Control or dilute
Control is a pre-requisit for integration. Conscious control. It keeps the whole thing together.
A common mistake people make is that they try to control only the undesirable; bad habits for example. But they don’t try to control good things; their talent for example.
What happens when there is no control is interesting:
When bad things are not controlled, they get intensified, when good things are not controlled, they are diluted. The key is probably in quantity. Quantity must be controlled if we want quality.
So when it comes to talent it’s a good thing to control it: to restrict the number of occasions you let it come to the surface. Truth is: they mostly come to the surface through impulses, just like bad habits.
Some examples:
If somebody is full of ideas he should exercise tremendous control over when and how to present them. Otherwise this talent gets diluted and becomes useless.
If somebody is great at socializing and making new contacts: he should restrict the occasions he exercises this talent. Each occasion will become more powerful. There is no power in 5000+ contacts.
If somebody is good at trivia, he should stop spitting out “facts” or if somebody has read a lot of books, he should stop quoting every time a conversation somehow is related to something he “knows”, if somebody is good at performing math calculations without a calculator, he should stop providing %’es at every opportunity when numbers are discussed and start thinking about context, timing, relevance.
When impulses are controlled and talent is applied objectively, as a tool that has nothing to do with the self, a distance develops between the self and talent, which is used to be perceived as part of the self. This distance, this void is “filled up” by power; this power is more important than the talent and as opposed to talent, it is actually part of the self.
If I remember well the following analogy is from Otto Weininger: he compared talent to a tumor that is first fed, then it grows larger and larger until it takes over the whole organization that at this stage exists only to feed it.
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