Enneagram URL & tests for

[Guest guest]

Mark,

 

Do you work at one of the SUNY Universities? Which department?

 

Love,

 

--Greg

[Guest guest]

On Thu, 8 Jun 2000 14:25:04 Gloria Lee wrote:

>The usefulness of this sort of information is that it's very applicable to

>understanding how one best learns and processes ideas... and then communicates.

For

>example, being an INFP myself...I seem to have no patience for very heavy

rational

>thinking, the detailed, logical step by step learning...and the frustration I

often

>experience with more "thinker" types I used to feel it was with

"them"..but now

I

>realize it's a an inner frustration with myself..with my own inability to

express

>myself back that way and speak their language. Or I'll drop some intuition or

>intuition on them and get frustrated if they don't get it. Then I have to use

what is

>my weaker skill, it's like speaking a second language. This is then seen as not

so

>much a problem with the person as a communication problem..we need to find a

common

>language to understand one another. So recognizing types can be helpful..

That's a

>vastly over-simplified example, but you see how it can be useful? Here's the

sites

>for anyone curious. ~~Glo

>

>http://elvis.rowan.edu/~cusumano/MBTest.html Meyers-Briggs short test (70

>questions) online

>

>

>http://pigment.lcs.mit.edu:8080/~becca/enneagram/rheti/ Enneagram test also

short.

 

Thanks for posting, Glo.

 

This was very interesting. I must say I became curious.

 

But once more, I had big problems choosing b/n the two

alternatives for each of the Brigg's test questions,

such two-alternative questions always make me want

to say yes to both or no to both as in:

 

"Yes, I'm rational, no I'm not rational,

it depends on the situation, yes, no, yes, no,

yes and no, yes and yes, no and no, do I really have to answer this ?".

 

In the end I had to close my eyes and press some

buttons and came out an iNFJ (???)

 

Well, the "complexity of personality" and "feeling others' feelings" fit.

 

Also the line about having sides other ppl

even long time friends don't see:

 

One time I asked my mom to order a dentist check up

for me with her dentist to have a check up before a

trip I was making.

My mother had promised me this was a nice dentist

and gentle, so I had no problems going.

 

The dentist didn't find any cavities, but

proceeded to clean my teeth and gums with a tiny metal hook saying there were

crystallizations

(don't know what it's called in English) around my

teeth which she wanted to remove as they could lead

to gum disease. The dentist did this with great gusto.

 

My mother came to pick me up and

in the car home I was ruminating over my bleeding

throbbing gums,

wondering how I had been fooled by the dentist and

also trying to find out where the pain in the mouth

came from and considering it to be both annoying and

a source of curiosity at the same time.

 

I was rather preoccupied with my own thoughts and

probably looked rather glum and annoyed as my mother

after a while said:

"What's wrong ? Are you angry ? Why are you acting so

strangely ? I've never seen you like this before."

 

I told my mother I was not angry and that my teeth hurt.

 

"Well, don't do that again. You scared me. I have

never seen you like that before."

 

Not often you hear your mother tell you that.

 

 

Also, I do pick up emotions from other ppl and

have lately stayed away from others as I find it

difficult to tackle other ppl's emotional turmoil

or confused / upset / desire-oriented

pushing and pulling emotional thinking next to my own problems.

 

But I do not see myself as very idealistic.

 

I'm not saying the following to discredit your

links and your views, Glo (and anyone else who may be

reading this), as I greatly enjoyed reading these

tests and taking them.

I'm in many ways saying this in attempt

to find out what a personality is,

so please bear with me:

 

 

As what Glo says and these tests indicate, each individual probably has a

pattern of reactions more

prominent than others in given situations.

 

However, personally, I must say I have come to see more

and more, like we talked about in the "Scariest thing"

thread that a lot of these personality reactions

(not "traits", as the word "traits" indicate something

permanent) are habits formed through the interaction

with others and / or results of patterns of emotional

desires and pulls that may or may not be subconscious.

 

There are probably reactions that are more prominent

in one person than in another person, but if these are

mapped and defined very detailed and in a great

number of ppl, how much variation would we really find

among humans ?

 

I have always, even as a child, regarded humans as

being capable of the same register of emotional

responses but in different "amounts" and at different

situations.

 

This common register could even be included to

certain mammals.

The most alien and "unintelligible"

in terms of emotional response

that would be clearly registerable as an emotional

response, is probable an animal such as octopi

that have a rather different nervous system than

mammals.

And even they have classical responses such as the

fight and flight response.

 

But where is the personality situated and where does

it come from ?

 

A friend of mine invited me to join them in an online role playing game and at

first I didn't want to

join as I had problems keeping a role in everyday

real life life. Thus, a role playing role would

also be difficult to manage I thought, emotional

stressful. I joined the game anyway, mostly out of

curiosity.

But when we started to play it turned out that my

hesitancy for personality and frustration with it,

was made easier by playing, by making pretend and

not take it too seriously.

 

I'm not pretending I don't have a personality, but

I have also seen that personality is something very

plastic and can definitely change over time.

Habit can become something ingrained.

In some ways you are what and how you think.

 

Right now I have been thinking a lot about

mass personality and individual personality

and it's not clear to me where one starts and the

other ends.

 

There is also one other aspect with personality.

Ppl have different views of even the same individual,

if you ask ppl what they think about the same person,

you will always receive different replies according

to ppl's perceptions of the other and in what situation

they have met and how much time they have spent

together, another parcel of the past that has been

wrapped up and stored.

But does that mean it gives the right picture.

Can anything give us the right picture of anyone

else or ourselves ?

(again, I'm saying this not to discredit anyone's views)

 

Well... this has become a long monologue

on personality since I have

been wondering a lot about that these days.

That's a communication problem, my thinking has

always been convoluted and no one seems to understand

what I'm thinking of.

 

I guess having a variable personality and

confused personality is a type of personality too.

 

Maybe the best description of my mind is

a Gemini in Pisces, fishy thinking.

 

Thanks again for sharing the URLs with us,

Gloria.

 

 

Love,

 

 

Amanda.

 

 

 

Angelfire for your free web-based e-mail. http://www.angelfire.com

[Guest guest]

Mark,

 

I have great respect for bioengineering, at the low level I'm familiar

with. It saved one of my knees, and gave me the ability to ride a bicycle.

I had a fixed-gear track bike whose geometry was not ideal for my body

type, length of limb, flexibility/stiffness in different body regions, etc.

I went to the chiropractor who not only did lots of therapy, but he helped

set up a bike that fit my particular body. He helped sensitize me to the

delicacies of a 5-degree or 3-millimeter difference when I was doing

thousands of rotations of the pedals with no coasting, and no breaks. The

bike he helped me with fits great and feels very sweet.

 

What a fun change to transpersonal psych. I like Michael Talbot's popular

books, like the Holographic Universe and Beyond the Quantum. He's a very

good writer, and delved into lots of interesting byways. So you are an

undergrad in that context, hmm?

 

In my Berkeley seminar (1982), the professor Colin Turbayne had been a

student of Brand Blanshard in the 60's. Blanshard was one of America's

greatest idealist philosophers. Turbayne seemed to be carrying this

idealist tradition -- he loved Berkeley, and wouldn't let anyone write a

paper against Berkeley's philosophy!! As un-intuitive as Berkeley's ideas

are, that was a great way to force the students to learn the philosophy.

He made us read all the technical stuff, like TOWARDS A NEW THEORY OF

VISION. Something happened to me during the course. There was an

irreversible phenomenal, perceptual shift -- POP!!! And this was way

before any spiritual investigation on my part. But after this POP, I went

to Turbayne and before I said very much at all, and he could tell something

had happened. He smiled very broadly. From then on, he did everything he

could to help me get papers published, do further work on Berkeley, etc.

He was positively evangelical about it. I had no real idea about the

importance or possible spiritual significance of what happened. I just saw

and felt that the world was lighter and sweeter and had lost its

separateness and solidity forever. Nothing seemed apart, and nothing

seemed physical. Turbayne retired the very next year and went back to

Australia. I have a feeling he might have been into a spiritual path, but

he didn't say a word about it in academic circles. He has a very

fascinating book called THE MYTH OF METAPHOR, which argues that all of our

sensory information is basically linguistic, not subject/object related.

Vision is to hearing as English is to Finnish.

 

See ya!

 

Love,

 

--Greg

[Guest guest]

snip

 

I guess having a variable personality and

confused personality is a type of personality too.

 

Maybe the best description of my mind is

a Gemini in Pisces, fishy thinking.

 

Thanks again for sharing the URLs with us,

Gloria.

 

 

Love,

 

 

Amanda.

 

 

Dear Amanda,

 

Hmm.. I hear you saying that you do not want to be defined or pinned down and in

some

ways prefer to be entirely free of personality, especially if it's just old

habitual

patterns, like programs running. Thus it *may* be useful to look and see if one

is a

particular rut or habitual pattern. I'm not trying to sell anyone on believing

in

this, Amanda. Some of it is new to me too. Like you say, it can be just as

useful to

look at what we all have in common, rather than emphasize differences. The

first

site that started all this was saying that the enneagram as a total, with all 9

"parts", was like the facets of a jewel..the jewel itself being all inclusive

was the

*picture* of the wholeness of an enlightened being. There are so many ways that

spiritually we become free of the mind and personality, at least not imprisoned

by

them. If a person can simply drop the whole shebang at once... great! For those

growing gradually into transformation, the meditations being related to separate

insights and understandings for what one's existing strengths and weakness might

be

seemed a very fruitful approach. I wouldn't see this as working on changing or

improving one's personality so much as a way of working with it cooperatively

until

it becomes less and less of a factor at all. When I get *there* I'll let you

know.

LOL

 

Love,

Gloria