(This article replaces Matrix Agents: Profiles and Analysis)
Empty
people. Puppet people. Cardboard cutouts. Drones. Organic Portals.
Background characters. Why do these terms even exist? Because out of
necessity they had to be invented by those who independently noticed
the same puzzling phenomenon, one for which there is no official name:
some people seem to be missing something very important inside. While
they are not necessarily any less intelligent, successful, or
physically healthy as anyone else, they nevertheless show no indication
of having any higher components to their consciousness.
Over
the years I have received emails from readers who came to this same
conclusion. They noticed that some people were strangely one
dimensional and hollow inside. This observation is not hard to miss,
but it is easy to rationalize away, especially with modern
society being so heavily brainwashed with the politically correct but
unrealistic concept that everyone is completely equal in every way,
which ignores functional differences due to environmental, genetic, and
most importantly, metaphysical factors.
Background
The
idea of empty people first dawned on me in 1999 after having done much
research into sociopaths and psychopaths, their condition being
medically known as APD or “Antisocial
Personality Disorder.” My interest in the subject grew out of having
been forced for many years to suffer under someone whom I later learned
had all the signs of being a sociopath. Heartless and soulless were
descriptive terms, but little did I know just how literally true they
were. I had noticed in this person an emptiness behind the eyes and a
very shallow conscious essence, which seemed to be at the root of the
behaviors I observed.
Eventually I realized that this same
root condition was present in some others who were not outwardly
sociopathic, but whose lack of heart was masked by a well-adapted
social exterior. In other words, what psychiatry would diagnose as APD
was only the more extreme, criminal, sloppy manifestation of a
condition that otherwise expressed itself more widely in a socially
acceptable and less incriminating manner. The latter is what may
account for the body of empty people present in the population.
But what exactly is missing in them? The answer is clear if we look at their common behaviors and qualities of consciousness.
Behavioral and Psychic Characteristics
Their
behavior tends toward being glib, shallow, egotistical, narcissistic,
mundane, predatory, and materialistic. Sometimes these traits are
camouflaged by a polished social exterior, but anyone with a discerning
eye can see through the disguise. They lack individuality, independent
thinking, and are strongly biased toward holding a herd mentality. They
lack comprehension of anything beyond the material sphere of the five
senses, and have no interest in such metaphysical matters except as
flashy accessories to boost their social image. They also appear
entirely incapable of empathy, soul-searching, and willful
self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, in the presence of others they can put on
a flashy show of concern, distress, or altruism for purposes of social
manipulation; for example, crocodile tears to elicit sympathy, or doing
something nice for another solely to guilt trip them later and extort a
favor.
Psychically scanning their consciousness reveals
something interesting. There is a certain simplicity, flatness, and
inertness to their essence, even if their intellects are highly
developed. Unlike other people, their conscious energy is more diffuse,
dull, impermanent, and amorphous rather than solid, sparkling,
crystallized, and concentrated. Put another way, their minds are like
sand castles instead of real castles. There is something animalistic
and rudimentary piloting their bodies. It seems they have conscious
awareness just as plants and animals do, but not conscious
self-awareness as humans are supposed to have. There is an important
difference between awareness and self-awareness.
Spirit: The Missing Component
The
missing factor must be something that endows a being with
self-awareness, volition, and the capacity to value transcendental
ideals. This goes beyond mere physical factors like missing portions of
the brain, defective genetics, or a poor upbringing, because the latter
are just defects in the hardware and programming of the biological
machine, whereas the problem here involves the consciousness operating
the machine. What intuitive or clairvoyant perception picks up about
their consciousness involves metaphysical factors instead.
What
to call this higher component of consciousness absent in some people?
Usually it would be called the soul, but that has caused too much
confusion in the past. For example, casual readers unfamiliar with the
proper definition of “soulless” thought it meant “completely devoid of
consciousness” when in reality it meant “devoid of individualized
consciousness.” No, they do have some kind of soul energy by virtue of
being alive, but the soul is not imbued with a higher spark of true
sentience and self-awareness.
Therefore I will call this
higher spark “spirit” and define it as follows: spirit is the core of
individualized consciousness, that permanent aspect of one’s being
representing the true Self, which accumulates experiences and spiritual
wisdom throughout life, survives physical death, and remains intact
upon reincarnating to continue growing toward the fulfillment of its
potential. It is the divine god-spark, the seat of freewill, the
holographic fragment of the Creator residing at the very center of your
being, the “I” that is you, the inner conscious observer capable of
observing even its own self-observation.
It seems not all
humans have spirit. Therefore they have no self-awareness,
individuality, wisdom, empathy, creative intelligence, or conscience.
What further confirms this hypothesis is that, as will be discussed
below, one may observe a total absence of destiny, synchronicity,
symbolic dreams, spiritual lessons, soul growth, and karma in their
lives. This is to be expected if they have nothing permanent in them
that survives death and reincarnates, because only spirit can gain from
such things. Without spirit, they are temporary beings whose awareness
forms shortly before birth and dissolves shortly after death. And if
so, then for them, spiritual life lessons serve no purpose, karma from
past lives does not exist, there is no higher Self acting as chaperone,
nor would they have genuine interest in anything that serves a purpose
beyond their current mortal existence. Therefore it is to be expected
that they be particularly materialistic, worldly, and mundane in their
ambitions; observation confirms this as well.
Other Components
How
can we better understand all this? By understanding the various
components and how they combine to make the whole of a being, we can
grasp the numerous differences and similarities between spirited and
spiritless humans.
Aside
from spirit, the other components are body and soul. Soul is the
nonphysical energetic interface between body and spirit. Occultists
divide the soul into the etheric and astral bodies. The aforementioned
“empty” people have bodies and souls, but not spirits. In this way it
is clear that they have some kind of conscious energy, but not the
permanent core that retains continuity trough incarnations.
The
soul consists of two components, the etheric and astral. The etheric
component is a quantum biasing field that keeps the physical body from
entropic disintegration. Or to put it more simply, it is life-force
energy that keeps the body from decaying. The astral component is more
abstract and intangible. It functions as the seat of consciously
experienced feelings and passions. Feelings are not just chemical
reactions in the brain, nor are they abstract thoughts in the mind.
Rather they are vivid energies residing somewhere in between, and that
buffer zone between the completely physical and completely metaphysical
is the astral component of the soul.
Body and Ego
The
body is the biological instrument through which we interact with our
physical environment. The body comes with its own hereditary
dispositions, biological drives and instincts, and behavioral
algorithms stamped into it through social programming. These
deterministic influences converge to create an artificial intelligence
in a person that, by default, runs the body like an autopilot computer
running an airplane.
This artificial intelligence is hereby
termed “ego.” Its fundamental purpose is to ensure survival of the body
by optimizing its behavior for the surrounding physical and social
environment. In other words, external conditioning programs the ego to
achieve survival in the environment from which that conditioning
originates.
But the ego has no true consciousness of its
own. It is just a computer running on neural (and by proxy, etheric)
hardware that simulates a living identity. Its main advantage is that,
being just a computer, it only has to mechanically calculate and react
to situations instead of deeply and consciously reflecting, therefore
it can respond much quicker to external situations.
For the
spirit, the ego functions as a software device that automates
interactions with other humans and provides a mask of identity,
programmed from birth, appropriate to the local environment. Somewhat
like a player’s avatar in the Sims game, which looks and acts like a
person and seems to do its own thing when not directed by the player.
The
problem is that the ego is entirely a product of the past, and spirit
entirely outside linear time. The first is completely deterministic,
the second is completely nondeterministic. The first is an emergent
property of matter, the second a permanent condensation of
consciousness. The two have impulses that are often diametrically
opposed, one pulling toward materiality, the other toward spirituality.
Our daily consciousness, also known as the lower self, is a blending of
both, namely the portion of spirit that shines through the mask of ego
and identifies with it, analogous to a driver so absorbed in the act of
driving that for him the car has become an extension of his body.
Physical or Spiritual Influences Upon the Soul
Now
the soul, in residing between body and spirit and mediating between
them, is influenced by both. It takes on its organization and function
according to impulses from both spirit and the body. For instance, the
astral body would respond both to a chemical drug inducing a feeling of
euphoria through the body, and the spirit volitionally invoking a lofty
feeling of spiritual joy, although the effects on the astral are not
identical.
Likewise, the etheric body could have its
structure altered by some injury to the physical body, or from some
blockage or abnormality in the astral body percolating its influence
down to the etheric level. Whatever influences are exerted upon the
soul by body and spirit, their effects continue to linger in the soul,
like tea continuing to circulate after having been stirred. This is why
I said the ego runs on both neural and etheric hardware. Despite
originating in the physical, the ego imparts the momentum of its
conditioning upon the etheric.
Consequences of Lacking a Spirit
With
the preceding in mind, consider what happens when someone has body,
ego, and soul, but lacks spirit. First and foremost, their entire
makeup would be the result of material influences like genetics and
environment. The seat of their apparent intelligence would be the ego.
And without the counterweight of spirit, their ego would reign king.
Thus, in accordance with the function of ego, such people would be
completely dedicated to material and social survival.
Notice
that people with spirit who are awake to their spiritual impulses often
make willful choices that serve no financial, social, or egotistic
gains, that go against the expectations of Darwinian evolutionary
principles, and that serve only spiritual ends. Such impulses are
absent in spiritless people, thus they are truly optimized for survival
in the physical world. Without conscience, empathy, or inner battle
between ego and spirit holding them back, they can more quickly and
easily succeed in their worldly environments regardless of the cost to
others.
To better understand their metaphysical differences,
consider what happens to spirited and spiritless people upon physical
death.
Spirit and soul nested one inside the other, together
leave the physical body. After a while, the etheric component of the
soul disintegrates, leaving only spirit nested inside the astral body.
The astral body then also disintegrates. The disintegration of etheric
and astral bodies, meaning the dissolution or casting away of the soul,
is known in Christian Esotericism as the second death. The liberated spirit then advances into the afterlife before reincarnating.
Reincarnation
involves the spirit forming around itself a new soul and then slipping
into a new physical body. In sequential reincarnations, what talents,
predispositions, and imbalances it has acquired from previous lifetimes
influences the new incarnation.
In the case of spiritless
people, life begins as follows. As the fetal body gestates in the womb,
the soul forms for the first time, like beach sand being gathered into
the shape of a castle, and joins to the body. This combination produces
rudimentary awareness. After being born, such a person becomes nothing
more than a product of genetics and environment due to absence of
spirit. Without a spiritual counterweight, biological drives and social
programming become their primary impulses in life.
Upon
physical death their soul evacuates the body, perhaps containing a
lingering imprint of the ego, and after some time it disintegrates and
is reabsorbed into the lake of energies from which it originally
formed. Nothing of their identity survives. For people without spirit,
this life is their only one. They form upon entering and dissolve upon
leaving. It cannot be otherwise if they lack a core of individualized
consciousness.
Thus everything that a spirited person has
due to the continuity of his or her incarnations, is missing in the
life of a spiritless person. For example, the spiritless would have no
need for life lessons or spiritual learning experiences. What would be
the purpose if whatever is gained disappears after death? Therefore
spiritless people are ones who cannot learn spiritual lessons, who
cannot profit spiritually from the trials of life, who cannot pass what
is gained onto their successive incarnations. And so they have no
concern for lessons of humility, empathy, compassion, understanding, or
forgiveness. Instead of changing as people through spiritual maturation
in life, they only change in the sense of better adapting to life
through conditioning. For instance, whereas a spirited person may see
the error of his ways and grow humble, a spiritless person would simply
learn to not get caught next time.
Karma is another
metaphysical factor absent in the life of spiritless people. There are
many misconceptions about karma, so I will first explain my
understanding of it, before showing how its absence affects the life of
a spiritless person.
Karma (the negative type) is simply a
spiritual debt or imbalance acquired upon violating the freewill of
oneself or another. Violating your own freewill happens when you make a
choice during an ignorant state, like when identifying with the ego and
acting upon its impulses, that violates a choice made during a more
spiritually sober state.
Upon committing a freewill
violation, the higher spirit-associated aspect of consciousness regrets
the error and makes a commitment to redress it, even if the lower
ego-associated aspect tries to ignore this. The karmic imbalance then
attracts experiences that teach a lesson correcting that ignorance,
whether in this life or the next. The lesson learned is universal and
does not require memory of the original choice that provoked it, just
understanding of the lesson. The karmic experience itself is not what
is fated, rather the lesson learned, therefore karma can sometimes be
mitigated through pre-emptive understanding and forgiveness without
necessarily needing to learn it the hard way through experience.
But
without spirit, there is no true freewill and no true lessons that can
be learned. Therefore the spiritless have no karma and instead live
completely under the laws of chance and the law of the jungle. Whereas
a spirited individual might be born with karmic handicaps, for the
spiritless these handicaps would strictly be a matter of chance or
heredity and serve no higher metaphysical purpose. Same with the timing
and manner of their death; whereas spirited people may have loosely
planned out their life before incarnating, including the way they will
die, spiritless people die according to random circumstances without
purpose or meaning, unless their death somehow plays an important part
in the pre-incarnation script of a spirited individual.
Other
missing factors include meaningful symbolic dreams, synchronicities,
higher intuitive guidance, and their personal hand of destiny.
Spiritless people experience none of these because they neither can nor
need to. This should be obvious from understanding the role of spirit,
but I will elaborate for the sake of clarity.
Meaningful
dreams primarily serve to alert a person to spiritual imbalances that
need to be corrected, but a spiritless person has no need for such
messages. They also have nothing higher to send such messages. Without
a permanent core of individuality, they have no “Higher Self”, which is
the perfected future manifestation of spirit reaching back through time
to help out extensions of itself still in the linear past. And without
a Higher Self, they have no inner intuitive guidance to provide certain
nudges and protection in life. Thus, whereas a spirited person might
experience freak synchronicities and bending of the laws of reality to
save them from untimely death, a spiritless person lacking such
direction and protection would perish according to chance.
Chakra Differences between Spirited and the Spiritless
There
is also a difference between spirited and spiritless in what chakras
they have. Chakras are vortical energy centers linking soul with body,
and linking spirit and body through the soul. Each center coincides
positionally with the major glands of the physical body, and each
serves a different behavioral function.
The lower chakras are
associated with such behavioral facets as physical instinct, sexual
impulses, base emotions, personal power, and intellectual activity.
Everyone possesses these. The spiritless, however, have no need for the
higher chakras, namely the heart, crown, and third eye chakras because
these are the ones that exclusively link to spirit.
The heart
chakra, the center of higher emotions like compassion, empathy,
spiritual jubilance, is missing in the spiritless because there is no
spirit present to associate with these emotions. The crown chakra,
through which higher intuitive understanding, originality and
creativity, and a connection with objective truth manifests, is
likewise missing. The third eye chakra, located between the brows, is
normally used for the perception of phenomena and concepts beyond the
material realm, and spiritless people confined to the world of the five
senses have no need for it either.
Consequently, another
difference between the spirited and spiritless is that the first have
all seven chakras while the latter are missing the three higher ones,
the heart, crown, and third eye chakras.
This further contributes to the intuitive or clairvoyant perception
that spiritless people are flat and inert inside regardless of how
animated they are on the outside, because the spectrum of their etheric
or auric vibrations are missing certain colors and are therefore of a
lower overall resolution.
All the above follows from one
simple postulate: that some people lack spirit, and that they therefore
also lack the higher chakras. If you deeply contemplate what this
entails, you will understand how this postulate explains the full gamut
of observations we have concerning so-called “empty” people.
Difference between Spiritless and Spiritually Asleep People
At
this point you might be wondering what is the difference between
spiritless people, and spirited ones who are spiritually asleep in life
or simply immature. After all, both may be worldly in their goals and
thoroughly caught up in the illusion of the “Matrix.” Both may not be
cognizant of dreams or synchronicities, nor display much empathy. For
example, there are negative people who are completely under the
influence of their egos and external negative forces, who can commit
violent crimes and even mass murder without blinking an eye. Not all of
them are spiritless. But all of them are indeed void of the influence
of spirit when it comes to engaging in such inhuman behaviors. Some
lack spirit, others are asleep to spirit.
The difference is
that a spirited but infantile/asleep person still has latent spiritual
potential. So they still have, even in small amounts, the presence of
those spiritual factors and dynamics mentioned above. They may still
suffer the consequences of karmic debt brought on by dumb choices, they
may still receive symbolic dreams attempting to alert them to spiritual
imbalances in life even if they ignore it, they may still experience
synchronistic help in shaping their lives against the odds even if they
cannot see it.
Spiritless people lack that potential
completely. They cannot grow spiritually. This is not a theoretical
declaration, but a painful lesson learned from having dealt with too
many such persons who never showed any signs of growth or
evolution no matter how much help and opportunity for improvement was
given to them. At best they adapt, but more out of conditioning and
calculation than actual understanding.
There is another
important difference. The spirited have lives appropriate to their
spiritual needs. So there is a correspondence between their spiritual
maturity and type of life. Infant spirits will lead crude lives,
because a basic existence is all they need, and anything more would be
too much for them to handle or gain from. Meanwhile, the spiritless
live whatever life they are driven into by circumstance and their own
cunning, which can mean being a beggar, corporate executive, or famous
author all the same. Without constraints established by spiritual
needs, the spiritless have no spiritual limits or curriculums
structuring their lives. And this is why “empty” people are not all
just spiritually asleep or infantile, because there exists a class of
people who share the same inertness behind their eyes regardless of their type of life, their social standing, their intellectual prowess, and their physical appearance.
Psychopaths, Sociopaths, and Narcissists
The
more extreme manifestations of an absence of spirit is known in
psychology as psychopathic, sociopathic, or narcissistic personality
disorders. Spirited people who fit this condition are misguided and
held hostage by their egos, but they can be rehabilitated. Instead of
lacking empathy, their empathy is either suppressed or displaced. These
are not true psychopaths, but spirited people with personality
disorders.
True psychopathy and sociopathy, however, cannot be
cured because something is fundamentally flawed at the core of such
persons. They lack empathy and remorse altogether, and these qualities
cannot be recovered because they were never there to begin with. The
incurable nature of psychopathy is an accepted fact in psychology. The
cause is believed to be an abnormality in the pain and fear centers of
the brain. Even so, without the balancing influence of spirit, such
abnormalities would introduce unchecked errors into the programming of
the ego, which then runs rampant to the point of coming to the
attention of the legal and medical systems. What the medical system can
diagnose is only the extreme and sloppy manifestation of a condition
that is more widespread throughout the population. Other spiritless
people with properly functioning egos are better at keeping their lack
of empathy and remorse camouflaged under more refined social
programming.
Why Spiritless? What Others Say
Theories
abound about why some people lack a higher component to their
consciousness and what purpose they serve in the bigger scheme of
things. Since I am not the first to make this observation, I will now
briefly discuss what others have said so that you can weigh the
available options.
John Baines writes in his book The Stellar Man
that humans, like all animal species, have a collective soul unique to
their species. This collective unconscious exerts a de-individualizing
influence on humans, nudging them toward mob mentality, herd mentality,
and following the crowd. Rupert Sheldrake would call this the human
morphogenetic field. People who have not developed their own conscious
individuality are mere automatons following the soporific influence of
the collective unconscious, as though they were extensions of a hive
mind. The goal of esoteric training is to split away from the herd, to
develop one’s own volition and thereby become a free being.
Rudolf Steiner voiced similar sentiments. His foundational work, The Philosophy of Freedom
addressed this problem. Steiner said that as long as humans obey
external authority, their own biological instincts, or the animalistic
parts of themselves in common with the rest of humanity, they are not
free beings. Freedom comes from choosing based on intuitive
understanding of what each option entails and what it means. This act
of freewill requires introspection and spiritual acumen to act from a
place of true understanding. Steiner acknowledged that not everyone
introspects to the degree necessary to make intelligent freewill
choices.
G. I. Gurdjieff spoke along the same lines. His lectures in Views from the Real World
summarize his position. Humans are born as blank slates, as biological
machines without self-awareness. At some point in life, a person either
develops an “I” or branches onto the opposite path toward further
mechanization and decay. So according to Gurdjieff, “empty” people are
those who have never developed their self-awareness as they should
have, but we all start out on equal footing. I don’t believe this to be
true because there are infants and children who clearly have high
sentience behind their eyes and expected behaviors of self-awareness,
while other infants and children lack it, which suggests the factor of
reincarnation in some people and complete absence of spirit including
the potential for spirit in other people.
Boris Mouravieff has written on the subject of spiritless people most extensively. See his three volumes of the Gnosis
series, particularly the second and third volumes. His approach is
based on Esoteric Christianity, and thus it quotes heavily from
scripture while bearing much in common with the Fourth Way tradition of
Gurdjieff, which itself seems to trace back to Sufistic teachings.
According to Mouravieff’s interpretation of the Book of Genesis, there
existed humans before Adam and Eve, but that only Adam and by proxy Eve
and her descendants received the breath of spirit from God. Thus
nowadays there exists two mingling sub-races of humans, the pre-Adamics
without spirit, and the Adamics who have it. Mouravieff explains that
pre-Adamics serve the purpose of harvesting energy from Adamics as part
of the cosmic food chain. He also explores the metaphysical differences
between the two, in regards to pre-Adamics missing certain “centers”,
which are analogous to chakras. Mouravieff believes the pre-Adamics
have a group soul unique to their collective, and that only after
further aeons of evolution will their collective soul differentiate
into individual spirits like what the Adamics already have.
The Corpus Hermeticum,
a famous hermetic and gnostic text written almost two thousand years
ago, likewise states that not all humans have the spark of divine
reason (termed Nous) active within them, and that without Nous
a human is more like an “irrational creature” (animal) in his
motivations, limited perception, and way of life. One would have to
read the entire text to understand this in proper context. See the
english translation titled The Way of Hermes: New Translations of the Corpus Hermeticum (Inner Traditions, 2000).
Lastly, the Cassiopaean Transcripts
addresses the works of Mouravieff and provides some key insights on the
matter at hand. The channelling source claims that some people are
empty portals for other intelligences to work through, that they have
uniform auras among them, lack the higher chakras, can be very skilled
at mimicking “souled” (spirited) people by reflecting back their own
soul energy, and that ultimately they serve as conduits from which our
energy can be siphoned for collection by negative hyper-dimensional
beings. All this is in line with my observations and the writings of
Mouravieff and Gurdjieff, except a bit more realistic than the
viewpoints of those two traditionalists. Whereas John Baines says some
humans are extensions of the human collective soul, the Cassiopaeans
say they are instead extensions of particular animal group souls. They
say such so-called “organic portals” serve as a bridge between the
human and animal kingdom, helping to transfer higher human energies to
these animal group souls to accelerate their evolution, but that their
function has been hijacked by higher negative forces for their own
energy harvesting use.
So what I am saying in this article is
not without precedent. I merely made the observation of “empty” people
independently in 1999-2001 and then cycled through various personal
speculations and existing theories before settling on the current one
explained in this article.
I believe there are several ways
in which people end up spiritless. Some are born that way because no
spirit ever took root, just like theater seats that remain empty
because no one bought tickets for them. Others may have started out
with spirit but had it depart at some point in life. It could have
evacuated through abuse or sudden extreme trauma, or evaporated
gradually from decades of soul-killing routine. Not everyone who dies
necessarily drops dead. People can go on existing as hollow shells, as
echoes of their former selves, now void of the spirit that once gave
them spark. There are other darker phenomena like dead people getting
reanimated by aliens with advanced technology, human clones, and other
types of artificial humanoids that would lack spirit, but these are
relatively rare and therefore not worth discussing in this article (see
instead my article on Human Simulacra).
Here
I speak mainly of a larger sector of the population who naturally lack
spirit, who always have throughout history, and who by virtue of their
predatory and worldly natures have gravitated toward the top of the
social, economic, and political hierarchies and made the world
antagonistic toward spiritual impulses.
The Benefits of Understanding
As
you can see, this idea that some people lack spirit explains much about
the robotic, animalistic, predatory side of humanity. So many of us are
under the false assumption that we are all the same inside, that if we
walked in another’s shoes we would fully understand their motivations.
But not all inhuman acts trace back to mere environmental variables.
There are cases where, even if we put ourselves in their place, we
would not act the same. That is because the cause of their motivations
is not environmental, but metaphysical: the absence of spirit, and the
supreme reign of ego.
Those who ignore the possibility of
spiritless people will continue to shake their heads in frustration at
behaviors they simply cannot compute and must either ignore or
rationalize away. When dealing with a spiritless psychopath, for
instance, such individuals are easily deceived and manipulated.
Only
after getting burned again and again do they realize some humans are a
different kind of animal, that some humans are not remediable because
they are acting fully and healthily in accordance with their spiritless
predatory nature. This is especially true of the psychopathic elite who
run this prison planet; they cannot be rehabilitated, made to see the
error of their ways, or convinced through appeals to empathy.
Caution and Conclusion
It
would be unwise, however, to look down upon the spiritless with
contempt. They are what they are, living their lives in accordance with
their makeup. They should be handled no differently from how one
handles a wild animal that acts according to its feral nature. It is
only by trying to hold the spiritless up to higher spiritual standards
that frustration sets in. Without expecting too much of them, and by
understanding why they behave as they do, frustration gives way to calm
insight.
Nor is it worth going out of your way to try and spot
who is spiritless, because in ambiguous cases you will likely err on
the side of paranoia. Since spiritless behaviors form a subset of the
behaviors of spirited people, only the behaviors unique to spirited
people can allow quick and certain identification, and then only of who
is definitely spirited. Spotting only works for picking out who is
truly spirited, which happens most easily with a spirited individual on
your wavelength. You will sense the life in their eyes, the clear and
unique energy behind their words, and the originality and independence
behind their thought processes.
Appendix I: Common Questions
How do I know I’m not a spiritless person?
– If you have experienced even one trait unique to spirit, then you are
not spiritless. The very fact that you have wondered this, that you are
uncertain and wish to know for sure, shows self-awareness and
introspection, which is another trait of having spirit. Regardless, it
is better to assume that you do have spirit and work on developing its
qualities like intuition, empathy, and lucidity, all the while being
aware of your lower egotistical impulses and keeping from acting on
them.
I suspect that my (friend, spouse, parent) is a spiritless person, what do I do?
– Set aside for a moment the question of whether they are spirited or
not, and focus solely on whether you can continue being with them. Are
they so manipulative, draining, abusive, or otherwise harmful to your
well-being that you have to get away? If so, then it doesn’t matter
whether they have spirit or not. Are they so friendly and easy going
that you are doing quite fine having them in your life? If so, then it
doesn’t matter whether they have spirit or not. So from a practical
perspective, you only have to be concerned with whether you can deal
with having them in your life. Where the distinction between spirited
and spiritless does come into play is in dealing with
psychopathic people, where even after promising to change they keep
returning to their abusive ways; then at some point, instead of
rationalizing that they are just misguided and need even more time and
attention, it is better to conclude that maybe they are acting
perfectly in line with who they really are. Naive people who think
everyone is equally good inside will keep rationalizing and taking the
abuse, but those with higher understanding will recognize the warning
signs of futility sooner and save themselves the trouble.
How
is this concept of spiritless people not somehow divisive, racist,
persecutory, and antithetical to the idea of human equality, unity,
harmony, and brotherhood? – If the theory is true, that some
people do in fact lack spirit, then the truth of the matter should not
be ignored for the sake of political correctness. When properly
applied, knowledge can lead to greater stability and harmony in the
long run. For example, every attempted utopian society has failed
because it was founded on naive assumptions about the makeup of its
citizenry; selfish, psychopathic, predatory individuals end up
corrupting the utopia. If the utopia were founded on full understanding
of such types, then measures could have been put into place to prevent
corruption. Also, a theory should not be blamed for the consequences of
its misapplication; those who misapply it use it as a vehicle for the
satisfaction of their own egos rather than applying it from a spiritual
perspective. Instead of throwing out the theory because of its
misapplication, better effort should be made to prevent its
misapplication. Lastly, the unity of all life can be recognized without
sacrificing awareness of the functional diversity comprising it; and
only by properly understanding each part of that unity can the whole be
recognized in full clarity instead of mere ignorant bliss.
Appendix II: Correlating Sources
John Baines – The Stellar Man
Rudolf Steiner – Theosophy
Rudolf Steiner – The Philosophy of Freedom
Rudolf Steiner – Outline of Occult Science
G. I. Gurdjieff – Views from the Real World
P. D. Ouspensky – In Search of the Miraculous
Clement Salaman, et al… – The Way of Hermes (Corpus Hermeticum)
Dion Fortune – Psychic Self-Defense
Boris Mouravieff – Gnosis, Volumes I-III
LKJ, et al… – The Cassiopaean Transcripts
Amit Goswami – The Self-Aware Universe
For excerpts from some of these sources, see this PDF.
Appendix III: Permutations of Metaphysical Components
To
show the necessity of concepts like spirit, body, etheric, and astral,
here is a list of how these components combine to form different kinds
of entities. As you will see, the difference between these entities
cannot be explained with fewer than those components.
Elementary matter:
body
Crystals and plants:
body | etheric
Average animals:
body | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans:
body | ego | etheric | astral
Spirited humans:
body | ego | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after choosing to incarnate, first stage:
astral | spirit
Spirited humans after choosing to incarnate, second stage
etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans shortly before birth:
body | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after childhood:
body | ego | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after physical death:
ego | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after “second” death, during the afterlife:
spirit
Spiritless humans after formation of embryo:
body | etheric
Spiritless humans shortly before birth:
body | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans after childhood:
body | ego | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans after physical death:
ego | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans after “second” death:
(nothing)
Artificial Humanoids:
body | ego | etheric
Etheric thought-forms and astral wildlife:
etheric | astral
Angelic beings:
astral | spirit
Demonic beings:
ego | etheric | astral
Spirited astral projectors:
ego | astral | spirit
Etheric aliens and transcended humans:
etheric | astral | spirit
Notes
