Essence of Type Six – True Guidance
Imagine that we each come from one of nine lands, the land where the essential quality to which we are sensitive reigns supreme. For Sixes, this land is one of True Guidance.
Type Six is called the “Loyalist.” In their souls, Sixes are sensitive to True Guidance - an inner connection to Guidance that means we can trust how life unfolds and that we will know what to do in the moment, so there is nothing to fear. Above all, Sixes want to live in a land where every being knows what to do, what to trust and what to be loyal to, even though everything is constantly changing. To live in a land where things feel safe, trustworthy and reliable because there is a guidance system operating. Your soul knows that you too are part of this True Guidance.
To understand the experience of Sixes in the world, imagine the “fall” from this Garden of Eden, the impact of encountering a frightening, unsafe reality without knowing what to do or how to protect yourself. For type Six, expulsion from Paradise feels like being cast into a dangerous, unpredictable and untrustworthy world, where the ground can be pulled out from underneath you at any moment.
Understanding The Essence of True Guidance
We can all relate to the basic idea of guidance as something that helps us when we need direction. True guidance would point us in the right direction - it would have some essential quality of inherent truth or correctness.
We may not often reflect on what guides us, but we can certainly recognize when we feel the lack of guidance - not knowing what to trust, being uncertain about what action to take in a situation and generally not knowing what we can rely on in life. These existential questions and feelings of insecurity raise the deeper issue of how to “know” anything at all.
The essence that Sixes are sensitive to is a basic trust in life, trusting that there is an intelligence to life that supports us. This means that the universe is a safe place to be. We may not know what is going to happen, but we can have a basic sense of security in how life works, and we can trust that it is ultimately optimal. So, although things change constantly in ways we can’t predict, we know in an existential sense that there is nothing to fear. We can trust that things will work out.
The essence of trust and guidance can be hard for us to understand because, of course, we see chaos everywhere. To naively say that things work out for the best is just a platitude. We don’t really know that things work out for the best, but at some level we may sense that life is workable and might ultimately be moving in an optimal way.
To begin to relate to the essence of guidance, consider the vast workings and movements of the universe - the planets orbiting, the sun rising and setting, the earth turning, the seasons changing, the moon causing the tides - a majestic system. Nothing stands still but there is a governing system, patterns and laws are being followed. We trust the sun will rise again tomorrow.
The more science discovers, for example, the images now coming from the James Webb Telescope, the more mysterious and unfathomable the universe seems. Yet scientists look for and discover governing laws. The vast workings of reality might just be random, but it doesn’t seem so. Einstein famously said “God does not play dice with the Universe” - he did not accept that the universe could be a game of chance. If there is an “optimizing direction” in reality, then surely we too are a part of that.
But thinking only gets us so far - we can’t really know whether this apparent guidance system exists or how it might be connected to our own inner guidance. Even Einstein only had a hunch. Sixes, and the Six in all of us, tend to hit the limits of the thinking mind in their efforts to find guidance, as we will see. This is because there is an unknown aspect to reality and, ultimately, the essence of guidance is something we discern in the moment, without knowing how it works.
To get closer to the essence of true guidance, we need to notice how we experience it or sense it working within us. When you know what to do in a difficult situation, or what to trust, how do you know? A sense of guidance may arise for us in challenging situations when we are very present. Have you had this experience, perhaps in a crisis, of knowing exactly what to do? How do we humans rise to the occasion? What are we tapping into? How about when we have a choice or decision to make and we “sit with it?” We aren’t thinking more and more, we are somehow waiting for the answer to emerge. Maybe it is what we call intuition, some sort of insight or wisdom that comes in when there is space.
In the end, the essence of guidance may be a matter of trusting something we can’t name or prove. There is a sort of Faith that Sixes are sensitive to - they know a leap of faith is required to trust life. This is not a belief system - it is more a sense of Basic Trust. And it relates to surrender, like the first of the Twelve Steps. It’s when we hit the limits of our own thinking, recognizing we don’t know, that we connect to our Higher Power.
Sometimes surrender means giving up trying to understand and becoming comfortable
with not knowing.
- Eckhart Tolle
