Thanks for posting the sessions. Atreides and Ailen, you are in my thoughts and I wish you all a perfect recovery!
These are just my thoughts:
I know there are folks who wonder what they should do now, and continue to think that the real job is to teach people about psychopaths, and maybe it is, but I'm thinking along different lines and am willing to explain what I mean.
But first I need to set up a scenario and speak rhetorically.
Have you ever fallen asleep in school with your head on your desk? You dream the bell rings and you get up and file out of the room with everyone else, thinking all is completely normal. The next instant, you wake up at your desk. After a moment's confusion and re-orientation, you realize the sound of the bell was real, the feel of the desk was real, but the part about getting up and leaving the room was a dream.
Now you feel a bit terrified because what happened is slowly dawning on the new set of students surrounding you and you're an instant away from being 'recognized', laughed at and humiliated. You realize that your experience consisted of a combination of real elements of the reality and elements of an hallucination blended together in a single context (your mind) to create what you thought was a 'normal', every day occurrence. In that split second, if you could find a hole to crawl into, you would.
If, during the dream, someone started talking about psychopaths and all they were responsible for, you would probably find it as interesting as a new toy or model. You might even 'sex it up' and fantasize about the ways you could play with it. Because you are half-asleep and half-dreaming.
It can be deduced that in a society and culture where so much dependency and so many inter-dependencies exist between people, that it would be not-so-good to grab folks by the collar and try to shake them awake. The results could be extremely unpredictable and traumatic.
A person might go insane as one minute he thinks he is 'saving America from terrorism', or beating the dust out of a rug, or 'fighting against the devil', and the next minute he awakens with a startling clarity, only to find a bloody sword in his hand and broken bodies lying at his feet. What happened to the terrorist, the rug, the devil?
Welcome to the "...weeping, wailing and knashing of teeth!".
With the above in mind, now consider this old 'joke':
Maybe the only difference between a psychopath and a Zen master is that a Zen master no longer has an axe to grind.
Is that shocking? If so, why? Both the psychopath and the zen master have high levels of awareness and can recognize each other, but, whereas the Zen master has an intense empathy and conscience to correspond with his awareness, the psychopath simply doesn't care. And he's lazy. His only fear is that people will wake up, leaving him exposed.
The psychopath sits on his 'throne', casting his linguistic spells that keep people hallucinating 'government at work', 'religion helping people', etc., etc, while marveling at the things people let him get away with.
The zen master lays the groundwork to establish the conditions that will facilitate the slow wake up process for humanity as a whole for the reasons outlined above.
Perhaps he establishes a 'formal Work' that people can become a part of. Perhaps he establishes a religion where people can express their spiritual aspirations without 'going crazy'. Or perhaps he just injects symbols into a domain to get people asking questions...like: "why is the defining characteristic of christianity an 'ascension', yet the main symbol concerns a 'murder'?
Am I suggesting that, from the widest perspective, all religion is STO inspired? Not really, but it 'could' happen, OSIT (What is PaleoChristianity? :)).
Perhaps he establishes detox knowledge so that people can start increasing their health and experience the benefits of positive neuro-chemical changes in the body and mind. Perhaps he establishes an EE program to help people process and clear old emotional baggage that keeps them cognitively tied down and stuck in familiar routines.
The Zen master, the Shaman, the STO Nordic, the alchemists, the Gurdjieff's are what they are and do what they do because of what they know.
Have you ever seen the pain and behavior from someone who was forced to cold-turkey-withdraw from a heavy, long-term addiction? It's a dangerous situation and not a pretty sight.
So no matter what is going on around us and to us, there are always so many things that can be done to help others. Anything that objectively benefits someone is STO inspired, in my view, and will help. And the evolutionary context is rolling along, like a fog down the mountain, just like it should be doing within the constraints of existing conditions, OSIT.
FWIW.
