"Visiting scholars"?? Of what? From where? Dear Dear FFL,
A Special Thank You to everyone who added in to this thread as it developed. It was appreciated very much by several visiting scholars who came recently to FairfieldLife looking in on this particular subject thread. You were very helpful. Is always interesting to find the range of who the readers are of this place. Best of regards to all my colleagues here, -Buck in the Dome [ OM BTW, You can post an e-mail directly to Buck using the reply for this post and then push the little rectangle on the top right of the text box that comes up. Set the address there. ] PostCharismatic Posts w/Turq's original about Lenz/Rama http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370519 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370519 w/ Melton's Intros http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370565 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370565 w/ comparative comment about succession and Boards http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370575 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370575 Turq's comment about NPD, http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370589 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370589 Ann's qualification of leadership and NPD http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370600 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370600 NPD and Charisma http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370617 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370617 What's a Saint anyway? http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370786 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370786 The Scholarly Consideration of Charisma, http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370672 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370672 Weber's Definition of Charismatic: http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370565 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370565 Graphing Data-pairs, Charismatics and Spiritual movements http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370787 http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/FairfieldLife/conversations/messages/370787 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/#!topic/communal-studies-forum/BVT5Okg_nfc https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!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 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 ) .
