312 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
this occurs, even the memory of the evening disappears; a week later the
Teacher person cannot recall that he was there.
Traits of the Teacher person due to automatic Teacher thought:
Intellectual subtlety. The Teacher person likes precise words.
Single-mindedness. The Teacher person hates the double-minded.
Novelty. The Teacher person appreciates ideas which are new.The Mercy person may respond to a lack of emotional content by
facing others with an emotional situation. However, how can the Teacher
person do this, when Teacher feelings must be constructed one step at a
time? How does one inject a sudden dose of Teacher emotion? Therefore,
the Teacher individual may resort to intellectual sniping in an attempt to
show others the emptiness of their words. His listeners, however, will
usually interpret this approach as a personal attack and respond by
defending their Mercy feelings. This makes the situation worse for the
Teacher person. Before, he only had to deal with a lack of Teacher emotion.
At least he could retreat into his own internal world of intellectual order.
Now he has to contend with a frontal assault from Mercy thought and an
overflowing of raw, disordered Mercy feelings. This confuses his thinking
and prevents him from sniping effectively, and so he tries now to escape.
Afterwards, he may not be able to sleep as he repeats over and over again
in his mind, sometimes in mumbled speech, the emotional words that were
spoken.A
It does not take many of these situations to convince the Teacher
person that his best choice is to stay home and to avoid personal contact
with others: “They don‟t understand, and no matter what I say or do, they
never will understand. Why should I cause a scene? It is better for
everyone if I do not come.” This also can be misinterpreted as a form of
pride or arrogance. Meanwhile, the Teacher person longs inside for some
form of intellectual interaction, some meaningful exchange of theories and
ideas.
The Teacher Internal World
Let us turn our attention now from automatic thinking to the internal
world of Teacher strategy. When we looked at internal Mercy and
Perceiver thought, we saw that both strategies were equipped with a
„doorman‟ who stood at the entrance to the internal world and decided who
or what would be allowed to enter the inner sanctum of thought. The
A We suggested earlier that the voices heard by the schizophrenic Mercy
person originate in subconscious Teacher mode. The Teacher person is
conscious in the module that causes this behavior.