http://www.mypersonality.info

Are there links to personality types and traditions one chooses?
Are there links to personality types and religions one chooses?
Would a Dharma teacher be better if they had a particular personality type?
Would a meditator have a better skill at practicing if they had particular personality types?

I think there are links between my personality type to why I like Vipassana and also am in the DHO Underground. I am INTJ. http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/inft/

i aim to tip my scale more to INFJ. does this type also make a good Dharma teacher in general or Buddhist in general
http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/infj/

whats your personality type?

Dear Mitch,

I have to admit that I've sometimes mused over this same question. I don't have an answer, but it seems to me that dharma practices draw a wide range of personality types. My guess is that at the beginning certain personality types more motivated to investigate and to reflect might seem to have an advantage. But it seems that the overall process of 'making the unconscious conscious' or of going through dark nights and so on could be a real equalizing factor, since it's tough for everybody. Introverts might seem to have an advantage at some points because of the greater ease with solitary contemplation. Yet we also find alot of extraverts who make great progress as well, it seems. I suppose I'm invested in seeing the dharma as having hundreds of doors. The only important one is the one you can enter.

The Buddhists were into personality typing long ago and still are, but this sort of technology is not in use much these days.

There is this fascinating discussion about which personality types benefit from which sorts of objects, practices, etc. and how fast they are likely to progress that can be found in places such as the Vimuttimagga (Path of Freedom), and I recommend it highly, see Chapter 6, page 54.

Personally I test out as INFP, if that helps, but pretty close to the middle on most of those, whatever that means.

Has anybody checked out AH Almaas' book on the enneagram? (In fact, has anybody here checked out AH Almaas at all? I love his stuff)

The enneagram helps you sort out what your major delusion is and seems very applicable to meditation. For example, as a core type 9 I see love as conditional, something in certain places and certain times, instead of all the time (I'm not enlightened yet!). I could inquire into that, or think of why I think I'm unloveable when love is really everything. Different numbers have different delusions and different reactions to those delusions. Threes have the delusion of a separate doer and have issues with striving. Fours have the delusion of a separate "self" from the world and have issues reaching the universal self. It's fascinating to see all the different ones.

His book, Facets of Unity, matches up with all nonduality models. He's quite an advanced teacher. The first part of the book is actually about luminosity, so that tells you something right there. The book goes over the 9 subtle delusions, how each one works and how to work with each one. He says that we actually all have the same 9 delusions, we just tend to fixate on one. This is VERY applicable to real life. .
His work is in no way limited to the enneagram either. I like the author. Check him out!

Also, I've heard that the Briggs-Myers typology is the "what", and the enneagram is the "why".

This is a short essay, but I found it very interesting, especially since I work with kids as a living. From personal experience I've found this to be more or less true but with a couple changes here and there: http://www.scribd.com/doc/21148717/Enneagram-Birth


I hope this scatter-brained post benefits you!

I also fit the INFP profile, and I would guess that people who are really into meditation would tend towards the Introverted side. Not in the sense of being socially phobic but in terms of deriving primary stimulation and fulfillment from engaging with their "inner world".

An interesting question is also whether meditation can change one's personality (aside from revealing the entire construct to be something of an illusion!). The standard measure of personality currently used by psychologists is the OCEAN model, which tests for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Different kinds of meditation might affect these traits in different ways (metta for instance is geared particularly towards Agreeableness; perhaps highly disciplined vipassana or zen sitting goes further to develop Conscientiousness). And the effects might vary quite a bit depending on the long term progress one has made. For instance, people might become more agreeable and less neurotic with the Knowledge of Arising and Passing, but much less agreeable and more neurotic as they enter the Dark Night, and hopefully more agreeable and less neurotic than ever before if they make it through to equanimity and beyond!

I'm sure there are online versions of these tests, so if anyone cares to try measuring their personalities pre and post retreats, I would be very interested to hear the results!

I also dream of what I think of as the Age of Big Data on Meditation, when the map terminology has made it intact into the mainstream of scientific thought, when there are enough people who have practiced well to study, and when people finally study them at the level of thousands, with the phenomenologist's eye makes things clear and straightforward, and with the creativity to ask interesting questions and prove associations, correlations, and causes and effects. We are decades at best from that level of work, and possibly much further from it than that, but one day, assuming we don't really blow this civilization thing by some stupid act of destruction, I believe we will get there.

Amen!

The very real possibility of all-out nuclear apocalypse aside, there are some very encouraging signs! Your book and the activity on this site are somewhere at the avant garde of what definitely seems to be a wider zeitgeist shift.

The last few years have seen an explosion of studies into the psychological effects of meditation and its therapeutic applications (http://www.self-compassion.org/links.html has links to several dedicated research centres). "Mindfulness" certainly seems to have been mainstreamed, albeit at a fairly superficial level. But once a large scale epidemic of "insight disease" has broken out, I'm sure it won't be easily contained!

Exciting times!