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.<\/p>\n
I thought about this, looking at people who simply assume that their untrained, intrusive and often aggressive dogs will be universally accepted as \u201ccute\u201d by every \u201cgood person\u201d, 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 \u2013 loud, often drunk, and with poor manners.<\/p>\n
Every single one of those people thinks that you must be a bad person if you don\u2019t 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\u2019t be a proper God if He doesn\u2019t love them. You can see this in the comics \u2013 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\u2019s siding with humans that makes a super-powerful being good, because you can\u2019t be good and not side with them<\/i>, good and loveable as they are. It\u2019s stunning, when you observe it from a distance, removing yourself from the picture to gain perspective.<\/p>\n
In spirituality, this creates a very stubborn but wrong belief that human core, their soul, is in its essence some kind of a \u201cdiamond in the rough\u201d, 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 \u201chear\u201d anything that contradicts this firmly held implicit belief. I had such an experience with one former student \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s light, because his entire \u201cself\u201d 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\u2019d go around repeating that at every possible instance.<\/p>\n
Let me tell you what I think about this. Yes, there is a phase when you are a \u201cdiamond in the rough\u201d that needs to learn how to \u201chone\u201d the physical in order to be able to express high spiritual realities in terms of the body and the world. The phase I\u2019m talking about is after initiation into vajra<\/i>, 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 \u201cpraise the glory of the Lord\u201d. That\u2019s what it feels like, but you\u2019re not really literally praising the Lord, you are manifesting God\u2019s light, bringing it into dark places where it wasn\u2019t present before, and making it open up like an unfolding flower. You are praising the Lord by making everything you touch more satcitanandamaya<\/i>, more of reality-consciousness-bliss which is a description of God\u2019s nature. Angels, essentially, make God obvious by their very presence \u2013 they look at you and God\u2019s 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\u2019t God burned away, and what returned was God\u2019s light and reality in a particular shape, and humans tend to call this an angel.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s another narcissistic concept, that God made humans in His image. No. There is a process of being remade in God\u2019s image and by God\u2019s design, and it\u2019s called yoga<\/i>. This process implies that you surrender everything to God, one piece at a time, and allow God to remake you in His image \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading