Passion Mode

Home > Overleaves > The Passion Mode

The Passion Mode

+ Self-Actualization
– Identification

Inspiration

Cardinal

Positive Traits: Dramatic, Emotional, Enthusiastic, Intensely Alive, Involved, Lively, Open, Self-Actualized, Spontaneous
Negative Traits: Boundary-less, Emotional Upheaval, Foggy Thinking, Identification, Invested, Irrational, Loss of Identity, Suffers Intensely

The Cardinal Inspiration Mode is Passion. First of all, lest the reader misunderstand, it should be pointed out that this Mode has nothing to do with sex (but on the other hand, when combined with a strong Sexual (Physical) Center, it can make for an interesting experience). A person in this Mode is passionate in the way he lives ("Wow!"). That is, he is intense and excited ("Fantastic!"). He is high-spirited — it is as if he puts an exclamation point with everything he does ("Terrific!"). The gestures are animated, and the voice is emphatic, with a variety of modulation. He is fervent and eager in his pursuits. The advantage of this Mode is that the person approaches everything with verve, so he is likely to succeed. The disadvantage is that he overreacts to things, exaggerates things, and overestimates the importance of things.

This Mode is the counterpart of the Reserve Mode. Whereas a person in Reserve goes through life as if it were shades of gray, a person in Passion acts as if it were very colorful. To use another metaphor, he is always running either hot or cold — there is no lukewarm for him. He is either 100% for or 100% against whatever. Rarely will he compromise because he feels so strongly about his position. However, note that he may switch from one position to the opposite and then support it just as strongly. Often a person in this Mode is found to be swinging from one extreme of the pendulum to the other.

The Positive Pole is +Self-Actualization, and in this Pole the person is very exuberant and expressive. He is an irrepressible "live wire". He lives in an uninhibited fashion, free and untamed. He does not like to have any restrictions put on his lifestyle. There is a need to express himself ("I do my own thing"), or be himself ("I gotta be me"), or find himself.

The Passion Mode is the Opposite of the Reduction Goal. People in Passion lack the need for privacy, simplicity, efficiency, and economy. Passionate people may love ornamentation, ostentation, and gaudy display. Such people have no problem with revealing intimate things about themselves. They are "up front" and open about everything. They do not run and hide from problems.

In the Negative Pole of -Identification, the person can get carried away by the emotions of the moment and exaggerate everything. He "makes mountains out of molehills". He is "off the wall", to use another expression. He lacks all restraint and inhibition, to the point of losing self-control. The person identifies with something so strongly he loses his own identity. It might be a person, a cause, or an ideal, but whatever it is, he gets very much involved in it, even "carried away" with it to the point that it consumes his life. This is the opposite of the Positive Pole of "+self-actualization", in which the person becomes more himself rather than less.

The fear that drives this mode is the fear of being restrained, of losing freedom of expression. In such fearful states, a person's behavior can be blatant and outlandish, even to the point that he enjoys shocking less liberal people with outrageous behavior. He lives his life in a carefree fling, unbridled and unfettered. He refuses to make commitments. He is wild to the point that it is impossible for him to be tame or domesticated. The way to overcome this is to consider and apply the Positive Pole of Reserve, which is +Restraint. Exercise some gentle self-control and one will revert to the Positive Pole of +Self-Actualization.

The counterpart of Passion is the Growth Goal. Both involve behavior motivated by aspirations to transcend the ordinary, to stretch beyond the limits, and to fulfill the highest potential. The difference is that Growth, being the Negative Aspect, concerns the seeking of these things, whereas Passion, being the Positive Aspect, actually has them inherent.

In general, other people are likely to find people in the Passion Mode to be colorful and interesting, but perhaps also irritating, flighty and undependable.

-- Phil Wittmeyer

Channeling About Passion

A person in the negative pole of reserve can be crippled by an inability to feel anything, whereas Passion mode explores the other end of this polarity. It is about the positive and negative sides of not controlling the inner world. In the positive pole, there is great joy that comes from freedom, from letting the natural take its course. It is like free-form dance, such as in a nightclub, people moving however they feel. There is also potentially much beauty in it; it is not a refined expression, but it makes up for that in its joie de vivre and spontaneity, in which something new may come through as a result of not controlling anything.

The negative side of "letting it all hang out," of having few boundaries, is loss of self. In the positive pole of reserve mode, there is a clear sense of the sanctity of self. For example, someone who has studied ballet for many years likely carries himself with an awareness of the boundaries and shape of self, and there is an ability to move through space in a self-assured manner with fine posture and grace. In the negative side of passion mode, there is an inability to know who you are. The positive pole means that you find out who you are by pouring your whole self into what you are doing, and you gain an actualization through the thing that you are giving yourself to.

Let's say that you volunteer for a charity organization, you work hard, it gives you a lot of pleasure, and you learn things about yourself because you didn't hold back; your passion came from within you and filled this larger form, giving you a greater sense of self. In the negative pole, "identification," you take it too far, and your self is like a leaky boat that sinks to the bottom of the larger form, rather than being buoyed by it. There's not enough sense of who you are left apart from that outer thing to hold yourself together. For example, you get involved in a romantic relationship. At first, you are on cloud nine because you are running your energy freely. Your lovemaking is exuberant (it may not be refined; refinement would come from the opposite, reserve mode) but it brings much pleasure because it is free. Then, however, everything starts to become about the other person, and you lose touch with your own needs and feelings. If this happens, slide to the opposite mode, reserve, and use restraint. This means you start to make a lot of little choices about how you carry yourself in that situation, so that you can get back to self-actualizing. On the other hand, a person in inhibition would do the opposite, and throw himself into something freely in an effort to let go into a larger container rather than holding on to the small internal container. These two modes illustrate the need to balance form and content, boundaries and exuberance. Those who are in one of these modes play with those polarities.

A person in reserve mode is not usually too hard to spot. There's often a graciousness, but there can also be an uptightness from not being able to let go internally, to feel freely (whereas in the negative pole of perseverance, a person can't let go of what she's doing, and in the negative pole of caution, of his expression). Passion mode is easy to spot when a person manifests it in physical or emotional ways. Emotional passion, especially, often manifests in ways that stand out to others. However, if a person is, say, in the moving part of the intellectual center and is not very emotional, there would still be a sense of passion mode's not trying to control the inner world, but you would have to be able to see the person's intellectual passion at work in order to identify it.

Q. I've been pouring through the work of Virginia Woolf, and she's been channeled as being in passion mode. In some of her letters, she's written about the personal challenge of having boundless, effusive emotions that she sometimes struggled to harness intellectually. She also mentions an eternal quest to find the self, and many of her characters are driven by this same quest.

A. It is a matter of true boundaries versus false. Passion mode seeks to minimize boundaries in order to discover a truer boundary, one that will emerge from within. In passion mode, you throw yourself into something new and see what shape it will take so that you can find out that you are something more than you realized you were earlier. Reserve mode, on the other hand, is about exploring the self that has already been created, and discovering that it is beautiful rather than a straitjacket. They are like the two goals on this axis, reevaluation and growth. Growth adds new experiences, and reevaluation processes the old ones, bringing them to their highest state.

You might compare this to the way progress occurs in music. In his day, Johannes Sebastian Bach was considered old school; he did not pioneer new techniques; he took old ones and did everything he could with them. That is like reevaluation and reserve on the ordinal inspiration axis, working with old forms and making them beautiful. Beethoven came along not much later, built on Bach's work, and pushed into new, more passionate and expansive experiences, which is like growth and passion.

Progress always has some of this back-and-forth. You need a lot more growth than reevaluation, but reevaluation balances the growth; it makes sure that it is really growth. Likewise, you need more lifetimes in passion mode than in reserve, but occasionally going into reserve helps you to make sure that the passion is real and under control. Another analogy is pruning a garden: most of the time, you want the plants to grow freely, but once in a while, you cut things back. Reevaluation, reserve, and the stoic attitude are like pruning shears, whereas the more common growth, spiritualist, and passion are expansive to the inner world.

-- Shepherd Hoodwin
From Michael On Modes

Next page | Caution Mode

The Seven Modes: Reserve, Passion, Caution, Power, Perseverance, Aggression

.....................................................................................................................................

Phil Wittmeyer is a longtime Michael student and scholar of the teachings. He can be reached at: wittmeyer@hotmail.com