Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00509)

At 11:26 AM 9/13/95, K. Paul Johnson wrote:

>What was surprising and uplifting about the failure of my
>little exercise was this sense of aiming for a unified
>approach. That is, when asked to select thinking, feeling or
>intuition, introverted or extroverted, as the main way they
>approach the Masters, no one was ready to do so. All
>acknowledged that their own approach partook of several
>functions.

Art: Undoubtedly all the functions co-operated in arriving at the
conclusions that the participants held but in what order and in what sort
of weight. This is what type theory is about ordering and weighing of
judgement and perception. If intuition is a dominant function then sensing
will not be ordered first but maybe third or last. If Feeling (that is
valuing for human effect) is first then sequential logic will not be
weighed until later. ect. People like to think they are balanced when they
claim to use all functions equally but it very unlikely that they do so
unless your participants were very elderly worked through most of their
shadow and were what Jung described as individuated.

All the functions must be weighed and valued and to arrive at a wholistic
evaluation each must be given its due. But wholistic evaluation is usually
transpersonal, done in groups, and rarely do we as individuals have the
capacity to be that balanced.

It is a great goal but only acheivable in my opinion by group
inter-dependence. I think that in group you probably arrived at a better
understanderstand than you ever would as individuals.

But more than that, there seemed a general
>acknowledgment that we should all strive for a balanced
>approach to the topic that would as you say "embrace all the
>different slants." We can learn from one another's diverse
>outlooks as a means of approaching the integrated state.