Letter to an INTP.

Letter to an INTP

                Before we take risks experimenting with Logic, we should ensure that we are in a consequence-free environment.

                I’m not saying that a ‘reasonable’ line between reality and fantasy cannot be pragmatically drawn, but I am saying that there is a way of interfacing With Reality that does not Necessitate that such a line be drawn, and by the same token it is liberating and profound.

                The presence of a discerning ‘reality’ principle is inessential to the assessment of the emotional value of a work, and it may also be stifling to the imaginative process necessary to conceive such a work. If one’s relationship to Reality and the Universe is to be intimate, one need not take a fundamental division between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ too seriously, unless it particularly befits one’s personality type and gifts. (Engineers, for instance, will require this discernment to arrive at the same place that the poet arrives at by irrational abstractions, or whatever his/her style may be.) To take this kind of discernment that says, with definition, ‘this is true; this is playful imagination’ into the intellectual realm of artistic assessment reflects merely a bias in favour of realism over romanticism. It may be conceived of as a ‘merely’ personal bias, but it stands as a bias, regardless. For many people, a fixed view of What The World Definitely Is is not necessary to a healthy life, and, for all people, it is not necessary for compassion, irrespective of differences of viewpoint and opinion, be they religious, cultural, scientific, etc.

                There are two trends of thought: The feminine and masculine. Jung, Kiersey, Myers, and Briggs postulated this dichotomy in, respectively, intuition and sensation, introversion and extraversion, feeling and thought, and perception and judgment.

                Where the Sensory (masculine, though by no means is this to be confused with ‘male’) artists sees as his/her quest the Rendering of Obvious, sensorily accessible and incontrovertible Reality, the intuitive (feminine) approaches the medium as an exploration.
  
   By virtue of the same process, an intuitive, feeling writer may write something directly from his/her imagination and feel what he/she might describe as an 'epiphany': What he/she has written is immediately recognised as True, as though by virtue of the writer's talent the Platonic screen between Ultimate Truth and the 'false realism' of habitual thought were penetrated.

   This is not to be regarded as a hallucination; it may very well be that logic and language obscure our view of a reality that is wordless, complex and irrational, and that the skilled writer is one whose mastery of words has transcended a dependency upon them and who is capable of rendering some semblance of the Unspoken and Unthought in words and thoughts.

   Where his/her view of Reality contradicts logic, that is, where the visionary sees the ocean beyond the mountains where the relatively grounded cannot, the rigorously logical may condemn his vision as a mirage, simply because words and discursive thought obscure an insight into the world's irrational processes, less flattering to the rational mind that devised the strain of thought.

   Where logic oversteps itself, it shows a bias also in favor of a particular, fixed Reality in mind toward which human beings must do their best to subordinate their views, as contrasted with the Hindu model in which the world itself may be (in certain sects of Hindu belief) an Illusion and a creative fantasy.

   To presume that we are more advanced than the ancient Hindus when our own model of logic still carries the biases and theoretical complications that could only have arisen in a Christian Culture is hubris, especially when our most contemporary and tantalising physics seems increasingly to line up with Hindu cosmology. As the Upanishads say, 'If you think you understand Brahman, you don't,' and, as a notable physicist put it, 'if you think you understand Quantum, you do not.'

   In order to practise yoga and in order to think outside of one's personal cultural confines, humility must pervade one's being entirely. But this is not to dissuade Action, for to be so sure that you do not know that you do not Act is still to be sure of oneself.

dm.A.A.