Fixation 4: “Ego-Melancholy” / “Over-Reasoner”

Knowing, in the sense of personal knowledge or acquaintance, is something we feet in the heart. When we read or hear or experience something and let it drop into our heart in contemplative practice, we know it in a meditative or insightful sense, as “Mary pondered these things in her heart.” At 4 , we tend to constantly question and compare, never satisfied with the answers that may come. At 4 , we seek knowledge, not abstractly, but directly, by experience. We seek to understand, which comes from the Old English understandan, meaning to stand in the midst of. Sometimes, in order to find our way, we must spend some time lost in the wilderness. I can be so bewildered, that, for a time, I lose my common sense. Understanding can come and go. As soon I say, “I’ve got it”, I’ve lost it. Conversely, as soon as “I’ve lost it”, I’ve got it. Part of the engagement of the intellect is to be disoriented; we always understand incompletely and we can always gain new insight. When we feel the confusion and bewilderment of this space, and yet, we are on our way forward. We are invited to find a home in our otherness. In the 4 fixation, people are overly concerned with not being “dumb”, having understanding of things and authenticity. They separate and categorize people unconsciously, there is constant comparisons and jealousies in their head. Reality is too brutal, the world delivers too many impacts, and this makes us extremely sentimental. Society imposes ideals and patterns we can not fit in, therefore we develop a natural and perhaps permanent sense of inner deficit, a “lack”, emptyness, meaninglessness. This builds and accumulates, leading to melancholy and self-defeating thoughts. We are jealous and so jealous, and we may not accept this, so we immerse ourselves in reasoning and touchiness, being in touch with our sentimentality and perception of broken “self”s. We feel that we are not good enough, that things are not perfect, the immediate reality is not complete. So we wish for and seek perfection, reasons, purpose, we try to have more and we live in anxiety because of constant thinking about alternative worlds. Within comparisons, there is envy, because people have happyness and things we do not have, therefore we envy them, we want what they have and we want to have what they also want, to prove ourselves and to prove for people that we are real, meaningful, special, that we have a presence and some place within humanity.

Here, socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations (for example, romantic love towards yaoi lol) are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior (trying to fit in and seek groups that share our idealizations, or understanding and perceiving reality in images we wanted). Bipolar personality - melancholy and wet depressions are transformed into emotional drama and euphoria. Unstable relationships and social connections hurt us deeply, and we internalize all criticisms we gain from the world. We can react to these reactions with arrogance and severe antipathy. Insecurity becomes our fate, and we try to find self-esteem and worth in the acceptance and conscience of other people. We seek external validations because we do not trust ourselves, we attach and cling to people we may love because we depend of their opinions. We understand opinion as absolute truth in the 4 space. Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) - a condition characterized by difficulties regulating emotion. Sentimentality and storms are the essence here. The 4 fixation is about feeling emotions intensely and for extended periods of time, and it is hard to return to a stable baseline after an emotionally triggering event. We become used to our sentiments, so they are one of the most known traits of our “self”. Authenticity, then, is attached to our sentiments and opinions, that maybe are caused by the external reality, impacts we receive and impacts we make. Consciousness is distorted by perceptions, so we cling to what we lack and the empty, the void. Some 4s are always striving for what they do not have in the current instant, and some 4s are always whining about what they think they can not do. “Everything is never enough”. In the 4 space, if we do not control our sentiments properly, we’ll may do crime and seek personal justice or revenge, things which will make us feel remorse and deception later. Sexuality can be quite increased here. Analysis and existentialism, philosophical research about our entity, is the trap that gets us stuck within this fixation. The way of pure clear analysis, when we do not associate our subjectivity with the objective reality, is what leads to self- realization.

Originality and authenticity, special character, is the image we may try to convey or suppress. If I dismiss my experiences, or reason them away, I cling to the pole of common sense or certainty and cannot enter deeply into the experience I am actually having. I skim over the surface of my life and do not fully live it. On the other hand, if I allow myself to be simply overwhelmed, that is not a true experience either. When we completely enter into an experience, we are able to say to ourselves, “I can bear it.” If we accept the unavoidable suffering of an experience, we avoid a great deal of suffering that is purely optional. “Why me?”, “What about him?”. Envy is one of the major barriers to having my own experience. I could react to the discomfort by feeling sorry for myself and wondering why I have to live with this ongoing issue. This might spiral into catastrophic thinking. Thoughts might lead to a mental and emotional paralysis where I can’t take even simple measures to deal with the present pain. Understanding will come with an accommodation and a suitability that is uniquely my own. I can recognize that my pain can disorient me and allow for that to be a signal to care for myself. I can choose some sensible actions to help with the pain. Discernment will tell me what I need to do in any given situation, while allowing for limitation. I may not always like the situation, but I can bear it. A living tradition allows us to interpret a present experience by comparing it to the way something was done before, integrating an old way and its wisdom with a new need. The dramatic arts, in that drama picks apart a human experience and makes it special; philosophy (repository of wisdom and insight); universities, schools, and libraries; and conferences (gathering to intellectualize and compare each other’s theories). All of those are representatives of 4. In conclusion, the polarities of 4 shall be represented by the paralyzed character and the analytic character. The former is lost within lack of reason and empty worlds, the latter is connected to the meaning of things and infinite information reality has, complete world.