This has been running through my head for a few hours and it seems important for me to put it where others can encounter it. Don’t know if it is for me to admit to or if it is for someone else or all of the above or none of the above. But that doesn’t really matter.
Remember, everything you build inside your head is not real. Reality is much more complex.
The models inside your head are based on the information you have and have gone through your own personal filters.
Sometimes they can be good guides, other times they can lead you astray.
A lot depends on how good your information is, how representative your information is of reality and how much of your own crap is being fed into the model.
Inside your head is not objective no matter how much you try to make it that way.
Additional information can really screw up a beautifully put together model that makes everything make sense, and sometimes it is hard to let go of the easy model. It is important to interact with the real world to keep the inflow of information as fresh as possible and not get too caught up on internal models.
Reading this simultaneously feels like “duh” and “you’re just saying that to make me feel bad!”
It’s very scary, for some reason, to be told that the models in my head aren’t good enough.
–Ember–
It makes sense that this would be scary for a 5. They depend on their models and if they aren’t good enough, then they feel like they can’t function.
And it isn’t that they aren’t good enough, it is that they are models. The map is not the territory and when stressed, the 5 will act like the models are what is real. There is no way to have enough information to make the models accurate and the 5 tendency is to keep collecting as much as possible to attempt just this. It is the ego’s way of creating a false sense of comfort.
What I have gotten out of my enneagram classes is that to find the true comfort, you have to stop the ego from creating this false one and head in the other direction. For the 5 that means to stop relying on the models and deal directly with reality. It is scary and not easy and a very hard path of growth.
I do a lot of 5-like things. This is one of them. But my big one is to let go of my false sense of freedom and embrace the experience of pain. I think my work on these things is one of the reasons I am having such trouble with depression. It isn’t an easy path. That is one of the reason I am having a hard time with the last egg. I think it is tied to my concept of freedom.
Wow! Ok to me that all makes sense. I don’t know why or can’t describe it but it does.
Oh I added you to the friends list after the Sunday meeting *S*