300 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
because of a fear that this novelty might disrupt the way in which the
existing „dozen tools‟ are arranged. Now you can see why the average
Teacher person seldom excels in history. He is so afraid of the emotional
risk involved in expanding his theories that he seldom thinks unless he is
forced to do so.
The second requirement for the Teacher storage shed, after a need for
raw material, is usefulness. If the Teacher person is to be successful in
coming up with new general theories, he must fill his mental storage shed
with information which is appropriate, just as the Mercy person must
absorb real experiences about the real world if he wishes to come up with
new and unique approaches to his environment. Trying to build a house
when the storage shed contains only gardening tools is rather difficult.
Similarly, the Teacher person will find it very hard to build theories if none
of his mental bits and pieces are designed for the job.
Unfortunately, this again is exactly the situation in which the average
Teacher person finds himself. What he really needs is general theories
about life—understanding which can help me to survive its journey
through messy existence. However, it is exactly in these areas that the
Teacher person finds it hardest to think: He evaluates theories emotionally,
and when he encounters subconscious Mercy thought and Mercy emotion,
he regards it as an alien way of feeling which is trying to disturb his way of
thinking. When emotions are being torn to and fro by personal Mercy
feelings, then the Teacher person literally loses his ability to think clearly.
If he encounters a good emotion, is it because he has discovered order, or
because he has triggered some pleasant Mercy experience? Or, if he is hit
suddenly by emotional pain, is his theory in danger or did he stumble
across some submerged Mercy hurt? He has no sure way of knowing.
Therefore, the Teacher person usually plays it safe and restricts his
theorizing to the sanitized world of the objective, in which his thinking will
not be warped by strange feelings. That is, the Teacher person usually
constructs a „castle in the air‟—a building which is totally disconnected
from real life and personal feelings.A
A We will see later that it is the Exhorter person who is mentally driven to
combine emotional Mercy experiences with emotional Teacher theories. I
mentioned that the theory in this book was initially conceived by my
brother, a Teacher person. He in turn encountered the basic idea of seven
cognitive styles in the Seminar notebook of an Exhorter speaker named
Bill Gothard. Without some seed theory, a Teacher person would not have
dared to examine personality differences with their emotional connotations.
The Exhorter individual in his role as instant expert might postulate a
theory of personality styles, but would then be repelled intellectually as the
Teacher person put some flesh on this concept.