anatolie

Five ⟺ Seven

Five loses hope distancing themselves from intrusions. With a worn down buffer, empty reserves, and a sense of scarcity that has progressed to starvation, they are forced to open up, indicating the transition from Rejection to Frustration. Afflicted by a profound state of depletion, they have nothing to lose by getting out in the open and filling up less discriminatingly at Seven.

At Five you gave up focusing on the source of intrusion and start focusing on what to be affected by instead and how to achieve this. Losing hope that diving into the current realities of a situation will be constructive, they start recreating and asserting their own reality irrespective of what already has been created. That there is something to fear or avoid in immediate surroundings may be so taken for granted that Sevens can be downright reckless in the face of negative consequences and risks.

Seven is a Five who has already been invaded. Already robbed, needs become more immediate. In the extremes of this state we can only do what is intrinsically motivating to ourselves, or we run out of fuel. Having lost their foundation at Five, Seven starts from scratch each moment. Their safe shell no longer exists, whether that be physically in the form of armor or psychologically in the form of detachment.

When defenses are overwhelmed, they give them up and stop investing in them. The starting point for Seven is having some pest to fend off, but having to do so indirectly; circumventing, avoiding, evading, or outmaneuvring it. Common pests include constraints, interruptions, insults, attacks, indications of being wrong, of having built something on shaky ground, and obstacles to what you want. We may for example hold beliefs that are incompatible to each other, enlivening whichever suits us in the situation we are in. Or we avoid facing an argument someone made, tricking ourselves we have addressed it when we are merely imagining that doing so is possible.

While postponing a confrontation can give us the chance to attain the resource or solution that were missing in the moment, this creates debts which have Sevens continually trading their energy to pay off the present moment. This in turn can make resting feel like standing in place while the ground falters underneath your feet, and they try instead to solve every deficit by finding some source of replenishment. Seven finds themselves on an endless search when as they branch out to find what solves their current debts, they encounter more and more drains and challenges which in turn create new needs, and on it goes.

Losing hope also of your capacity to hold onto resources, storage of possessions feel uncertain. This can explain an irrational spending habit, where the ego unconsciously responds to a situation where spending beyond one’s means would be fully reasonable. Of course there are just as many situations where spending is the better choice. Spending money is just an exchange of a general resource for a specific one. 

Without a controlled environment where you can limit what can impact you, Five to Seven can’t rely on preparing for what will be required in the future. They cannot expect what challenges tomorrow brings, as conditions may change at any moment. Under these circumstances, making long term choices is not as rational. You do not have the luxury of long term planning when the demands of existence can’t be predicted beforehand. At Seven you have the constant task of reinvesting your valuables or currencies, making sure they suit the situation at hand, making sure of their relevancy. The skills you honed for your given set of conditions at Five may be useless in a different setting. Your chosen currency may turn illegitimate. Commitment may be avoided as it means being vulnerable to future unforeseen demands.

Seven has more acute and unpredictable challenges, and therefore a more varied spectrum of interests compared to Five. They prioritise mobility and adaptability over storage and amassing, though may locate and hunt down a wide variety of sources of fuel or charge that may never be revisited, as it didn’t end up being the panacea hoped for. Yet, when you can’t carry a large pouch, you need constant refill, and become hyper-attuned to shiny treasures and other fascinations. As the highest Frustration type, Seven has a belief in the possibility of attaining them, and get bursts of energy to go after them.

Sevens have to learn to quickly navigate unknown territory, and therefore develop more general and translatable talents like improvisation and making quick approximations. They begin to seek ways to generate what they need as they go, investing what they have into the next target of attention instead of holding it, and become dependent on getting something out of every moment and on their productions yielding frequent and sufficient returns on investment. They continually scan their surroundings, seeing its positive potential and engaging with the environment in exploring, probing ways that hopefully generate some unexpected beneficial result.

The fun-seeking of Seven is usually seen as a luxury need, when what is fun and interesting to us is a flaming sign of what is relevant to the challenges we perceive we have. Interest springs both from needs and from what supports the desired development for one’s life. It is an excellent indicator of what is genuinely beneficial for you, as long as it stems from true interest and not avoidance of something else. Being in a prolonged thrill-seeking state indicates some chronic impoverishment, where it may be all you can do to be survive until you can find the missing piece to a chronic problem. Our descent into habitual coping begin if we forget the original problem and stop registering when improvement can be made to it. A gluttonous tendency is often a combination of the presence of some resource and the absence of another, such as a spoiled child who feeds the hole of lacking parental presence with toys and candy and is dependent on their overconsumption to compensate.

One way to view Wisdom, the virtue assigned to Seven by Claudio Naranjo, is knowing what is relevant in a given situation, such as how and when to use information or other resources, knowing what’s needed, and seeing the place of something relative to the full picture. A classic example of lack of wisdom is when a usually very knowledgeable type of person insists on their correctness after delivering a fact which is not the centrally relevant truth of the situation, however true it may be in isolation. This person does not see the whole picture but focuses on the veracity of their piece in itself, while the person on the receiving end often can’t explain why the know-it-all is wrong even if they are right.

The act of clarifying, successfully selecting what is relevant and what is to be discarded, is another integration to Five. Sharpening the signal; what you can make sense of, and neutralising noise; what you can’t. There is no noise, however, only too much complexity for our minds to make sense of, which would lead to mental overwhelm without appropriate noise reduction or holistic thinking to scale.

Selecting a vantage point, a central perspective, with which to see the world from when finding one you sufficiently believe in, is yet another. You choose a permanent ground when you found one solid enough to convince you of its incomparable payoff or long-term stability, such as when a belief, a relationship, a home, or a challenge continues to yield fruits and you can sustain its cost and inherent constraints. Sevens can struggle with the lack of a sense of spending time, energy or other resources on the right activity, wondering whether what they are doing is the best use of their time and focus, wanting to follow many trails at once. Choosing and choosing out of one such trail, like of a train of thought, demonstrates how integration and disintegration continually happens at a micro level.

Sevens are distractible by new stimuli because investment has to be redetermined with any change in overview. By finding a worthwhile focus they integrate, and mental direction is more unified and stable at Five. You can choose to cut off alternatives and narrow down your reality when you believe an experience will cover its costs, that the present moment supplies you enough to deliver you to the future. Or better yet, that it is the optimal way to spend your time.

When for any reason you lose faith in how you invest your attention, Five zooms out, going from focus to overview and moving attention quickly between several foci, scanning their mental space or physical surroundings at Seven. They gain accuracy at the expense of precision, going from deep understanding and high resolution of one area of focus to quickly comparing and contrasting different appearances and their dynamic interplay. Appearance means surface level depth, or as far as you can quickly grasp something without getting stuck at a plateau that requires greater effort and investment to break past.