INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

Self-knowledge leads to wisdom, compassion and freedom. Learned people (scholars, professors, intellectuals, professionals, etc.) who do not know themselves are really unintelligent, unbalanced individuals; they are not free from ignorance, delusion and suffering, from self-centered craving and attachment. In self-understanding, there is the whole of existence. Life itself is our greatest teacher. The more we learn about life, the more we learn about ourselves.

When I returned to Canada, I experienced horrendous reverse culture shock. I was so open and childlike, and profoundly affected and transformed by my experiences in India and Nepal that I felt very vulnerable to the realities and superficialities of modern, materialistic society.

After being in a culture where communication in public was easy and effortless, I found people quite self-centered, isolated and lonely, and shopping in supermarkets terribly cold and impersonal. It seemed really amazing that one could buy a lot of groceries, go through the checkout counter, pay your money, and not have to utter a single word. In Asia, it is the human contact that is important, the product that you are purchasing is secondary; in modern society it is the product and its cost that are important, human contact is secondary, seemingly unimportant.

I found the environment very sterile, uninteresting, superficial and isolating. I just wanted to turn around and return to South Asia, to the ancient, exotic, mystical, and very human culture of India and Nepal. I felt like a fish out of water, but I could not afford to return.

It was a time for healing and deep introspection.

Excerpt: “An Inquiring Mind’s Journey”

“I have often wondered what my name turns up when I’m not in the room. I know I’m the mystery child, the one born premature (just six and a half months in the womb), who should, by all rights, have had balsa bones, a heart of chalk. I’m not the proud success that Nena has become, or a genius like Patricia, but neither am I the troubled baby that is the sinewy Pauli, nor as helpless as Caridad.

“I’m something else entirely; my own island, with my practical borders, seemingly ordinary on any map but, for all the burnt earth and barren mines, the least likely to be swallowed and disappeared by the waters.

“What I mean is this: I am as marked by genetics and exile as everyone else, as comfortably a part of any family portrait as the others. But though nobody much notices, I’m also a stranger in my own family, whether my connection is by blood or experience. I run about ten degrees hotter than they do—not to a boiling point, but to a simmer. Unlike Nena, I don’t fight to get my way. Unlike Patricia, I don’t proselytize. Unlike Pauli, I don’t shock. And, unlike Caridad, there’s a real weight about me.”

—Achy Obejas, “Memory Mambo”

“Who—what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of everything done to me. I am everyone, everything, whose being in the world was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone, which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I,’ every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” —Salman Rushdie