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Originally posted by lilalove

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Originally posted by Stormy

Why did he write the book(s)?

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Because he wanted to be a writer and community organizer when he was younger. Obama wrote a large number of short stories when he was a community organizer. It was a passion of his. They were about crumbling churches, the pain of the people, the sorrows and joys absorbed in a community. To date, none of those have been published, but I'm sure in time they will be. Obama was given a book deal at the age of 28 and chose his inner demons to expel for all the world to see and then spoke of how he found the path to an inner union of two halves that tried to tear him apart.
If he thought that book would help him as a politician 20 years from when he starting writing it.. then he was stupid. That book haunted him non-stop on the campaign trail. It was used against him, time and time again. In the end he over came it.. but it was by no means a help to him as a politician. The Hillary camp did everything they could to paint Obama as an ambitious and arrogant empty suit that could not be trusted to keep his word because he was not willing to fight. They turned Obama's natural compulsions as a peace keeper into type 3 at level 5 detached slick image lightweight who had no personal principles or values of his own other than his own image and adore. Not shockingly it was bill Clinton that had the bright idea to paint Obama in lower health 3 colors.
After Obama won the primaries McCain's team went about playing on that same distorted image of Obama the Clinton machine defined him as.

But then Mccain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate and 100% lost his ability to paint Obama as a lightweight risky choice.

So then the McCain people dug into Obama's past a little deeper.. and what they found became there next attempt at defining Obama. They found what we are seeing in fact. Remember McCain said it was Obama that was really like Bush? Everyone laughed.. but I knew what he was talking about. lol Obama is steadfast in a belief system. Obama was telling the left the truth on the campaign trail.
And that lead to screams of socialism. lol
Which is a gross exaggeration... but closer to the truth than the Clinton machine definition of Obama. Which was just really bill talking about himself.



Obama's other 2 books were clearly to define his platform for the election because he knew he was an unknown. No one cared about those two book.. they were just like every other politicians platform books before an election.

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Originally posted by lilalove

I'm going to promote 3w4 at levels 1-4 because that is the image Obama needs in order to get things done. The job is to under play and under-cut every left leaning thing he does and make it sound watered down.

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Originally posted by lilalove

No, because Obama clearly is but does not want that fact out of the bag,
It's image.. not reality. If Obama can push through a left wing plat-form and make it sound middle road.. that's a public win.
Not like bush at all.

3w4 is much better.

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Originally posted by lilalove

Indeed.

the EIDB does a poor job at selling 3w4.

Lets help them out.

Our country does not want another Bush.

It will cause big problems.

I'm going to promote 3w4 at levels 1-4 because that is the image Obama needs in order to get things done.The job is to under play and under-cut every left leaning thing he does and make it sound watered down.

The Obama team wants to be promoted as a 3w4 between levels 1-4.

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The Receptive Person

Unfortunately, even healthy Nines are not always so healthy. Self-possession is difficult to sustain, and the fear of losing the sense of balance and harmony they feel with the environment and with the people who are important to them always remains in the shadows of their minds. If they succumb to it, Nines desire to create peace of mind for themselves by becoming unselfconscious. Instead of bringing the fullness of their awareness to themselves, others, and the moment, they subtly begin to lose themselves in their impressions, to begin to forget that they are an active part of what they are experiencing. In the desire to merge harmoniously with the other, they begin to lose their center. Basically, to maintain a sense of peace, the Nine stops focusing on the self as an object of their attention.

Because Nines developed their sense of self by identifying with both parents, they also are able to identify with others, giving lots of positive attention to those who are central in their lives. They are extraordinarily receptive, capable of identifying with others so completely that, they are not self-conscious, self-doubting, or self-centered. Not only are healthy Nines free to give their full attention to others, they positively want to do so. Because of their ability to identify with others, healthy Nines have a great capacity for loving and sustaining others, both physically and in their imaginations.

Since they are so unselfconsciously accepting, there are few conflicts either in their emotional lives or in their relationships. Nines see themselves as peaceful, and as long as they are healthy, they really are at peace with the world. They have a high tolerance for stress and irritation; they are patient, imperturbable, relaxed, and tranquil. They do not fly off the handle over the little annoyances of life. There is also an unmistakable innocence and simplicity about healthy Nines. When you deal with a healthy Nine, you are dealing with someone who is guileless, to whom lying or trying to take advantage of others would never occur. (It is incomprehensible to them how others can be guilty of this sort of thing.)

Their receptivity allows healthy Nines to be the most trusting of the personality types. They trust others, they trust themselves, and they trust life. Because they communicate the feeling of non-judgmental acceptance of others, Nines serve as emotional anchors for people; stable and solid, they are always there when others need them. Modest, gentle, and approachable, they are sanctuaries of peace to whom others come for solace, rest, and comfort. Uncritical and unthreatening, they do not have unattainable standards either for themselves or for anyone else. They are easy to please and make very few demands on anyone. (Healthy Nines are not, however, totally uncritical and equally receptive to everyone. Some people repel them, of course, but healthy Nines are more gracious to those they dislike than any other personality type.)

Although healthy Nines feel at ease among people, they also love to commune with Nature. Sailing, hiking, camping, gardening, or taking care of animals makes them feel very much at peace. Nature--especially its mystical and mythological side--strikes a receptive chord in them because by identifying with nature, Nines feel at one with something larger than themselves. Moreover, since they are used to identifying with others, personalizing them in their minds, nature, animals, and even abstract ideas and symbols have a deep emotional resonance for them. For example, Nines do not think of their country as an abstraction but as a living thing; their pets are people to them; the countryside is populated by mythological creatures; mountains, trees, and rivers are archetypal forces; elves, ghosts, and leprechauns populate their living room or favorite shady spot.

The archetypal imagination we find in healthy Nines also has a deep appeal to other people since it taps the desire for union with the cosmos which, at some level, everyone desires and needs. Healthy Nines supply the personality types with a vision of the magic of the world. They have a way of looking at the world through innocent eyes. Their mythological imagination recalls the consciousness of childhood in which everything seemed to glow with enchantment. Healthy Nines never lose the contemplative side of themselves or their sense of wonder.

Correspondingly, Nines have an affinity for non-verbal communication. They are at home in the world of pictures and symbols, and they often tend to think in colors and impressions rather than in words. Many Nines are also attuned to music, and derive great fulfillment from singing or playing an instrument. The quality of music is very supportive of their state of awareness: playing or listening to music is an experience in which one can lose one’s self in the process. Further, the sense of harmony, tone, and vibration all feed the Nine’s feeling of oneness and flow with their environment.

Finally, since Nines see themselves as part of nature, the physical processes of sex, birth, aging, and death itself seem natural to them, things which should be accepted as part of the way things are. Their acceptance of nature and nature's ways is yet another source of their peacefulness because they are not at odds with existence as many other personality types are. Nines are not defiant of the natural order, but happy to be part of it, yielding themselves to it.


The Supportive Peacemaker

Because their peace of mind is threatened by any tension between them and others, healthy Nines want to ensure that peace reigns everywhere in their lives. Achieving and maintaining peace motivates them to become peacemakers, mediating disputes and conflicts between those they are close to. Nines want to reconcile people to each other so that everyone will be at peace, just as they are with themselves.

They are also good mediators because they take the complaints of others seriously. They understand real differences between people, why others are upset and concerned about whatever is on their minds. Healthy Nines also are able to see areas of common ground, and they work toward achieving reconciliation because they feel that there is much more to be gained by cooperation than by divisiveness.

The list of their positive qualities is a long one: healthy Nines have a healing touch and go out of their way to pour oil on troubled waters. They have a soothing effect on others because they are so calm themselves. Others find that they are mysteriously at peace simply for being in their presence. They are also optimistic and reassuring, and whenever they can responsibly do so, they stress the positive because they believe that looking on the bright side of things is preferable to dwelling on the negative. They are able to forgive and forget, to put conflicts completely behind them and get on with their relationships and their responsibilities. They are extremely affable, pleasant people, the kind others spontaneously (and rightly) call "nice," or the "salt of the earth." They are jovial and have sunny dispositions, a natural, unaffected sense of humor, and a warm, easy laugh. They are unpretentious, treating everyone with the same honest directness no matter whether the person is royalty or a cab driver. They are easygoing and as comfortable as an old shoe. It must be the rarest of persons who does not like a healthy Nine.

Healthy Nines are not simply good-natured, however. They bring other qualities to society, particularly the support which they give others so that they can thrive. Whoever is significant to Nines--spouses, children, close friends--will be the beneficiaries of their unstinting love and generosity. And since healthy Nines possess a gut instinct about others (as a result of their identification with them), what they do for people is both appropriate and valuable for their development.

And, when Nines feel something important needs to be said, they can be extremely candid, perhaps saying more than other types would find it politic to say, although Nines do so without desiring to hurt anyone. Their candor can be very valuable since they distinguish themselves by their uncommon common sense, a combination of simplicity and guilelessness so true as to be extraordinary. They have no ulterior motives, no pretensions, no large ego to protect or inflate, no concern for status or prestige, no desire to impress or condemn others. Hence, they speak with the honesty of children and the wisdom of adults.

Their serenity is certainly soothing to others, and a great help to them in negotiations of all sorts, but it also serves them very well in a crisis. Healthy Nines can maintain a level-headed calm, even in highly stressful or dangerous circumstances. They often combine this composure with their healing touch in the medical professions or in related fields of health and nutrition. Of course, Nines can be found in a wide variety of professions, but even if they are not pursuing a career in the healing arts, many high-functioning Nines are interested in a health issues and holistic approaches to life.

In a similar vein, healthy Nines are often students of metaphysics and human development. They are at home with a global, transpersonal perspective and are frequent attendees of workshops on meditation, healing, yoga and relaxation techniques. Nines enjoy exploring the world of dreams, symbols, and images, and they are not infrequently attracted to the ways of indigenous peoples who emphasized life in harmony with nature. They also are adept at synthesizing different perspectives or traditions in a way that finds the common threads in them all, but produces new insights.

Nines can be wonderfully creative in more traditional ways as well, and delight in sharing their visions of an enchanted, utopian world with others. When they are healthy, their unselfconsciousness allows them easy access to their creative process (although this changes in the average Levels of the continuum.) Not surprisingly, much of the art they produce has qualities similar to their personal style: that is, positive, reassuring, and full of a sense of wonder about the world.

Last, even though healthy Nines are easy going, they may become extremely successful in their professions because of their ability to bring out the best in others by creating a nurturing environment. But precisely because they are not competitive and never call attention to themselves, others tend to underestimate them. People take Nines for granted, until they realize how much they have contributed to everyone's welfare.

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The Accommodating Role-Player

Outwardly, average Nines seem little different from healthy Nines, although a shift has taken place, not so much in their actions as in their attitudes. The difference between healthy Nines and average Nines is that healthy Nines are in touch with themselves and others, whereas average Nines gradually lose touch with themselves and others by subordinating themselves to roles and social conventions too much, putting themselves in the background so as not to ruffle their environment.

In the healthy Levels, Nines are dynamic individuals who work to create a positive, harmonious environment for themselves and others. But in so doing, they may begin to fear that asserting themselves or their desires will create conflicts with others, thus spoiling their peace. When they begin to fear getting into conflicts with others, Nines are being swept into the average Levels of the Continuum. Ironically, this strategy is the genesis of many of the conflicts that Nines will have with others. People want input and responses from Nines, but as they reflexively avoid possible conflicts and repress their opinions, their input is not forthcoming. (“Where would you like to go for dinner tonight?” “I don’t care. Wherever you want to go.”)

To avoid conflicts, Nines lower their expectations of life and of themselves, and begin going along with other people’s wishes to avoid conflicts with them. In fact, the expectations of society and of their peers begin to create a role into which Nines can disappear. Everyone plays various roles in life, but in the case of average Nines, the role is created by others and exists to fulfill their expectations and needs. Average Nines want to blend in and to be unthreatening to others. But this leads them to repress themselves, particularly their ability to assert themselves, and so become self-effacing and accommodating.

Average Nines willingly accommodate themselves to others because their sense of self depends on it. Average Nines begin to idealize the people they identify with, so that the more wonderful the qualities of the other, the better Nines feel about themselves. The more the other is idealized, the stronger the emotional bonds, and the more at one with themselves Nines feel. In fact, this action creates the opposite effect. Nines feel better about themselves because of their association with and connection with such wonderful, fantastic people. But they are devaluing themselves to do this. Or more precisely, they are forgetting themselves and neglecting their own development. They become like a mother who lives for her children or a wife for her husband. Of course, it is appropriate for a mother to accommodate herself to the needs of her children when they are infants and cannot do without her. But it becomes a problem if, as they get older, she continues the same pattern of self-effacement. The essential problem is that average Nines go too far in identifying with the other, losing too much of themselves in the process. Too readily do the wishes of others become their wishes, the thoughts of others their thoughts.

A reciprocal motion occurs: as they accommodate themselves, the idealize the other. If the other is a person, he or she can do no wrong; if it is a value or belief, it is never questioned. Thus, average Nines easily fall into conventional roles, defining themselves as persons whose place in life is to fulfill the functions--husband, wife, breadwinner, parent, citizen,--which have been assigned by someone else or by the culture in which they live. Getting married, having children, and holding down a job, among many other things, are expected of them--so they accommodate themselves. Their lifestyle, their religious and political beliefs, their expectations for themselves and their children are all defined by expectations of them which they have accepted.

This is why average Nines are so aptly thought of as the archetypal common man. They are the glue of society, which by its very willingness to be molded into whatever niches are needed is valuable to society, although at a cost to the individuals involved. Without a thought about developing themselves, average Nines embrace the values and ways of thinking and living of the culture in which they find themselves. Even if they are part of an “alternative culture,” they will dress, behave, and live their life in the way they feel is “normal” for that culture. (Nines in a spiritual community will be conscientious about observing the practices and protocols of that community.) Respectability and acceptance by their peers is therefore very important to them. Nines are not so much interested in keeping up with the Joneses as in being respectable members of their society, doing what is proper, and not doing what they imagine a person of their society would not do. In this sense, average Nines are also usually conservative, not necessarily politically conservative, but conservative in the sense of being committed to adhering to and preserving the traditional values of their peer group.

Because they are conservative, average Nines also tend to be past-oriented. The past is always more comfortable than the present or the future, since the past is a known quantity. It is less threatening because it has already been lived through. Moreover, average Nines can be nostalgic about the past, getting sentimental or idealizing it because doing so creates a source of good feelings for themselves and others. Further, happy memories from the past become a reliable source of positive feelings when conflicts and problems erupt in their world.

It is difficult to quibble with many of the particular values of average Nines. The problem is not so much with their values as with their not thinking them through. They simply adopt their way of life wholesale, naively accepting everything at face value.


The Passively Disengaged Person

Because their emotional stability depends upon maintaining their inner world of beliefs and idealizations, average Nines at this stage fear change. They want to do nothing which would upset them, and therefore want to maintain the status quo as much as possible. Rather than exert themselves in any deep, essential way, they would rather that everything simply work out on its own, without their intervention or response.

The irony is that average Nines must actually do something to do nothing: they must disengage themselves from anything in the environment which they perceive as a threat to their peace. Their healthy unselfconsciousness has become a certain unreflective disconnectedness, a lack of awareness of much of the world around them. They remain on friendly terms with reality, but not slavishly so. A sluggish complacency, intellectual laziness, and emotional indolence set in. ("Oh, well, we don't have to worry about that....") They become passive: life begins to happen to average Nines.

There is a distinctive vagueness about Nines at this stage because they maintain an uninvolved distance between themselves and their activities, an impassiveness, which does not allow anything to get to them or upset them. They are extremely easygoing, but they do not make real contact with the environment--or with those in it--becoming inappropriately matter-of-fact, even about things which would rightly call for a more personal response. They slip into an indifferent "I can take it or leave it" attitude, which prevents them from getting too excited about or involved in anything. They move from one thing to another, equally content and equally neutral about it. In short, average Nines are mellow and "laid-back" to a fault, the classic phlegmatic temperament personified. Being "on cloud nine" takes on new meaning.

Because they do not allow themselves to feel anything very deeply, their highs are not high and their lows are not low, as Jung noted. Everything is kept on an even keel. Average Nines are not even aware that their feelings are dampened since they have disconnected themselves from their feelings. At this stage, average Nines begin to be so vague and undefined that others cannot help but notice that something is missing in them, as if they were not all there. They are unfocused and spacey, a million miles away, as if grooving on some inner trip, or secret thought--or on nothing at all.

Nothing seems particularly important or urgent to average Nines, and they put no particular mental energy into anything unless they absolutely have to. Details do not interest them, they forget things, and do not concentrate on their work for more than a few minutes before mentally floating off. Their conversation rambles or they change the subject abruptly, revealing their lack of attention to what is being said. Average Nines are life's dreamers, enjoying the contemplation of their inner vision of whomever or whatever they have idealized. But, unfortunately, because their attention is inward on their contemplation, they become inattentive to the real world. If they are intelligent and well-educated, they may enjoy talking about philosophy, theology, the arts or sciences, although even so, much of their thinking is frankly little more than vague woolgathering, the purpose of which is to pass the time rather than actively engage themselves with anything requiring intense involvement or effort.

Increasingly, to convince themselves that they are doing something constructive with their time, average Nines engage in “busy work.” They involve themselves in all sorts of projects, errands, and activities which help maintain their world to some degree, but which have little real impact on their lives. Nines at Level 5 begin to have difficulty galvanizing themselves to do things that would substantially improve their lives. They feel an enormous inner resistance to leaving the comfort of their routines, as if they were trying to swim through molasses. Everything seems like too much trouble, so average Nines soon switch on “auto-pilot” and disappear into their routines again.

Their healthy simplicity has deteriorated into obliviousness, a permanent absent-mindedness, as if they were constantly daydreaming about nothing in particular, perceiving the world like someone who looks at a clock without seeing the time. Indeed, the way most people have trained themselves to ignore television commercials is how average Nines experience a lot of reality, disconnecting themselves from whatever they do not want to see or hear until inadvertence becomes habitual. They are like sleepwalkers, physically present but not aware of what is going on around them.

Their energy is spent maintaining their peace, ignoring anything which would excite or trouble them. Physical and emotional comfort is an important value, and average Nines do not push themselves too hard intellectually or physically lest they get either too stimulated or too exhausted. They pass the time in undemanding ways, puttering around the house, going on errands, collecting knickknacks, or mindlessly watching television. At this stage, they become accustomed to living in a state of semiawareness, like people who have been on tranquilizers so long that they forget what it is like to be off them.

It is important to understand, however, that psychological passivity is not the same thing as complete inactivity, although it is a precursor to it. Average Nines may be the heads of multimillion dollar corporations, leading vast enterprises while still maintaining an inner disconnectedness from their activities. Nines are able to be uninvolved because one of their defense mechanisms is compartmentalization (isolation), which allows their subjective experiences to be broken into unrelated segments so that they can move from one thing to another without engaging themselves. As a result, reality has little impact on them. They can be relatively busy while remaining emotionally and intellectual detached from their activities.

Because they disconnect from their experiences, average Nines do not make the cause-and-effect connections one would normally expect: cause and effect simply do not seem to go together for them. They do not think of the consequences of their actions, or of the fact that their omissions will also have consequences. They do not think through anything, unquestioningly feeling that everything will work out for the best.

Their lack of self-awareness is at the root of what is going on here. Inattention arises because, unless they are healthy, Nines never learn to focus on anything, including themselves. Just the opposite, their entire orientation is to be unselfconscious and receptive to the other, as we have seen. Because they are unable to sense themselves as discrete individuals, they get used to perceiving all of reality vaguely. When practical problems arise, especially with other people, their inability to attend to reality only makes things worse. Average Nines increasingly become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The problem is that average Nines have made many accommodations to others to avoid conflicts and to be left in peace. But these accommodations are not without cost, and underneath the passivity, Nines are angry both at others for not seeing them and their needs (although they may be uncertain as to what they are or how to express them to others) and at themselves for their inability to assert their desires. They are convinced, however, that this anger would ruin their inner stability, their peace of mind, so they repress it, not realizing that it is the very energy that would enable them to assert themselves. To repress their anger and anxiety, they begin to disconnect from all of their feelings.

They also disconnect from interpersonal conflicts by compartmentalizing their relationships, splitting people into two major groups: those with whom they have identified and everyone else. The second group of people has little meaning to average Nines because they are essentially unreal, little more than an abstraction.
Average Nines can be surprisingly callous and indifferent about this group of people. They may as well not exist.

Nor do average Nines put much energy into their relationships even with those in the first group with whom they have identified. Nines idealize these people, and then shift their attention from the real people to their idealization of them. The result is that others sense a lack of attention to themselves or to their real needs. Ironically, others may also begin to lose interest in average Nines because there is so little energy or relating going on in the relationship. As Nines drift off, others drift away.

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