The hell for evil souls after death consists of looking at the truth.

Interestingly, the heaven for good souls consists of the same thing.

I find it amazing how people can have the strangest opinions, without stopping to check what this says about the universe they live in and the way it functions.

I’ll have to explain this; for instance, in Star Wars, you have physics of the Universe that makes sense – there is Force, the living beings have a certain number of cellular organelles called “midichlorians”, which are something akin to mitochondria or chloroplasts in our universe, and they essentially connect your living tissues to the Force, and if their count is significant enough, you become “Force sensitive”, and if a Force sensitive person receives proper training, they can develop abilities to use the Force for things such as telekinesis, telepathy or whatever. It all makes sense, the way plants being able to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugar makes sense. However, X-men don’t make sense. The underlying premise is that you have mutants with special abilities. I have no problem with that if “special abilities” are enhanced hearing, ability to perceive more colours or even the ability to hear radio. That is all possible without changing anything with the universe. However, when you have a mutant who can stop time, use extreme telekinesis or read minds, this is a “stop right there moment”. Here you need a universe with different laws of physics that make this possible, you can’t just have a mutation that introduces midichlorians in a universe without the Force, and expect telekinesis to be possible. Yes, you can develop cellular organelles or tissues that transduce radio waves into electricity and feed it into the brain, giving you a sense that “hears” radio. It’s not all that different from the way eyesight works. However, to be able to read minds or perform strong telekinesis, there must be an underlying physics that makes it possible. If something works, the question you need to ask is what underlying conditions need to be met in order for this to work, and what does this say about the universe we live in.

Let’s return to my initial conundrum. I had people making claims such as “if someone doesn’t have money, it means he can’t be of God”, the assumption being that God is the ruler of this and every other world, and nothing happens without His sanction – basically, God will provide for His own people, and they will never have to worry about money. On the other hand, those same people will make negative claims about very rich people, assuming that money is the thing of the Devil, and all the rich people must have sold their souls in order to become that rich.

So, which is it? They apparently never stopped to think that the first claim contradicts religious teachings; Jesus was born in a barn and Krishna was born in a dungeon, so it’s not like there’s actual evidence for the claim that those of God will be provided for and safe in this world. If anything, evidence for the contrary can be found. However, I’ve seen same people have the expectation that if you have money, you must be spiritually fallen, and if you don’t have money, you can’t be on good terms with God, not stopping to think that you can’t have it both ways. There are three basic options – either God micro-manages the world, Satan micro-manages the world, or nobody micro-manages the world and it runs according to its own independent laws, which makes exceptions from those laws “miracles”. Also, the corollary of God being able to provide for His people is that He is able to control everything in this world, which makes every bad thing that happens in this world His fault, which gives you a God that is either malevolent or indifferent. If Satan is able to control everything in this world, why aren’t things much, much worse for good people? Why do evil people such as Hitler experience frustration and failure in their plans? The third option, where neither God nor Satan have complete control or influence here, but the world functions according to its own independent laws, and either side is able to occasionally “tip the scales” their way according to some complex ruleset seems far more likely. For instance, Satan can tempt you and make your life very difficult, but he can’t outright kill you. God can’t outright solve all your problems, but He can inspire you – but you have to believe it and accept guidance. Also, miracles do exist, but the defining characteristic of a miracle is that it happens exceptionally, and not regularly. If something happens regularly or predictably, it’s called the law of nature. Miracles, where exceptionally good and unlikely things happen to people who pray to God, do happen. However, so do the anti-miracles, where exceptionally bad and unlikely things happen to people who pray to God. The pattern according to which this happens isn’t obvious, but for some reason people act as if it is – of course God’s people should be rich, famous, healthy and live forever, because take the example of Jesus, who was born in a barn, was always poor, had to escape lynching mobs and was eventually betrayed and crucified; oh wait…

Most of this nonsense is caused by poor religious education people received in childhood, which is why I didn’t allow my kids to attend catholic “Sunday school”. This proved to be an excellent call when other children, who did attend, were mocking my kids saying that if they didn’t pray to Jesus they will have bad grades and their mom will die. Apparently, that’s how it works according to the religious teachings those kids received – you pray to Jesus to get good grades and your mommy doesn’t die. What did I say to my kids in response to that? “This is pure nonsense. God is the highest reality and the highest good, and you pray to God by trying to understand what is real, adhering to the highest truth you can know, and always choosing the greatest good you can see in everything you do, and prayer is good if it focuses you in those efforts. However, if you want to get good grades, you better study, because prayer won’t help there. As for your mom dying, let’s put it this way: if God didn’t strike that idiot Sunday school teacher with lightning for teaching children this stupid nonsense, it is safe to assume things don’t really work that way. God is not a vending machine where you insert a prayer-coin and get a wish, God is the greatest of all goals and the function of prayer is to align your life with this goal in order to be with Him in both this life and the one after. That teacher is an idiot and that’s why I didn’t allow you to listen to that nonsense, because it would teach you such idiotic things about God that you would end up being atheists. God is the safety line you hold on to in order not to go crazy in this world which is full of all kinds of evil and ignorance, in order to get to the other side whole, undamaged and hopefully improved by the experience.”

Yes, this is actually a true example of the kind of speeches my kids could hear from me when they were 7. 🙂

I’ve been dealing with the second really bad narcissist in the last two months, and I’m wondering whether there’s a message or a lesson I’m missing, so God keeps sending them my way until I get it.

So, I’ll try to think out loud here and try to figure it out.

The common belief of narcissists seems to be that they are “good persons”, and everything that contradicts this belief is someone else’s fault. Also, they feel entitled to everything – they are entitled to your full trust and confidence, and take offence if you call them out in any way. Every form of interaction is riddled with tripwires and red flags you need to avoid of doing things exactly the way they want it, or shit instantly hits the fan. They act as if they have an innate right to everything and everyone, and the only way for you to not be attacked is unconditional obedience and submission, where boundaries are never clearly defined because they feel the innate right to extend them whichever way they feel like at the moment.

I wanted to say that God is the only person who actually has absolute rights, but that’s actually not true, because God respects His children as having innate sovereignty that roots down to the fact that their souls are made from God-stuff, and so the sovereignty of God propagates throughout His creation. I initially thought that the defining characteristic of narcissists is hubris, or claiming that which is true only for God, but it seems to be actually worse than that – they claim rights not even God claims, which makes me think of why that might be.

I think the actual cause is innate spiritual emptiness. A narcissist is the opposite of God. God is fullness that gives, and a narcissist is emptiness that claims and takes.

A narcissist cries because he feels wronged, and feels he is owed so much that he didn’t receive. A good person cries because he wronged others, or feels that he could have done so much better. Interestingly, a narcissist never, ever feels remorse – only regret that things didn’t go his way, the way things are supposed to go. Remorse is a different feeling – a feeling where you know what is right, and knowing you fall short. It hurts, but there is beauty and glory of God behind the hurt, because you saw the glimpse of that which is the wonder of wonders, beyond, and you repent for your unworthiness and strive to overcome it.

Do I have to face narcissists because I am somehow vulnerable to being exploited by them? I don’t feel particularly vulnerable – I instinctively go into intellectual, analytical mode with them, focusing on facts and evidence and completely ignoring all the emotional snares they constantly use to provoke empathy in others they are perfectly incapable of feeling themselves. Am I a narcissist myself, and they are a mirror God is having me face? I can understand what they are, so there is obviously enough of it in me to cause good understanding, but I could say that about almost anything, since I was always prone to losing myself in reflecting others, and that has always been my weakness. Or is that it? My weakness of excessive empathy that makes me function like a chameleon, losing myself in the environment, appropriating the colour of things around me and never truly being myself? Are those narcissists a warning, that I should claim myself or be perpetually exploited and abused? My mother was a narcissist, and a very bad one at that, and she caused some very deep injuries, that mostly have to do with the ability to exist as my own person, and not just a service provider to others. There’s probably something there; I recently went to buy a fountain pen because I realised that I neglected my handwriting over the years of wearing out keyboards, and I felt deep unease and revulsion when I came upon a certain style of Pelikan fountain pens that my mother used to have in her drawer when I was a child, and this feeling of disgust was overwhelming to the point where I wondered what the hell that was – apparently, it is a part of what she considered her “golden years”, and she extended all kinds of fantasies and crazy entitlement and dreams of a happy future she is owed, until the damn children happened and took it all away from her. She never failed to mention how I ruined her life by merely existing, several times a day, and that fountain pen seemed to be so impregnated with her narcissism that it felt like a disgusting cursed object, a Nazgul’s blade or something, and the implicit message of my mother to me was that she had the right to be happy, and I took that away from her by being born, and it is my fault for not getting out of her way, the fault for all of her life being devoid of all the things she dreamt of. The implicit message of narcissists is that you only have a right to exist if that pleases them and increases their greatness. I resist them, but there is a vulnerability and a pain somewhere in there, as well – probably something that makes me want to get along with people and be invisible, probably a desire not to provoke my mother’s anger by existing, and this is completely inconsistent with what I would have to be were I to incarnate my full power, power of the kind that has the absolute right to exist, power that has the right to manifest itself regardless, because it is rooted in the will of God, and that probably looks like whatever it is that the narcissists do, to me, and I object to it on some level. Can this be it? It does strike me as true.

Oh, I had an idea just now.

The point of this world is to be a place where narcissists come in order for them to have God get out of their way, so that they can enjoy true life and happiness, without Him.

God existing and being that great wonderful thing that everybody strives for and wishes to embody is something narcissists perceive as a crime against them, if they have to witness it and suffer it, because somebody else being the focus of attention is a terrible offence against them. God should just get out the way, the damnable selfish creature that would want them to put Him in the center of their Universe, where they and nothing else belongs.

I think this is it. That’s why my mother keeps crossing my mind when I try to figure this out – she and her attitude towards me is an incredibly archetypal example of a very widespread problem.