Saturday, October 27, 2012

Proposed supernatural personality functions.

By symmetry I postulate there may be 4 supernatural personality functions:

Proposed perceiving supernatural functions:
Extroverted Faith,
Introverted Faith

Proposed judging supernatural functions:
Extroverted Hope,
Introverted Hope.

Here is something I came up with to remember how it works:

When the senses can't observe and intuition yields no clue there is still Faith...
When emotional fervour runs dry and reason fails to convince, do it for Hope's sake.



I postulate that when taking on the supernatural life you might start using these to replace, augment, or elevate your natural personality functions. I suspect your introverted/extroverted (attitude) function order would remain the same. So, I being an ENTJ if I were to to take on the supernatural personality traits would have a function order that changes as follows:


Part of the inspiration for this idea came from the 1907 Catholic dystopia novel "Lord of the World."   by the priest Robert Hugh Benson.  You can read it online here since it is in the public domain:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14021 

  It is a really interesting book and I highly recommend it.  The author has some interesting insights on human nature.  Also,he creates a world where psychology and science have made faith irrelevant for most people.  The few remaining Catholics (including the pope) deal with situations where both reason and emotion for Faith are not effective.  I think a similar situation occurs with people very very far advanced in the spiritual life.  I suspect something like this would proceed the "Dark Night of the Spirit," as described by John of the Cross.  Mother Teresa reported a similar phenomenon.  It would see to me that faithful people deprived of the ordinary perceiving and judging functions would need to use supernatural virtues.  Faith, Hope and Love.  Faith seems more perceptive and hope seems to me more on the judging side.  Love is an act of the will and orientation of the heart.  I would think it would be a different kind of entity than faith and hope.  We won't need faith and hope in paradise but we will still have love.  

Here is one of the more interesting excerpts from the book on progress in the spiritual life that I think sheds light on what I am trying to say.

"
He expressed it to himself by saying 
that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
the image and mind of Christ.
" 

So for clarity, here are the natural, more or less commonly accepted contemporary Jungian/Meyers Briggs function orders.
And here are the resulting new supernatural personality function orders:

One interesting observation, is that 4 new major subgroups of personalities emerge. You also go from 16 different types of personalities, to only 4 different types of supernatural personalities.  These four groups are the same in the sense that they all have the same supernatural personality function order.  My working names for these groups are seen in the chart: scholars, mystics, charismatics/inspirers, and the implementers/organizers. I suspect that people common to a subgroup would potentially understand each other very well and would have similar priorities.  Not that people from different subgroups wouldn't get along. If everyone did this in theory we would all get along very well.

Interestingly this would suggest the ordinarily gentle, sweet and nice ENFJ would look very similar to the ordinarily rough and demanding ENTJ.  Many types that would ordinarily be very different look similar when using the supernatural personality functions.  Also, people that once looked very similiar are not very different.  All the NTs and NFs are now in totally different groups and not similiar to their prior peers at all. 


Very open problems and questions. -

I only have very rough ideas of what the characteristics of these four new supernatural functions might be.  For instance I suspect the people with Extroverted Hope high on their function order might tend to display a focus on works. Whereas people with Extroverted Faith might be very open to grace that might inspire works.  This is all very rough.  If these supernatural personality functions exist in any sense, I do not totally know what they would look like.

I am not really sure that the names of the 4 subgroups are appropriate or even what their emergent characteristics might be. For instance I suspect that the Introverted Faith, Extroverted Hope (IxxJ) group and the Introverted Hope, Extroverted Faith (IxxP) might be flipped.  In our normal life IxxP's are often somewhat mystical, but is people were actually using these funciton orders the IxxJs might actually be more mystical caused by their primary interest in introverted faith. 

There are many more that I do not have time to write. 

 

3 comments:

  1. Let's see, my fav subject is Supernatural stuff.
    In the natural if my personality is analytical than in the supernatural I am able to figure out how to.....are you ready.........NAME THAT SIN!.

    To the measure you can identify your own sin determines the level you go in the spirit. The more repentance the greater the level of power in the spirit. It is like cleaning the windows so you can see inside. The more sin you rid your life of, the cleaner the windows of your soul are. Thus being transparent becomes a life style. What you hide controls your life. ....
    Just some thoughts...on the natural vs supernatural...but it is not Supernatural...it should read super in the spirt.

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  2. I don't get what is extroverted hope, or inverted faith hope...

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