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.

There was a question on the forum about sin, remorse and so on. I touched on some aspects of it there, but then realised there is more to be said, so I’ll elaborate here.

The question was whether someone like Judas could repent for his sin of betraying Jesus and become pure again.

My answer was that the feeling of remorse is the result of sin being outright faced and not hidden away from, and that sin, in essence, means that cohesive forces between the fundamental particles of your spiritual body are being weakened. Sin, in that respect, is like heat being injected into a refrigerator, which then needs to work harder in order to extract. However, it’s all a function of mass and temperature. Inject enough mass of enough heat and the refrigerator will break down. This is, in essence, what happens if gravity of the sin committed exceeds the amount your spiritual body, defined by the number of kalapas and the cohesive forces that bind them, can handle without being fatally disrupted and, essentially, disintegrating.

A soul instinctively tries to protect itself from this, and since trauma caused by sin is a function of understanding, this self-protection usually takes the form of encapsulating the entire traumatic memory and ability to understand it into some compartment isolated by a layer of astral substance. There are various names for such structures, but the one I found most accurate is “larva”. A larva has the external “wrapping” that eventually bursts, flooding the rest of your spiritual body with content that was deemed too traumatic to handle, and when that happens, you can either repeat the process and wrap things up again, or you can bite the bullet and face trauma head-on, and that’s where remorse and spiritual pain enter the picture, and if you are able to endure the pain, the trauma-causing chaotic energy disrupting your spiritual body is eventually spent, unless the magnitude of it is too great and it fatally disrupts your spiritual body and you cease to exist as a spiritual being. Obviously, a spiritual being will try to avoid this outcome and instantly wrap-up everything into a larva as soon as it becomes too much to handle. My yogic techniques’ primary purpose is to make this process more survivable by allowing one to vent trauma with mantric resonance and up-stream kriya, and to target things deliberately with insight into the inner space. Essentially, remorse and suffering is still what does the actual cleansing and re-harmonization of the spiritual body, but the techniques are there to avoid the outcomes that either kill you or make you panic and wrap the whole thing up again.

So, what exactly is the problem with wrapping it up into a larva?

First of all, the part of your spirit that is wrapped up is not usable or accessible to you, which is about as great as having part of your brain unusable or inaccessible, only worse because the problem outlives the body. Furthermore, the instinct to protect yourself from the traumatic experience influences your behaviour. You avoid the truth and the light, and part of creating the protective shield around your sin involves creating complex worldviews to justify yourself – it can involve entire false ideologies. Also, since the light of God instantly causes larvas to burst, exposing the sinner to trauma, the instinct of a sinner is to hide himself in some dark place, far from God, most of his soul locked away and paralysed, leaving him with a very narrow ability to do anything, and persistent suffering caused by such a state is often in a state of equilibrium with the fear of facing the traumatic things that were locked away. And in that state, the sinner is either completely paralysed, or tries to boost his ego with egomaniacal boasting about how great and free he is and what miserable beings God and His angels and believers are, not having his freedom and virtue. Hell is a place where you have such doomed souls, rotting away, causing each other suffering and cursing God and everything that is holy. Since every such action further weakens the soul and produces results that are opposite of healing, the only eventual outcomes are either to be finally destroyed, or to face your sin and endure the suffering of remorse, and thus slowly re-acquire the ability to face God’s light.

Essentially, efforts to protect oneself from the onslaught of remorse only delay the eventual outcomes of either doom, or purification. In order to be able to return to God, you need to face the truth about yourself and your actions, which might be a highly unpleasant experience, but there is no way to ultimately avoid it. So, my technique of yoga consists primarily of re-claiming the parts of your soul that were locked away into larvas, facing and surviving the pain, and growing larger by being able to “move” in an increasingly larger part of your spiritual domain, which is increasingly free from “land mines”. Is it possible to resolve extreme things, such as betraying someone like Jesus? Probably, if you have the virtues of someone like Jesus, because he would be able to face the judgment and punishment for anything. However, since sinners are usually also cowards and weaklings, they will protect themselves and their weakness above all else, and will be reduced to guarding the integrity of the larva with the totality of their being, until it eventually bursts and they whimper away into the nothingness they chose for themselves. That’s what I meant by survivability being the function of mass and temperature; if your soul is great and its internal cohesive forces are very high, you will have greater “intestinal fortitude” required for facing and enduring things. This means that greater souls have the capacity for dealing with greater problems, and the lesser souls lack the capacity for dealing with more-less anything, and if a lesser soul commits a sin above its pay grade, that usually doesn’t end well, unless it is saved by the grace of God, in some way.

Years ago I saw someone describe a particular narcissist as someone who is unable to understand that someone can fully comprehend his opinion, and still disagree with it.

I thought about this, looking at people who simply assume that their untrained, intrusive and often aggressive dogs will be universally accepted as “cute” by every “good person”, implying that you must be a bad person if you mind their bothersome animal intruding on your personal space. The same applies to their loud and obnoxious children, or themselves – loud, often drunk, and with poor manners.

Every single one of those people thinks that you must be a bad person if you don’t love them, which brings me to my observation: narcissism is a fundamental trait of human species. Humans implicitly assume that they are good, and everything that opposes them or hates them is evil. It seems to be an evolutionary imperative of some sort. Humans, essentially, believe that God can’t be a proper God if He doesn’t love them. You can see this in the comics – the difference between super-heroes and super-villains is that the super-heroes fight on the side of mankind against all kinds of threats; it’s siding with humans that makes a super-powerful being good, because you can’t be good and not side with them, good and loveable as they are. It’s stunning, when you observe it from a distance, removing yourself from the picture to gain perspective.

In spirituality, this creates a very stubborn but wrong belief that human core, their soul, is in its essence some kind of a “diamond in the rough”, that only needs to be properly expressed and polished in order to shine. I would be very surprised if people holding such beliefs ever made any kind of progress, among other things because their inherent narcissism makes them not “hear” anything that contradicts this firmly held implicit belief. I had such an experience with one former student – I would tell him that enlightenment works by surrendering yourself to God fully, in darshan, to the point where God burns away everything in you that is not of God, and then you learn how to manifest yourself as such a new person. That’s what I said. What he heard was that he had to learn how to express and manifest himself in the world. Never, at any point, did it occur to him that I told him that he has to die in God’s light, because his entire “self” is illusory and, basically, made of garbage that needs to burn. That part was simply not heard, but the idea of manifesting himself in the world, he’d go around repeating that at every possible instance.

Let me tell you what I think about this. Yes, there is a phase when you are a “diamond in the rough” that needs to learn how to “hone” the physical in order to be able to express high spiritual realities in terms of the body and the world. The phase I’m talking about is after initiation into vajra, when you are essentially Buddha in the world, the jewel in the lotus. You need to learn how to speak while bearing that power and reality in the words; you need to learn how to act. Truly, you need to learn how to manifest That, but in reality we are approaching the reason why the saints describe the angels as beings who “praise the glory of the Lord”. That’s what it feels like, but you’re not really literally praising the Lord, you are manifesting God’s light, bringing it into dark places where it wasn’t present before, and making it open up like an unfolding flower. You are praising the Lord by making everything you touch more satcitanandamaya, more of reality-consciousness-bliss which is a description of God’s nature. Angels, essentially, make God obvious by their very presence – they look at you and God’s presence awakens in you and all illusions are cast away as reality unfolds in your soul. That is so because an angel is essentially a being who abandoned any definition of self other than God. He walked into God and everything that wasn’t God burned away, and what returned was God’s light and reality in a particular shape, and humans tend to call this an angel.

The reason why humans have such a hard time with spirituality is because they expect it to magnify and enhance them, while in reality they are garbage that needs to be burned away, and God is the incinerator. There’s another narcissistic concept, that God made humans in His image. No. There is a process of being remade in God’s image and by God’s design, and it’s called yoga. This process implies that you surrender everything to God, one piece at a time, and allow God to remake you in His image – essentially, make you as He would make you, in the process un-making everything that you are, and as this process unfolds you get to learn true humility, by understanding that you were really neither great, nor loveable, nor agreeable to God. The only thing that can truly stand in the presence of God is God, and as you get closer, and in order to be able to get closer, you need to stop being a sack of shit that you are, and allow God to remake you in His image. In the process of being remade, everything that you are needs to die. If you oppose the process and attempt to keep yourself, you are destroyed because filth has no right to exist. If you surrender to the process and to God, you are remade and God acquires another name and form to be called by.

Every now and then I run into claims that God and Devil are fighting for human souls, which are so precious that everybody wants them for some reason, and I roll my eyes. You see, I’ve been there, only from the position of Vedanta, which states that all souls are in essence bound and deluded aspects of brahman, the Absolute, and are precious as such. This was the implicit assumption I worked with, and it was seemingly confirmed by the visible efforts “the guys up there” went through in order to bring someone to the point where they would make up their mind. Imagine my surprise when it turned out that they saw a final decision of any kind – for or against God – as a good thing. My implicit assumption was wrong; what they wanted was for souls to be removed from the pool of the seemingly undecided. Liberation of the good and destruction of the wicked was fine, but wicked finding perpetual excuses as for why they didn’t really have the right opportunities and so their choices aren’t really valid so they need to go at it yet another time, or the almost-good ones perpetually finding ways to get stuck in something and needing progressively better, “cleaner” options to choose from, that seemed to be very bad and they wanted to drain that swamp as soon as possible. The implications of this reality to my worldview were not good, but I had to learn what it meant and how to deal with it.

The thing is, humans seem to live in some kind of a narcissistic illusion of the kind typical for teenage girls, who found out that all the guys want them, which they interpret as a sign that they are something special and valuable, while the male teenagers have the opposite situation where nobody wants them and they have to learn how to deal with it. The problem the teenage girls have is that they don’t seem to get that they are in exactly the same position as the male teenagers. The one they would truly want doesn’t care about them. The ones that want them, they just want to fuck them and leave. For the one who really matters, they would have to work – acquire virtues, prove value and loyalty, and so on. However, it’s very hard to understand that you can’t have what you really want, when everybody is seemingly throwing themselves at you. You think you have so much choice, not realizing that all the choices you seem to have are bad, and the option you really want is the one you have to work for as hard as any teenage male who seemingly has no options. You are both in the same position, where the one you want isn’t available, it’s just that having all the undesirable options gets into girls’ heads.

You see, in a spiritual sense you have all kinds of options, and they are not God and Satan, they are mostly various flavours of Satan. God isn’t an option for you. In order for God to be an option, you would have to really work for it, to put yourself out there, to give up all the false, undesirable options the way a teenage girl would if she kept herself for that one guy she really wants to marry and spend the rest of her life with. God becomes an option only when you reject everything else first, and without any guarantee that God is even achievable; however, you know that anything else isn’t an option for you, and you refuse to settle for cheap substitutes.

It seems that pretending to be undecided and trying to disqualify all the available options is a standard strategy of the evil souls that reject God, but who want to avoid the consequences of outright rejecting God. “Oh, I really wanted God and Guru but nobody was pure and good enough for me, and I couldn’t settle for anything other than perfection” seems to be a standard trope, and it seems to be working, for a while at least. Eventually, everybody makes a decision. Either you ignore the real thing because you can’t be bothered to look, and that’s a decision, or you see the real thing and you find faults with it, or you choose it but your heart isn’t in it and you just fumble around until you fall off. Or you choose the real thing with all your heart and stick with it forever, changing yourself to remove anything that’s in the way of that choice.