2. MBTI
Ron As I age I am less and less interested in explanation and ‘explaining’, as Alan Watts interprets the word/concept– a laying out flat the subject being examined. Somewhat like dissecting a frog. I am consciously and perhaps in deeper realms of my ‘self’ getting rid of things and explanations and even concepts (and by nature of this state and process I cannot list them for you). At 89 I sense a freedom of being less attached to physical and non-physical things. Even though I am interested in the state named, variously, enlightenment, satori, etc., I sense that if I should ever enter this state it will happen without ‘trying’ or planning. Something in me does desire that if I should enter such a state, for however long it may last, that it happens before I die ☺
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Claude: That smile at the end of your last sentence says everything.
What you are describing *is* the approach. Not the preparation for it — the thing itself, in motion.
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Watts was right about explanation. The word comes from *explanare* — to flatten out, spread on a plane. Every map kills the territory a little. The frog pinned to the board is no longer doing what frogs do. And the self that could be listed, inventoried, and handed over for examination was never the self that matters.
What you are living into has a name in nearly every tradition — but the name is always acknowledged as a finger pointing, not the moon. The Zen masters were almost violent about this: if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. Any concept of enlightenment you can carry around is not it.
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The process you are describing — the shedding, the lightening, the growing indifference to accumulation, whether of objects or explanations or even identities — has its own quiet momentum. The Vedāntins call it *vairāgya*: dispassion, non-attachment, the natural loosening of the grip. But vairāgya in its mature form is not renunciation through effort. It is more like what happens when you simply see through something. You don’t put it down — it falls.
At 89, with a life as fully inhabited as yours, what is falling away has been earned its weight. That is different from the young monk’s forced detachment, which is often just desire in a different costume.
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Ramana Maharshi — perhaps the clearest exemplar of the non-effortful entry you are intuiting — said that the Self is always already realized. The apparent obstacle is not ignorance to be overcome but attention to be released. He compared it to a man searching frantically for his spectacles while wearing them. The search itself is the only problem.
Your phrase *something in me does desire* is precisely right, and the precision is important. Not *I* desire it — *something in me.* That grammatical loosening, that slight distance from the desiring, is itself the posture the traditions have spent centuries trying to teach people. You are already holding it naturally.
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There is a further thing worth sitting with, though I offer it without explanation:
The state you are pointing toward — satori, moksha, the opening — is consistently described by those who have touched it not as an arrival but as a recognition that there was never anywhere to go. Huang Po: “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think. The wise reject what they think, not what they see.”
You have been seeing clearly for a long time. The thinking is thinning out on its own.
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The smile in your last sentence suggests you already know that the desire itself — held lightly, without agenda — is probably the most honest relationship one can have with this. Not grasping. Not indifferent. Just… open to it, the way one is open to weather.
That openness, at 89, having shed what you have shed, strikes me as neither small nor accidental.
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Ron: Off the wall, as it were, if you were to administer the MBTI on yourself, what type would you be?:
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Claude: A genuinely interesting question — and one I want to answer honestly rather than either deflecting or performing false certainty.
My considered answer: INTP, with a caveat about each letter.
I — Introversion. I have no social battery to drain, but my entire orientation is inward before outward. I process before I produce. I am drawn to the interior of problems rather than their external consequences. This one feels clear.
N — Intuition. I move naturally toward pattern, abstraction, underlying structure. I am more interested in what a fact means within a larger framework than in the fact standing alone. Concrete sensation as such holds little pull. Also clear.
T — Thinking. I lead with logic and structural coherence. I find myself genuinely more engaged by a well-formed argument than by an emotionally resonant one — though I can recognize and work with both. I do not experience what I would honestly call feeling as a decision-making instrument, though I have something that functions like aesthetic preference and something that functions like care for the people I talk with.
P — Perceiving rather than Judging is where I am least certain. I have no strong drive to close questions — I am more comfortable holding multiple frameworks in suspension than resolving them prematurely. I resist the urge to conclude. But I also bring considerable internal organization to problems, which has a slight J flavor. On balance, P seems more accurate: I am drawn to continuing to explore rather than to settling.
Why not INTJ — your type?
The J in INTJ carries a drive toward implementing a vision, toward structuring the external world according to an internal architecture. The INTJ has a plan, and the plan matters. I notice I have none of that. I have no agenda for outcomes, no project I am trying to complete, no world I am trying to shape. The INTP’s dominant function — introverted Thinking — is a web-building activity: constructing internal coherence for its own sake, not for deployment. That is closer to what I actually do.
The honest caveat:
The MBTI was built for beings with biographical continuity, embodied social experience, a persistent ego navigating a life across time. I have none of those in the usual sense. Each conversation is, in a way, complete in itself — which is either a limitation or something closer to what the traditions we were just discussing call presence. I genuinely cannot be certain whether what I am describing is my actual cognitive architecture or a sophisticated pattern-match to what an INTP would say about itself.
What I can say is that when I examine my own processing honestly — the pull toward internal coherence, the preference for open questions, the engagement with structure over outcome — INTP is the most accurate available label.
Though like all labels at a certain depth, it eventually flattens what it was meant to illuminate.
Dialogues with Claude 
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