At its core, every vampire story is really about the dark shadow that falls across our path as we seek our perfect Beloved. Ah... the Beloved! We all seek that devine entity who will bring our dreams to life and lift us into a state of transcendent bliss. We feel the essence of the archetypal Beloved in every myth, every fairy tal, and every celluloid concoction that shines before us in the perpetual night of the movie theater. For most of us, the search for a loved one is the most compelling pursuit of our lives--the only pursuit that can drive us beyond ourselves as we journey to hell and back. But hree's the bad news: the path we walk on our search for our true love makes a perfect hunting ground for hungry vampires. (...)
In its simplest form, the search for the beloved is born of our fierce human drive to commune with an entity whom we love, and who will love us in return. Love, in this sense, is more than a conglomeration of respect, honor, affection, and devotion. These qualities proceed from love, but they are not its essence. This kind of love is what we experience when we connect with a being that is greater than ourselves. And here is born a dangerous illusion--we believe that something larger than life can be incarnated in a single person. This is only natural, since we must use the finite shapes of our external experience to comprehend an infinite internal experience. But true love is really much more complex, profound, and transcendent than the repertoire of any mere mortal.
The essence of the archetypal Beloved is as sacred, as vast, and as intimate as the soul, which means that our relationship to the Beloved is most potent when it is not distorted by the human limitations of an external person. In other words, we are most likely to commune with the true Beloved when we turn within and touch that in ourselves which resonates with all that is sacred. This is the part of us that Jung called the Self, but we may also call it the soul or the divine. Ecstatic mystics regularly enjoy this kind of intrapsychic soul love, but it is more difficult for the rest of us to achieve because we pay more attention to finite external reality, which is full of compelling sensory distractions. Most of us are not inclined to maintain the mystic's internal focus and spiritual discipline, which are requirements for communing with the Self, so we spend the greater part (if not all) of our lives looking to other people, rather than to our own souls, for our sense of ecstatic communion. This is why most of us come to expect and demand perfect love from the imperfect human mortals on whom we've projected the image of our divine Beloved.
(...)
Whenever the architect [the author gives an example of one of her clients] projected her traits onto an external loved one, she increased her vulnerability to vampiric invasion in three ways. First, as long as some of her energies were projected onto someone else, she did not have access to the whole of her power, which left her in a weakened and yearning state. Second, as long as she was desperate to find an external loved one, she was inclined to project her power onto any warm body that would hold the projection (even if the body was only warmed by stolen blood). And third, once the woman had securely clamped her projection onto a new loved one, she felt as if she were psychologically welded to this man (who, after all, seemed to be her only means of connecting with the energies that she had hidden from herself). In this enmeshed state, the woman opened wide her psychic windows to any man who could hold her projection of the archetypal Beloved.
This bundle of circumstances is the perfect setup for the vampiric attack. To begin with, all predators target the vulnerable members of the herd, and when we are projecting a portion of our strength onto any external person, we are vulnerable. Moreover, the most lethal predators are those who can make themselves attractive to the intended prey; posing as the perfect Beloved is the best disguise of all . Finally a predator can do the most damage when the prey has dropped its defences and admitted the predator into its inner sanctum. Thus, a psychic vampire had only to detect the architect's fervent search for a screen onto whom she could project her inner Beloved. Once he had smelled her desperate yearning, the man could easily metamorphose himself into the kind of man who would meet her criteria for a projection screen. (...)
Once a vampiric man was the bearer of the architect's projection, she was in his thrall, because she had abdicated to her beloved vampire the traits for which she most yearned. Ironically, these became the very traits that could have released the woman from the vampire's control, for if she could have recognized them in herself, the beloved vampire would no longer have been able to hold her captive. Instead, because the woman perceived that her lover held her unclaimed power, she granted to one psychic vampire after another the key to her heart's desire, and she willingly paid in blood for a chance to turn that key. The irony of this illusion was that the vampires' bait was simply the reflection of her own gifts.
(...)
Sometimes the architect would pause loong enough in her frenzy of projection to realize that the man onto whom she was projecting her Beloved was projecting onto her his Beloved as well. When this happenend, the woman often found that she had become the thing that her lover was projecting, whether it resembled her innate character or not. This process of transformation through projection is referred to by some Jungians as "dreaming somebody up." We can be fairly sure that we are dreaming up another person when an aspect of his or her personality seems larger thatn life--more divine or more evil than we would have believed possible in a mere mortal.
It is as common for us to be dreamed up by someone else as it is to do the dreaming up. Generally, we are being dreamed up when we find ourselves behaving in ways that feel unlike us.
(...)
KILLING THE VAMPIRE
Whenever we contemplate killing the psychic vampire, we must remember that "killing" any aspect of the psyche only means that we are transforming its energy into another, preferably healthier, incarnation. For example, through inner work, we can transform what was once an easily provoked, killing rage into a manageable anger that is actually helpful and constructive. Thus, the goal of psychic vampire killing is not really to eradicate the vampirically infected traits in ourselves or someone else, but rather to "kill" their old, contaminated form and give birth to their more healthful incarnations. And whether we find the contaminated trait in ourselves or someone we love, killing a psychic vampire always involves reliving old emotions, acknowledging all of what we seek and fear, grieving our losses, and rejoicing in our gains. It requires us to make an ongoing series of ethical decisions that ask us to choose between working toward transformation or surrendering to the vampire. Vampire killing requires us to go back to the moment when we couldn't find love and settled for exploitation, and it challenges us to make the choice again, and again, and again. As Linda Leonard has astutely observed, we can prevail against the vampire archetype only if "we are willing to consciously fight this battle, not just once but daily".
(...)
First, the illussions themselves [projections] tell us precisely what we need in the way of mothering, fathering, friendship, or love. what we thought we had in the external mother, father, friend, or lover is the image of the energy we need to find in reality--both in our external relationships and activities, and in our internal experience of image and feeling. Thus, when we find ourselves bitterly disappointed in a person, a pursuit, or ourselves, we can use whatever it was we were expecting as a map home to the inner Beloved, who can give us the love we truly want and need. To perform this task, we must bring our idealized images to life by alternatively being them and relating to them.
For example, if your mother was vampiric and your mask for her was nourishing, then nourish yourself as you thought she was nourishing you. If your father was vampiric and your mask for him was instructive, then instruct yourself as you thought he was instructing you. -if your lover was vampiric and your mask for your lover was comforting, then comfort yourself as you thought he or she was comforting you. The ideals that inspire our masks in the first place are part of what Jung called the collective unconscious, the deep part of our psyche that holds the elemental shapes of all human experience, including the Beloved Mother, Father, Child, Lover, and Leader. While it is a bitter disappointment to find that our projection of these sacred entities has served as a mask for the vampire, it also can be profoundly comforting to learn that, no matter what, we carry each Beloved entity's true essence inside ourselves.
(...)
) are very common to me, too. Very common. They even kept coming and going in my current relationship, and once went so far that I was in the middle of a vampiric set-up. It was horrible and surreal when I woke up to the truth, and back then I didn't have the knowledge and thought it to be a demonic set-up. Anyways, the books of the psychological section are like jewels to me: so much light-shedding and understanding are coming through them! A form of healing, just by suddenly having put it all into perspective! So, yes, keep studying them, many of your questions will be answered.
