Post by Hrafn on Feb 8, 2018 17:20:43 GMT -5
hrafn et al, how emotionally attached would you say you are to your interior castles? Do you feel a 'pinch' if they are challenged? What if they are disproved (even by yourself): what happens to you then? And how far wide or high do they go, these castles? Would you say you have one for everything/life (a theory of everything)? Or would you say you have a castle per major topic; for example, CT can be one and there could be another one to explain other interests/concerns... This void seems from descriptions like a very detached thing, yet Ti leads or possibly even PeTi's make lots of investments in these castles, so I wonder if self-worth is attached to the integrity of the castle you've built? And the void...do you mean calm/peace? Or is it something negative/unpleasant?
Here's an example of the first kind. Like many people I'm very attached to the idea of liberty: that society should be constructed in a way that gives people the most practical latitude for personal freedom. I suppose that's an ivory castle in the sense that it's more of an ideal than an actual thing. Let's say that someone showed me an irrefutable proof that went like "here's how human nature actually works: more people are way more happy when there are strongmen rulers & rigid bureaucracies who can guarantee peoples' security. In order to do this, these governments must cull out the disrupters and really clamp down on civil liberties. The People's Republic of China is taking exactly the right approach toward how to manage enormous & burgeoning human populations." I think it might make me very bitter to have such a conclusion rammed down my throat: perhaps I'd lose some of my faith in humanity. Perhaps some of my particular beliefs, as they relate to specific political problems, might change. But I don't know that I'd lose my faith in the idea of liberty. My first response would be to try to squirm away from the inevitability of the conclusion: for instance, I believe that humans are constantly evolving and human nature isn't a static thing. I also tend to think human nature isn't something that can ever be fully captured and intellectualized using human knowledge systems (any more than an individual human could gain perfect knowledge of themselves without input from other people). At a more basic level, I think the ivory castle of liberty is based on the deep happiness that I've felt in my life from feeling free. So even if I could change the appearance and arrangement of the castle, I don't know if I could really change its underlying structure. At the most, my belief might undergo a gradual evolution based on my life experiences over a number of years.
Yet since I'm more than likely a P-lead, I think my general approach is more to build bits & pieces of castles as needed to help me flow along in life. I don't have the time or energy to meticulously make sure that every single belief I have is perfectly self-justified and internally consistent. That turns into a rut of circular thinking that I generally try to avoid. I really just need a passable facade that doesn't have any glaring structural flaws. I need to be confident enough that it won't lead my beliefs or actions horribly astray. Even with the belief in the ideal of freedom could be an example of this. I believe deeply in it, but I don't know if I could rationally justify it to myself without ultimately circling back to the fact that it simply feels like the right thing. It's more of a building-block, like I said, from which I could build different castles depending on the time & place.
As far as feelings of emptiness and detachment, as I discussed in another thread, for me I've never found it calm/peaceful. In my psyche it's more like the idea of death, toward which my natural response is negative. I like feeling calm, but feeling calm is very different from feeling empty. If anything, feeling calm more like feeling whole & content; attached in the sense of being integrated & interconnected with the world surrounding me. So I guess that's a P-lead perspective.
One more thought about the castles. Even though it's Ji that sculpts them, by filtering good from bad & true from false, I'm guessing it's Pi that actually holds the castles in place. Ji would focus more on sculpting & forming the underlying structure of the castle, on taking away bad or superfluous parts; Pi would focus on fleshing out & adding to the existing structure. In other words, I suspect if Ji is strong and Pi is underdeveloped, you might end up with all scaffolding but no castle (like what the book talked about with the TiNe minimalist and the FiNe sensitivist), or an outlandish castle with no actual relevance to the world. If the Pi is strong but Ji is underdeveloped, I suspect it might be more like a messy, ramshackle collection of towers & turrets that are tacked together over the years with no underlying structure.
What about you Authenticity? Do you have interior castles? How would you describe them in your experience?