Defining and Accepting Vectors

As you will recall from the first chapter, the sensitivity enjoyed by each of our orifices is determined genetically. That is why the potential of each vector remains largely unchanged from birth straight through to the end of life. However, that is just the potential—the actual development of each vector and how they manifest themselves for each individual person across different periods of life depend on a number of factors. Two people with the same brown-vector potential may look and act completely differently, something that is impacted by more than just other vectors: the brown vector could be balanced or imbalanced for different people, for example. Beyond that, how each vector presents itself can change significantly throughout our lives. This chapter will help you navigate all of that.

The principles laid out here can be applied identically to each of the eight vectors, though, given your familiarity with the brown vector, we will use it as an example.

Scenario 1.

Imagine a child gifted from birth with a 100% brown vector (that does happen, if rarely), meaning that their brown vector potential is maximized and just about all the brown-vector qualities we have discussed could be realized. Also imagine that the child’s parents are also brown-vectored (that may not be the case, as we can very easily be more similar to our grandparents than our parents in our appearance, character, or health).

This child is lucky, however, and his brown-vectored parents are as well: they can dote on a child whose character is very similar to theirs. The satisfied parents encourage him, supporting him everywhere his brown vector raises its head: “Good job sitting for so long—you’ll be very diligent when you get older!” Their behavior demonstrates that they accept their child’s brown vector completely, and the child follows in their footsteps by completely accepting that vector in himself and lives happily, contentedly, and harmoniously.

In this scenario the genetic potential is 100% and vector acceptance is 100%.

What kind of person will the child be when he grows up? Chances are he will be well-adjusted and healthy (note that we are only talking about this single vector at the moment), the kind of person you could look at and immediately pick up on an enormous number of easily recognizable, productive (positive) brown-vector qualities. Happily for the child, there will be no unproductive (negative) brown-vector qualities.

People who completely—100%—accept their vector enjoy only its productive qualities.

Scenario 2.

Next imagine the same kind of child, one with strong brown-vector potential, born this time to non-brown-vectored parents. Her genes apparently skipped a generation or two, coming from her grandparents (or great-grandparents) rather than her parents. Many features and genetic diseases, incidentally, are known to take that generational or bi-generational leap.

With that said, the child’s parents are simply wonderful, loving her with all their hearts despite the fact that her character is in many ways dissimilar to theirs. They accept her for who she is, although they do not necessarily encourage her brown vector when it manifests itself. All said, the parents accept her brown vector for the most part, though not 100% (perhaps something like 80%), and as a result the child accepts her own brown vector at that same solid level of 80%.

What kind of person will this child grow up to be? Well-adjusted and healthy overall, it will be fairly easy to tell that she is brown-vectored. While maybe not visible immediately, it will still be clear thanks to being fairly well-endowed with brown-vector qualities. Will there be any unproductive brown-vector qualities? Yes, though not very many, an outcome that is more often encountered in real life than the first.

Scenario 3.

We start from the same position: a child is born with significant brown-vector potential. However, his parents are anti-brown, as they both are not brown-vectored personally and despise the brown-vectored people around them.

And what luck! Practically everything about their child drives them crazy: how methodical he is, how hung up he gets on insignificant details, how long he sits on the potty. Not only do they consider those qualities bad or even unhealthy, they may be ashamed of the way their child acts or think there is something wrong with him. The parents do everything in their power to retrain their child and modify his behavior: “What’s taking so long? Let’s go! Come on! Stop washing your hands! You waste so much water!” As a result, the child’s natural behavior is repressed and eventually forgotten, roughly crammed into his subconscious.

The parents’ acceptance of their child’s brown vector in this case is minimal (say, 30%), and the child follows in their footsteps by feeling ashamed of what makes him who he is. He tries instead to be someone else and in so doing earn his parents’ approval. As a result, he does his best not to act from within himself, but to conform to the significant adults around him. The effort the child exerts is so strong that eventually he is successful: every year more and more productive brown-vector qualities go into hiding. But what happens with unproductive qualities? Let us take a look at a simple model to see what happens to the existing potential.

Imagine a rubber blow-up rabbit. It has a body, two pairs of legs, a head, ears, and a little tail, all of which look well-balanced and symmetrical absent defects. For the sake of experiment, we can try squeezing one of its paws—the air is pushed into other body parts that in turn expand. Next we tie off the deflated paw so that it nearly disappears and move on to the next one. We can imagine, watching the air from the second paw transfer elsewhere, what would happen if we did the same with a third paw, an ear, and a tail: the rabbit would morph into an unrecognizable blob with a few oversized appendages. Nobody would be able to tell that those appendages were a leg, an ear, and a head.

The blow-up rabbit models an individual vector (any of them), rather than a complete person. Genetic potential is not redistributed between vectors; instead, it is pushed between a single vector’s qualities.

That potential is distributed evenly at birth. Parents and later people on their own who accept a specific vector allow it to develop harmonically and proportionally, with all its qualities productive and none “overinflated” or “underinflated.” On the other hand, if a vector is only accepted to a low degree, meaning that the parents and person do their best to suppress some of its natural manifestations, the vector’s other qualities are proportionally “overinflated.” That end result is always unproductive.

For example, brown-vectored people are always slow and methodical. If the brown vector is balanced (completely accepted), their slowness will be both appropriate and productive. Such a person would be able to slowly but inexorably churn their way through quite a few things, if at a slower pace, while those around them flit from one to the other. However, if the vector is out of balance (“overinflated” like that blow-up rabbit’s appendages), that same slowness is counterproductive and becomes a hindrance.

A brown-vectored person is concentrating on a math test she is taking. She is obviously trying to push herself to go faster, since she has been told more than once that she is dawdler watching life pass her by. Sadly, her efforts to speed things along seem to have the opposite effect, and soon the teacher comes over: “Hurry up! The bell’s going to ring soon, and you’re still working on the first problem!” With that, the student’s thought process is irrecoverably lost.

But what happened? It appears the child has an unaccepted brown vector, otherwise she would not have been so slow. The teacher, in her effort to get a move on things, only added to the pressure exerted on the unaccepted brown-vector qualities (going back to our model, the teacher is squeezing those rabbit appendages just a little harder), resulting in the child’s excessive slowness, an unproductive quality, becoming even more pronounced.

What could the teacher have done differently? Perhaps she could have walked over and quietly mentioned, “Relax, there’s still time left. You do a better job when you aren’t hurrying.” That way she would have expressed her acceptance of the child’s brown vector and let her stop worrying about how slow she was going (in other words, let her accept her own vector). As a result, the work would have been done faster and better, at the child’s natural pace.

Working quickly means slow movements made one right after the other (a brown-vector saying).

Generally speaking, balanced people (those for whom all their existing vectors are accepted) do not have unproductive qualities. All unproductive or, as they are often called, negative qualities are driven by suppressed features of a vector that exaggerate others, just like with the blow-up rabbit.

What is the point of discussing all of this? And what can a person do who sees an overwhelming number of unproductive qualities in himself and those around him?

We can use the exact same model to answer that question. If we find a blow-up rabbit in that pitiful condition (remember that at the end it looked like some kind of blob with a few engorged appendages), we first need to figure out what is suppressed (finding those areas can be anything but simple, since those tied-off nubs are miniscule next to the giant rabbit). Then we need to untie them. What happens next? The air in the rabbit settles back into the newly created space and soon the rabbit looks just like it did when it was “born,” with balanced limbs and features. How much time that takes depends on how long the rabbit was in that state, meaning that untying recently tied-off limbs could get things back to the status quo in a matter of hours or days. On the other hand, if it lived a good while tied-off and misshapen, it might take weeks or months before the material can remember and get back to the way it used to be.

The same is true of suppressed vectors. If you find unproductive traits of a particular vector in yourself, you need to figure out which other qualities have been suppressed—perhaps by close adults, life itself, psychological trauma, or something else (incidentally, just understanding the problem goes a long way toward resolving it).

Then you can use the tool that works best: acceptance, or the equivalent of untying the blow-up rabbit’s nubs. By accepting your vector, you allow it to find a balance that minimizes unproductive qualities (overinflated limbs) and maximizes the productive qualities you have always had.

You can do the same for other people, and especially your loved ones. If you find unproductive qualities in your child or another adult, you can still bring acceptance to bear. Accept that vector as a whole, even with its unproductive qualities, which will release the person to accept it for themselves. The result will not keep you waiting.

Once at a training seminar a brown-vectored women could not get over the fact that her young adult daughter could never remember to make her bed (we can jump ahead and note that the daughter was strongly red-vectored). Even after quite a few lessons the woman could not understand how acceptance was important to her situation. At the second-to-last lesson she once again raised the issue and, after I gave her a detailed answer, sat in thought for a while. Then, at the last lesson, she was simply shining: “You know, I was on my way home last time and suddenly understood what acceptance means. It was like something dawned on me right there in the metro! But you know what is most surprising? I got home and my daughter’s bed was already made—for the first time without anyone yelling!”

That is how accepting vectors in other people works: often instantaneously and miraculously. From that example we can see that acceptance is less an action and more an attitude.

Acceptance means relating to how your or someone else’s vector displays itself with no evaluation whatsoever (not judging good from bad) and giving it room to exist for no other reason than because it is already in your or that person’s life. Even beyond that, acceptance is acknowledging that nothing manifests itself in a person senselessly: all qualities are there for a reason and serve some purpose, even if the how and why are not apparent.

Some might object: “So what, I just have to be happy about my negative qualities and everything will be fine??” No, it is not about being happy; it is about acceptance, or relating to them without making any kind of judgment.

When we accept a vector and all the qualities that come with it, including the unproductive ones, it balances and the unproductive qualities disappear.

The opposite of acceptance is exclusion. That can be passive, by simply “forgetting” that an unpleasant quality or habit exists, or it can be active, which is when someone actively struggles with something they do not like in themselves or someone else. The problem is that a battle with one’s own manifestations (in other words, with one’s self) cannot be won, and only drains time and energy.

Now let’s go back to the different ways a vector can develop.

Scenario 4.

The genetic potential is 60-70%, while the parents accept it completely. A person like this would grow up healthy and balanced, given the 100% acceptance. They would be much less reminiscent of a pure brown vector than in scenario two, though 70% is still pretty significant. At the end of the day, it would take just a brief conversation to see that brown vector peeking out.

Scenario 5.

The genetic potential is 10-20%, meaning that the child can really not be called brown-vectored at all. She will have very few brown-vector characteristics, though her parents accept them fully and she grows up healthy and balanced. Note that there are many non-brown-vectored people in the world, and they can be just as successful and happy as anyone else. Also note that in this situation we are talking about a fully accepted vector, weak though it may be.

Scenario 6.

The genetic potential is the same 10-20% as in the last example, though “brown-vectored monsters” is too soft a term for the parents. They are fully convinced that the most important qualities in life are sitting still, being thorough, and being thrifty, though their child, as if on purpose, is born completely bereft of those traits. Well, good thing they studied all those books on how to raise children (do you remember how brown-vectored people love books?)! They are now ready to wield their arsenal of child-rearing tips and tricks to make their child act the way they think he should.

Children who are born with weak brown-vector potential will stay that way, meaning it is impossible to make them brown-vectored. Certainly, they may be able to force themselves to display different brown-vector traits, though those traits will have nothing to do with the vector itself; instead, they mean the children in some situations act as they were taught by their parents. Sometimes that can look very odd:

A friend of mine could not have been further from the brown vector, though his parents did their best to make him brown-vectored. One thing important to his brown-vectored mother was washing the apples they always had around the house from their giant apple tree. As a child, however, my friend had no problem picking an apple up off the ground and eating it with no second thought given to his health. His mother did her best to raise him well, and after a few years she had reached her goal: for the rest of his life he reflexively washed apples before eating them.

I once invited him over and asked him to wash a basket of fruit. On his way to the sink he dug through the apples on top, grabbed a dirty pear from the bottom, and ate it without blinking an eye. A couple minutes later he bit into a beautifully cleaned apple. That is how a trained, situational reflex works as opposed to an innate need for cleanliness.

Scenarios 3 and 6 often occur for a particular parenting style, though within the context of different vectors. As a result, what children should naturally display at birth is suppressed and replaced by something artificial and unnatural. They accustom themselves to behaving how their parents or other significant adults want them to, in the process losing touch with who they really are. In fact, it is excruciatingly difficult and often impossible for them to differentiate between their own qualities (their natural vectors) and those they acquired when they were young. They very well may claim unnatural values to be their own with complete sincerity, push toward unnatural goals they think are their own, and ultimately come away with nothing but dissatisfaction in widely varying areas of their lives. When a person lives someone else’s life, they waste an incredible amount of energy forcing their life away from their personal calling, real success, real love, and real happiness. Does that sound familiar?

The most important thing you should learn from this book is probably how to understand what part of you is really you and what part is not (you can also learn to make this distinction for other people). Simply thank that foreign part (it has been with you for a while, after all) and start living life differently: in line with your innate vectors.

One more thing

It is crucial to understand that vector acceptance, unlike genetic potential, can change to a large degree over the course of a lifetime, ranging from 0% to 100%. In childhood that number depends on significant adults (family members, teachers, other educators), while adults are responsible for it themselves.

Parents and other significant adults are responsible for accepting children’s vectors. Adults, on the other hand, must accept their own.

Of course, children can be so psychologically traumatized that they cannot recover even as adults, at least independently. That, however, is an exception to the rule. For the most part, we as adults control vector acceptance ourselves, which is the key to resolving most of the problems we face in our relationships (with ourselves and those around us), our personal development, our health, and other areas of our lives.

Some of you are probably wondering if all you have to do is resign yourself and be indifferent to everything that happens. Absolutely not!

Acceptance is not indifference or resignation. Rather, it is a mental act that requires a certain amount of effort put forward while always hoping for improvement. Indifference holds no hope for the future and takes no energy, while resignation has more to do with hopelessness. Let me illustrate:

An overweight young woman walks up to her mirror in the morning:

Resignation: “Still a fat old cow. Awful! Well, nothing I can do about it… Looks like I’ll be an old maid… I’ll think I’ll go have a snack to cheer me up…” She slouches away from the mirror with tears in her eyes and a week later has gained three more pounds.

Indifference: “Still fat and ugly. Time to get back to my dissertation.” She steps away from the window thinking about her dissertation and a week later nothing has changed.

Acceptance: “It would be nice to lose a few pounds, but even with the extra weight I am beautiful and successful. I think I’ll go meet somebody new.” She bounces away from the mirror with a shining face and a week later has lost three pounds.

Fighting one’s self: “That’s it! I can’t live like this! Tomorrow I’m starting some kind of strict diet until I lose twenty pounds!” A week later she has lost ten pounds, though her head and liver hurt, her face is haggard, her sex drive is missing in action, and her life is bereft of happiness. Someone may have won that battle with herself, but it is obvious that someone has definitely lost…

This example is certainly a bit contrived, though I hope it shows one thing: acceptance does not mean that development has stopped. Instead, it drives development toward positive change. Resignation, on the other hand, is characterized by the phrase, “Nothing I can do about it…”

The recipe for accepting unproductive qualities within any vector:

1. Recognize that IT (a quality) exists.
2. When possible, make no moral judgment as to whether IT is good or bad—IT simply is.
3. Understand that if IT exists, it came from somewhere and serves a purpose(!).
4. Give IT space in your life just because IT is already there.
5. Understand that excluding IT (forgetting or struggling with IT) can only make IT stronger and more unproductive.

Understand that only acceptance (all of the above) can make IT really insignificant, such that IT no longer bothers you and is easily integrated into your productive life.Replace the pronouns with a particular quality or habit of yours that you do not like and read those six points again.

About the vector test

Our vector test has results displayed in two diagrams. The eight rows in the first show the potential innate to each of the eight vectors, while the eight in the second reflect the acceptance those vectors currently enjoy.

What result should you have to be successful and happy? Training seminar participants often answer that question in a number of different and interesting ways: “The best is when all of your vectors have 100% potential!” “It’s better when the potential for all your vectors is the same.” “It would work well to have the acceptance equal the potential, for example 50% and 50%.” However, all those answers are wrong.

A person can be completely developed on a personal level, successful, and happy with any combination of vectors (the upper diagram), while that can only be true if they fully accept what they are naturally given (the lower diagram).

People with high potential in seven or eight vectors can of course blossom into widely varying areas. On the other hand, it is much more common to see strong potential wasted than it is to see more moderate potential wasted. That may be due to excessive ambition; it may also occur because people with sky-high potential in different areas jump back and forth between them without ever finding what they personally enjoy most of all.

Many readers here will raise an important point: “How can you measure genetic potential using a psychological test?” While this test does not analyze your genes, it is based on the study of tens of thousands of people, with the questions and algorithm behind the results thoroughly vetted and proven. Regardless, attempting to measure psychology (or genetics) mathematically is “magic” to a certain degree, and so you would do well to take your results with a grain of salt.