The Field: My Interaction with Reality

The Relevant Field

Primal Quests are distinct methods for a person to experience a form of happiness through life. How you pursue that happiness is shaped by the Primal Quest that you have chosen as most suitable.

A moment's thought This is a rhetorical statement: the «moment» took me about 3 years. reveals that there are only two things that have the power to spoil my happiness: my self and the reality within which I find myself. So interaction with reality is the field within which Primal Quests operate. That fits perfectly with the origin of the Quests in the Framework of Endeavour, which is about interacting with reality so as to change it.

The TET, via its two Axes, must represent this field and enable focus on the two happiness spoilers. Remember that in a TET:

	► X-axis =	the desired objective output or result
	► Y axis =	the personal requirement for producing the output

Specifying the Axes

The Objective Output

The desired result of each Primal Quest must involve putting the pains, stresses and difficulties of everyday life into perspective so that they cease causing unwanted distress. I emphasize «unwanted», because not all Quests expect comfort or even tranquillity. However, each Quest expects that whatever distress occurs should be tolerable and meaningful in its own terms.

The Quest therefore must allow someone to function above and beyond everyday reality, i.e. it must enable a degree of transcendence. Because purpose lies within the transcendental section of the framework of endeavour, a purpose-of-life is well-placed to provide this facility.

Only Primal Quests are dedicated to distancing one's self from current reality. All other THEE Typologies focus on achieving temporal goals that are reality-based and require full engagement.

THEE Note: Each Principal Typology has one Type (with formula: PH'●L7) based in an imaginative or spiritual dimension. However, that method is still about engaging directly with pressing issues or problems.

In plotting the Primal Quests, we will therefore consider the degree to which each enables and requires transcendence of current realities.

X-Axis = Transcendence of Current Reality

The Personal Requirement

These Primal Quests seem to exert some control over our lives that feels «100% natural» and «fully right». That is why the term «happiness» fits. It makes a chosen Quest difficult, nearly impossible, to resist. So we find ourselves, willy-nilly, striving to accommodate and pursue the Quest.

However, paradoxically, all Quests simultaneously demand that our personal desires and preferences take second place. These desires are partial or temporary, or survival focused, or about social approval, while the Quest is about our whole life, now and forever.

To Repeat: The insistent demand of a Primal Quest is to use our self in its service, but at the same time it demands that we develop a distance from our «ego/self».
Re Terms ► 

The «self» is a wholeness of experience that everybody recognizes as the basis of their sense of continuity and sameness from day to day. In this context, the focus is mostly on personal motivations (desires, interests, needs, expectations and obligations) and less on memory, capabilities &c.

The term «ego» is often used by writers to capture our self-centredness. To keep this orientation in mind, I refer to both. Note that this is not Freud's ego, which is a hypothetical inner agency, handling both internal dynamics and the external world.

In plotting the Primal Quests, we will therefore consider just how detached they require us to be from our own preferences, motivations and tendencies.

Y Axis = Detachment from the Ego/Self

This proposition for the X and Y axes generates the initial TET image. shown at right.

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• Now commence plotting the Quests.

Originally posted: 13-Jul-2012.