--- In [email protected], Share Long wrote:
>
> Richard, I'm pretty sure this is a specialty of the MGC. If they think
of you as the enemy, they ignore what's good about you and focus on your
mistakes or flaws which of course we all have.
Trying my best to speak generically, Share, I think you'll find that
this is a quality shared by Mean Girls everywhere, not just on this
forum. If I were to pass along the occult view of the 'dynamic' in place
in such interactions, it would go sorta like this.
Mean Girls (of any type, or sex) feed on Attention. They are hooked on
it in the same way that smack addicts are hooked on heroin. And when
they see someone getting more Attention than they are (or, let's face it
on this forum, any Attention at all), they get pissed off at those who
are attracting the Attention because it's "Ours, damnit." If one could
auto-color posts according to psychosis, the posts from Mean Girls would
consistently be green, for jealousy. :-)
So anyway, these wannabe occultists see someone else getting the
Attention that they seek, so they Can't Have That. They have to combat
that somehow. The most common tactic -- Stage One, as it were -- is to
try to attack the person who is getting more attention directly, *to
make them feel bad, and lose their self-confidence*. This first psychic
attack is intended to weaken them.
If it doesn't work, they move on to Stage Two, which involves trying to
make the other people in the immediate environment see the person who
they're paying attention to as flawed or broken, as 'less than
themselves.' This is the Stage in which the Mean Girls usually pull out
all the stops. They'll say anything they can think of about the person
they're trying to demonize, because the Whole Purpose is *to* demonize
them. Since they *obviously* can't compete on equal ground and gain a
similar measure of Attention, they attempt to discredit the ones who are
getting more Attention than they are, in the hopes that it will shift
back to them.
So *naturally* such people focus on what they perceive as your mistakes
or faults. *Their* whole act is about pretending that they don't have
any. So if you do, *you* are not worth paying Attention to, and they
are.
Yeah, right.
This is such an old, tired act on the Internet that it amazes me that
people still fall for it. But they do.
Bottom line from my POV is that *if* people do, and *if* they write you
off because of what a few Mean Girls say about you, they really aren't
worth having in your sphere of influence, are they?
> Actually I just realized something: it's probably healthier to have
them as enemies than as friends!
You should look into the works of Carlos Castaneda. He may have been a
charlatan, but a case can be made that everyone else people cite on this
forum as an authority is, too. :-) Charlatans or not, they occasionally
said things one can learn from.
In Carlos' case, the pieces of his philosophy you might wanna look into
have to do with his characterization of the Petty Tyrant. They're pretty
much "required reading" if one wants to survive on the Internet.
In the strategic inventories of warriors, self-importance figures as the
activity that consumes the greatest amount of energy, hence, their
effort to eradicate it.
One of the first concerns of warriors is to free that energy in
order to face the unknown with it. The action of rechanneling that
energy is impeccability.
The most effective strategy for rechanneling that energy consists
of six elements that interplay with one another. Five of them are called
the attributes of warriorship: control, discipline, forbearance, timing,
and will . They pertain to the world of the warrior who is fighting to
lose self-importance. The sixth element, which is perhaps the most
important of all, pertains to the outside world and is called the petty
tyrant.
A petty tyrant is a tormentor. Someone who either holds the power
of life and death over warriors or simply annoys them to distraction.
Petty tyrants teach us detachment. The ingredients of the new
seers' strategy shows how efficient and clever is the device of using a
petty tyrant. The strategy not only gets rid of self-importance; it also
prepares warriors for the final realization that impeccability is the
only thing that counts in the path of knowledge.
- Carlos Castaneda, "The Fire From Within"
