Vampirism...?

[godhi]

Eshmasesh

TeaDidikai

Edit: Of note- I have my own idea as to why the Temple practices as it does, and to be honest- it makes me giggle to think that people are paying money to be used like that.

As for those parasites who say "We need it/We can't help ourselves!", I think it's a pathetic copout and that such people are pretty much the scum of the earth.

So the temple is a scam?
I read a little bit of the site yesterday. From what I read, that was my first impression.
"You MUST buy this book from the temple.
Even if you already have it, you must buy it from the temple anyway!
If you use the book and you are not in the temple, you will get the vampire curse! wooOooOo..."

Sounds like proof that Barnum was right...  

[Eshmasesh]

Morphenius = heart
That reeeeally helps xD
I read the first post last night, I'll have to read the second tonight (I know next to nothing about energy) and maybe the first again to understand it better.  

[TeaDidikai]

Eshmasesh

Morphenius = heart

Look Phenius! Your first fanboy!  

[TheDisreputableDog]

Oh my, Morphenius. I stopped reading a thread at one of your posts the other day because I didn't have time to read it then, and now I'm really sorry I missed it.

Talk about a stronger mind causing a weaker mind to align with it because the weaker isn't paying attention. wink You may have inspired me to not be so lazy.

Anyway...I agree with the "mental/emotional vampire" categorization. Having been in an abusive relationship and had friends of the perpetual victim sort, I know that having all of one's time and motivation co-opted for another's nefarious purposes, witting or un-, is decidedly unpleasant. I don't approve. stare

Disregarding Morphenius' distinction between "order" and "energy" for the moment because I'd like to avoid adopting it out of hand simply because he has blinded me with eloquence: I find it hard to give the idea of psychically stealing energy from someone much credibility. To me it seems like taking cookies from the soul's cookie jar...and that doesn't make any sense.

Engaging in any kind of relationship with an "emotional vampire" can certainly leave one drained. This is because the other person induces stress which decreases the body's ability to fend for itself, or the other person decreases the time available for the body to recuperate. It's not because the parasite is literally removing units of "lifeforce" from the host and adding them to their own stores.

Maybe that's simply a support for Morphenius' classification after all. xp

However, I've never met any of the "psi vamp is as psi vamp does" variety, nor any Vampires-with-a-capital-V. I'll leave the Vampires to Morphenius then, even more so since they seem to have religious motivations rather than claim physiological or psychological necessity.

The effects of psychic vampirism as such could be explained practically as well--simple depression, and so forth. It would be perfectly reasonable for someone with untreated bi-polar disorder to have a mix of manic and depressive episodes, coinciding with the weariness the other people in their life experience in dealing with their moodswings. My mother, for example, sometimes has a very difficult time dealing with her moods and it makes my family nuts. It doesn't mean she's a vampire--she has a disease that went untreated for a long period of time, and we never developed proper coping skills because nobody knew about it. Sure, shielding is effective--the sort that involves telling yourself "It's not my fault, it's not her fault; I will try to have patience and I will be a better person in myself for it."

Or how about: lately I've started feeling very tired, I don't have a lot of energy (hur hur) or motivation to do things I normally enjoy. Then my girlfriend starts feeling the same way around the time that it seems like I'm recovering a little of my zest for life. Gosh, maybe I'm a psychic vampire, and draining her lifeforce to feed my own deficiency! No--I have mono, and I probably infected her, and therefore our illnesses are offset.

I don't think I'm trying to apply an overly reductionist viewpoint to the concept by saying that an imbalance in brain chemistry or lifestyle is a more reasonable explanation for that inexplicable down-in-the-dumps feeling than "Little Susie is stealing my energy."

To borrow and expand from Morphenius a little: humans make patterns. It's something our brains, for whatever reason, are good at. This patterning capability is what makes us able to recognize faces and understand language, for example. Maybe you think Little Susie is draining your energy because you don't like Little Susie, so you don't feel good in her presence, and you subconsciously recognize this pattern and perpetuate it until you decide that Little Susie must be a vampire, because no one else makes you feel this way. Self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a lot like how when considering a man and a woman with equivalent job performance, the man will be more confident than the woman, because the woman has been socialized to pattern her poor performances and pass off her good performances as flukes, and the man has been socialized the opposite way. (cf. Why So Slow)  

[Morphenius]

godhi

Eshmasesh

TeaDidikai

Edit: Of note- I have my own idea as to why the Temple practices as it does, and to be honest- it makes me giggle to think that people are paying money to be used like that.

As for those parasites who say "We need it/We can't help ourselves!", I think it's a pathetic copout and that such people are pretty much the scum of the earth.

So the temple is a scam?
I read a little bit of the site yesterday. From what I read, that was my first impression.
"You MUST buy this book from the temple.
Even if you already have it, you must buy it from the temple anyway!
If you use the book and you are not in the temple, you will get the vampire curse! wooOooOo..."

Sounds like proof that Barnum was right...

I'd like to pose two notes of warning about this. First, if you ever get a hold of any Temple literature, one of the first things they say is:

"Within lies fact and fancy, truth and metaphor. Discriminate with care."

This is on the front page of every book they produce and on the bottom of nearly every webpage on their website. I'm reminded of a quote by either Richard Bandler or John Grinder (the context makes it uncertain as to who was speaking) from their book Frogs Into Princes:

Quote:

Everything we're going to tell you here is a lie. All generalizations are lies. Since we have no claim on truth or accuracy, we will be lying to you consistently throughout this seminar. There are only two differences between us and other teachers: One is that we announce at the beginning of our seminars that everything we say will be a lie, and other teachers do not. Most of them believe their lies. They don't realize that they are made up. The other difference is that most of our lies will work out really well if you act as if they are true.

(Frogs into Princes, p. 18 )

This is not an idle point. Many people in the Temple are active practitioners of neuro linguistic programming (NLP), which happens to be the brainchild of Bandler & Grinder. Having spoken with several of their administrators, I'm quite confident that they are using no end of NLP in the Temple's structure.

Second, the Curse of the Temple is a necessary consequence of their espoused beliefs. An essential part of the process of becoming a god of Vampirism is summoning other beings who have already attained Vampiric godhood. If you have obtained the instructions for summoning them via piracy against the very same Temple they have authorized as their only public interface, you had best hope that you do not succeed in summoning them! If you do, you will need to take steps to make amends. Otherwise you'll have to live with the fact that you've welcomed the greatest predators in the world into your life using material you've essentially stolen from them.

So as silly as it may sound to those who do not abide by Vampirism, this "Curse of the Temple" is actually a sign of integrity on the part of the Temple. According to their paradigm, they are giving the reader fair warning.

(Again, just to remind: I'm not a Vampire. I've simply had more than my share of interactions with Vampires.)

Eshmasesh

That reeeeally helps xD

biggrin Great! I'm glad I could be of some assistance!

TeaDidikai

Look Phenius! Your first fanboy!

eek twisted wink

TheDisreputableDog

You may have inspired me to not be so lazy.

Woot! biggrin I'm pleased to provide inspiration!

TheDisreputableDog

Engaging in any kind of relationship with an "emotional vampire" can certainly leave one drained. This is because the other person induces stress which decreases the body's ability to fend for itself, or the other person decreases the time available for the body to recuperate. It's not because the parasite is literally removing units of "lifeforce" from the host and adding them to their own stores.

Maybe that's simply a support for Morphenius' classification after all. xp

Heh. I don't know about support, but it sounds like you're arguing for essentially the same thing I am. cool  

[catofsilence]

I thought I might make a note here about my thoughts on defenses against psi vamps.

Shielding
This is not always the best idea. It only works on someone who is subconsciously feeding off others. The reason it works is that when you shield put up a wall of you own consolidated energy. When the person does not know they are doing, they bump into it and decide if must not be food. If you have someone who does know what they are doing, all they do is sit there and start chewing on your shield.

Feedback
A clever thought to give what you don't want to the vamp to try to get them to bugger off. Again, this works great against most of them that do not do it on purpose. You might hurt them or make them uncomfortable or some thing along those lines. This stops working so well if the person knows what they are doing and starts to reformat the energy they are taking it.

Reflecting
Why not bend their attempts back on them selves. Leave them sucking their own thumb and they probably will not even notice.

Void state
If you can through one method or another, put your energy up on a shelf so that they can't reach. What are they going to do? Sit there impotently, that's what!  

[TeaDidikai]

My usual favorite method of dealing with folks (especially ones who you warn and they keep at it) is to gag them. A form of crossing that one might liken to a "binding", there is something deeply comforting about starving the bastards.  

[catofsilence]

TeaDidikai

My usual favorite method of dealing with folks (especially ones who you warn and they keep at it) is to gag them. A form of crossing that one might liken to a "binding", there is something deeply comforting about starving the bastards.

Same problem as shielding though. A gag only works if you can't chew your way through it.  

[CuAnnan]

catofsilence

Same problem as shielding though. A gag only works if you can't chew your way through it.

Indeed. But there are ways and means of ensuring this. Barbs in the gag, for example  

[Pelta]

reagun ban

catofsilence

Same problem as shielding though. A gag only works if you can't chew your way through it.

Indeed. But there are ways and means of ensuring this. Barbs in the gag, for example

Or stripping them of everything and leaving them husked... but that sounds like a lot more effort than it's usually worth.

(there is one girl in fibber's though I'd love to see it happen to)  

[Sir_Catherine]

Depression is a mental drain on those around the person. Depression, however, is not something a person has chosen to have.

If the psi parasite is aware of what they are doing, thus choosing to do what they do/have what they have, they need to stop now, no matter if they think they need the energy or not.

To this day my mental health improves with an hour in the sun. It's the time I can most feel the energies of the world around me. There are indeed other, better, sources of energy than your fellow humans.

If the energy stealing is truly unconcious, then someone needs to point it out to them! We have that much responsability. Once we've done our part, it is their turn to take responsability and stop. Kind of like teaching children that it is not okay to force sexual acts on another person and then expecting them to be responsable for their actions if they commit rape. You don't commit rape unconciously. I could be convinced that a psi parasite drains unconciously. Hence the need to make them concious of it first.

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Phenius: good to meet you and read your postings. Their depth reminds me of Tea and Regun. That's a good thing! smile

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I've a friend who claimed to be a psi vampire in that he liked the taste of some people's auras/energy. Not sure how much I believed this. A secodn friend, who's aura he said was delicious, strongly suspected that he was the cause of her headaches for a month.
Either way, the guy learned to do other energy work and stoped leeching her aura so peace does reign. As I said, I'm not sure how much of all this I believe. There was never anger or depression on either of their parts, just a lot of decent humored 'stop drinking from me!'. *shrug* No true danger, no harm done so no big deal or anything to worry about I suppose.

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I am picturing psi vampirism as a block of ice next to a living person. Yes, the head radiating off of the person is 'free for the taking', but the utter coldness of the ice draws off more than is usualy 'freely given' and thus makes the person cold.  

[TeaDidikai]

reagun ban

catofsilence

Same problem as shielding though. A gag only works if you can't chew your way through it.

Indeed. But there are ways and means of ensuring this. Barbs in the gag, for example

Or simply sewing the lips shut.

Sir_Catherine

Depression, however, is not something a person has chosen to have.

Most people do not choose it.

Unhealthy individuals who mark their depression as a measure of their "uniqueness" would be a counter example.