Empty people. Puppet people. Cardboard cutouts. Drones. Organic
Portals. Background characters. Why do these terms even exist? Because
out of necessity they had to be invented by those who independently
noticed the same puzzling phenomenon, one for which there is no
official name: some people seem to be missing something very important
inside. While they are not necessarily any less intelligent, successful,
or physically healthy as anyone else, they nevertheless show no
indication of having any higher components to their consciousness.
Over the years I have received emails from readers who came to
this same conclusion. They noticed that some people were strangely
one dimensional and hollow inside. This observation is not hard
to miss, but it is easy to rationalize away, especially
with modern society being so heavily brainwashed with the politically
correct but unrealistic concept that everyone is completely equal
in every way, which ignores functional differences due to environmental,
genetic, and most importantly, metaphysical factors.
Background
The idea of empty people first dawned on me in 1999 after having
done much research into sociopaths and psychopaths, their condition
being medically known as APD or €œAntisocial Personality Disorder.€
My interest in the subject grew out of having been forced for many
years to suffer under someone whom I later learned had all the signs
of being a sociopath. Heartless and soulless were descriptive terms,
but little did I know just how literally true they were. I had noticed
in this person an emptiness behind the eyes and a very shallow conscious
essence, which seemed to be at the root of the behaviors I observed.
Eventually I realized that this same root condition was present
in some others who were not outwardly sociopathic, but whose lack
of heart was masked by a well-adapted social exterior. In other
words, what psychiatry would diagnose as APD was only the more extreme,
criminal, sloppy manifestation of a condition that otherwise expressed
itself more widely in a socially acceptable and less incriminating
manner. The latter is what may account for the body of empty people
present in the population.
But what exactly is missing in them? The answer is clear if we
look at their common behaviors and qualities of consciousness.
Behavioral and Psychic Characteristics
Their behavior tends toward being glib, shallow, egotistical,
narcissistic, mundane, predatory, and materialistic. Sometimes these
traits are camouflaged by a polished social exterior, but anyone
with a discerning eye can see through the disguise. They lack individuality,
independent thinking, and are strongly biased toward holding a herd
mentality. They lack comprehension of anything beyond the material
sphere of the five senses, and have no interest in such metaphysical
matters except as flashy accessories to boost their social image.
They also appear entirely incapable of empathy, soul-searching,
and willful self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, in the presence of others
they can put on a flashy show of concern, distress, or altruism
for purposes of social manipulation; for example, crocodile tears
to elicit sympathy, or doing something nice for another solely to
guilt trip them later and extort a favor.
Psychically scanning their consciousness reveals something interesting.
There is a certain simplicity, flatness, and inertness to their
essence, even if their intellects are highly developed. Unlike other
people, their conscious energy is more diffuse, dull, impermanent,
and amorphous rather than solid, sparkling, crystallized, and concentrated.
Put another way, their minds are like sand castles instead of real
castles. There is something animalistic and rudimentary piloting
their bodies. It seems they have conscious awareness just as plants
and animals do, but not conscious self-awareness as humans are supposed
to have. There is an important difference between awareness and
self-awareness.
Spirit: The Missing Component
The missing factor must be something that endows a being with
self-awareness, volition, and the capacity to value transcendental
ideals. This goes beyond mere physical factors like missing portions
of the brain, defective genetics, or a poor upbringing, because
the latter are just defects in the hardware and programming of the
biological machine, whereas the problem here involves the consciousness
operating the machine. What intuitive or clairvoyant perception
picks up about their consciousness involves metaphysical factors
instead.
What to call this higher component of consciousness absent in
some people? Usually it would be called the soul, but that has caused
too much confusion in the past. For example, casual readers unfamiliar
with the proper definition of €œsoulless€ thought it meant €œcompletely
devoid of consciousness€ when in reality it meant €œdevoid of individualized
consciousness.€ No, they do have some kind of soul energy by virtue
of being alive, but the soul is not imbued with a higher spark of
true sentience and self-awareness.
Therefore I will call this higher spark €œspirit€ and define
it as follows: spirit is the core of individualized consciousness,
that permanent aspect of one€™s being representing the true Self,
which accumulates experiences and spiritual wisdom throughout life,
survives physical death, and remains intact upon reincarnating to
continue growing toward the fulfillment of its potential. It is
the divine god-spark, the seat of freewill, the holographic fragment
of the Creator residing at the very center of your being, the €œI€
that is you, the inner conscious observer capable of observing even
its own self-observation.
It seems not all humans have spirit. Therefore they have no self-awareness,
individuality, wisdom, empathy, creative intelligence, or conscience.
What further confirms this hypothesis is that, as will be discussed
below, one may observe a total absence of destiny, synchronicity,
symbolic dreams, spiritual lessons, soul growth, and karma in their
lives. This is to be expected if they have nothing permanent in
them that survives death and reincarnates, because only spirit can
gain from such things. Without spirit, they are temporary beings
whose awareness forms shortly before birth and dissolves shortly
after death. And if so, then for them, spiritual life lessons serve
no purpose, karma from past lives does not exist, there is no higher
Self acting as chaperone, nor would they have genuine interest in
anything that serves a purpose beyond their current mortal existence.
Therefore it is to be expected that they be particularly materialistic,
worldly, and mundane in their ambitions; observation confirms this
as well.
Other Components
How can we better understand all this? By understanding the various
components and how they combine to make the whole of a being, we
can grasp the numerous differences and similarities between spirited
and spiritless humans1.
Aside from spirit, the other components are body and soul. Soul
is the nonphysical energetic interface between body and spirit.
Occultists divide the soul into the etheric and astral bodies. The
aforementioned €œempty€ people have bodies and souls, but not spirits.
In this way it is clear that they have some kind of conscious energy,
but not the permanent core that retains continuity through incarnations.
The soul consists of two components, the etheric and astral. The
etheric component is a quantum biasing field that keeps the physical
body from entropic disintegration. Or to put it more simply, it
is life-force energy that keeps the body from decaying. The astral
component is more abstract and intangible. It functions as the seat
of consciously experienced feelings and passions. Feelings are not
just chemical reactions in the brain, nor are they abstract thoughts
in the mind. Rather they are vivid energies residing somewhere in
between, and that buffer zone between the completely physical and
completely metaphysical is the astral component of the soul.
Body and Ego
The body is the biological instrument through which we interact
with our physical environment. The body comes with its own hereditary
dispositions, biological drives and instincts, and behavioral algorithms
stamped into it through social programming. These deterministic
influences converge to create an artificial intelligence in a person
that, by default, runs the body like an autopilot computer running
an airplane.
This artificial intelligence is hereby termed €œego.€ Its fundamental
purpose is to ensure survival of the body by optimizing its behavior
for the surrounding physical and social environment. In other words,
external conditioning programs the ego to achieve survival in the
environment from which that conditioning originates.
But the ego has no true consciousness of its own. It is just a
computer running on neural (and by proxy, etheric) hardware that
simulates a living identity. Its main advantage is that, being just
a computer, it only has to mechanically calculate and react to situations
instead of deeply and consciously reflecting, therefore it can respond
much quicker to external situations.
For the spirit, the ego functions as a software device that automates
interactions with other humans and provides a mask of identity,
programmed from birth, appropriate to the local environment. Somewhat
like a player€™s avatar in the Sims game, which looks and acts like
a person and seems to do its own thing when not directed by the
player.
The problem is that the ego is entirely a product of the past,
and spirit entirely outside linear time. The first is completely
deterministic, the second is completely nondeterministic. The first
is an emergent property of matter, the second a permanent condensation
of consciousness. The two have impulses that are often diametrically
opposed, one pulling toward materiality, the other toward spirituality.
Our daily consciousness, also known as the lower self, is a blending
of both, namely the portion of spirit that shines through the mask
of ego and identifies with it, analogous to a driver so absorbed
in the act of driving that for him the car has become an extension
of his body2.
Physical or Spiritual Influences Upon the Soul
Now the soul, in residing between body and spirit and mediating
between them, is influenced by both. It takes on its organization
and function according to impulses from both spirit and the body.
For instance, the astral body would respond both to a chemical drug
inducing a feeling of euphoria through the body, and the spirit
volitionally invoking a lofty feeling of spiritual joy, although
the effects on the astral are not identical.
Likewise, the etheric body could have its structure altered by
some injury to the physical body, or from some blockage or abnormality
in the astral body percolating its influence down to the etheric
level. Whatever influences are exerted upon the soul by body and
spirit, their effects continue to linger in the soul, like tea continuing
to circulate after having been stirred. This is why I said the ego
runs on both neural and etheric hardware. Despite originating in
the physical, the ego imparts the momentum of its conditioning upon
the etheric3.
Consequences of Lacking a Spirit
With the preceding in mind, consider what happens when someone
has body, ego, and soul, but lacks spirit. First and foremost, their
entire makeup would be the result of material influences like genetics
and environment. The seat of their apparent intelligence would be
the ego. And without the counterweight of spirit, their ego would
reign king. Thus, in accordance with the function of ego, such people
would be completely dedicated to material and social survival.
Notice that people with spirit who are awake to their spiritual
impulses often make willful choices that serve no financial, social,
or egotistic gains, that go against the expectations of Darwinian
evolutionary principles, and that serve only spiritual ends. Such
impulses are absent in spiritless people, thus they are truly optimized
for survival in the physical world. Without conscience, empathy,
or inner battle between ego and spirit holding them back, they can
more quickly and easily succeed in their worldly environments regardless
of the cost to others.
To better understand their metaphysical differences, consider
what happens to spirited and spiritless people upon physical death.
Spirit and soul nested one inside the other, together leave the
physical body. After a while, the etheric component of the soul
disintegrates, leaving only spirit nested inside the astral body.
The astral body then also disintegrates. The disintegration of etheric
and astral bodies, meaning the dissolution or casting away of the
soul, is known in Christian Esotericism as the second death4.
The liberated spirit then advances into the afterlife before reincarnating.
Reincarnation involves the spirit forming around itself a new
soul and then slipping into a new physical body. In sequential reincarnations,
what talents, predispositions, and imbalances it has acquired from
previous lifetimes influences the new incarnation.
In the case of spiritless people, life begins as follows. As the
fetal body gestates in the womb, the soul forms for the first time,
like beach sand being gathered into the shape of a castle, and joins
to the body. This combination produces rudimentary awareness. After
being born, such a person becomes nothing more than a product of
genetics and environment due to absence of spirit. Without a spiritual
counterweight, biological drives and social programming become their
primary impulses in life.
Upon physical death their soul evacuates the body, perhaps containing
a lingering imprint of the ego, and after some time it disintegrates
and is reabsorbed into the lake of energies from which it originally
formed. Nothing of their identity survives. For people without spirit,
this life is their only one. They form upon entering and dissolve
upon leaving. It cannot be otherwise if they lack a core of individualized
consciousness.
Thus everything that a spirited person has due to the continuity
of his or her incarnations, is missing in the life of a spiritless
person. For example, the spiritless would have no need for life
lessons or spiritual learning experiences. What would be the purpose
if whatever is gained disappears after death? Therefore spiritless
people are ones who cannot learn spiritual lessons, who cannot profit
spiritually from the trials of life, who cannot pass what is gained
onto their successive incarnations. And so they have no concern
for lessons of humility, empathy, compassion, understanding, or
forgiveness. Instead of changing as people through spiritual maturation
in life, they only change in the sense of better adapting to life
through conditioning. For instance, whereas a spirited person may
see the error of his ways and grow humble, a spiritless person would
simply learn to not get caught next time.
Karma is another metaphysical factor absent in the life of spiritless
people. There are many misconceptions about karma, so I will first
explain my understanding of it, before showing how its absence affects
the life of a spiritless person.
Karma (the negative type) is simply a spiritual debt or imbalance
acquired upon violating the freewill of oneself or another. Violating
your own freewill happens when you make a choice during an ignorant
state, like when identifying with the ego and acting upon its impulses,
that violates a choice made during a more spiritually sober state.
Upon committing a freewill violation, the higher spirit-associated
aspect of consciousness regrets the error and makes a commitment
to redress it, even if the lower ego-associated aspect tries to
ignore this. The karmic imbalance then attracts experiences that
teach a lesson correcting that ignorance, whether in this life or
the next. The lesson learned is universal and does not require memory
of the original choice that provoked it, just understanding of the
lesson. The karmic experience itself is not what is fated, rather
the lesson learned, therefore karma can sometimes be mitigated through
pre-emptive understanding and forgiveness without necessarily needing
to learn it the hard way through experience.
But without spirit, there is no true freewill and no true lessons
that can be learned. Therefore the spiritless have no karma and
instead live completely under the laws of chance and the law of
the jungle. Whereas a spirited individual might be born with karmic
handicaps, for the spiritless these handicaps would strictly be
a matter of chance or heredity and serve no higher metaphysical
purpose. Same with the timing and manner of their death; whereas
spirited people may have loosely planned out their life before incarnating,
including the way they will die, spiritless people die according
to random circumstances without purpose or meaning, unless their
death somehow plays an important part in the pre-incarnation script
of a spirited individual.
Other missing factors include meaningful symbolic dreams, synchronicities,
higher intuitive guidance, and their personal hand of destiny. Spiritless
people experience none of these because they neither can nor need
to. This should be obvious from understanding the role of spirit,
but I will elaborate for the sake of clarity.
Meaningful dreams primarily serve to alert a person to spiritual
imbalances that need to be corrected, but a spiritless person has
no need for such messages. They also have nothing higher to send
such messages. Without a permanent core of individuality, they have
no €œHigher Self€, which is the perfected future manifestation
of spirit reaching back through time to help out extensions of itself
still in the linear past. And without a Higher Self, they have no
inner intuitive guidance to provide certain nudges and protection
in life. Thus, whereas a spirited person might experience freak
synchronicities and bending of the laws of reality to save them
from untimely death, a spiritless person lacking such direction
and protection would perish according to chance.
Chakra Differences between Spirited and the Spiritless
There is also a difference between spirited and spiritless in
what chakras they have. Chakras are vortical energy centers linking
soul with body, and linking spirit and body through the soul. Each
center coincides positionally with the major glands of the physical
body, and each serves a different behavioral function.
The lower chakras are associated with such behavioral facets as
physical instinct, sexual impulses, base emotions, personal power,
and intellectual activity. Everyone possesses these. The spiritless,
however, have no need for the higher chakras, namely the heart,
crown, and third eye chakras because these are the ones that exclusively
link to spirit.
The heart chakra, the center of higher emotions like compassion,
empathy, spiritual jubilance, is missing in the spiritless because
there is no spirit present to associate with these emotions. The
crown chakra, through which higher intuitive understanding, originality
and creativity, and a connection with objective truth manifests,
is likewise missing. The third eye chakra, located between the brows,
is normally used for the perception of phenomena and concepts beyond
the material realm, and spiritless people confined to the world
of the five senses have no need for it either.
Consequently, another difference between the spirited and spiritless
is that the first have all seven chakras while the latter are missing
the three higher ones, the heart, crown, and third eye chakras5.
This further contributes to the intuitive or clairvoyant perception
that spiritless people are flat and inert inside regardless of how
animated they are on the outside, because the spectrum of their
etheric or auric vibrations are missing certain colors and are therefore
of a lower overall resolution.
All the above follows from one simple postulate: that some people
lack spirit, and that they therefore also lack the higher chakras.
If you deeply contemplate what this entails, you will understand
how this postulate explains the full gamut of observations we have
concerning so-called €œempty€ people.
Difference between Spiritless and Spiritually Asleep People
At this point you might be wondering what is the difference between
spiritless people, and spirited ones who are spiritually asleep
in life or simply immature. After all, both may be worldly in their
goals and thoroughly caught up in the illusion of the €œMatrix.€
Both may not be cognizant of dreams or synchronicities, nor display
much empathy. For example, there are negative people who are completely
under the influence of their egos and external negative forces,
who can commit violent crimes and even mass murder without blinking
an eye. Not all of them are spiritless. But all of them are indeed
void of the influence of spirit when it comes to engaging in such
inhuman behaviors. Some lack spirit, others are asleep to spirit.
The difference is that a spirited but infantile/asleep person
still has latent spiritual potential. So they still have, even in
small amounts, the presence of those spiritual factors and dynamics
mentioned above. They may still suffer the consequences of karmic
debt brought on by dumb choices, they may still receive symbolic
dreams attempting to alert them to spiritual imbalances in life
even if they ignore it, they may still experience synchroni
stic
help in shaping their lives against t
he odds even if they cannot
see it.
Spiritless people
lack that potential completely. They cannot
grow spiritually. This is not a theoretical declaration, but a painful
lesson learned from having dealt with too many such persons who never showed
any signs of growth or evolution no matter how much help and opportunity
for improvement was given to them. At best they adapt, but more
out of conditioning and calculation than actual understanding.
There is another important difference. The spirited have lives
appropriate to their spiritual needs. So there is a correspondence
between their spiritual maturity and type of life. Infant spirits
will lead crude lives, because a basic existence is all they need,
and anything more would be too much for them to handle or gain from.
Meanwhile, the spiritless live whatever life they are driven into
by circumstance and their own cunning, which can mean being a beggar,
corporate executive, or famous author all the same. Without constraints
established by spiritual needs, the spiritless have no spiritual
limits or curriculums structuring their lives. And this is why €œempty€
people are not all just spiritually asleep or infantile, because
there exists a class of people who share the same inertness behind
their eyes regardless of their type of life, their social
standing, their intellectual prowess, and their physical appearance.
Psychopaths, Sociopaths, and Narcissists
The more extreme manifestations of an absence of spirit is known
in psychology as psychopathic, sociopathic, or narcissistic personality
disorders. Spirited people who fit this condition are misguided
and held hostage by their egos, but they can be rehabilitated. Instead
of lacking empathy, their empathy is either suppressed or displaced.
These are not true psychopaths, but spirited people with personality
disorders.
True psychopathy and sociopathy, however, cannot be cured because
something is fundamentally flawed at the core of such persons. They
lack empathy and remorse altogether, and these qualities cannot
be recovered because they were never there to begin with. The incurable
nature of psychopathy is an accepted fact in psychology. The cause
is believed to be an abnormality in the pain and fear centers of
the brain. Even so, without the balancing influence of spirit, such
abnormalities would introduce unchecked errors into the programming
of the ego, which then runs rampant to the point of coming to the
attention of the legal and medical systems. What the medical system
can diagnose is only the extreme and sloppy manifestation of a condition
that is more widespread throughout the population. Other spiritless
people with properly functioning egos are better at keeping their
lack of empathy and remorse camouflaged under more refined social
programming.
Why Spiritless? What Others Say
Theories abound about why some people lack a higher component
to their consciousness and what purpose they serve in the bigger
scheme of things. Since I am not the first to make this observation,
I will now briefly discuss what others have said so that you can
weigh the available options.
John Baines writes in his book The Stellar Man that humans,
like all animal species, have a collective soul unique to their
species. This collective unconscious exerts a de-individualizing
influence on humans, nudging them toward mob mentality, herd mentality,
and following the crowd. Rupert Sheldrake would call this the human
morphogenetic field. People who have not developed their own conscious
individuality are mere automatons following the soporific influence
of the collective unconscious, as though they were extensions of
a hive mind. The goal of esoteric training is to split away from
the herd, to develop one€™s own volition and thereby become a free
being.
Rudolf Steiner voiced similar sentiments. His foundational work, The
Philosophy of Freedom addressed this problem. Steiner said
that as long as humans obey external authority, their own biological
instincts, or the animalistic parts of themselves in common with
the rest of humanity, they are not free beings. Freedom comes from
choosing based on intuitive understanding of what each option entails
and what it means. This act of freewill requires introspection and
spiritual acumen to act from a place of true understanding. Steiner
acknowledged that not everyone introspects to the degree necessary
to make intelligent freewill choices. In private discussions, Steiner
went even further:
Dr. Steiner: That little girl L.K. in the first grade must have
something really very wrong inside. There is not much we can do.
Such cases are increasing in which children are born with a human
form, but are not really human beings in relation to their highest
I; instead, they are filled with beings that do not belong to
the human class. Quite a number of people have been born since
the nineties without an I, that is, they are not reincarnated,
but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon. There
are quite a large number of older people going around who are
actually not human beings, but are only natural; they are human
beings only in regard to their form. We cannot, however, create
a school for demons.
A teacher: How is that possible?
Dr. Steiner: Cosmic error is certainly not impossible. The relationships
of individuals coming into earthly existence have long been determined.
There are also generations in which individuals have no desire
to come into earthly existence and be connected with physicality,
or immediately leave at the very beginning. In such cases, other
beings that are not quite suited step in. This is something that
is now quite common, that human beings go around without an I;
they are actually not human beings, but have only a human form.
They are beings like nature spirits, which we do not recognize
as such because they go around in a human form. They are also
quite different from human beings in regard to everything spiritual.
They can, for example, never remember such things as sentences;
they have a memory only for words, not for sentences.
The riddle of life is not so simple. When such a being dies,
it returns to nature from which it came. The corpse decays, but
there is no real dissolution of the etheric body, and the natural
being returns to nature. It is also possible that something like
an automaton could occur. The entire human organism exists, and
it might be possible to automate the brain and develop a kind
of pseudomorality.
I do not like to talk about such things since we have often
been attacked even without them. Imagine what people would say
if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings.
Nevertheless, these are facts. Our culture would not be in such
a decline if people felt more strongly that a number of people
are going around who, because they are completely ruthless, have
become something that is not human, but instead are demons in
human form.
(Faculty Meetings With Rudolf Steiner Vol. 2, 3 July
1923, p. 649-650)
G. I. Gurdjieff spoke along the same lines. His lectures in Views
from the Real World summarize his position. Humans are born
as blank slates, as biological machines without self-awareness.
At some point in life, a person either develops an €œI€ or branches
onto the opposite path toward further mechanization and decay. So
according to Gurdjieff, €œempty€ people are those who have never
developed their self-awareness as they should have, but we all start
out on equal footing. I don€™t believe this to be true because there
are infants and children who clearly have high sentience behind
their eyes and expected behaviors of self-awareness, while other
infants and children lack it, which suggests the factor of reincarnation
in some people and complete absence of spirit including the potential
for spirit in other people.
Boris Mouravieff has written on the subject of spiritless people
most extensively. See his three volumes of the Gnosis series,
particularly the second and third volumes. His approach is based
on Esoteric Christianity, and thus it quotes heavily from scripture
while bearing much in common with the Fourth Way tradition of Gurdjieff,
which itself seems to trace back to Sufistic teachings. According
to Mouravieff€™s interpretation of the Book of Genesis, there existed
humans before Adam and Eve, but that only Adam and by proxy Eve
and her descendants received the breath of spirit from God. Thus
nowadays there exists two mingling sub-races of humans, the pre-Adamics
without spirit, and the Adamics who have it. Mouravieff explains
that pre-Adamics serve the purpose of harvesting energy from Adamics
as part of the cosmic food chain. He also explores the metaphysical
differences between the two, in regards to pre-Adamics missing certain
€œcenters€, which are analogous to chakras. Mouravieff believes
the pre-Adamics have a group soul unique to their collective, and
that only after further aeons of evolution will their collective
soul differentiate into individual spirits like what the Adamics
already have.
The Corpus Hermeticum, a famous hermetic and gnostic
text written almost two thousand years ago, likewise states that
not all humans have the spark of divine reason (termed Nous)
active within them, and that without Nous a human is more
like an €œirrational creature€ (animal) in his motivations, limited
perception, and way of life. One would have to read the entire text
to understand this in proper context. See the english translation
titled The Way of Hermes: New Translations of the Corpus Hermeticum (Inner
Traditions, 2000).
Lastly, the Cassiopaean Transcripts addresses the works
of Mouravieff and provides some key insights on the matter at hand.
The channelling source claims that some people are empty portals
for other intelligences to work through, that they have uniform
auras among them, lack the higher chakras, can be very skilled at
mimicking €œsouled€ (spirited) people by reflecting back their
own soul energy, and that ultimately they serve as conduits from
which our energy can be siphoned for collection by negative hyper-dimensional
beings. All this is in line with my observations and the writings
of Mouravieff and Gurdjieff, except a bit more realistic than the
viewpoints of those two traditionalists. Whereas John Baines says
some humans are extensions of the human collective soul, the Cassiopaeans
say they are instead extensions of particular animal group souls.
They say such so-called €œorganic portals€ serve as a bridge between
the human and animal kingdom, helping to transfer higher human energies
to these animal group souls to accelerate their evolution, but that
their function has been hijacked by higher negative forces for their
own energy harvesting use.
So what I am saying in this article is not without precedent.
I merely made the observation of €œempty€ people independently
in 1999-2001 and then cycled through various personal speculations
and existing theories before settling on the current one explained
in this article.
I believe there are several ways in which people end up spiritless.
Some are born that way because no spirit ever took root, just like
theater seats that remain empty because no one bought tickets for
them. Others may have started out with spirit but had it depart
at some point in life. It could have evacuated through abuse or
sudden extreme trauma, or evaporated gradually from decades of soul-killing
routine. Not everyone who dies necessarily drops dead. People can
go on existing as hollow shells, as echoes of their former selves,
now void of the spirit that once gave them spark. There are other
darker phenomena like dead people getting reanimated by aliens with
advanced technology, human clones, and other types of artificial
humanoids that would lack spirit, but these are relatively rare
and therefore not worth discussing in this article (see instead
my article on Human
Simulacra).
Here I speak mainly of a larger sector of the population who naturally
lack spirit, who always have throughout history, and who by virtue
of their predatory and worldly natures have gravitated toward the
top of the social, economic, and political hierarchies and made
the world antagonistic toward spiritual impulses.
The Benefits of Understanding
As you can see, this idea that some people lack spirit explains
much about the robotic, animalistic, predatory side of humanity.
So many of us are under the false assumption that we are all the
same inside, that if we walked in another€™s shoes we would fully
understand their motivations. But not all inhuman acts trace back
to mere environmental variables. There are cases where, even if
we put ourselves in their place, we would not act the same. That
is because the cause of their motivations is not environmental,
but metaphysical: the absence of spirit, and the supreme reign of
ego.
Those who ignore the possibility of spiritless people will continue
to shake their heads in frustration at behaviors they simply cannot
compute and must either ignore or rationalize away. When dealing
with a spiritless psychopath, for instance, such individuals are
easily deceived and manipulated.
Only after getting burned again and again do they realize some
humans are a different kind of animal, that some humans are not
remediable because they are acting fully and healthily in accordance
with their spiritless predatory nature. This is especially true
of the psychopathic elite who run this prison planet; they cannot
be rehabilitated, made to see the error of their ways, or convinced
through appeals to empathy.
Caution and Conclusion
It would be unwise, however, to look down upon the spiritless
with contempt. They are what they are, living their lives in accordance
with their makeup. They should be handled no differently from how
one handles a wild animal that acts according to its feral nature.
It is only by trying to hold the spiritless up to higher spiritual
standards that frustration sets in. Without expecting too much of
them, and by understanding why they behave as they do, frustration
gives way to calm insight.
Nor is it worth going out of your way to try and spot who is spiritless,
because in ambiguous cases you will likely err on the side of paranoia.
Since spiritless behaviors form a subset of the behaviors of spirited
people, only the behaviors unique to spirited people can allow quick
and certain identification, and then only of who is definitely spirited.
Spotting only works for picking out who is truly spirited, which
happens most easily with a spirited individual on your wavelength.
You will sense the life in their eyes, the clear and unique energy
behind their words, and the originality and independence behind
their thought processes.
Appendix I: Common Questions
How do I know I€™m not a spiritless person?
If you have experienced even one trait unique to spirit, then you
are not spiritless. The very fact that you have wondered this, that
you are uncertain and wish to know for sure, shows self-awareness
and introspection, which is another trait of having spirit. Regardless,
it is better to assume that you do have spirit and work on developing
its qualities like intuition, empathy, and lucidity, all the while
being aware of your lower egotistical impulses and keeping from
acting on them.
I suspect that my (friend, spouse, parent) is a spiritless
person, what do I do? Set aside for a moment the question
of whether they are spirited or not, and focus solely on whether
you can continue being with them. Are they so manipulative, draining,
abusive, or otherwise harmful to your well-being that you have to
get away? If so, then it doesn€™t matter whether they have spirit
or not. Are they so friendly and easy going that you are doing quite
fine having them in your life? If so, then it doesn€™t matter whether
they have spirit or not. So from a practical perspective, you only
have to be concerned with whether you can deal with having them
in your life. Where the distinction between spirited and spiritless does come
into play is in dealing with psychopathic people, where even after
promising to change they keep returning to their abusive ways; then
at some point, instead of rationalizing that they are just misguided
and need even more time and attention, it is better to conclude
that maybe they are acting perfectly in line with who they really
are. Naive people who think everyone is equally good inside will
keep rationalizing and taking the abuse, but those with higher understanding
will recognize the warning signs of futility sooner and save themselves
the trouble.
How is this concept of spiritless people not somehow divisive,
racist, persecutory, and antithetical to the idea of human equality,
unity, harmony, and brotherhood? If the theory is true,
that some people do in fact lack spirit, then the truth of the matter
should not be ignored for the sake of political correctness. When
properly applied, knowledge can lead to greater stability and harmony
in the long run. For example, every attempted utopian society has
failed because it was founded on naive assumptions about the makeup
of its citizenry; selfish, psychopathic, predatory individuals end
up corrupting the utopia. If the utopia were founded on full understanding
of such types, then measures could have been put into place to prevent
corruption. Also, a theory should not be blamed for the consequences
of its misapplication; those who misapply it use it as a vehicle
for the satisfaction of their own egos rather than applying it from
a spiritual perspective. Instead of throwing out the theory because
of its misapplication, better effort should be made to prevent its
misapplication. Lastly, the unity of all life can be recognized
without sacrificing awareness of the functional diversity comprising
it; and only by properly understanding each part of that unity can
the whole be recognized in full clarity instead of mere ignorant
bliss.
Appendix II: Correlating Sources
John Baines : The Stellar Man
Rudolf Steiner : Theosophy
Rudolf Steiner : The Philosophy of Freedom
Rudolf Steiner : Outline of Occult Science
G. I. Gurdjieff : Views from the Real World
P. D. Ouspensky : In Search of the Miraculous
Clement Salaman, et al€ : The Way of Hermes (Corpus Hermeticum)
Dion Fortune : Psychic Self-Defense
Boris Mouravieff : Gnosis, Volumes I-III
LKJ, et al€ : The Cassiopaean Transcripts
Amit Goswami : The Self-Aware Universe
For excerpts from some of these sources, see this PDF.
Appendix III: Permutations of Metaphysical Components
To show the necessity of concepts like spirit, body, etheric, and astral, here is a list of how these components combine to form different kinds of entities. As you will see, the difference between these entities cannot be explained with fewer than those components.
Elementary matter:
body
Crystals and plants:
body | etheric
Average animals:
body | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans:
body | ego | etheric | astral
Spirited humans:
body | ego | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after choosing to incarnate, first stage:
astral | spirit
Spirited humans after choosing to incarnate, second stage
etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans shortly before birth:
body | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after childhood:
body | ego | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after physical death:
ego | etheric | astral | spirit
Spirited humans after €œsecond€ death, during the afterlife:
spirit
Spiritless humans after formation of embryo:
body | etheric
Spiritless humans shortly before birth:
body | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans after childhood:
body | ego | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans after physical death:
ego | etheric | astral
Spiritless humans after €œsecond€ death:
(nothing)
Artificial Humanoids:
body | ego | etheric
Etheric thought-forms and astral wildlife:
etheric | astral
Angelic beings:
astral | spirit
Demonic beings:
ego | etheric | astral
Spirited astral projectors:
ego | astral | spirit
Etheric aliens and transcended humans:
etheric | astral | spirit
Notes
1 In case anyone wonders why we even need terms like spirit, soul, astral, and etheric, it is because these constitute the simplest model that explains large body of known observations, in accordance with Occam€™s Razor. People who ridicule the necessity of such metaphysical distinctions and believe only in the body, or only in body and soul, are leaving out certain crucial observations, thus their over-simplistic model suffices for their smaller set of givens. However, the model must be expanded to include observations by clairvoyants, the astutely perceptive, and anyone who has experienced the paranormal. In doing so, the additional concepts of spirit, soul, astral, and etheric enter the picture. I believe these are the minimal components necessary to explain spiritless people. But it explains a lot more, just see Appendix III. These terms are also not just ad hoc explanations, however. Instead of just being theoretical, the etheric and astral bodies are directly experienceable through astral projection and viewable by clairvoyants.
2 Amit Goswami explains with great insight how nondeterministic consciousness acquires deterministic traits through conditioning in the physical body, how quantum systems can acquire classical characteristics. See chapters 13 and 14 of his book The Self-Aware Universe.
3 What does it mean that the ego imprints itself upon the etheric component of the soul? For one, it ties into a lot of what Rudolf Steiner wrote concerning the etheric double, the doppelganger, that mysterious shadow side of ourselves that is antagonistic toward our spiritual well-being. It also ties into Steiner mentioning that in Asia where ancestor worship is common, demonic entities can wear the cast-off etheric shells of deceased persons and thereby receive unto themselves all the psychic energy given to that identity during worship. Further, the ego continuing after death in etheric form may explain certain types of ghosts, as well as the problem of astral/etheric impostors in channeling whereby a negative entity can closely mimic a deceased relative. All these phenomena suggest that some portion of a person€™s worldly identity (ego) survives death, and since it cannot be via the physical body, it must be the next closest thing: the etheric component of the soul. And lastly, when it comes to true artificial intelligence in quantum computers and cybernetic beings, it should be expected that these will be accompanied by an etheric field, just as plants have an etheric field, which would assist in the artificial intelligence having some level of €œlife€ and not be just a deterministic machine with pseudo-random output.
4 The term €œsecond death€ is Biblical. €œHe that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.€ Revelation 2:11. €œAnd death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.€ Revelation 20:14-15. Boris Mouravieff and the Cassiopaeans would have interpreted this approximately as follows: €˜overcometh€™ means having developed spirit, €˜second death€™ is the dissolution of the etheric and astral components of the soul, and €˜lake of fire€™ represents the undifferentiated group soul into which the soul dissolves. What does a fire do other than melt and turn to ashes, removing all trace of former identifiability? Second death happens after the first death. If the first death is death of the physical, then the second has to be death of the nonphysical. I believe this interpretation because it makes sense.
5 €œHigher€ means higher in function, not posi
tionally higher on the body, so the throat chakra is n
ot a higher chakra since it is associated merely with speech an
d intellectual functions. In
the Fourth Way system it correlates with the €œlower intellectual center€. It probably developed or evolved along with human capacity for speech and abstract thinking, something most animals lack. That is why spiritless humans have a throat chakra as well, and why they can be intellectually sharp and have no limits to their speaking abilities. So it€™s one of the lower chakras in terms of function.