Charles said:
I am not sure if I understand you well Esoquest.
I don't blame you. I wanted to express why I thought Magus's suggestion, although sounding reasonable on the surface, can actually lead to more problems, and then offer an alternative direction in a few words. Understanding and applying effective keys to spotting OP's, psychopaths and others
who are not healthy souled individuals, is another complex and deep issue that connot simply be resolved with a convenient "how to" list that we can take home and put to use like some cooking recipie.
Let me try to elaborate by first expressing the premise of my disagreement with Magus. In my opinion, we should refrain from trying to identify the pathologicals using methods that they can mimic or otherwise turn against us. In other words, I believe if we are to be effective in making distinctions (and it is important that we learn to do so), we need something that those "others" do not have and cannot access. Otherwise, ANY criteria we adopt can be used as more ammunition for the pathological, psychopathic, pathophagic or however you want to call it, person to use against us.
I will try to maintain continuity in this message, although I have to admit it is more like a train of thought that I tried to keep as organized as I could. As such, my thoughts will extend in a few directions, which I will try to bring together in describing how empathy can help here (and it is simpler than it sounds), and what can help the feeling sense to function without fail.
I will, therefore, try to develop with my train of thought, step by step. There are difficulties in digesting this topic (or humanity would have resolved the issue long ago), and I may be overly ambitious in thinking that I can unravel potential confusion here, but I will do my best.
From what I have read in the SOTT material, and from what I understand, there are two things that distinguish the individualized, ensouled and healthy individual from those "others" of the various categories discussed in other threads in this forum. One is the ability to feel and experience emotions, which is not the same as the ability to express and act out emotions, i.e. the ability to feel. The other is the ability to empathize.
Empathy is defined as feeling the emotions of another as if they were your own. According to this definition, we need to distinguish empathy from the dynamic of "feeling for another", which is experiencing emotions you would feel if hypothetically you were placed in the circumstances of the other. This distinction is important, because true empathy is a psychic or soul ability, while the second case of feeling for another involves feelings triggered through imagination.
The second case, IMO, is also the closest OP's and even psychopaths can get to understanding true empathy. In the case of psychopaths imagination is used to assess emotional queues as references for generating a behavioural map of the emotion-capable person. It's something actors do at drama school. And it works.
Case in point: We have all (or most of us at least) experienced being in a movie theater and shedding a tear during a particularly touching scene. If we had bothered to look around, we may have seen that most everyone in the theater was shedding tears, and some even profusely. The question is, what causes this?
Certainly not empathy. Not only are we responding to light patterns on a screen, but the patterns conveyed are all lies (officially called acting). We are not feeling into anything because there is nothing to feel into. We are taking body and verbal language queues from the liars (actors) on the screen and use our imagination in doing so as an emotional stimulator. One can call this emotional masturbation.
Furthermore, those of us familiar with the categories of human types expressed in this forum, notice that the large proportion of people exibiting emotional response to images of hypocrites (the Ancient Greek word for actors) on a screen must include OP's as well as indivualized humans. As an aside, I have read about and even met self-professed "magicians" claiming to go to theaters to absorb the ambient emotions into their bodies through the solar plexus. They claimed it envigorated them.
I was interested myself in this movie theater phenomenon of collective emotion, and often went into that environmnet with the intent of being an objective observer. I discovered that the tone of emotion during the theater experience was different than that one feels with another individualized person. It felt as if it was being forced upon me, as if I was compelled to resonate in response to an applied vibration. At first I thought it was the collective field of the people in the theater influencing me, but I noticed the same "push to emote" when watching movies alone on the DVD player.
Was this something "beamed" by the movie itself, an accumulation of emotional energy from all those who watched it before me, or my own "hardwired" subconscious forced to respond to external queues? I cannot say for sure. What I do know is that a good actor uses his or her imagination to get into an emotional state and forces their body to simulate emotive response, including flushing, tears, trembling, vains popping out on their face, sweat and a variety of responses that cannot be easily elicited from one moment to the next.
Although they are the result of observing dramatic expressions, the "emotions" of a movie-viewer are much shallower than true feeling, while for the OP they probably represent the very definition of feeling. By the time the movie is over, the last tear is usually wiped, and the average movie-viewer goes about their business as if nothing had happened, although they do tend to savor the memory of the experience as a thing of value.
Research done on the chemical constituency of tears reveals that tears of joy, sadness, rage and the kinds caused by the wind and cold all have a different chemical composition, also different from the tears of a hypocrite. Now those who have souls may disagree with me and protest, justifiably, that they have shed tears while watching movies, and nobody can tell them that the experience was not real. That may be so because the truly emotive person subconsciously (or consciously through sheer identification with the actor) triggers some corresponding memory of emotion to fuel the response instigated by the presented queues.
In other words, we have two dynamics here in the ensouled individual. The capacity to feel, and the capacity shared by all other humans to stimulate the body into emotional simulation through imagination, either passive through the receiving of queues or actively willed. The difference between the OP and the ensouled here is that the OP will "recover" far quicker, while feelings tend to linger for the ensouled. The psychopath will either laugh at both of these for being "weak" or join in the emotive dance to fit in for whatever reason.
I presented this drawn out description to show that what constitutes true empathy is easily misunderstood. Because it is misunderstood the media can manipulate even ensouled individuals with images whether these are based on fact or are outright lies. The psychopath does exactly the same thing as a media image in real-time. As such, the psychopath can simulate anybody's "how to be normal" list, and on top of that play the role of a one-man or woman blockbuster epic to pull our strings while we are busy looking for key words or revealing body language.
Instead, like the media does on a grander scale, the psychopath gives us a preformance that can defy anything we know or think we know about how they are or are not supposed to act. I need to qualify this assessment with the understanding that Magus is at least partially correct in his view when that involves "scratched" pychopaths, who tend to rant into incoherence and constant egoistic reference, but this is obvious from the overall expression, and cannot be analyzed easily into identifiable indicators. Durand was a case in point here. He seldom used the words I, Me or My, but nobody here can deny the guy was foaming at the mouth.
So I come back to my distinction between individualized souls and the "others" discussed in the forum. The one is the ability to feel emotion as opposed to expressing it, and the other is the ability to empathize, which is different than imagining or projecting oneself in the situation of another. I do not intend to discredit this latter quality, by the way, because it can lead to understanding of another's circumstances (with reference to one's self always), and that is undeniably useful. It can also, however, lead to misunderstanding and being manipulated by those who can feed us with calculated queues and pull our strings.
I have said that if we want to deal with psychopaths, we need to understand what they can use as ammunition against us, and what is completely beyond their grasp. They can manipulate any and all externally oriented queues and stimuli. They can puppet their bodies and minds to perform with confounding accuracy regarding the movie they want us to swallow. Notice of all the potenial technologies that could have been developed over the last century, instead of clean energy, real health-promoting medicine, truly enlightening education and environmental solutions, we have had a profound development of means for violence and means for deception and manipulation.
It stands to reason the psychopaths will finance technologies reflecting their greatest "talents" (the promotion of chaos and manipulation). It also stands to reason that by understanding and learning to deal with the psychopath as an individual we can move to deal with the collective version called pathocracy. It is because I consider this understanding important that I am being a bit long-winded here, so please bear with me.
It seems the forum and SOTT in general have already proposed methods of identifying psychopaths. From what I understand, however, these involve having to run the psychopathic gauntlet, to be with the psychopath until they essentially slip up. This includes the possibility that the psychopath can inflict damage by the time we get wise to him/her. We may come out unscathed or at least a bit bruised a few times, but in this day and age of psychopaths crawling out of the woodwork it seems a bit risky to wait until a Marc Dutroux under whatever guise has us cornered.
My suggestion was actually inspired by Magus' worthy motive to spot and identify the psychopath before they can exert influence. In my last job, I worked under a psychopath and suffered a lot because I signed contracts and made commitments. If I could have identified the concealed tyrant from the first interview I could have spared myself a lot of anguish.
I was once attatched to a psychopathic girlfriend. Call me stupid for falling for such a person, but it sure would have been nice to identify her at the first conversation, before things got heavy. Psychopaths know that they are vulnerable in the beginning of contact with sincere people, before they begin to feed and manipulate. They know that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. First contact with a psychopath is an opportunity for sincere people to spare themselves a lot of pain, so its worth examining.
I realize I am preaching to the choir here, and I do so to address the next point. What I described previous is how the psychopath can manipulate our emotional projection into other circumstances, which is often mistaken for empathy. Let's examine empathy proper here, at least from my point of view.
anart said:
I think this may be a bit of a dangerous assumption. When a psychophage feigns pain and suffering, they do it very very well - and my empathetic response may well be that they are in pain, so I feel the pain - when, all the while, there was no real pain being experienced by the psychophage. Doesn't this automatically make empathy a subjective phenonmenon? The objective fact is that the psychophage is pretending to be hurt - the empathetic response is a feeling of pain for the psychophage - thus is it not an objectively true response. I do agree that using elements of the psychophage's personality that they do not have to help to identify them is a more logical way to go, I just don't know that one's empathic feelings could be used with a high degree of accuracy.
You are right anart, it IS a dangerous proposal (although I do not consider it an assumption). It is dangerous as driving a car on a busy street. Statistically, the number of auto accidents every year should make driving daunting, and yet those who drive do so because they must, and because they know that skill, caution and attention can be learned to minimize the risk.
In this case, the danger arises not from empathy, but from imagining oneself in the psychopath's place, which is unrealistic for any healthy person.
Also I am only presenting this in the context of a dialogue spiraling toward understanding, not as some kind of ultimatum. On the other hand, dealing with psychopaths is dangerous no matter how you address it, and getting more dangerous every day as crises in society mount.
Also...
Lucy said:
When the psychopath, or psychophage, happens to be a parent, child or romantic partner, then no, there may not be a 'desire' to know, or to face, the truth. That is an extremely painful situation, and is, imo, one of the reasons psychopaths are so often 'inserted' into our lives in this way. And, in reference to Laura's quote above, perhaps after prolonged exposure to the psychopath a person may have acccumulated many "psychic hooks" in them, easily allowing the psychopath to continue to "play with them." So even someone who "wants" to know may have a tough time doing so, especially if it is true that the situation is not only psychological, but also physiological, in that it can ""deaden the thought processes self-defense capabilities" of the normal person.
So the more we interact with the psychopath, the worse it is.
To get to the meat of the matter, clear objective observation is indeed invaluable, and I will not deny it. OP's and psychopaths tend to give themselves away, and of the two (unless triggered by STS) OP's are normally harmless, and can be identified through their adherence to social structures, what other people think (although not necessarily), a need for a credo or list of "truths" to follow and a shallowness that can easily be observed when one is not hesitant to affirm the depth potential of one's own feelings and aspirations.
Pre-scratched psychopaths are much harder to identify because they are actively concealing, while the OP takes their state as a given of normalcy (the OP often emphasizes being "normal"), and mistrust concepts such as following your heart or a sense of proper conduct independent of external structures or traditions.
Unlike the psychopath of any variety, the healthy OP expresses what is true to his or her nature, often quite honestly. To recognize the OP as well as the psychopath, I feel it is important to know thyself. In the case of the OP, I found identification is fairly easy when I can discard social conventions of what is normal and simply be honest with the depth of my being, which then comes into contrast with OP shallowness. In the case of OP's (the non-psychotic variety), I believe we tend to hurt ourselves more than they overtly hurt us because we keep expecting more from them than they can give.
Many ensouled are, furthermore, tortured souls because they try to convince themselves they are OP's and follow the shallow OP way to feel "normal" and accepted. Being ensouled in an OP majority is like being gay, and being afraid of coming out of the closet.
In addition, one does not run the risks with OP's that one runs with psychopaths, provided there is self-acceptance of one's ensouled state, and an awareness of knowing oneself.
Regarding psychopaths, however, self-knowldge and self-acceptance are also a must, and that goes without saying. If you have experience with OP's and identifying them, it helps in dealing with psychopaths, because identifying OP's also implies identifying yourself intimately in comparison to them. The first weapon in the arsenal against the psychopath is, therefore, self-knowledge (which implies self-acceptance). It is a true weapon because they cannot use it against you when it is properly rooted (i.e., you have no doubts about who you are).
Self-knowledge, itself rooted in uncompromising self-honesty, is a prerequisite for even considering true empathy as an organ of objective perception. Without a necessary degree of self-knowledge, empathy easily can be confused with imagination.
Anart mentioned that the very concept of using empathy as a means to detect the psychopath is an exercise in subjectivity. This is true given the atrophied state of the average (ensouled) human emotional body, the lack of self-knowledge and the manipulative nature of the psychopath that blurrs the line between objective and subjective. I need to note here, however, that the psychopath does not really manipulate emotions, since the psychopath has none. What the psychopath does is manipulate our imagination and perception of the situation to cause us to manipulate our own emotions in their favour, just like the media does.
The psychopath hijacks our imagination and turns it against us. When we are in touch with our own inner world and know ourselves, and our healthy responses and values as well as our weaknesses and needs, we can tell when the master-story teller psychopath is trying to weave our imagination against us. Since the psychopath is baiting us in the beginning, we can be suspicious when what they say sounds a bit like a tale designed to awe and amaze. The psychopath, after all, seeks to impress.
Modes of mental observation, however, are secondary and play a supportive role regarding the psychopath. Self knowledge allows us to own our imagination, and we can trust our "spider sense" to inform us if a psychopath is trying to give us an "emotional hand-job" (pardon the expression). We can sense this because the psychopath will try to breach our emotional integrity no matter how that is sugar-coated. The psychopath will try to seduce us, in one way or another, and trying to explain this in a cut and dry manner is like trying to tell somebody how you can tell the difference between sincere affection and seduction.
Even all of the above, however, implies some extended contact with the psychopath. Using empathy as a psychic sense of perception, on the other hand, takes the above requirements as prerequisites so that we can hold our own while identifying the psychopath as such.
It is possible to "get into" the inner world of the psychopath and get an undeniable confirmation of his or her insanity. Fortunately, this is not necessary. I was meditating with a psychopath once and we were describing our experiences when he brought up the concept of god. It seemed, "god" was inhibiting his experience, so I told him to simply ignore god. I convincingly said: "There is no god, take it from me". This person knew me to be sincere, and I expressed this to remove the fear/guilt inhibition, which I mistakenly assumed was sincere in turn.
Well, as we continued to meditate I saw him turn toward me, and what impacted me was the psychopath unafraid. He convinced himself all too readily that the concept of punishment or karma is an illusion and what was held in came out, and he tried to project it at me with a gaze that was not cold but reminded me of a boiling pestilent swamp. I was not stabbed by a penetrating look, but all of the sudden I was (in my imagination) as an insignificant speck in the face of a pus-like wave of hateful entropy, rotting everything it touched.
In fact, psychopathy in my opinion as a tangible presence one can feel from the insane carrier is not a single pattern or state, but a wide spectrum of entropic potential from extreme cold and sharp to extreme hot and lava-like and even luke-warm patterns of rot, corruption and pestilence in between.
It is possible to develop self mastery to hold one's own against this core psychopathic presentation, and even push it the other way and face the psychopath with their own insanity. But that is truly making "dangerous assumptions", and neither here nor there I think.
The point is that it does not have to go that far if you recognize the initial sense of discomfort the psychopath causes, and you can recognize it through experience and observation of your own empathic sense in the face of the psychopathic boundary of first contact. Initially, the time may take to be sure you are dealing with a psychopath may be long enough to do damage because one is not sure and does not trust those initial feelings of unease, which seem to have no rational explanation.
Eventually, however, when we have experienced enough of the psychopaths in our lives, we can learn to recognize those initial impulses for what they are without having to go through the pain of giving the psychopath the benefit of the doubt. Thus, we do not need to enter the psychopath's world, just touch the outer boundary of it, and realize that it does not feel good nor "right", because the world of the psychopath does not feel right at all from a soul perspective.
It is a subtle feeling, and until it can become stronger through practice, self-knowledge protects us from the psychopathic attempts at manipulating our imagination, which begins from the first moment of contact. And it is difficult when we are already under prolonged pschopathic influence. In that sense, empathic recognition is best applied during initial contact, and is more prevention than cure.
Like I said, its a complex topic, and this is simply an attempt to clarify my view on it.