all the saints I ever communed with were cats, and they all loved to kill mice
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 1/22/14, awoelfleba...@yahoo.com <awoelfleba...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: The Postcharismatic Fate of New Religious
Movements.
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Date: Wednesday, January 22, 2014, 2:25 AM
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com,
<dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote:
In
Graphing data-pairs of Saints and spiritual groups; along
the path we all long-timers had experience to some
degree with ranges and distribution of personality
narcissism in
spiritual people, from ordered to disordered and with
continuum of
relatively saintly charismatic affect and the less than
saintly
spiritual behaviors. In looking at spiritual leaders or
looking at
spiritual groups historically I tend to draw back and place
them on
Cartesian paired-data graphs working two types of relative
scales to
get a fix on the spirituality. I find this works good as
framework
for placing any group or saint relatively. Weber's
definition of
Charismatic can be one scale. There also comes a calculus
that can
be seen through time with charismatics or their groups
(life-cycle)
for instance if you plot transformative spiritual
affective-ness on
one axis against the altruistic evolution of group
organizational
development on another. Graphing like thus one can parse
variously
using data-pairs of scale to sort them out relatively.
For instance,
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/communal-studies-forum/BVT5Okg_nfc
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/communal-studies-forum/BVT5Okg_nfc
Awoelflebater writes:
How many times do I have to tell you
Bucko, there are NO SUCH THINGS AS SAINTS. Get over it. Go
stare your
horse in the face, look in his eyes and tell me this is not
the most
sublime, the deepest thing you will ever see. Collecting the
ashy
crap emanating from some fake's toes or feet or whatever
it was you
said you saw is downright creepy. Get a grip. For a farmer,
you need
to get grounded again. I think you've flown off in the
cornfields to
somewhere imaginary and strange.
Weber's
definition of charismatic is
good for purpose of discussion generally and also for
extending out
to include the uncomfortable person who is skeptically asking
in
unknowing
disbelief, “what exactly's a saint?” I feel
that granting the
spiritual consideration of charisma makes the whole
consideration of
spirituality and charismatic leadership much more
interesting and also makes for a more interesting sense of
history too if people will grant for
sake of discussion that charismatic saints do happen.
Weber's
definition then begins to allow for further scholarly
consideration
of spirituality and of even the saintly, if people will
grant it rather
than just being in a position of contending and denying
it.
-Buck
Thanks Buck but did you go
out and look into your horse's eyes today? If you did,
can you tell me what a "saint" can relay to you
that those eyes can't? Did you feel anything? Learn
anything? Did you realize that saintliness, depth and wisdom
is everywhere to be found in the things around you? Did you
know that the powers that be can't kick you out of the
Dome for transcending into your horse's eyes? Sounds
like a win win to me.
I am not
"uncomfortable" with the possibility that what you
think of as "saints" exist, indeed, I surely hope
they do. I believe all things are possible, including all
manner of beings. "Unknowing disbelief" does not
describe the nature of my incredulity about the existence of
saints. I just don't think they are what you and others
think they are. I think they are way more than
that.
Turq,
separating the NP-Disordered as a
consideration is just a scale with a range and distribution
of
consideration around the real spiritual charismatic. The
Dis-ordered may just indicate bad nurture of upbringing or
some bad
nature of dis-ease of genetic material otherwise and both
may be independent of
a charismatic life of saintly-hood as a trans-formative
affective
energy field in time. Bad nurture or bad nature may
travel with charisma evidently as part of the story.
That is only human? The OEM of the human form
does come with ego included as part of the factory package
on earth. That evidently can give us all a lot to talk
about and I appreciate your journalistic pursuit of the
subject here.
-Buck in the Dome
>
> "Weber, in an oft quoted passage, defined charisma
as a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue
of which [s/]he is set apart from ordinary [people] and
treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at
least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These
are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but
are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the
basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a
leader." 1"
Turq
writes:I would suggest -- and in fact have, many
times -- that a synonym for charisma in many cases is
Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
There is a weakness in many people and their basic *lack* of
self confidence and self awareness that makes them
"easy prey" for those who have a surfeit of it.
They encounter someone who is so "taken with
themselves" that they can literally think of nothing
and no one else and they project a bunch of admirable
qualities onto a disorder that is largely devoid of them.
Think about the arrival on FFL of someone who is as classic
an example of NPD as has ever existed. Some people saw the
endless "But enough talking about me...let's talk
about me" drivel as what it was and lost interest, and
some looked at the same drivel and somehow projected
greatness onto it.
To this day, the most dismaying thing about my entire
experience at FFL has been the fact that many people here
were completely *unable* to recognize two classic
psychopaths -- Ravi and Robin -- when they encountered them.
Instead they admired them, became their groupies, and in one
case actually created a small cult following around them.
That is worrisome, especially in a group of people who claim
to be "sophisticated spiritual seekers" who've
been "on the path" for 20-30 years. To have spent
that much time theoretically studying the psychology of
enlightenment without being able to tell it from the
psychology of psychopathology is
shocking.
O).
