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
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote: > > "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" 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.