Primal Quest Affinities & Contrasts

Primal Quests that share a TET quadrant have a natural affinity. Similarly, Quests in diagonally opposite quadrants offer sharp contrasts. This contrast exists within the similarity provided by the diagonal quality.

Discretionary Interaction v Entangled Activities

The Immersion set of Quests demands action-based identification. Identification with a role or with a sufferer (Obedience or Salvation) is a matter of choice and provides fairly predictable interaction, so it can be labelled: discretionary. By contrast, identification with a challenge (Creation) is far more problematic because personal activities to meet the challenge are inherently diverse and uncertain. The result is to be swept up and entangled in the messiness of reality.

Entangled Activities: Lower Right Quadrant

The lower right quadrant is about direct action in the world as it is: i.e. «messy». Reality is messy because psychosocial and empirical realities are multiple and intermixed in ways that are confusing, irritating, complicated, unknowable and often surprising. In addition, the individual is distancing and transcending the reality within which everything happens.

Also endeavours generate numerous actions that emerge and ramify in incomprehensible ways: being psychosocial for some and empirical for others. The term «entanglement» is used to emphasize that «person+activity» has no determinable or definite bounds. So it cannot be fully comprehended or structured.

Potentially relevant factors: practical, emotional, relational, political, social, environmental, familial, cultural, historical, accidental, statistical, climatic, racial....and more.

More on Entanglement

Where the Creation Quest is about working «in flow», the entanglement is less risky. It can be organized to manage anxiety (e.g. via feedback) and to use known strengths not too far from a comfort zone. Where Creation is about supreme courage, the Quest leads to far more risky and demanding activities, often with pain, frustration, rejection, setbacks, new demands and confusion for prolonged periods. Once a significant creative effort starts, it can be difficult if not impossible to know how, where, when or why it will end.

Imagination is required to find your way through the uncertainties and complexities of reality as you handle your challenge. That does not mean that informed rational analysis or system modelling is useless or irrelevant. Not at all. However, for a creative punch, any method of decision must be applied imaginatively if it is to deliver on its potential.

Discretionary Interaction: Upper Left Quadrant

This upper left quadrant is about chosen activity within a discrete part of the social world. The term «discretionary» is used to emphasize that interactional activity related to the Quest can be defined, and then started and stopped more or less at will. Most importantly, the context for interacting can be changed to suit yourself. Interactions still look ethical to others: so they usually get social support and may irritate or expose the powerful and politically-connected. Those on these Quests may have to make hard choices at time, but they are still doing what feels natural to them.

Ethics of Salvation and Obedience

The Salvation Quest works to protect, help or rescue specific needy individuals in a selfless fashion. It therefore reflects a teleological ethics. The Obedience Quest requires interactions to follow rules and duties that have been determined to be right by the selected social institution. It therefore reflects a deontological ethic.

Observation is required to ensure you are interacting properly and fully in accord either with your role as rescuer or with your duties and obligations. That is sufficient because situations here are relatively straightforward, even if choices vary. The term, observance, is used when there is a combined observation of:

• an applicable rule or duty, &
• the rule or duty is followed correctly.

Feeling Good v Knowing Clearly

The Equilibrium set depends on focused concentration. Focusing on immediately accessible feelings and checking that you feel good is relatively easy. Focusing on knowing clearly any aspect of reality is more difficult.

Feeling Good: Lower Left Quadrant

Primal Quests in the lower left quadrant, being so self-attached, make the questor all too aware of personal suffering and unmet needs. They aim to alleviate this pain by feeling good. Well-being + self-esteem is what «happiness» is about here. So, in both Quests, the person brings social and personal values into play and makes efforts to obtain desired emotional experiences.

The Pleasure Quest

Feeling good is primarily bodily and sensory. Sensual stimulation and comfort may be supplemented by aesthetics, social attention, admiration, and possibly intellectual pleasure as well. Failure means bodily discomfort because «painful frustration» involves physical tensions and physiological changes.

The Meaning Quest

Good feelings are abstract and generated by values. That is why holding ideals or having a personal mission seems so important. It is why there are goal-directed efforts to do what you believe in and to make a difference. Failure here leads to «feeling badly» about something or about oneself.

Self-esteem is required when feeling good. Failure and disappointment disrupt equilibrium in part by undermining self-esteem. The Quest can help restore equilibrium and self-esteem. However, persistently low self-esteem is more serious and may disrupt use or preclude adoption of these Quests.

Knowing Clearly: Upper Right Quadrant

The two Primal Quests in the diagonally opposite quadrant handle suffering and its inevitability in a totally different way. By knowing clearly, it is possible to realize that feelings do not define the self, and that suffering is not to be removed except by tricks on oneself. Furthermore, self-deception and self-delusion are causes rather than solutions to suffering. So removal of illusions and delusions is the only genuine solution. Only by knowing the nature of the human condition, can you master its intrinsic pain, misfortunes and failures.

The Enlightenment Quest

The focus of concentration is on selected existential and psychosocial puzzles where there is wrong thinking leading to unnecessary harm in the present. Removing confusions by knowing clearly allows right thinking and beneficial interaction—so far as is practically possible.

The Spirituality Quest

The focus of concentration here is the reality of oneness and the delusional misperception of reality as dualistic. Knowing clearly the existence of spiritual states and divine realms where suffering and evil have no meaning is a positive spur for this Quest.

Belief is required when knowing clearly. Belief has an emotional component as well as its specific ideas. A coherent doctrine makes it much easier to sustain and manage specific beliefs. (Belief is sometimes referred to as «faith», but that term is vaguer in this context.)

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• Now consider the auspices under which each Quest operates.

Originally posted: 27-Jul-2012.