The feature article in this issue of the Journal bears the title What We Mean When We Speak of the 'inFp', etc - a critique of the J/P designation in the MBTI. It demonstrates how an alternate convention for naming the MBTI types can be used to pinpoint a major theoretical concern regarding how the 'J' and 'P' designations operate in the MBTI. The Conversations section in this issue is devoted to a series of follow-up questions and answers.

It was this theoretical concern that led to the FD33, our experimental 'functional preference-order indicator', which permits non-traditional preference order combinations of various kinds. In an upcoming issue of the Journal we will report our findings in that experiment.

Also featured in this issue is an article by Roslyn Kopel Gross, whose Type Writer page appears regularly in The Enneagram and the MBTI. She poses the question, 'If we examine the writings of a well-known author in the context of his/her era - that is, if we look at some examples of established literature - what can we learn about personality typing?' In this article, entitled Typing Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, it is the personality types of these two authors that Ros explores.

DNA has a double-helix shape that looks like a twisted ladder (left). Scientists now believe that one end of the ladder can loop back on the other end, forming a closed circle, like in the figure directly below - the ladder's two posts are shown intertwining.

If you take a closed circular DNA molecule like the one to the right above, but made from a much longer ladder, and twist the whole thing a number of times, you get 'supercoiling', as illustrated in the figure below.

To further explore these forms, try this 3-D Puzzle.

The remaining articles that appear in this issue, described in greater detail below, are also on the subject of art and personality type. But they address questions first raised here in papers on seemingly unrelated topics. Please bear with us in the following few paragraphs as we attempt to put the art articles that we offer this time into the context of our previous work, presented in recent past-issues.

In Issue Six our focus was on science. We reported a conversation that John had had with physicist Brian Greene, on the topic of the fundamental structure of physical reality. It may ultimately be organized in a 'liminocentric' fashion, similar to consciousness - like a series of nested 'Chinese boxes' in which the innermost box is identical to the outermost box. In another paper in that issue, The Structure of Consciousness: Liminocentricity, Enantiodromia, and Personality, we explored the idea that it is the enantiodromic relationship between the four Jungian 'mental functions' that permits us to conceive of the personality itself as having a complex and essentially paradoxical structure. These pieces, along with articles and interviews from previous issues, remain available in our Archive.

The view that consciousness is structured, and that it is structured by attention, was first put forward by C.O. Evans. An early pioneer in consciousness studies, Evans took this position in his 1970 book, The Subject of Consciousness. In 1976, John worked with Cedric to co-author a monograph in which they offered a model of consciousness based on that perspective. These and related works were recently made available at www.mentalstates.net. A synopsis of the model is offered in a paper John wrote for that site, The Subject of Consciousness Revisited. He suggests that the model continues to provide a useful frame of reference from which contemporary issues in the field of consciousness studies might be profitably addressed in the 21st century.

It was in our recent series on The Enneagram as Mandala that we (John and Pat) took the next step and publically introduced the idea of a liminocentrically structured consciousness. We showed how, in the pre-Jungian spiritual traditions from whence Jung borrowed the term 'mandala', these figures were typically presented in such a way that their innermost and outermost rings were conceived as indistinguishable - making them not only intentionally paradoxical, but also a structure of the type for which we coined the term 'liminocentric'. As we pointed out at the time, mandalas are organized in that way in order to achieve the 'reconciliation between incommensurable orders of existence' for which they are celebrated.

For Jung, the mandala represents the 'Self' - another term that he borrowed from Eastern philosophy. This 'Self' is NOT what we ordinarily refer to as the 'ego', 'I' or everyday 'self' (without a capital 'S'), but stands in relation to these in such a way that when, during the 'enlightenment' of the individual, the personality shifts from its

Photograph from cover of "Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life that Matters" by Bernard Glassman & Rick Fields Hardly a seamless monument ! When will these old blowhards learn that no matter where they plop themselves down, as long as there are just two of them they won't be able to say they are sitting in a circle? Even if you have nine lives to devote to finding a solution to this dilemma, it won't matter. One thing is for sure, though - they made us laugh so hard our insides fell out!

center in the 'ego' to its center in the 'Self', such a shift can either be understood as the attainment of a state of 'egolessness' or the accomplishment of 'Self-realization'. In their recent book (left) Glassman and Fields describe it in the following way -

"Most people think [that spiritual self-sufficiency] involves building up a strong sense of self. But building oneself up - becoming the whole universe - really consists of what Dogen calls 'forgetting the self'. ... Its as if we become a point that has no dimension, but that point is the center of an all-encompassing circle. There's no longer any separation between us and everything else." (Glassman and Fields, p.92)