Ideas

The shape and nature of imagery

This leads me to the intuition via Plato of imagery as its own realm. Imagery is not a flight of fantasy, it is not passive wishing, nor sexual fantasies. Imagery is rather an observational process wherein our soul peers into another reality, which has its own objects and inhabitants. This reality is not a mental reality, for it has space and extension the same as our reality has, hence its relation to Plato. To bring up an older view of this sort of thing I will refer to Norse mythology: In norse mythology the spirit of a person resides in the chest, literally through the breath, wherein we have the essence of our mental life, deemed as Hugr. Hugr has a sight to it as well, because Hugr can leave the shell, which is the body, also called Hamr, which is a term that essentially means skin, in order to either travel elsewhere, or to enter animals to travel and see things through their eyes. In this respect the imagination would literally just denote a means to travel through the physical world via our spirit/hugr, and in this view when you imagine something that does not exist, what you are imagining is not a creatio ex nihilio, but rather something that either exists physically outside the border of Midgård, or literally a crafting of Ymirs body into something that now actually exists within the world of Yggdrasil. I bring this type of intuition up to contrast the older physicalist view to the Platonic spiritualist view, wherein this world of the imagination is properly differentiated and given its own dignity. We see this with the separation from both intellectual substances and the perpectual experiences as in Ibn Arabis Barzakh. Imagery then is its own autonomous realm of perception, which it shares in common with sensation as purely perceptual and observational.This realm therefore has strong connections to prophets, mystics, artists and generally to spiritual phenomena. Imagery is therefore an observation of the autonomy of the world of spirit, one might say, or the ”inner eye” with which one perceives the ”inner” world. But how does one distinguish this from what is just fantasy? Because there is such an attitude towards imagination where it is just fantasy. The just fantasy, in my view, comes from the intellect, the thinking lens, or from intuition itself, which either tries to force an image via pushing it out, via language, or which has an incomplete image that is hazy and fades quickly. The intuition comes from a feeling of an image which lacks the perceptive nature of imagery, which just observes, lending this imagery an element of simply ”knowing”. Actual perception through imagery feels the same as observing through sense perception, though without physiological tension, with the sense that you are observing something and can see its details and shape. The intellect forces this faculty into submission via concepts and via will, but imagery can also relate to thinking via infusion of words with images, which one might call disolving the sterile and dead concepts into their fluid energetic forms which can be apprehended by imagery as spiritual substances. With imagery there is also an involvement of the body, which comes from embodiment itself; the extent to which you can feel yourself being inside of the spiritual world. So to finalize this, I want to say that imagery is that ability where we feel that we are observing something which is not physical, and not with our eyes, but rather with our ”minds”, which might be felt to be inside of you (based on modern intuitions), but which in some intuitions is really a spiritual reality, or actually physical if you go by the Norse intuition. The latter are more empowering.

Part 1/2

Imagery and its components

part 2

But enough of these kinds of examples, I can also demonstrate through photography. There is a particular one I took on one of my trips in high school when we went to watch a play in a small but cozy theater. This is one of my favorite photos ever took and it was taken by an old phone and has one of those filters that were popular ten or so years ago. The quality does not matter, beauty is in the vibe. The mood. The atmosphere.

Perhaps, looking through a Jungian lens, you could call this Participation mystique, blending of the subject with the object, the line between conscious and unconscious disintegrating. I would argue that this is simply what feeling does best – unites people. It unites us for common causes and into revolutions, it unites as in singing together at concerts, it unites as with our family and friends and lovers. It can also unite us in negative feelings, because that is the full spectrum of feeling.

It is not only a perception of the nice but also of the ugly and painful. Feeling does not discriminate. And if the vibe is strong enough feelings will arise, whether they be pretty or ugly, comfortable or unnerving, joyful or tearful.

To be someone who orients themselves by their feelings means to be someone who seeks out feelings in the world and goes with the flow of them. Someone who creates art in order to transfer moods. Someone who will trust what their feeling tells them – you feel like there is a bad vibe in the place you visited therefore you leave the place. You feel you should go left, not right? Then you better go left.

I think this scene from the movie ‘Her’ is a good example of feeling. Heck, the whole movie is a good example of feeling, even the movie itself has a ‘vibe’, you know, one of those specific feeling vibes I explored at the beginning of this essay. Anyway in this scene he looks at people and he tries to guess their background. How does he know? It is in the way they move, the way they interact with each other, the way they look, maybe the way they are dressed. He is moved by this and he says he likes to see everyone as an individual with their own past and stories. This is what feeling is really good at. Seeing humanity in the world and feeling both its sorrow and beauty, maybe even both at once. It grasps the nuance of emotions and moods that are all around us, in the objects, in the people, in the nature.

The Feeling Function part 1/2

I cannot give an intellectual account of feeling because then it would cease to be feeling, but I can try to make it closer to you, reader, by describing my experience with it the best way I can. This should help you understand it in a more genuine way, rather than through concepts which do not have much in common with the reality of my perception. In the simplest way put feeling would be a perception of ‘vibes’, I could even call it the vibe function for that matter, because I believe that when people speak about their feeling function what they usually bring up is ‘vibes’, especially if fancy themselves as intuitive.

You know when you walk into a room and this room just has a specific ‘vibe’ to it – this is the feeling function. The vibe you feel is created by the people who either built, are populating or have been in this room. The way they designed it, what people spoke about in it, what its function is, what decorations it has, whether its window faces south or north… All of these details build a vibe and the vibe is felt through the feeling function. I perceive even my dreams in this way which is why they are so tedious to write down.

For example I had a dream in which I saw a Japanese style door with cherry blossoms painted on it, semi-transparent and I could see the silhouettes behind it. The room behind the door was not visible for me, only the people’s shadows, and this room was located in a strange looking place which was supposed to be an Olympic games arena and it had a floor made up of blue gym mattresses. The content of the dream is not very important because this scene itself is what carries the vibe of the dream. I could call this vibe perhaps a blue Japanese Olympic games vibe and I don’t know how better to describe what these scene offered me. Feeling is impossible to transfer into words, it must have content and personal experience and it is transient and elusive. Hard to catch and even harder to share.

Each day has a specific vibe, perhaps the best example I have of what I mean by this is one day I experienced which was a specific color to me – a shade of turquoise. This day also smelled like popcorn. I remember walking down the road towards my grandmother’s place and a dream I had that day which set the tone, which was also painted turquoise. Now when I look back on the memory I remember the sky as being turquoise and the smell of popcorn in my nose, yet there was no popcorn or turquoise – it was just the vibe that was like that!

Now I know what some of you might say, that this has more to do with sensation, that it sounds a bit like subjective sensations. I’ve had these thoughts too, of course, as someone coming from MBTI and Jung, however it is not sensations which matter to me. In fact they are quite irrelevant, and I do not sense the objects, I sense the ‘vibes’, or I ‘feel’ if you will. I will give you another example: I have a really amazing ability to smell pictures, there are certain pictures that have a smell to me, though what I mean by smell is more of a vibe. I get a feeling impression from images. Perhaps there is sensing there but this sensing is imaginary, and that is not really how Jung describes sensation.

Part 2

The four windows and their dynamics

The four windows, whenupon the undercurrent and structure of certain intuitions, can change markedly. Not only does their inherent relation to ourselves change, but so does their relation to each other change. A good case for this is how our current intuition is stuck in the thinking window, which looks mainly upon the realm of sensation: the intuition underpinning this, is, one which I briefly illustrated before, of a homunculus intellect which inhabits our brains, or our heads, as the thinking locality (here we find that thinking is actually localized in the body, to refer to how they base themselves all in sensation), with the sensation as an object outside of our thinking heads (the body is reduced to the brain and head) as the object of study. It even has come to be inhabited with our concepts, or laws and our sciences as the way to view and experience reality; many cases we even conflate thinking and its concepts themselves with the actual objective experience of the senses. We see this contrast greatly if we compare Newton and Goethes view of light and color theory for instance. Goethe takes more of a pure sensation approach, the pure phenomenology, whereas Newton bases himself upon a conceptual notion of light, which leads to the theory of frequencies of light, which only our subjective retina interprets, but that doesn’t exist in ”reality”. Though I think this is a misnomer, because there is no reality that we can confirm the existence of, if we apply the principle of evidence, that lies outside of our subjective sense impressions. Though naturally his illustrates the power of the intuition to even shape the way in which we choose to look at the windows of the world, as it presets in us a sort of disposition of an attitude that from the get-go selects and ignores certain things over others. But these intuitions also come to affect the windows in such a way that it may deepen their nature immensely, lending them more value than perhaps some of the other windows should possess. It is in this type of intuition that I believe that we find Jung’s differentiation of these elements, and they are therefore immensely beneficial in that they give us an enormous advantage in that particular window, but disadvantegous in another way in that we ignore the others. It adds, however, an immense range of colors to the world and how we engage with it. I will make an attempt to illustrate different types of intuitions for different windows to give a general sense of this phenomena. Thinking, owing to western culture, has a tendency to stick out to anyone who has undergone any extent of education and is therefore a really important window for understanding our culture and for understanding the intuitions that we are beholden too; many intuitions about the world are greatly intersecting with this, which lends it a great presence in our understanding, assumptions and predispositions towards the world and the other windows. It is therefore important, in my view, to engage with this window, either in attempts to dissolve it, or to use it as a push-off point, which segways into other windows. Because it can serve as an unknown hinder otherwise, I think it is important to be aware of the intuitions that surround it. I have already illustrated what I believe is one of the central intuitions surrounding this window, but there are many others. Thinking is that window which enters us into the world of thought, patterns, rules, understanding and knowledge. As I have already shown it is mediated through language, but it may also be mediating just as well through for instance numbers, as a means with which to engage it. The intuition we currently have of thought is that it belongs to the individual and exists in our head, but there are intuitions in various places that thought is in speech itself, as a type if oratory capacity.

part 1

The four windows to the world

Four is in this instance not exhaustive, but rather a description of what I have come to be aware of in my own experience. Though there could very well be more than four windows, perhaps something related to kinesthetics, or mathematics for instance? Be that as it may, I intend to explain the four windows of the world here--what they are and how they work. Sensation is where it begins and ends. But what is sensation? If we look at where it begins, sensation is embodied experience. Our bodies rise out of the primordial waters as we first awaken. When we awaken we step out into a world full of forests, deserts, savannahs and herds of animals. We step into a world of the sun and the moon, the day and night, winter and summer. The stars dress the nightsky with mysterious tiny lights that catch our wonder and the seasons puzzle and amaze us with the cyclical changes and movements which is found in nature all around us. Layers and layers of beauty are revealed, all from our body, from our own being. As a body everything exists in relation to our senses, and these senses bring everything in connection to its nature: all visible objects are in relation to our eye, as all audible are to our ears and so on. Here we awaken all the colors, all the music, all the tastes and sensations which the cacophony of the world may offer. This is sensation; it is the pure beauty and ugliness of the natural world, and all of the qualities we discern therein within our sense organs. When we die we leave this world, our body rots and is again absorbed back into these primordial waters wherefrom we sprung. Since all originates in the sense, thinking too has its own place in the senses. Jung uses the word logos, in an abstract fashion to describe this, but as we shall come to see later, all abstractions arive out of blending of these four windows with intuition. Thinking, as the word logos implies in its original meaning, is the function of speech; speech is one of the first technologies. We learn speech, it is passed on, and it evolves through time as our technology evolves. Through speech we can mediate knowledge of all of our senses, by naming them accordingly: in this respect we also find its origin in the body, because to name something is to give a sound to the body, with ourselves having a name too, a name for ourselves, for our body. All bodies are therewith named, and thus called upon freely. What is techonology? It is a means to overcome the limitations of nature, the limitations of this one life, by passing on our knowledge to give the next generation a greater chance than we had at overcoming the bite of the crocodile at the dawn of life, swimming in those waters that call us back. So thinking involves the dimension of speech and technology and it helps us therefore think of tools, and to formalize things. We can with speech put things that are not together in nature, together in our words; in the same manner we can put together a stone, a branch and hair in order to create a spear.

Feeling is that which mediates love, not just via erotic love, but just as much in terms of familial and tribal love. It connects all of the tribes members together, and motivates them to help each other survive, do favors for each other, and to pass everything on to the next generation. With love you get all the social ties and exchanges of expression, character, emotions and personal experiences. With our bodies we communicate our character too, as well as love itself, and in this respect you find that feeling too connects and nests itself in sensation. Imagery is that function you find among children when they play; they pretend something is happening within an empty space, see something in front of them, yet we cannot see it unless we share their eyes. What they are seeing is the images that occupy their imagination, and these images are too conjoined too and projected outward into space, so that they are visible in space. This is played with, as a partner, and fended with and interacted with, so that the body of the person is in interaction with something as though it were real. Imagery is also that which, behind the ancient tradition of story-telling, occupies the mind of the story teller, who invents those talltales and myths which come to touch with its index the spot inbetween peoples eyesockets. Imagery therefore is the medium of mythology, which is said to occur in the physical world, but at another place in another time. Imagery mediates what you cannot see here with your eyes, but what you can still see in front of you; it is a type of sight that is not with your eyes or ears. When you mix the changes of intuition across the span of time with such a notion, the intuition and experience of all of these windows come to be altered, to change their shape and understanding completely: thinking turns not into speech, but into knowledge of patterns, and thoughts that occur within the head; sensation is no longer about the beauty of the world, but is an objective dead colorless space to study; imagination is nothing but an illusion in our heads, whereas feeling fades away from our attention completely. Intuitions are studied in philosophy, which is why intuition is felt to be the tool and study of philosophers. Intuitions are affected by the philosophy who discovers new intuitions and new ways of seeing the world by playing around with speech (logos). New patterns of speech thus change our intuition, and therefore our perspective of the four windows, their role in our psyche so to speak. The intuitions are, as per their nature, not known consciously, and are therefore accepted under the surface, in a way where it seems obvious and to be of nature; we think our intuition is an absolute portrait of reality itself—alas it is not. These can be adjusted, though hard it may be, through exposure to older or foreign intuitions. It is therefore correct, in my view, that intuition is the perception, or knowledge, of the archetypal patterns of a given culture, as it inherits with it their suppositions. As we shall see later, this heavily informs the possible ways in which we can view these four windows. I want to inform of this, because I want the road to be open to the possible ways and colors which every window entails. Some are diminished relying on certain views, while some are enhanced by others.

Part 2

Intuition as a general function etched through history Image as a definition fits more how Jung describes the introverted intuitive type, while also for instance fitting statements such as: ”Like sensation, intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas.” With the introverted intuitive we get statements such as: ”Intuition, on the other hand, receives from sensation only the impetus to its own immediate activity; it peers behind the scenes, quickly perceiving the inner image that gave rise to this particular form of expression—the attack of vertigo. It sees the image of a tottering man pierced through the heart by an arrow. This image fascinates the intuitive activity; it is arrested by it, and seeks to explore every detail of it. It holds fast to the vision, observing with the liveliest interest how the picture changes, unfolds, and finally fades.” ” The peculiar nature of introverted intuition, if it gain the ascendency, produces a peculiar type of man: the mystical dreamer and seer on the one hand, the artist and the phantast on the other. The artist might be regarded as the normal representative of this type, which tends to confine itself to the perceptive character of intuition. As a rule, the intuitive stops at perception; perception is his main problem, and—in the case of a creative artist—the shaping of his perception. But the crank is content with a visionary idea by which he himself is shaped and determined.” These type of characterisations has come to incline me to believe that he is not referring to intuition at all, but to another function, which through history has been forgotten, but more about that later.

What then, do I think intuition is actually about and what is it if it is not a function? I will firstly make the case that I think that windows to the world is more fitting as a term than functions, but more about that later. What intuition is really about is ultimately a play between absence and presence. We can also say that intuition is those invisible connections which underpin the assumptions we make about the world before we engage it with any of the four windows, so that this is a background informed heavily by our cultural background and the language which we speak. Language is itself filled with intuitions. I think that an intuition can be found if you think about a chair as it is in itself, not as a multitude of memories, not as vibe, not as an image or as a sensory experience, nor as a concept itself, the concept of what makes up a chair, but when you simply feel the ”chairness” of the chair without the presence of it. To illustrate this we can simply take a chair in a hypothetical environment, remove it, and then stay aware of our knowledge that a chair was there in the first place. So the intuition of the chair comes from the absence of the chair. This absence is also the origin of numbers: numbers are intuitions. The ultimate identity of numbers, which comes when you do this same operation but on numbers, is that of the number 0: 0 is the base identity of numbers and of intuition itself. Yet, as with the integers, intuition also expresses itself in the form of the sense of a presence: you take four apples, you don’t just have a perception of the apples, but also an intuitive awareness of the fact that they are there, which is the reason why you can even count them in the beginning. It gives you a sort of grasp of the perception. As we shall come to see later, sense perceptions is a very distinct perspective from this awareness of presence. Intuition is a sense, therefore, of a grasp of a situation underpinning it, a sense of knowing what connects things together, a sense of the space, if you will, that underpins consciousness in general. In this respect an absence in which every phenomena of consciousness may be fit. This sense of intuition as an absence, however, has a definite shape: this is informed to me by the more eastern traditions of thought, which is to be found in Japan, where absence in the middle of a vase is considered to be just as definitive for its shape and nature as is the vase itself. Intuition lends us our primary mode of understanding something via our culture and language, which therefore has a long history behind it of developments; intuitions such as this may be rendered to change, if one has the right tools and education in order to adjust it accordingly. This will be important to remember when dealing with the question of imagery. Our intuitions are therefore, one might say, base assumptions and perspectives of the world. A good example of this is the idea we have of connecting thought to consciousness, and consciousness specifically to the head; this is not the case in many ancient cultures, such as greek, norse and indian. In our current paradigm we share an intuition of life being that of an intellect that sits inside of our heads and looks out yonder in observation of the objective natural world, which is to be studied and understood as this hardcoded, concrete and determinsitic world of matter and chemistry. Yet the natural world, with the relation it has to our senses, is, to one who is open towards it, an incredibly colorful, textureful and ultimately subjective realm of experience, where every person experiences their own reality. Many intuitions we have of the world are in this sense not even understood and conscious to us, owing to the unconscious nature of intuitions.

Part 1 Intuition as a general function which is etched through history

In all forms of typologies intuition is defined as one of the primary functions of consciousness, involved in creating some of the most captivating and controversial types: the intuitive types. Jung was the first individual who came to define intuition as an independent psychological function which could be used as a decisive means of consciousness to orient itself in the world. Jung based this on his experiences with patients, primarily women, who, when he interacted with them would draw upon ”hunches” in order to gain knowledge of the future or the past, without being informed of any sensation facts which might have informed such intuitions; a good example is the story of an intuitive woman which Jung speaks of treating: ”You see, intuitive types very often do not perceive by their eyes or by their ears. They perceive by intuition. For instance, once it happened that I had a woman patient in the morning at 9 o’clock. And, you see, I often smoke my pipe and have a certain smell of tobacco in the room of a cigar. And so she came and said, but you begin early. I said, you call it early at 9 o’clock? She said, no, you must have seen somebody at 8 o’clock. I said, how do you know? She said, there had been a man there that had come at eight o ‘clock already.  Then she said, oh, well, I just had a hunch there must have been a gentleman with you this morning. I said, but how do you know it was a gentleman? she said, oh, well, I just had the impression the atmosphere it was just like a gentleman here.

All the time, you know, the ashtray was under her nose  and there was a half-smoked cigar. But she wouldn’t notice it. So, you see, the intuitive is the type that doesn’t see. the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells the hunt for ten miles.”

In this anecdote with this woman Jung is exposed to a woman who would intuit, but in turn completely ommit the sense perceptions; as a result, owing to Jung’s dichotomy of functions, Jung came to conclude that sensation and intuition are mutually exclusive functions, as are feeling and thinking. He also, upon encountering many women of this sort, came to conclude that there must be a fourth function, namely intuition. Intuition was originally defined by Maria Moltzer as: "grown out of instinct. I consider intuition to be the differentiation and conscious function of instinct."“The tendency of individualisation also contains a collective element which arises in the half conscious, half unconscious function which we call intuition. Intuition . . . contains elements of feelings as well as of thoughts, and tries to solve a given problem and create an adaptation in bringing together these half conscious and half unconscious elements. This adaptation coincides with neither the extraversion nor the introversion tendency— it contains elements of both. Therefore I am inclined to accept a third type which uses mainly this intuitive function in its adaptation to life” This definition is markedly different from the final definition which Jung ultimately gave of intuition as a function of belonging to introverted and extraverted types respectively, and in which intuition takes the role of one of the four primary functions alongside thinking, feeling and sensation. I am myself more inclined to agree with Moltzer myself, and to ultimately regard Jung’s types, especially the introverted intuitive, as not being expressions of intuition at all. I am deviating here by moving the idea of intuition away from functions and into the realm of general human psychology. As we shall come to see, intuition is even a vital existence in math, philosophy and the development of human perception and understanding historically. My idea is that Jung’s intuitive type actually concerned itself with people who were not differentiated as types, as his idea of type depends upon this concept. A hint towards this is the fact that intuition can appear in the form of thought, feeling as well as sensation. The concept of intuition, however, concerns itself with our inherited knowledge and assumptions about the world, so that it shapes the way in which we automatically and underneath the surface interpret the world. In this sense it underpins all functions, rather than being its own independent function. My suggestion, which I will explore later more in detail, is that we do have four functions, at least, but that the fourth one, which Jung describes is more akin to something like imagery, first suggested by Eligio Stephen Gallegos

Introversion and Extraversion Under normal interactions and experiences of relationships we are bound to come across differences in people, not just owing to specific personality traits, but sometimes even due to a marked nervous character; some people react strongly to stimuli, wheras others seek it out actively. I should assume that this is an experience that most people have come across on some level in people. To further the characteristic, there are people who are more intensive and private with their interests and need time by themselves and those who prefer to interact with others, either directly or indirectly, as a sort of anchor. Jung’s original meaning of extraversion and introversion takes on a philosophical connotation, namely that of Aritstotle and Plato, but then it moves on into the history of philosophy in the scholastic age; it is my view that this was a mistake. I believe this moved what should have been an attempt to trace something biological into the realm of culture, whereby the terms become entirely susceptible to fluctation. Rather, to move it into the sphere of biology, by examples of animals, we can make the case for introversion and extraversion actually being expressions of of the nervous system: On the one hand we have an individual who lacks sensitivity to stimuli and who, therefore, seek it out more actively, with people, with objects and activities; on the other hand we find a person who has an added amount of sensitivity to stimuli, leading to a withdrawal from activities involving too much sensory input, in favor of calm places, spaces and social interactions, ultimately leaning towards more of a solitary and reflective approach to life. I believe, due to modern intuitions of the world, that this physiological explanation should be sufficiently satisfactory and comprehensible, even easy, to grasp. We also have the case of animals: some animals put more emphasis on propagating through as many offspring as possible, whereas others propagate sparingly but put more emphasis on protecting and nurting their offspring; the first one reflects an extraverted attitude whereas the second one reflects the introverted one. I think that introversion and extraversion denotes less so a ”type”, as type is an image, and more so a physical and nervous expression of responses to our sensory experiences, therefore, to my mind, introversion and extraversion are ultimately irrelevant to the expression of what Jung called functions. This owes to a different conception of what type is, in parts, but also to Jung’s own emphasis on the four general functions. As such I do not agree with Jung’s ultimate distinction between introverts and extraverts, whereby you have the expression of subjectivitiy and objectivity, along with attempting to ground the introvert in his concept of archetypes. In my view there is no special connection of either of these to either the introvert or extravert. I shall go on to explain better why this is the fact later on, in a future text. I ultimately conclude that introverts and extraverts simply denote different nervous responses to stimuli, owing to different degrees of sensitivity; furthermore, these degrees of sensitivity are complex, meaning that a person can react differently to different stimuli, that is with different degrees of sensitivity to different stimuli. The term introversion and extraversion are therefore always relative; a person with a penchant towards higher sensitivity to stimuli will swing towards introversion, whereas the less sensitive one towards extraversion. Many people, however, fall in the middle.

Libido and psychic orienation

Libido is psychological energy in general, not just concerning sexuality. There is some correspondence between phsyical and psychic energy, but they are not the same. Physical energy involves musclular activity, such as in breathing, walking, running, and sexual functions. But in the latter there is also a psychological component, which is found in sexual fantasies for instance. Fantasies are therefore a good representative of psychic energy, along with other mental activity in general—such as thoughts, feelings, emotions, aspirations, dreams, daydreams and impressions—which can be defined braodly as a psychic event, i.e., it does not need a necessary trigger of physical origin to occur but can occur autonomously, on its own accord, such as in the ”daydream” condition aboard a public transportation vehicle. Psychic energy also consitutes attention, as attention is an element that can be directed both inward and outward, i.e., towards daydreams and towards sense stimulus, for everyone. When we are concerned with this energy, it has a physical basis too of course, since psychic energy corresponds with physical; for example, you will tire out more easily mentally following intensive physical activity. So perhaps one could say that energy exists as an intermediate form that can turn either physical or psychic depending on the need. Libido is also expressed through the unconscious, by the loss of energy which results in a particular content losing vividness and sinking out of our attention to become essentially unknown to us; this happens to memories, which we can remember but then eventually have them fade out of attention. Any and all content that enters into consciousness can come to sink into the unconscious once our attention is turned elsewhere. The unconscious content is not necessarily completely deprived of libido, but deprived of enough so that it sinks below the threshold of enough energy to be noticeable next to a more charged and vivid content in our attention. Owing to this factor, if an unconscious content gains enough energy through the bunching up of unconscious contents, for instance through associations, it can again rise to the surface. A good example of this is when we see one thing and it immediately bursts forth the thought of an association of a memory we did not consider in some time from this initial thing. All contents that are at once content but are turned away from gain some touch of the unconscious as soon as we turn away from it, so that even if we turn our attention back upon it after turning away, this content has essentially changed in that it now has a hint of the unconscious to it. Libido as psychic energy also can be characterised as having two general directions that one may view as goals or more like tendencies. These are two mechanisms which everyone possesses that help us in different tasks and situations: it is an extraversion and introversion of libido. The extraversion of libido helps us in situations where we are required to extend our libido over multiple areas of focus, so that our attention is split across multiple interests for various reasons. When we look at introversion on the other hand this is a character of energy which helps us in being more intensive, when we need to put our attention to one or a few things in a given situation for various reason, so that irrelevant things may fall to the wayside. Both of these mechanisms help us and exists in every person, as they are essentially just means to engage attention: one form of attention is intensive where as the other one is more expansive. From these two mechanisms, when they are more or less habitual in a person, meaning a person has a habit of either being intensive of expansive, you get a typical way in which this person engages his energy of the psyche, hence you get an introverted and an extraverted libido type. Introverted and extraverted types

On the leafless tree a black shadow of a bird kindles the spark within: Flown to my window's arm, Brought with her a glass filled with liquid green; With a head of a hen in glass it covers it well -- When I ultimately there was lead, out of curiosity to pick it up and look at it close by I saw the glass hen start to move and sing; onto my hand it jumps and filled with its typical color of forms, Quacking and stomping around my palm, Finally bursts leaving behind a tiny chest and its feather of lead.