(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 humans1.
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 through 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 body2.
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 etheric3.
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 death4. 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 chakras5.
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. In private discussions, Steiner went even further:
Dr. Steiner: That little girl L.K. in the first grade must have something really very wrong inside. There is not much we can do. Such cases are increasing in which children are born with a human form, but are not really human beings in relation to their highest I; instead, they are filled with beings that do not belong to the human class. Quite a number of people have been born since the nineties without an I, that is, they are not reincarnated, but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon. There are quite a large number of older people going around who are actually not human beings, but are only natural; they are human beings only in regard to their form. We cannot, however, create a school for demons.
A teacher: How is that possible?
Dr. Steiner: Cosmic error is certainly not impossible. The relationships of individuals coming into earthly existence have long been determined. There are also generations in which individuals have no desire to come into earthly existence and be connected with physicality, or immediately leave at the very beginning. In such cases, other beings that are not quite suited step in. This is something that is now quite common, that human beings go around without an I; they are actually not human beings, but have only a human form. They are beings like nature spirits, which we do not recognize as such because they go around in a human form. They are also quite different from human beings in regard to everything spiritual. They can, for example, never remember such things as sentences; they have a memory only for words, not for sentences.
The riddle of life is not so simple. When such a being dies, it returns to nature from which it came. The corpse decays, but there is no real dissolution of the etheric body, and the natural being returns to nature. It is also possible that something like an automaton could occur. The entire human organism exists, and it might be possible to automate the brain and develop a kind of pseudomorality.
I do not like to talk about such things since we have often been attacked even without them. Imagine what people would say if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings. Nevertheless, these are facts. Our culture would not be in such a decline if people felt more strongly that a number of people are going around who, because they are completely ruthless, have become something that is not human, but instead are demons in human form.
(Faculty Meetings With Rudolf Steiner Vol. 2, 3 July 1923, p. 649-650)
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
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
Source: http://montalk.net/matrix/157/spiritless-humans
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