Xeno, sorry for attributing to you the idea of NPD's incurability. I took it as tacit agreement when you left in that strong statement at the beginning of the article. I was wrong to do so. Just to repeat that I'm very encouraged by the work Dr. Behary is doing in the field of NPD. I think both she and Dr. Siegel, whose focus is on other disorders, use mindfulness meditation. I think they both also have a strong neurophysiological perspective on all this which I think is very good news. Think undeveloped mirror neurons, which I would guess sociopaths have, and what can be done to awaken and strengthen them via mental techniques and everyday strategies.
As for so called normal people and spiritual practices and results, I'm now mentally comparing Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie and Adyashanti, three seemingly very different paths to a quite realized, IMO, state in each case. I'll also add in Father Keating whom Rick has interviewed. Actually listening to some of those interviews might shed some light on what, if any, influence there is from the original motivation onto the results. >From my own experience and reading about others and listening to others, I >think the whole thing is a crap shoot. I'm just reading Adya's Falling Into >Grace, which is of course, a much better way of saying that! ________________________________ From: Xenophaneros Anartaxius <anartax...@yahoo.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 8:32 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: A short history of the FFL Posting Limits, for Seraphita --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Share Long <sharelong60@...> wrote: > > Xeno! You had me chuckling last night when I read this, thank you, and > smiling this morning as I reply. And even Ravi has finally noticed how > humorous you can be. See how much good a short, snappy reply can accomplish?! > I'm just sayin...AND I really enjoy your longer replies too. > > PS Any change in your opinion about NPD not being curable? As the subject of NPD was brought up on FFL, I was just curious, just as when I came across an article on sociopathy; so have been reading something about them. The opinion that NPD is not curable is not mine, it is found in the material I have read and copied to FFL. It is also the opinion in these articles that sociopathy is not curable either; these things seem to be baseline ways the brain and its programming interprets the world and the sense of self. The question that interests me is can a discipline like meditation have a significant impact on these people, and what would that impact be? It seems to be an unconscious rule in spiritual circles, if you do so-and-so, there will be some sort of uniform result. Maybe that is not true. Maybe only certain people, or even just a subset of certain people (what sociopaths call 'neuro-typical' people or empaths), respond in the predicted way to spiritual techniques. As research on meditation techniques is in general not very good, finding data on population subsets like this would seem to be out of the question at this point in most cases. Mental problems aside, it would be interesting to find out if there is a difference in result between people who learn meditation because they want to feel better, and people who have strong desire for enlightenment, this latter being the historical reason for doing meditation. This does not require a scientific definition of enlightenment, since none exists in my acquaintance, only that certain people want whatever the word enlightenment means to them. "Normal people get too bothered witnessing suffering to keep seeing it. Narcissists don't care – they are too focused on their own story, judging the losers in a way that makes them feel good about themselves, etc. But sociopaths can really see the suffering and keep going."
