Key passages: > Vagueness, mental fog, “underconfidence”, avoidance, evasion, blanking out, etc. are hallmarks of Ra. If cornered, a person embodying Ra will

Key passages: > Vagueness, mental fog, “underconfidence”, avoidance, evasion, blanking out, etc. are hallmarks of Ra. If cornered, a person embodying Ra will abruptly switch from blurry vagueness to anger and nihilism. > Ra involves seeing abstract, impersonal institutions as more legitimate than individuals. For instance, I have the intuition that it is gross and degrading to pay an individual person to clean your house, but less so to hire a maid service, and still less so if a building that belongs to an institution hires a janitor. Institutions can have authority and legitimacy in a way that humans cannot; humans who serve institutions serve Ra. > I remember being angry at a coworker, once, for attempting to sell a product to big pharma companies, because he was thinking of them too lightly, not appreciating the awesome majesty of the pharma companies that we were barely worthy to submit our ideas to. He seemed not to understand the unspoken “way of the world”, and that made me angry. That was classic Ra thinking on my part. > Ra is involved in the sense of “everyone but me is in on the joke, there is a Thing that I don’t understand myself but is the most important Thing, and I must approximate or imitate or cargo-cult the Thing, and anybody who doesn’t is bad.” E.g. having the intuition that the power to make successful companies lies in things like “complex sales”, without understanding how complex sales works on a nuts-and-bolts level. If you just associate complex sales guys with power and success, if you have the feeling that they probably know how to become an insider even if you don’t, then you’re engaging in Ra thinking. > There’s a disinclination to get specific about numbers or negotiations or goals or arguments. And then an angry sense that people who do get specific are “doing it wrong” or “bad people” and deserve harshness. An intuition that the really important things in life, the true “ways of the world”, are hidden or mysterious, always unspoken, and must be respected.