I always want to have more to say, than what I actually have to say.
To fit in.
There is an extreme that the extremely compliant will go to.
As Annie Lennox sang “They say the greatest coward can hurt the most ferociously “
What a voice! What an amazing lyric.
This is the mess I am extracting myself from. A few days ago, in my contemplation of the irritation of all the various life forms living on me, in me around me, and what not…I started to see that Inhave to “lean into” this.
I do not , and have never , had any sort of “pleasure dome”. As in, it was not in my experience that life was going to be pleasurable and easy.
It’s not in many people’s experience at all! Some are better equipped, but most are in some level of “cope”.
My days currently revolve around alcohol. Which is such a weird turn of events over the last decade. As before that, I didn’t particularly care about it.
I quite smoking nearly a year ago. That was an amazing thing really. It had far greater grip on me than drinking. At least I thought so.
But drinking alcohol actually is what makes me the closest to who I want to be.
I feel things other than boredom, resentment, and frustration.
I feel like I am soft.
Like Paul Simon’s sang, in one of my other favourite songs; “ why am I so soft in the middle, when the rest of my life is so hard?”
I am being honest, it seems so serious otherwise. Some sort of test.
Like a Rick and I agreed many yeas ago; if there was a “Button “ . We would have slammed our hands on that a long time ago!
To keep it real, and less dramatic, I am “leaning into” life being far less than “hedonistic “ and mostly painful.
Pain is just as much a part of life as pleasure. That is, being alive has lots of natural pain and discomfort. Sometimes, and mostly, that’s all it has.
A Greenland Shark live it’s entire multi-century life with parasites hanging off it’s eyeballs!
In my experience, what alcohol does is making the fearful “me” descendant, and the adventurous “me” ascendant, but it’s all “me” anyways ranging and pivoting from bad to good feelings.
Some of my most conventionally happy memories are when I was drunk, and that’s because I went “risk on” mode, and dare to be more connected to people in various ways (sexually, romantically, fraternally).
These memory imprints are a testament of who was in control: it was “me” liking me and being more liked, because my usually avoidant personality prevents these connections to happen and both me and the others crave it.
But I don’t remember any moment when a “me” wasn’t in control; in fact, could be a positive “me”, but also negative ones because “I” have been more malicious as well, so I can potentially be both very collaborative but also very competitive under the influence. It’s all just delegation to different parts of “me” according to different contexts and circumstances. Nothing close to an EE/IE or a PCE, at least in my experience.
Incidentally, I had an interest shift regarding alcohol weeks ago, after a nice switch in my overall mood. At some point a couple of months ago, I realized a barrier I had with people was weakened all of a sudden. From there I decided to not drink in a few occasions with friends (when I usually drink), and noticed how I wasn’t bored, competitive or craving for connection, but was actually calm and overall happy.
Now, this may not be a permanent shift, as I decided to have a couple of beers again just recently, but at least I learned that there’s a way to not be dependent on alcohol to be in an harmonious mood and be liking/likable around people.
I guess it’s still dependent, but it’s dependent on the actualist inertia I cultivated in the last few days (when I dared to feel happy and harmless in a more sustained way), and that’s a better way of depending than emergency drugs like alcohol, I guess.
Some who have talked with me on the phone or video, will know I am just a normal guy. I want to like you, and I want be liked. Very normal. I have always maintained that evangelist type of enthusiasm for making something meaningful in conversations, and try as I can to be accommodating.. Obviously, I am looking for my own meaning, my own position in that exchange. However, I appreciate that both are doing the same.
I appreciate the people here, and a few I I talked with elsewhere, that seek a solution to the suffering the world, if not only their own suffering.
So, if I can frame this as just “having a chat”, instead of what it actually is, a public declaration,( this is searchable public post, and not a private conversation), if I could for the sake of what I am going to type, pretend mutually that it’s a “safe space “ (which it is not) then, we can read what I am about to write as if tomorrow neither of us will remember it, because we usually have conversations to be heard and to connect, rather that leave with a dossier on “he said this, and thus…I am on his side, or the other side.”
Preamble out of the way, here is the central thought:
This iteration of the universe sucks.
I really felt genuinely whole saying and thinking this today.
A few who know me from before the 2015 trip (which I skipped ) will potentially remember how obsessed I am about the words “infinite “ and “eternal “. A long time before Actualism, these were the two words that shaped my core ideas.
It dawned on me today that this is not the ultimate form of the universe. There is no ultimate form.. (This is not a declaration, imagination is key here; we are just chatting) . There is, by definition of “infinite “ and “eternal “ no ultimate form.
I felt whole just saying out loud, this universe (this manifestation of infinite and eternal existence) sucks.
I pushed back at Vineeto about the statement “what I can eat, and what could eat me”. I understand the reference, but found it absurd. I know I can kill and eat chickens. Fish. Give me a sharp stick, and I can have a go at rabbits, sheep, all sorts of creatures. I can kill them and eat them.
Yesterday, as I thought about this, I felt completely “whole” when I said out loud “that sucks”.
So, what is the point?
It’s the infinitude! The infinitude is what is fundamentally enjoyable. This particular express of the infinitude does suck. But, the infinitude itself, the fundamental and essential existence of existence, is essentially what Richard called “pure intent”. Something fundamentally beyond the fact that the “red in tooth and claw” “dog eat dog” “what can I eat and what can eat me” circle of “life” in this out folding of infinite possibilities, is enjoyable. It is able to be experienced perfectly. Even though this current universe requires me to eat other living things, the infinitude itself, is not “tied to” this way of existence. It is existence. It is infinite and eternal existence.
Now, so this post has some depth, rather than me (in typical fashion) fill in the gaps in my own head, assuming everyone else is in my head, let me spell it out;
I will die, this is the only life that I will ever have. This universe does suck, it suck a lot! But, the infinitude itself, is enjoyable.
DNA, Stars, the entire brutality of 4 kelvin being the temperature of the measurable universe, the absence of life in general, and the brutality of the life we know; it’s just one of an infinite potential ways the infinitude can exist.
We already know this. We can already imagine a far better way of existing. I could rattle of a handful of ways this universe could be better. I would have to limit myself to a handful.
What is the point? This brutal existence, with creatures eating each other, is just another of the infinite ways the universe can …universe.
We get the opportunity to free ourselves in this moment, from the very simple and apparent fact this example of the universe, sucks.
As you would know, actualism is experiential. When there is no identity, either in a PCE or when actual free, the universe is experienced as it factually is – infinite and eternal. It is ‘you’, the identity which creates and experiences the self-centric limitation and boundary to then fill this limited experience with imagination and beliefs/ concepts. As such your “by definition” statement is without substance – it is either philosophical or imaginary, or both.
Andrew: I pushed back at Vineeto about the statement “what I can eat, and what could eat me”. I understand the reference, but found it absurd. I know I can kill and eat chickens. Fish. Give me a sharp stick, and I can have a go at rabbits, sheep, all sorts of creatures. I can kill them and eat them.
Yesterday, as I thought about this, I felt completely “whole” when I said out loud “that sucks”.
By now, you made it clear that your whole message is an emotional reaction to what I wrote to you six days ago –
Vineeto: The instinctual passions are also called animal instinctual passions – because all animals are endowed with instinctual programming/ passions to ensure their survival and species proliferation – even jellyfish operate by the principle of attraction/ repulsion, the most primitive instinctual behaviour. Jellyfish are not free from the instinctive/ instinctual programming or behaviour, they are not felicitous either, let alone harmless. They operate under the same principle as all instinctive/ instinctual programmed creatures – what can I eat, what can eat me? (7 Apr 2026)
I understand from your ‘non-declaration’ that when you say “I pushed back at Vineeto about the statement” means that you do not question the fact of how instinctive/ instinctual passions operate but that you strongly express your displeasure/ resentment about the fact that it is so. You are riling against the way the universe, in this case sentient beings, operate and function.
Andrew: So, what is the point?
It’s the infinitude! The infinitude is what is fundamentally enjoyable. This particular express of the infinitude does suck. But, the infinitude itself, the fundamental and essential existence of existence, is essentially what Richard called “pure intent”. Something fundamentally beyond the fact that the “red in tooth and claw” “dog eat dog” “what can I eat and what can eat me” circle of “life” in this out folding of infinite possibilities, is enjoyable. It is able to be experienced perfectly. Even though this current universe requires me to eat other living things, the infinitude itself, is not “tied to” this way of existence. It is existence. It is infinite and eternal existence.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what infinitude means [infinitude: infinite extent, amount, duration, etc.; a boundless expanse; an unlimited time; (Oxford English Dictionary)] – there is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what pure intent means but that is a topic for another conversation. This short quote from Richard might explain infinitude (there is more in Richard’s selected correspondence on the topic) –
Respondent:(9) Can you tell me how far the space around us extends. Can that space end somewhere? If so what is beyond that? Richard: Space is infinite, so it extends indefinitely. As it is infinite, it can not end somewhere. As it does not end, there is nothing beyond the universe. It is ‘I’ who, being a fiction, desires Immortality to perpetuate ‘my’ real existence for all of Eternity – thus secretly despising this body and this physical life – and it is ‘I’ who, being a central figure in ‘my’ scheme of things, proposes that there is an outside to this material universe. There is not. This universe has no edges … which means that there is no centre either. With no centre to existence we are nowhere in particular. Being here, as an actuality, is to be anywhere at all, for infinity is everywhere all at once. [Emphasis added]. (Richard, List A, No. 23, #No.01)
As you say at the beginning of this message “this iteration of the universe sucks”, what you consider infinitude is ‘your’ imagined “iteration” of infinitude, experienced and expressed through the lens of your identity and resentment. The actual physical infinitude, boundless in expanse and time, does not have “iterations”, where suddenly different laws of physics operate, imagined perhaps of the nature that you wouldn’t find objectionable. As such your statement “the infinitude is what is fundamentally enjoyable” is altogether a product of your imagination, an ‘infinitude’ which has enjoyable “iterations” and those which “suck”.
Andrew: Now, so this post has some depth, rather than me (in typical fashion) fill in the gaps in my own head, assuming everyone else is in my head, let me spell it out;
I will die, this is the only life that I will ever have. This universe does suck, it suck a lot! But, the infinitude itself, is enjoyable.
DNA, Stars, the entire brutality of 4 kelvin being the temperature of the measurable universe, the absence of life in general, and the brutality of the life we know; it’s just one of an infinite potential ways the infinitude can exist.
We already know this. We can already imagine a far better way of existing. I could rattle of a handful of ways this universe could be better. I would have to limit myself to a handful.
What is the point? This brutal existence, with creatures eating each other, is just another of the infinite ways the universe can … universe.
To say “We already know this. We can already imagine a far better way of existing” in one breath is an oxymoron – just because you can imagine something does not mean it is factual. It does not mean you “know this” for a fact, else there was no need to imagine. You already have filled in “the gaps in my own head”, suggesting that the universe you experience is “just one of an infinite potential ways the infinitude can exist”. In other words, you find your idea of infinitude “enjoyable”, while you find the emotional/ passional reality which ‘you’, the identity, experiences, anything but enjoyable.
This quote might be informative –
Richard: The only ‘infinitude’ there is, for an identity, is a metaphysical infinitude (a timeless and spaceless and formless ‘being’ or ‘presence’). Respondent:I would say that regardless of the thoughts, feelings, beliefs present, it is impossible to not be in the universe. Richard: Ha … it is impossible for an identity (being but an illusion/ delusion) to ever be in actuality. Respondent:But where else is there to be, for you are always here, even if you say I am something/ somewhere else. Richard: An identity is never here – let alone ‘always here’ – as to be here is to be at this place in space (now at this moment in time). [Emphasis added]. (Richard, AF List, No. 54, 1 Nov 2003)
Andrew: We get the opportunity to free ourselves in this moment, from the very simple and apparent fact this example of the universe, sucks. (link)
Whenever you allow your emotions full reign, as in this post, intelligence doesn’t get much of a chance to operate. By starting with an imagined premise that there are “infinite potential ways” of ‘universe-iterations’ you just dive deeper into imagination and metaphysics.
There is indeed “the opportunity to free ourselves” for those who are interested – allow the current strong feelings of resentment subside by neither pushing them away (repressing) nor feeding them (expressing) until you get back to feeling good. Then intelligence will get a word in edgeways.
Here is what Richard has to say about dealing with resentment [resentment: an indignant sense of injury or insult received or perceived, a sense of grievance … (Oxford Dictionary)] – best read when feeling good –
Richard: Sure, there is a whole range of reasons for getting angry (which vary according to different situations and circumstances) … maybe the following will be of assistance in regards righteous anger (aka indignation):
• [Richard]: ‘One of the major issues the identity inhabiting this flesh and blood body all those years ago attended to very early in the piece was the indignation – ‘anger excited by a sense of wrong, or by injustice, wickedness, or misconduct; righteous anger’ (Oxford Dictionary) – which had dogged him from almost as early as ‘he’ could remember (‘he’ was often moved to indignancy because of injustice/ unfairness whilst still in grade school for instance) as righteousness, being oh-so-readily justifiable, is such an insidious feeling’. *(Richard, AF List, No. 79, 9 Feb 2005). *
• [Richard]: ‘… one of the most persistent forms of anger is indignation (or righteous anger/ justifiable anger): it can be eradicated rather simply by the realisation that its raison d’être – a guardian against injustice, unjustness, unfairness, inequality (partiality, discrimination, and so on) – is as much a human invention as those concepts it defends … justice, justness, fairness, equality (impartiality, indiscrimination, and so on).
I have touched upon this elsewhere: (Richard, AF List, No. 66, 27 Apr 2005).
• [Richard]: ‘There is no ‘chaos’ and ‘order’ as a ‘sub-stratum of the universe’ … they are but human inventions and do not exist in actuality. The same applies to fairness/ unfairness, justice/ injustice and any other human concepts that, whilst being useful for human-to-human interaction, are futility in action when applied to the universe. Male logic is as useless as female intuition when it comes to being free: the everyday reality of the ‘real-world’ is a veneer ‘I’ paste over the top of the pristine actual world by ‘my’ very being … and ‘being’ is the savage/ tender instinctual passions (giving rise to feelings of malice/ love and sorrow/ compassion etc., with the resultant concepts of bad/ good and evil/ god and so on) which cripples intelligence by invariably producing dualistic concepts. ‘Tis all a fantasy … feelings rule in the human world’. (Richard, List B, No. 33c, 3 Aug 2000).
Put simply: nature is neither fair nor just – a volcanic eruption (for just one instance) does not discriminate between who or what it obliterates/ destroys – and thus coupled with the basic resentment at having to be alive in the first place is the further grievance that life is inequitable/ iniquitous. (Richard, AF List, No. 76, 16 Jun 2005).
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Andrew: What I see is that I transferred me “fear of god” which I was born into, to a reverence of “the universe”.
I couldn’t validate and value my own life, because of this. Like the billions before me, and contemporary to me, revere some higher power.
The universe, is not a “higher power”. It’s down to earth. I just so happens that this iteration “sucks”. It is “down to earth” crap. (link)
The physical universe is indeed “down to earth”, and the down-to-earth fact is that it is “boundless in expanse and unlimited in time”. It has always been here and will always be here. It has no “iterations”. To you it “sucks” because this is what your instinctual/ passionate identity informs you of, which operates via the principle of “what can I eat, what can eat me” (in other words, attraction and repulsion), or, in higher animal species, the instinctual passions of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.
The good news is that “the opportunity to free ourselves” exists, and one can diminish the influence of these passions, both ‘good’ and bad feelings, and its concomitant social identity, by being affectively attentive each moment again with the sincere commitment to feeling good come what may, and use one’s native intelligence to find and eliminate the triggers/ reasons for not feeling good (such as the resentment for being here that you have expressed). Without such firm aim one easily drowns in the continual see-saw of emotions and feelings. Here is what Chrono reported just today –
Chrono: Yes it makes everything easier if I’ve made committing to feeling good right now the number 1 priority. It makes sense now why I’d be more stuck in certain bad feelings in the past for a long time. It’s because that commitment had not been made. Now that it has, it’s just a matter of returning to that commitment if I notice I’m not feeling good and also figuring out why. (link)
I didn’t have anything more to say about the discussion above. I otherwise was “over” trying to work out how any of this “actualism” was going to work out for me.
It clearly wasn’t. 14 years, and not so much as a sustained period of feeling good. Whatever was in my way, was clearly unmovable through whatever ways I was approaching it.
Strangely, over the last few days, another pursuit, has brought ‘me’ into sharp focus. More so that ever before.
I have been learning to become a Trader, specifically forex and gold/oil. I started over a year ago, and was able to do it full time, (sort of) for the last 7 weeks.
I thought that I would master it. I am pretty good at picking up skills, and this seemed like something that “if I just had the time” I would get the hang of.
Oh! How wrong I was. The entire skill “is” emotional. Yes, there is hundreds of hours of learning, which is very easy to do with AI. Yes, the principles are not “rocket science “. But, boy oh boy, if it is not “the” Masterclass in feelings being a detriment to living.
The simultaneous effect has been my desire to start jogging, and becoming healthier. I feel compelled to increase my cognitive health! I can’t hide! I am exposed!
Without meaning to, when I am just doing anything, the world around is brighter and more vibrant.
It’s very obvious that the very immediate fact that ‘I’ am in the way of being able to trade effectively, and I have no one else to blame except my feeling reality, is so unintentionally the best learning experience regarding actualism I have had.
Andrew: Hi.
I didn’t have anything more to say about the discussion above. I otherwise was “over” trying to work out how any of this “actualism” was going to work out for me.
It clearly wasn’t. 14 years, and not so much as a sustained period of feeling good. Whatever was in my way, was clearly unmovable through whatever ways I was approaching it.
Hi Andrew,
It often is this way – one picks up one end of the stick and runs with it but then missing an overall aspect of the actualism method/ practice, which you are starting to now experientially understand – that “feelings being a detriment to living”.
Feelings are indeed “a detriment”, at least both the ‘good’ and the bad feelings, whereas the felicitous/ innocuous feelings are only beneficial to living. Now that you experientially see how “detrimental” and silly it is to nurture those non-felicitous and harmful feelings, the obvious consequence is that they lose their dominance and attraction and “the world around is brighter and more vibrant”.
Andrew: Strangely, over the last few days, another pursuit, has brought ‘me’ into sharp focus. More so that ever before.
I have been learning to become a Trader, specifically forex and gold/ oil. I started over a year ago, and was able to do it full time, (sort of) for the last 7 weeks.
I thought that I would master it. I am pretty good at picking up skills, and this seemed like something that “if I just had the time” I would get the hang of.
Oh! How wrong I was. The entire skill “is” emotional. Yes, there is hundreds of hours of learning, which is very easy to do with AI. Yes, the principles are not “rocket science “. But, boy oh boy, if it is not “the” Masterclass in feelings being a detriment to living.
The simultaneous effect has been my desire to start jogging, and becoming healthier. I feel compelled to increase my cognitive health! I can’t hide! I am exposed!
Without meaning to, when I am just doing anything, the world around is brighter and more vibrant.
It’s fascinating to read how your experiential acknowledgement and understanding that “feelings being a detriment to living” is now giving you the motivation to start living life in a different way, more sensible and salubrious, more happy and appreciative whilst giving less emphasis on philosophically working out the problems of the world.
Andrew: It’s very obvious that the very immediate fact that ‘I’ am in the way of being able to trade effectively, and I have no one else to blame except my feeling reality, is so unintentionally the best learning experience regarding actualism I have had.
Who would have thought it?
Haha (link)
Ha, who would have thought it indeed – when there is no one else to blame you realise you can fix yourself up.
And the tools and way to do that are all there on the AFT website, yours for the using if and when you want it.
Richard: I am not gifted or special … I was born of ordinary parents, was sent to an ordinary state school – receiving an average education until I was fifteen years of age – took an ordinary job and worked for a living. I eventually got married and had four children and bought a house and … in short, I was relatively normal and did all the expected things. Thus did I live my life for thirty two years according to the ‘tried and true’ methods as laid down by the countless millions of other humans that had lived before me. I tried my best to make their system work to produce the optimum result … but to no avail. Only then did I make the first and most important movement of my own volition … I discarded the ‘tried and true’ as being the ‘tried and failed’. (I did say ‘I was relatively normal’ because one thing, and one thing alone, stood out that distinguished me from whomsoever else I met: I wanted to know – as an actuality – just what it was to be a human being here on this planet, as this body, in this life-time.) (Richard, List A, No. 26)
You might be able to relate to this, further down in the same email –
Richard: It is a radical break with the past … something akin to an evolutionary mutation, so personally seditious is its revolutionary opening gambit. (Richard, List A, No. 26)
Richard “Eighteen years ago I looked – actually looked for the first time – at the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the oceans and the sky and the clouds … and the stars at night … and just knew that this enormous construct called the universe was not ‘set up’ for us humans to be forever forlorn in with only scant moments of reprieve. It was all too big, too enormous, too magnificent and too marvellous to be forever a ‘vale of tears’. I realised there and then that it was not and could not ever be some ‘sick cosmic joke’ that we all had to endure and ‘make the best of’. I felt foolish that I had believed for thirty two years that the wisdom of the world I had inherited – the human world that I was born into – was set in stone.”
I had tears in my eyes for the first time reading something on the AFT.
It is a wonderful piece of writing, and I am very pleased it touched you and moved you to tears.
Something has happened to you that opened a window for you to be able to be receptive in a more profound way. Perhaps your recent the insight you wrote about yesterday has something to do with it –
>Andrew: … I have no one else to blame except my feeling reality … (link)
When all other distractions are presently quiescent and you are only interested in changing yourself then you suddenly notice and absorb what has stayed obscured before – how can I change my “feeling reality” to be one of enjoyment and appreciation.
All the best for further fortuitous and beneficial discoveries.
I just deleted the start of what was going to be a dramatic post about why I cringe at my posts. Then I needed to take out the trash, and that gave me the opportunity to reflect and I saw that I was definitely going to cringe at my post.
Taking out the trash just saved me a cringe moment.
My lastest cringe moment, which I would describe as an existential cringe moment, up there with existential dread: it was realising I wasn’t really that good of a song writer, and the 3 songs I had completed in my life to a “published stage” were really not very good.
The post I deleted was going to delve into why I post at all, and why I ever was inclined to seek in the first place. There was death, abuse, suicide, and what not involved.
I thought that was a good place to start, as it was accurate. I can only say that I appreciate that your ongoing efforts, and perhaps I would more would be useful if, nope, skipping why I started seeking properly (the death and what not), to the crux of what you linked me in on: cringing at one’s posts.
Cringing is so very normal. Most people are cringing all the time. What I am posting about is the use of “narcissism” and “vanity” being conflated.
My understanding, from being heavily involved with actual NPD and a lot of learning, is the common understanding of narcissism is way off base in terms of the reality involved.
But, instead of taking my word for it, perhaps the word of a self described sociopath and grandiose narcissist (he says he ranks off the scale on both tests):
Prof. Sam Vaknin. https://youtube.com/@samvaknin?si=yeHzk6XOHiUbK7nz
Well respected (?) , i am not sure, he says so. But the point this: when my last girlfriend displayed unmistakeable symptoms, I deep dived this guys videos and it was so spot on, that it removed any anger of mystery.
Why is that relevant? Well, I noticed you last, or second last post was how much you want to be free from this “narcissistism / vanity” . I assume that was the aspect?
It may pay to understand that an actual clinical narcissist doesn’t technically have ann ego, and is thus not vain.
Sam Vaknin describes the development of the disorder as the result of the child being objectified. In this, the child never develops beyond 2 years old, as a psyche.
Relevance? Not sure. However, it was very instructive to me to have the “real deal” explain the clinical and his own respected (?) opinion of how he became that.
As of now, I am not aware of any cure for NPD or ASPD.
I am not calling you either of these things, I have always enjoyed your posts, for exactly the opposite reasons: very considerate and thoughtful, and I have always been very impressed with the care you show people. But while you are considering the subject of narcissism and “vanity”, perhaps the latest information would be beneficial.
By the way, “vanity” used to mean something very different to its modern meaning. Once it meant “meaningless and ineffective “ as in “vanity of vanities, chasing after the wind”
When I write about narcissism/vanity it is more to clearly label the ‘flavour’ of that particular aspect of ‘me’ which I am referring to, I am not implying that I am clinically a narcissist or anything of the kind. Narcissism/vanity exists in all ‘selves’, it’s part of the survival package of ‘me’.
So when I am looking at these ‘good’ feelings which are rooted in ‘my’ self-image, and the dramas that stem from that, it makes sense to call it vanity or narcissism, but this is not a clinical diagnosis.
I didn’t mean that I thought you were calling yourself that, but rather that the entire subject is far beyond “vanity” and the regular understandings of ego, pride and vanity.
I realise actualism is proclaimed in the first line Of the website as “It is possible to live in this modern era, freed from out-dated Philosophy and Psychiatry”, but i never saw anything about narcissism being “cured” in the clinical sense on the website. As in, the word is used in it everyday meaning whenever i have read anything on the site.
the clinical reality of the “disorder” is far more instructive than the way it is is lumped in with philosophy and metaphysics et al, on the website.
There is over 100 years of research into how the “normal” aspect of the psyche can manifest in the worst of human behaviour and create the worst of it. Objectification (whether sexual, or otherwise) at the early stages of life creates what Vaknin describes as an “imaginary friend” which ends up being the only self the victim ever develops.
To take it back to applicable usefulness: in what way have we created and maintained a false self from childhood becuase of objectification?
