(Edited 5/26/2018. I typed this out almost without editing on Monday night, but as I've thought about it over the past few days, I realized I was too negative toward the end. The only changes are to the last third.)
It occurred to me that maybe the most obvious type of all personality types is whether or not you find the idea of personality types useful/helpful. If you think the idea of personality types is right up there with astrology and magical thinking, then I can understand why you would find the topic so utterly uninteresting. It's like the punch line to a joke (a not very funny one): There are two types of people in the world, the people who like types and the people that don't.
But for me, figuring out my own personal framework has been unendingly helpful. That four tendencies thing I talked about a couple of months ago-- that has been great. Now when I see myself going into Obliger mode, I can notice it and sometimes I can choose to act differently if I need to. I love having the extra self-awareness it gives me.
Another one has occurred to me, and that is, for lack of a better way of stating it, what type of core self you have, or maybe your tendency to calmness or chaos. I have to back up to explain this one. For a long time, I had a really hard time with meditation because the teachers (even my favorite, Pema Chodron) would talk about finding the naturally spacious, calm place inside of you. The idea seemed to be that if you dig through all of your layers of fear and false expectations and whatever else, you'd get to this place of naturally-occurring peace and calm that was your True Self. (or not-Self, if you're Buddhist, but that's an entirely different discussion.)
The problem with that was that the further I dug, the more tangled things got. I could create a space of peace and calm in my head (for a few seconds anyway), but I never got the sense that it was the "real" me. Ever. Not even once. So for awhile I decided (because, you know, I know more than every single person who has ever meditated in the history of the world), that all those teachers were Wrong, and that really, the only way to get to this space of peace and calmness was to learn how to create it-- that our "real", "natural" selves were a maelstrom of chaotic thoughts and feelings.
But recently it has occurred to me that maybe-- *drum roll* --people are just different. Maybe there are some people who can dig through all their layers and they get to a place that feels like coming home to their true selves and it's all peaceful and calm in there. And maybe there are others of us who just keeping on coming up with more layers of muck the further we dig--in other words, at the core of true selves is a chaotic mess. Or, to put it more positively, a whirlwind of chaos and color.
If that's true, for those of us who are the second type, the purpose of meditation isn't to find an inner place of peace that already exists, but to create that peace, to learn how to observe the whirlwind without getting sucked into actually feeling chaotic.
What would we call this? People who are naturally calm vs people who are naturally chaotic? I don't know. But it would explain why some people, when they try meditation, just get more and more angry as they feel more and more like failures for not being able to find this mythical, supposedly natural, feeling of peace and calm, while other people take to it like the proverbial ducks to water.
Or maybe I just haven't dug through enough layers yet.
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