Thanks EQ for what I think is a pretty good analysis. And yes, you are right, Vinnie was quite likeable and had not revealed himself. Yes, I had reservations about him, but I always brushed them under the rug and figured that we could learn from each other. I was totally unaware of the level of deceit that one such as he was could and would and DID employ on a daily basis in the conduct of their lives. That is why this mirror session was such a blessing.
After the session, I had as much trouble as anyone would have had believing what I had seen, since it was so completely contradicted by his WORDS. It was at that point that we began to try to find out a bit more about the guy. It was also at this point that we decided to set up some little "scratch tests" a la Don Juan's "Stalking" or "systematic harassment" to see if we could flush out anything that would confirm what I had seen. After all, the guy was really smooth and had an answer for everything. It's really hard to believe someone is lying when they do it so confidently and utilize that "special psychological knowledge" of the psychopath to anaesthetize the brain of normal people.
Needless to say, he failed all the tests - or passed them, depending on your perspective - and confirmed everything that I had "seen" and more. I still didn't want to believe it because, frankly, I liked the guy, and who else was I going to talk to about Fulcanelli and Rennes-le-Chateau and so on? So I kept adding more little "tests" just to convince myself that I wasn't imagining everything. Again and again, he showed that he was "different," though at the time I had no context for this difference. That made it doubly difficult to know what I was dealing with. The one thing I DID understand pretty clearly was that he was a liar and involved in a complex series of manipulations. This is one of those things that is like the picture hidden in the picture. It may not be obvious at all on initial viewing, but once a few features of it have been pointed out, you can see it plainly and you cannot NOT see it anymore.
Things that I once accepted at face value from Vinnie, words, descriptions, stories, etc, were now revealed in an all new light. I could see the lies and manipulations.
What was bad about it, though, was that I knew that not everybody could see it as we were now seeing it. I should add that there were two other people present at that session so there was me, Ark, these two other people, and my children who "saw through" Vinnie. Two of my children in particular. The youngest didn't like him from the instant she laid eyes on him and told me that he was a "vampire." She actually said to Vinnie "When are you leaving?" I was mortified. Well, she was only 12 at the time and at that "stage" where a kid can be obnoxious. Naturally, Vinnie had to pronounce on this saying that my daughter was "psychologically damaged" because I had allowed her to learn too much too soon and hadn't protected her from the "dark side" or whatever... Go figure.
My son had a conversation with Vinnie which he told me about later as we were discussing if it could be true that he was the fraud that we were thinking he was. Apparently Vinnie had been telling him some story that included name dropping and it just so happened that my son knew more about the subject than Vinnie and immediately spotted the lies but didn't let on and, in fact, kept drawing Vinnie out on the subject (can't remember exact details, but had something to do with martial arts which is my son's great interest) just to see what other outrageous things he would say.
Anyway, as I was going through all this, I was still having a hard time believing that Vinnie was such a liar. I think it really hit me when I went to his website and read an article he had written where he claimed to have done some kind of "Ophanic Magic" ritual on the Spring Equinox in the mountains in NC and how the Sun had erupted in a giant flare and this was evidence of the efficacy of his "working." As it happened, I knew for a fact that he hadn't done this because he was at my house on the Spring Equinox. Seeing such a blatant lie wrapped up in such a dramatic story with so many details and nice little touches that made it seem so true finally convinced me that he was, indeed, capable of lies beyond anyone I had ever met in my life.
So, realizing that he was, indeed, involved in (or at least claiming to be involved in) all kinds of activities and practices that were diametrically opposed to our own work, attitude, approach, etc, I thought I would try to find out what was wrong and try to fix it.
I was trying to be understanding, to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to know what was troubling his soul such that he had to lie about things. (And at this point, I still thought he did have the experiences and credentials he had claimed. It didn't occur to me that all this was a lie too!) I wanted to know if he had a bad relationship with his family, if he had been so poor that he had to "create a fantasy world" to ease his pain; if kids had been mean to him when he was growing up, and so forth. But my attempts to get such a discussion going were stymied at every turn. I let him know that we could "work things out" that there was nothing that could not be fixed by talking about it. I was completely rebuffed from going there.
Since we were, at that moment, under intense attack from a gang of ADL types who were really working up a case to label us anti-semitic because of our page about the Jews, and had published our home address on the net and encouraged anybody in our area to "take care of us," while at the same time, they were roaming the net accusing us of being connected to "Nazi Black Magic," and there we were, associated with Vinnie who most certainly WAS involved in that stuff, as we had just discovered, we knew we had to do something.
Well, anyway, it is all chronicled elsewhere on the site. I'm still working on page two of the mirror thing since I decided that the file was too big and I needed to divide it. The sound bytes are now back up.
