aside, far more was at play with that man’s conduct.
“He reported the following: after his father disappeared, he was rejected by his mother who gave him to his grandmother; a short time later, his grandmother rejected him and gave him over to the state.
“As a child who was wanted by no one, he felt a sense of ‘loss.’ His thought-life was one that said, ‘You are not good enough; you will never be good enough; therefore, you will never have enough…of anything.’ Behind those kinds of beliefs, excess will always be assigned great value.
“His desire was to be accepted by two women during his childhood years, but since he was not, he was driven during his adulthood years to hear as many women say ‘Yes’ as possible; to hear as many women as possible say ‘You are good’; to have women fulfill his self-ish desires; to use women in his effort to negate his fear of being rejected by supposedly being ‘accepted’ time and time again (as if paying someone for something could even remotely mean that they ‘accept you’).
“His rationalized claim that ‘I just really love women’ was eventually shown to be nothing more than deception and self-deception. He was shown that he actually hated women and that the repetition compulsion was in full bloom and manifesting through his childish conduct. He was eventually shown that he was doing to as many women as possible what the first two women in his life had done to him: he ‘had’ them, and then he rejected them.
“His was a selfish mission of revenge on one hand and a self-centered mission of seeking the acceptance he never had as a child on the other hand. In the process, he had also rejected his wife, yet he was egotistical enough to be angry at her when she was finally driven away and delusional enough to think that his wife had rejected him. Though in his 30’s, his behavior was that of an early teen at best, driven by the dualistic beliefs of a five to seven-year old.”
Trapped in his false personas, he was driven by personality and by the instinctive sexual variant of personality, but neither had anything to do with the natural instinct for sex. Are you seeing the error of the conclusion drawn in your e-mail, Art, when you wrote: if self-preservation is instinctive, wouldn’t that make it natural?
Neither the instinctive personality variant of self-preservation nor the instinctive variants involving sex and socialization are natural, generated by personality as they are. Please enter the silence of contemplation. (To be continued)
RELATED TO TODAY’S POST:
