Dirk’s question 5.9 is next on the list.
[5.9) How does the relative absence of certain emotions play out in this? Clearly we see sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, stoics, empaths, natural carers (a British term), sensitives of various types, and a myriad of others. Some seem highly negative in ways. Some highly positive. Some seemingly neutral.]
Well, once again we would say, look at what you already know from experience, but conceptualize it, this time, from our point of view. Specifically, look at all those kinds of people not as the causes but as the manifestations.
We’re going to move back a few steps, as so often, so that the context may help explain the perception.
- What you experience as “external” is not separate from you, but a part of you experienced separately.
- Therefore what is “external” in your lives will vary in extent and even form as you proceed with your self-development.
- In effect, your will alters the facts of life of your world.
- At the same time, everyone else in the world is undergoing the same process, so not only does their internal world change, but their share of the shared subjectivity changes as well.
- Usually this is a very small change, because you are so small and the world is so large; however, the effect of any given person’s changes may be huge to you because of resonances and other ties.
- Other people as perceived by you is all you can know of them. You cannot use a non-existent yardstick. Instead, you guess; you judge, you intuit, you estimate. But you do not know.
- Implicit in your guessing, or estimating, are numerous schemes for classification such as you cite here. These are not useless, nor mistaken a priori, but they do mislead.
I think you are saying that we are measuring effects rather than causes.
Isn’t that what we said?
Maybe, but it seems clearer now.
That’s the idea. If your emotional life as experienced from within you is actually the product of interaction between your inner and outer life, then can’t it be said that the report you get of other people’s lives is measuring the same thing?
Just as for us, so for others. The emotional makeup we observe is a combination of the results of (1) friction between inner and outer, and (2) the habits one develops in response to a lifetime’s experience.
And I think I can offer a good example. George Washington’s temper was apparently volcanic, nearly ungovernable when he was a boy. But a lifetime’s rigid self-control put it so entirely under his will that it almost never surfaced, even when observers could see him smoldering in the successful effort to retain self-control. “Self-control” in this case means, refusal to manifest what is strongly prompted.
Yes. His initial composition led to tremendous friction between inner and outer. Fortunately for his country, he willed himself to prevent the manifestation of that friction, and so later in life was able to function as if unaffected, even when he obviously was affected.
Now, generalize. All around you, you see your fellow 3D souls. That is, you see part of them! You see things about them that they don’t see themselves. They see things about themselves that observers do not and cannot. And there are many things about them that are accessible to neither themselves or others.
The short answer to Dirk’s 5.9, then, is that all these variations in a person’s personality or psychology are appearance rather than essence, or, let’s say, they represent a part of a person, never the essence. They show that soul from the outside as it reacts to the shared subjectivity
You mean, I know, it shows how they appear to us outside.
Yes. Sometimes – often, in fact – also how you appear to yourselves. But don’t mistake the ionized layer for the motive factor.
Well, how do we conceptualize the ionized layer when it appears to us as a lack of emotion, rather than as an emotion?
It isn’t any different. High tide and low tide are still part of the same phenomenon. It isn’t like low tide is qualitatively different from high tide merely because it doesn’t wet the same ground.
As we said, such classification schemes aren’t useless, they’re just measuring something different than they think they’re measuring. Like the epicycles of geocentric astronomy, they save the phenomena and may be relied upon, but they silently distort larger understandings in part because they do offer valid readings, though on a wrong scale.
So a sociopath is a person without remorse, say, a person to whom other people aren’t quite real. A narcissist may concede the reality of other people, but not consider them as very important or even very present. Someone who naturally cares about others, or, as in the case of empaths, cannot (apparently) prevent itself from identifying with others – are all these types the result of differences or are they the causes of differences? Do you enter 3D life so constituted that you must be a sociopath, or do you come into 3D life, identical in makeup, but manifesting differently depending upon the external environment experienced?
“Nature v. nurture.”
Yes, but again seen from the other end of the telescope. The 3D soul is the same in essence. But which part of that essence it manifests depends upon where and how it finds itself, and what second- and third-tier effects it determines to manifest.
George Washington might have turned out differently if he had not gotten that terrific temper under control.
Everything would have changed. That doesn’t mean he would or wouldn’t have ceased to be the father of his country, but he wouldn’t have been the same man (considering in terms of third-tier effects) and so you couldn’t expect that the results of his interactions with the “external” world would have been unaffected.
So do you wish to say more on Dirk’s question?
It is hazardous to classify even familiar states as positive or negative per se. They may be positive or negative when seen in a certain context, or when seen by a certain viewer (or even by self), but when do you ever have the data make a definitive judgment? The world is good; your lives are good. It is only the tree of the perception of things as good or evil (duality and judgment combined, in other words) that leads you to reject some and embrace others. You know this abstractly by now, but this is one more specific situation to apply it to.