The conversation is long today. If you prefer to listen, here you go:

It started with a book. It usually does. I pulled Dario Nardi‘s The Magic Diamond off the shelf this morning more or less at random, the way you do when your hand knows something your mind hasn’t caught up to yet. I’ve been in this long enough to trust that impulse. The books find me as much as I find them. And this one, it turns out, had something specific to say. Not just about Jungian typology, though it has plenty of that. It had something to say about me, about this particular knot I’ve been carrying around, the one I keep prodding and never quite loosening.

Nardi is one of those rare people who takes the cognitive functions seriously enough to run EEG data on them. He’s not a typology hobbyist. He’s a researcher who has been watching real brains process information in real time and mapping what he sees back onto Jung’s original eight types. That matters because it means the framework in this book isn’t borrowed furniture. It’s load-bearing. When he talks about the tension of opposites or the Transcendent Function, he’s not being metaphorical. He’s pointing at something structural.

So I’m reading through the appendix, comparing the INFP and ENFP profiles, and something interesting happens. The short blurb for the Harmonizer Clarifier, the INFP, reads like someone wrote it with me in the room. The quiet crusading. Choosing and sticking to what is congruent with your personal identity. Relating through stories and metaphors. Uncovering mysteries. Exploring moral questions. Knowing what is behind what is said. Struggling with structure and getting their lives in order. I read that and thought: yes. That’s the map of the territory I actually live in.

Then I read the full thirty-page coaching packet for the Excited Brainstormer, which is the Ne dominant function, the ENFP’s lead. And that hit differently. Not recognition of a description, but recognition of an engine. The way Ne works from the inside, the hunger, the cross-pollination, the inability to stop making connections, the living out of stories rather than just observing them. That wasn’t a portrait of me. That was me.

The flip was interesting. The short blurb for INFP resonates. The long report for ENFP resonates. What that tells me, and I think this is actually accurate, is that I’m an ENFP who has done enough inner work that my Fi, my introverted Feeling, the co-pilot function, is well developed. Mature, even. Four decades of journaling will do that. The quiet crusading isn’t foreign to me. It’s just not the engine. It’s the compass. Ne drives, Fi navigates. I had been reading the compass as if it were the wheel.

A Quick Glossary for the Uninitiated

This post wanders into Jungian typology territory, so here are a few terms that might need unpacking if you’re new to the cognitive functions. I’ll cover all eight in much more depth in a dedicated post, but this should be enough to follow the thread here.

More on all of this in a full post on the cognitive functions, coming soon.

The Problem That Finally Has a Name

From there the conversation went somewhere I hadn’t entirely planned to go, though I should have seen it coming. I’ve been circling this for months. The question I took out on the walk this morning was this: what happens when I stop making the container more interesting and just go further in?

That question came out of a longer conversation about the friction between my constructed identity and my revealed identity. The constructed self is Soulcruzer, the Narrative Alchemist, the Spiritual Technologist, the various framings I’ve assembled and reassembled over the years. These are real. They’re not fake. But they sit on top of something older and simpler that I keep almost naming and then decorating instead.

The revealed identity showed up immediately when I went looking for it, which is always the sign that it’s been there all along. Writer. Healer. Teacher. Three words. I’ve had them since I was a kid sitting with the third graders because my first grade teacher didn’t know what else to do with me. I remember Paulo, a Puerto Rican boy who took me under his wing when I was the small kid in the wrong classroom. I remember the books riding shotgun through every Army duty station. I remember the blog that has been running since 2004, 2,000 posts and counting, because the writing never stopped being necessary. Writer became poet became blogger. Healer became coach. Teacher became trainer. But the three things underneath never changed.

So why does it keep getting dressed up? Why does “writer who heals and teaches through story” never feel like enough? That’s the question I took out into the cold this morning, and I think I came back with a reasonably honest answer.

Two Reasons for the Container Problem

The first reason is pure Ne energy. Novelty is my play. Generating new framings and titles and combinations is genuinely fun. It’s not pathological. It’s not even avoidance, necessarily. It’s just what the dominant function does when it has space. Ne goes horizontal when it has no instruction to go vertical. Making a new container is interesting because you get to dream up a title, scour the internet for pieces that fit together, feel the click of something novel. That’s not a character defect. It’s an engine looking for fuel.

But there’s a second reason, and this one I named on the walk and then let sit. I don’t want to appear ordinary to others. Writer, coach, trainer: everybody is a writer, everybody is a coach. The exotic framing isn’t just Ne playing. It’s also armor. It’s a way of managing the perception of others, of making sure I register as interesting and novel rather than just another person doing a thing that lots of people do.

I named it on the walk and kept moving. I didn’t explore it. That’s fine. That’s for another session. But I want to mark it here because naming it accurately is the first condition of doing anything with it. The constructed identity isn’t just Ne having fun. It’s also a performance of interestingness for an audience that may not exist, or that may not require what I think it requires. That layer will need its own walk.

Blow as Deep as You Want to Blow

Kerouac said it. I don’t remember the exact line and I didn’t stop to look it up on the walk, which felt right. The gist of it is: blow as deep as you want to blow. He was talking about jazz and writing and the same thing, really, which is the permission to go all the way down instead of staying in the shallows where it’s safer and more performable.

The insight that arrived on the walk, cold as it was, is that going further in doesn’t mean going slower or going quiet. It means redirecting the same energy that’s been going horizontal. All that Ne generativity that has been making new containers can go deeper into the one that’s already there. The territory inside “writer who heals and teaches through story, shaped by 40 years of journaling, chaos magick, Jungian depth psychology, the Army, roller skating, wisdom walks, tarot, and a 2,000-post blog that started before most people knew what a blog was” is not a small territory. There’s no bottom to it. The exotic framing was never the source of the voltage. The voltage was already there.

What changes when I stop making the container more interesting and just go further in? I stop tying up energy in the re-framing loop. I stop the loop-de-loops, as I put it on the walk, the tangents and delays that feel like progress because they’re generative but are actually horizontal movement dressed as vertical. I can just get on with the game.

Robert Anton Wilson and the Chair at the Head of the Table

Wilson came up twice today, which means something. He’s one of the three I keep returning to, along with James Hillman and Paulo Coelho. None of them are hermits. None of them retreated from the noise of their moment to write on stone tablets. Wilson especially was fully immersed in the live current of his era, the counterculture, the government conspiracies, the psychedelics, the science, the politics, all of it. He didn’t need a more interesting job title. The work was the identity.

But the thing about Wilson that I want to sit with more is how he handled his parts. Reading Cosmic Trigger 1, what strikes me is that he was exceptionally clear about the different voices operating inside him. The skeptic got a seat at the table. The shaman got a seat at the table. The conspiracy theorist got a seat at the table. The rationalist got a seat at the table. None of them were silenced, none of them were crowned. Wilson was the one holding the conversation, not any single voice within it.

That’s the mature Fi move. Introverted Feeling at its most developed isn’t one coherent self standing firm against contradiction. It’s deep integrity across a multiplicity of inner voices. Knowing which part is speaking and why, without needing to collapse them into an official position. The constructed self and the revealed self don’t need to fight to the death. Narrative Alchemist and “writer who heals and teaches” can both be at the table. The question is just who is chairing the meeting.

I think the chair at the head of the table has been empty for a while. Or rather, Ne has been sitting in it by default because it’s the loudest voice and the most fun at parties. But Ne isn’t the integrating function. Ne generates. The one who holds all the parts in conversation, who lets the skeptic and the shaman both testify without picking a winner, that’s not Ne. That might be closer to what Nardi is pointing at with the Transcendent Function.

The Transcendent Function

Jung’s Transcendent Function is the concept that holds the whole Magic Diamond together, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than just using as a nice metaphor. The starting premise is one-sidedness. Every person develops a dominant way of engaging with the world, preferred functions, real strengths. But those strengths cast a shadow. The more you rely on one side, the more the opposite side gets neglected or repressed or projected outward onto other people. An Ne dominant type generates possibilities with extraordinary ease but can struggle to land, to commit, to finish. That’s not a flaw. It’s the structural cost of having a strong lead function.

Life eventually forces the issue. Through crisis, through breakdown, through what Jung called the tension of opposites, the neglected side starts pushing back. The thing you’ve been avoiding shows up as a problem you can’t solve with your usual tools. This is the moment the system is actually designed for, not as punishment but as invitation.

The Transcendent Function is what emerges when you hold both sides of that tension without resolving it prematurely. Not by picking one, not by splitting the difference, but by staying in the discomfort of the contradiction long enough for something genuinely new to arise. Jung borrowed alchemical language deliberately. You don’t get gold by melting lead into something more agreeable. You get it through a process that transforms the base material into something that wasn’t there before. The transcendent part doesn’t mean mystical or otherworldly, though it can touch that. It means the function transcends the opposition. It doesn’t live on either side. It’s what becomes possible when neither side wins.

This morning, I wasn’t resolving the tension between the constructed self and the revealed self by picking one and eliminating the other. I was holding both long enough to see what they were actually pointing at. That’s the Transcendent Function doing quiet work. The constructed identities aren’t wrong. The revealed identity isn’t more real. What’s real is the one who can see both and choose where to put the weight.

What I’m Carrying Forward

A few things to hold going into the reading and the days ahead.

The type question is clarified but not closed. I’m an ENFP. Ne leads, Fi navigates. The pull toward the INFP description is real and worth paying attention to, not as evidence that I have the type wrong, but as a signal about where my development is being called. The Harmonizer Clarifier qualities I resonate with are where I’m growing, not where I started. Nardi’s development path for the ENFP involves growing toward extraverted Thinking and introverted Sensing, the functions that support structure, follow-through, and staying with something long enough to go deep. That tracks with everything I know about my own edges.

The identity question is named but not finished. Writer, healer, teacher: those are the three that always return. That’s enough to work with. The second layer, the fear of appearing ordinary, that needs its own session. I’ve noted it. It will come back around.

The direction for the Ne energy is clearer. Stop going horizontal. Go vertical. The territory is already vast. The container doesn’t need to be more interesting. The depth is the interest. Blow deep.

And the Wilson model is worth keeping in view. Give all the parts a seat at the table. Don’t silence the constructed self, don’t exile the exotic framings, don’t pretend the Ne isn’t going to keep generating. Just make sure there’s someone in the chair at the head of the table who isn’t any one of those voices. Someone who can let them all testify and then say: right, here’s where we’re going.

It’s colder than they let on out here today. But the walk was good.

~ Clay