Place-Your-Stakes

Introversion and extraversion as where we place our stake in the world

Where is your stake in things?

Perhaps from an extraverted standpoint, your stake in things is in the world:

• In specific results that you want to achieve (Extraverted Thinking)

• In your standing in the community and your relationships with specific people (Extraverted Feeling)

• In unknown and unrealized potential that you hope to release or make visible (Extraverted Intuition)

• In action and enjoyment right now, doing what comes naturally and obviously, seeing and being seen (Extraverted Sensation)

And perhaps from an introverted standpoint, your stake in things is not defined in terms of something in the world, but in the realization or existence, in any form, of a kind of pattern or way of being:

• In harmony of elements, rational order, emergent design revealing an underlying principle (Introverted Thinking)

• In harmony between living needs and the environment (Introverted Feeling)

• In communion with a transcendent reality or with the totality of things, including what cannot be seen or even described (Introverted Intuition)

• In faithfulness to the natural order of things (Introverted Sensation)

Developing a function, then, would work like this:

• For extraverted functions, finding things in the world to have a stake in, learning how to achieve them, and getting involved in the give-and-take of achieving them.

• For introverted functions, becoming aware of something that matters to you, a calling, that could be realized in an infinity of possible ways.

This suggests that Developing A Function is vastly more complex and difficult than Gear-shifting Theories would suggest. It's not a matter of learning a skill or heuristic but of acquiring a consciously understood stake in something. In the case of introversion, Developing A Function would consist of recognizing your interest in living in a kind of State Of Grace regardless of any particular circumstance in which you happen to be involved. In the case of extraversion, Developing A Function would mean seeing yourself as having a stake in the world beyond your internal state, having to choose among and respond to worldly matters.

State Of Grace

The need that we understand through introversion

To be an introvert, perhaps, is to be Oriented primarily by your sense of a "state of grace": a certain way of being and responding.

Extraverts can understand and appreciate this, too, but they are primarily Oriented by worldly callings. Extraverts are often in a better position to preach the value of a State Of Grace, because they understand it primarily from a perspective outside it, and they must engage in conscious effort to choose it.

Introverts find that they need to take worldly matters seriously, though, or their state of grace becomes hollow.

Introverted Thinking types

Lenore says that ITPs are attracted primarily to situations that bring their internal sense of logic into play. What matters, then, is not the results or the situation, but being "in the zone", responding faithfully to some idea manifesting itself in the present situation.

This can be baffling to people who expect that everyone has a consciously understood goal and purpose when they act. Within an ITP's typical self-experience, there is no goal or purpose, only responding to the situation as the situation calls for. One creates art, designs and builds, or understands for the sake of the process of doing these things, not for the end result, not for praise, not anything else.

Perhaps the same is true, in different forms, for all introverts, and even for extraverts to the extent that they take an introverted attitude seriously. Fi types aim to live each moment in harmony with the life spirit that they perceive in all things, Si types aim to live each moment upholding and doing their part in the cosmic order, and Ni types aim to live each moment heeding the call of something beyond. All are ways of existing in a certain way, for its own sake. As ways of consciously Orienting oneself, though, they aren't sufficient unto themselves: none can be fully achieved without attending to specific, genuinely culture- and situation-dependent concerns.