How I Reconcile Personality Types and Nondualism & The Idea of Psychic Wholeness

My move towards nondualism put me at odds with the idea of personality types. But Carl Jung, the author of "Psychological Types" was a nondualist who was deeply critical of the MBTI.

I was recently asked by a YouTube viewer (Cognitive8) how I reconcile making videos on personality psychology despite my criticisms against typology and fixed classification systems.

Yes, my position on the MBTI might appear contradictory. I have thousands of past videos on personality types, and plenty of content on my website about them. And yes, over the last few years, I’ve made several videos criticizing the MBTI. How can I reconcile the idea of personality types with a nondualist perspective? Well, I have to look no further than Carl Jung himself. Jung himself refused to meet with Isabel Myers or to review her work on the MBTI. He said that:

Every individual is an exception to the rule. Hence, one can say that the 'types' are not at all to be used as labels. It is a critical apparatus serving to sort out and organize the welter of empirical material, but not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight." — C.G. Jung, Psychological Types (Collected Works Vol. 6)

The goal of Jung’s works is the process of Individuation, becoming your own complex person, and becoming whole. Becoming whole means not reducing yourself to a specific part of yourself, like your “dominant introverted thinking” but seeing yourself as the full totality of what you are, including your “inferior extroverted feeling” process.

To Jung:

• You work your way out of opposing functions and inner conflict and arrive at what Jung called the Transcendent function.

"The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona.” - Carl Jung

How can you possibly do this if you become attached to acting out or being a certain type?

The worst-case scenario is that we take our assigned type to be an “instruction manual” on how to live, and that we forget that our own life is our own. The right thing to do in life, at work, and in your relationships, is not what is dictated by or recommended by common personality descriptions or coaches.

Your goal is not to live a life “in tune with your personal preferences” but in tune with your higher ethics and goals. You’ll find that you have an inner voice that describes what is right and wrong. When to prioritize your career, and when to prioritize others, and when to work on yourself, and when to choose connection. Basically:

The right thing to do is the right thing to do.

We need to make up our own minds about what kind of people we want to be and how we are going to reconcile different forces within ourselves, like our empathy or care for others, with our ability to criticize or deconstruct problems. We have to decide how to bring these different impulses together and achieve unification.

“I do this because I’m an introvert” is not an answer; it’s an excuse.

The heart of nondualism

I moved towards nondualism in my late 20s as I discovered the works of Lao Tzu and Eastern spirituality, and as I read Jung’s later works, such as “Aion”. Jung himself reached the same conclusion as the old Eastern sages, without knowledge of their work. Later, when he discovered these ideas, he was deeply impressed and saw a strong resonance between them and his own ideas.

You might not understand what nondualism is. Nondualism is the idea that all categories like Introverted or Extroverted are false dichotomies and that the truth is that they are both two sides of the same coin. You might have criticisms about nondualism as an idea. For example:

You may believe that the answer to improving the MBTI is to bring it more in line with science, and that the way to do so is by creating a more rigid, fixed model. You may think the solution is to make the personality types "harder” and more clearly defined by using sharper, more rigid definitions and categories. I tried this route in my mid 20s, but I found that the more linear and fixed the definitions became, the more inaccurate they became. It was like trying to use a cookie cutter to define a person when the person was the cookie dough and stretched far beyond what could fit inside the shape.

The harder I made the definitions, the less scientific they became, because the idea of fixed, static categories in biology and psychology is a flawed premise, because organic beings have organic shapes and forms. The harder a model becomes, the less it can predict and account for human growth and evolution. The premise of nonduality is:

We are not the riverbanks (or the edges that make up the river) - we are the river itself.

With this knowledge, any system of personality psychology should be redefined to study people as rivers, changing in nature, by looking at the course they are headed, the source they come from, and understanding any emerging properties of the river in the present as transitory. If you insist on using categories like INFJ or ENFP, then your category of “INFJ” has to assume an infinite variance within the type category itself.

The more you obsess about identifying the contours of yourself and your limitations, the more fixed your view of yourself becomes, and the less open to growth you become. You may feel that doing so gives you some comfort or security and makes your life more predictable or easier to understand. But an easy or comfortable life is not a happy or rich life.

Or, like it was to Jung:

"My scheme of typology is only a scheme of orientation. There is such a factor as introversion, there is such a factor as extraversion. The classification of individuals means nothing, nothing at all. It is only the instrumentarium for the practical psychologist to explain, for instance, the husband to a wife or vice versa."F

From the angle of this photo, it may appear as if the sky has a fixed shape or form. But that’s just from this angle. The sky has no shape, and neither do you.

How I Reconciled Nondualism With Personality Psychology

If you want to use the MBTI or personality psychology in a meaningful, healthy way, then the nondualistic approach can offer a healthy way forward:

• Study how each cognitive function manifests as forces that influence the self, and understand the Self as the totality of all cognitive functions and inner psychological drives.

This idea is common in meditation, where we speak of not being your thoughts, not your feelings, not the sensory impressions you experience, but that these impressions appear in you, the same way a radio receives radio signals. You are not your Introverted Thinking; you simply are experiencing Introverted Thoughts. Recognize how a function might have a possessive or dominating nature, in the sense that it wants you to identify with and become attached to it. E.g., if you have stupid thoughts, you may feel as if you are a “stupid person”. That’s just the way of the Ego you’re working to transcend.

• Speak of how you are influenced by a function, or by the repression of a function. Reflect on how you can synthesize these functions and what the answer is if you can resolve inner conflicts.

• Think about how you can go from being a static, stereotypical representation of a personality type, like the INFJ, to becoming an integrated, whole Self. E.g: “I currently identify as an INFJ, but I’m working to integrate the ESTP psychological drives into my own life, and find how I can unify these dichotomies in myself to find my own truth on what to do and how to live my life.”

To a nondualist like myself, categories are simply a tool, and are only useful to the point that they can accurately, or somewhat accurately, describe complex forces and experiences. A nondualist doesn’t have to reject dualistic categories or dichotomies, they simply have to understand that yin and yang are two sides of the same coin, and that the truth is the coin itself. One cannot exist without the other, without your Extroverted iNtuition, your Introverted Sensing could never have been, and vice versa.

We can on a day to day basis switch between them, or use them, as we see fit to meet our long-term goals and desires, but to raise one of them forward as the master, and to subjugate the other as the slave, or to hope to one day “overcome” one of the functions and to resolve inner conflict by force of one side winning, that is impossible. The striving for one force to win, or for your Introverted iNtuition to one day “conquer” Extroverted Sensing, is a naive fantasy.

The only way one side can win is if it also loses. I tried, for the longest time, but eventually, I saw the futility of it. Now, I continue to speak about personality psychology, because I see the value and use of these categories as transitory, open-ended concepts, that help us navigate and understand our day to day life, where we are stuck, and where we have developed an unhealthy fixation. What about you? How do you reconcile the idea of using fixed categories with scientific standards? How do you look at the conflict between nonduality and dualism?