Danger Has A Face

Buddhist belief in Psychopaths:

In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra the “icchantikas” (i.e., a species of being who can never attain Buddhahood) are deeply evil. 

They don’t believe that all beings have the Buddha-nature. 

They wish to harm others. 

They take pride in their twisted views, and live lives contrary to the Buddhist precepts.  Especially, the icchantikas conceal the evils they have done some of which are grave in nature. 

Nor are they capable of repenting their sins.  As far as their spiritual capacity is concerned, they have “no capacity for saddharma” (true Dharma). 

The Buddha refers to icchantikas as “the incurable ones.” …

The rest of this article from zennist.typepad.com makes the link with psychopaths and goes on to discuss the pervasive nature of the problem in society.

How many times have we heard from well-meaning friends and family members that the solution to our problem was to “just let it go”? My stepdaughter recently asked me, “I want to let it go, but how do I do it? What does it really mean?” Her sentiments echo the frustration of many who understand the need to let negative thoughts and beliefs go but are not sure of the steps to take to make lasting and positive change. And others wonder if “letting go” is really a cure-all and if so, how do we learn to let it all go?

(Source: The Huffington Post)

How often do we find ourselves in a situation that seems un-winnable or, in the extreme, impossible? When this happens, it is difficult to make sense of the things that have happened to us. There are situations that, regardless of what we do, will change us forever. When these life-altering events happen, we can expect a period where a lack of perspective dominates our life. 

How do we move forward when everything has changed?

5 Ways to Cope With No-Win Scenarios

Acceptance — Resignation that your life will not be the same again. This is the hardest situation to overcome. When circumstances have taken the life you cherished and enjoyed away from you, what stands in its place may never measure up. When we focus, however, on what we are missing instead of what remains, we will suffer longer. We must agree that our life has changed and make the decision to move forward embracing that change.

Fight — Anger may be what we need to push ourselves forward out of complacency or despair. Fighting as an alternative can keep you focused when the odds are stacked against you. If fighting is your only alternative, then don’t give up. Do not give in to fear. Fight to make things rights again, to make something better or fight to move in a different direction. As the saying goes, “Live to fight another day.”

Compromise — We may not feel like we won but neither will we lose everything. This choice is less drastic than fighting, but a settlement can help in resolving things so you can move on. No-win scenarios can trigger stress responses in the body, and compromise helps alleviate this distressing condition and it makes for a better choice in some instances.

Healing — This is the perspective you need to search for in all challenging situations. Repairing that which is broken in our lives allows for balance to reemerge. Healing as it relates to illness may show us that in the course of our illness, cure may cease to be an option, but remember that no hope of a cure does not mean no hope at all. When you receive the information that the illness is serious, it can feel like a no-win scenario, but with a support team who can help manage the challenges you’ll face, you can live with a serious illness for as long as possible and as well as possible.

Creative — Even though we are intelligent and organized, being in what feels like a no-win scenario makes it hard to keep things straight. Think of solutions that you have never tried or maybe tried in the past but didn’t work. Try again. Looking at your scenario with “fresh eyes” can lead you to a new perspective and ultimately a solution. Know that people are willing to help, and becoming comfortable asking for assistance, advice or information may lead to additional opportunities that were not available before. When we diligently look for solutions and “open every door” that is available to us, we will find that there are fewer no-win scenarios.

Something positive remains after all devastation; it may take years to see it or lifetimes to understand it, but it is there.

We are acutely aware of being under the influence of many things: drugs, alcohol, jealousy, manipulative media, and racism. We fight to create awareness so we can move beyond the influences of these negative emotions and situations. Just as important as letting some things go, there is the importance of bringing new things toward us. One of the influences that we can and should embrace is joy. Being under the influence of joy has the ability to shift your focus and change the trajectory of your life.

How Can I Create Joy

When we carry the burdens of every crisis (lesson) on our backs, we become hunched over. It is not necessary to carry the weight of rejections, fear, loss and disappointment with us throughout our lives. Life is hard, and if we can learn our lessons and not be diminished by them, we create the conditions to experience joy.

When we rush through events and moments by being results driven, we do not see the joy that is available. When we think back to the precious moments with our children, if we let our fatigue or worries take precedence over the moment, that moment is lost forever. Be conscious of those times when joy is present and acknowledge it, enjoy it and be grateful for it. Promise to allow joy to stay once it arrives.

When you are in the midst of turmoil, uncertainty, pain or sadness, remember to be love in action — and this includes forgiveness. In every dark moment there exists its opposite. Continue to hang on and know you have the strength within you to find joy. It is there — I promise.

(Source: The Huffington Post)

It seems that fear is manufactured before our eyes through the news and our interactions with others, and it appears most often without our permission and it permeates our lives. Because fear is contagious, it can control us effortlessly, if we let it. The destructive power of fear no longer has to control our lives.

How to Reduce Fear in Your Life

1. Monitor your thoughts. Watch for fear-producing emotions such as anger, sadness, jealousy and judgment. To be negative is easy. When negativity is allowed to flourish, it generally will produce more fear. Choose thoughts that produce emotions that make you feel comfortable in your body: love, happiness, peace, joy.

2. Place painful memories of the past on pause. Just because something happened to you or someone else in the past and it had a negative outcome does not mean it will happen again. The pain of something that happened in the past is an indicator of the need for a change in direction. Once you evaluate the memory, you will be able to see the situation more clearly, and if nothing can be changed thenstop thinking about it immediately. When you allow yourself to recall a fearful memory, you pull yourself out of balance. Change what you are doing. Spend your mental efforts and energy on creating a new direction for you.

3. Do not hang on to your fears — fear of illness, fear of financial loss, fear of losing someone, fear of death, fear of losing your “stuff,” the fear of rejection or the fear looking stupid or weak. When we choose fear, we are making the choice to keep fear inside of ourselves and in doing this, we let fear dictate our futures and we limit our options for greater security, peace and comfort. No matter what challenges life gives you, you can choose to respond in a new way.

4. Become calm. Work at being the “calm in the eye of the storm.” We can prevent ourselves from becoming overwhelmed with the extreme situations surfacing all around us. Regardless of what is happening in your life at this moment, know that you have the strength, courage and wisdom you need to move forward without fear.

5. Find a way to let fear go and start again. No one who has been in the grip of fear would underestimate the challenge that lies in front of us in order let fear go. Finding strength, balance and faith will save us from debilitating fear. As we know from experience, fear and faith cannot coexist… you must choose one. Let us find the determination to choose faith over fear.

Each moment of our choosing builds upon the previous moments. Our thoughts, words, feelings and actions are powerful beyond our knowing. It is critical that we stay focused on the positive possibilities, and let the unrealized fear dissipate. Let this moment be your starting point, so to speak, for a release of fear, and enjoy the peace and comfort that will surely take its place.

(Source: The Huffington Post)

Psychopaths make up an astounding 1 to 2 percent of the general population and occupy virtually every niche in society. Often ruthless, callous and completely devoid of empathy, they impose an incalculable toll on individuals and society. And science is increasingly learning that psychopathy may actually be a genetic disorder — one that could eventually be eliminated.

 There’s growing consensus among clinicians and neuroscientists that psychopathy does in fact exist as a meaningful and identifiable personality disorder. A growing community of experts are starting to use psychopathy as a clinical diagnosis. 

In terms of definition, psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by severe emotional dysfunction, especially a lack of empathy and remorse. Psychopaths exhibit consistent disregard for the feelings of others and the rules of society. They are completely unable to recognize such things as anger and fear in individuals, either based on facial expressions or verbal exclamations. In terms of behavioral traits, psychopaths are generally regarded as being callous, selfish, dishonest, arrogant, aggressive, impulsive, irresponsible, and hedonistic. At the same time, psychopaths often exhibit higher than average intelligence and a superficial kind of charm.

Scientists are increasingly finding a genetic basis to psychopathy . Work in genetics has revealed that the heritability coefficient for psychopathy is a shocking 50%. Psychopathy, it would appear, runs deeply in the family.

But while genes may be a key factor, there’s still plenty of room for environmental factors. It’s thought that, while genetic factors may generally influence the development of psychopathy, the environment still affects the specific traits that predominate.

It’s also worth noting that virtually all psychopaths exhibit anti-social traits as children , but that half of them “grow out of it”. This gives therapists hope that the condition could be treated environmentally.

Psychologist Robert Hare, a leading expert on such matters, has argued that psychopathy may actually be adaptive. He has observed how many male psychopaths have a pattern of mating with and quickly abandoning women — and as a result, have a high fertility rate. His contention is that these children may inherit a predisposition to psychopathy.

And there appear to be physiological differences between psychopaths and everybody else — a recent study showed that the psychopathic brain has significantly less grey matter in the anterior rostral prefrontal cortex and temporal poles than the brains of both non-psychopathic offenders and non-offenders. These areas of the brain appear to be important for reading other people’s emotions and intentions, and seem to be active when people think about moral behaviour.

Neuroscientists have also found that the amygdala is impaired in psychopaths. The amygdala is responsible for stimulus-reinforcement learning and responding to emotional expressions, particularly fearful expressions. It is also involved in the formation of both stimulus-punishment and stimulus-reward associations.

At first blush, the estimate that 1 to 2 percent of all people are psychopaths seems astonishingly high. In a country like the United States, this implies that there are between 3 to 6 million psychopathic Americans. Psychopaths also make up roughly 15 to 25 percent of the prison population, and are responsible for the lion’s share of brutal crimes and murders. And according to the neuroscientist Fabrice Jotterand, psychopathy affects 3 to 5 % of all CEOs.

But not all psychopaths are dangerous. Given the high prevalence of psychopathy in our gene pool, and given that many seem to fare rather well in society, it’s fair to say that we run the risk of generalizing about this condition and pigeonholing all psychopaths as being inherently dangerous.

Robert Hare, co-author of Snakes in Suits , takes a hard-line when it comes to psychopaths, referring to them as “intraspecies predators.” He argues that they lack the very qualities that allow humans to live in social harmony and is concerned about their ability to blend in, undetected, in a variety of surroundings, including corporate environments. By conceptualizing psychopaths as remorseless predators, he feels we can better understand what often appears to be senseless behavior.

Indeed, it may very well have to be the human toll that’s considered. Psychopaths, given their indifference and often insatiable desires, can harm people in any number of ways, whether through physical violence or ruthlessness in the workplace. It’s the continuing prospect of having psychopaths around in the general population that may eventually determine whether they should be filtered from the gene pool.

Psychopathy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Like autism, it falls along a spectrum. The Hare Psychopathy Checklist , a standard inventory used in law enforcement, has a top score of 40. Psychopaths tend to get a bit scary when they score in the early 20s. A very demented and dangerous psychopath would score around a 30. As journalist Jon Ronson has noted , “There are absolutes in psychopathy and the main absolute is a literal absence of empathy. It’s just not there. In higher-scoring psychopaths, what grows in the vacant field where that empathy should be is a joy in manipulating people, a lack of remorse, a lack of guilt. If you’ve got a little bit of empathy, you’re kind of not a psychopath.”

This is why Ronson and others feel that some psychopaths make for great CEOs. “I think the other positive traits for psychopaths in business is need for stimulation, proneness to boredom,” Ronson told Forbes. “You want somebody who can’t sit still, who’s constantly thinking about how to do better things.”

Taking a step back, an overarching question that needs to be asked is one about end-goals. What’s more important: changing someone’s behavior, or changing a person’s state of mind? A consequentialist would argue that it’s behavior, and that it doesn’t matter what a person thinks or what kinds of empathic impairments they might have — all that matters is how they act. Subsequently, an argument can be made that, if we can root out criminally harmful behavior, our task is done.

But as Robert Hare has argued, that may not be good enough. The absence of empathy, he argues — the very definition of a psychopath — will always result in malevolence.

That may very well be the case, but the truest expression of humanity is the ability to extend empathy towards others — even those incapable of mustering empathy themselves.

(Source: io9.com)

When we realize our life is not working — financial hardships, abuse, unfriendliness, weight gain, bad relationship and/or an unfulfilling job — there are a few habits we can let go of to change our reality immediately. Change is swift and permanent when we choose to make certain mental, spiritual and physical adjustments. The hardest part is being comfortable with change. To let go of the habits we created is difficult, but the rewards of creating new and positive habits can be life-changing.

The seven habits that can hurt you:

The Habit of LYING

A lie does not become truth if you say it enough. A lie does not become truth if you say it louder. Little white lies are never little to the person being lied to. Lies can eventually begin to erode your self-esteem and those relationships based on truth and honesty.

Choose this instead: truth. The day we stop lying and start speaking the truth, we will feel a change. Speak the truth, no matter what. Our only hope of becoming a better person is by adopting the habit of speaking the truth.

The Habit of FEAR

Fear can be so ingrained as a habit that even a loud sound can produce the adrenaline of the flight or fight response. Adrenaline can create a great deal of emotional and physical stress within the body, and when left unchecked, it can reduce your ability to handle the small problems, which occur throughout the day.

Choose this instead: Fear and faith cannot coexist, so choose one consciously. Do not spend your thoughts on anticipating trouble; thoughts create your reality.

The Habit of Living in CHAOS

Chaos is created in the mind when we fill our lives with noise and drama. I believe our environments can program us to perform certain behaviors and if you find yourself with someone or somewhere that adds chaos and unpredictability to your life, change your environment and/or the person you are with.

Choose this instead: Silence in place of constant noise, creates a space for us to release the stress that causes this habit. Try living with the concept of “less is more.” Enjoy less stress by choosing less chaotic activity, less TV, less Internet usage and fewer “drama queens.”

The Habit of SELF ABUSE

Self-harm is always something we can learn to control. Why do we treat ourselves harsher and more critically than our worst enemies would? Do your anger and your blame take center stage in your life? Are you living it over and over again?

Choose this instead: Heal yourself and let this story go. Change your environment because changing your scenery can help a bad habit become less tempting and available. Limit your interactions with people who encourage your bad habit. Surround yourself with people who love you and who will teach you to love yourself. What is more important than love?

The Habit of FAILURE

All who achieve expects failure, but when it becomes a habit, you have stopped learning from what came before and have started expecting failure as a way of life.

Choose this instead: Failure is necessary before we can begin again.

Failure is nothing to be feared… what you should fear is giving up or aiming too low. Laughter, true laughter, not a joke to demean, is guaranteed to change your mental state in the midst of experiencing failure. Seek out laughter. Start again.

The Habit of WORRY

Worrying about what may never happen — the plane/car may crash, bad things will happen to our children, someone will hurt me and/or I will be taken advantage of — can lead to unwise decisions because they are based on fear. Worry is caused by this anxiety, and it can lead to unhappiness.

Choose this instead: Be in the moment when you can clearly see you are safe. Learn to control your worry so you can make better decisions. Filling the void left by your old habit with a more positive activity can help you avoid falling back into your old habit.

The Habit of WHEN MORE IS NOT ENOUGH

Resist being driven toward having more: more technology, food, money, and relationships. This behavior can lead us toward isolation and superficial status in all areas of our lives.

Choose this instead: Focus on being more, not having more. Replace this habit with something new and positive in your life: beauty, community closeness and compassion. Become undisturbed by loss and gain. Unclench your heart and allow it to breathe with peace and the knowing that you have enough.

Be fearless in your efforts to let go of limiting and unhealthy habits. Remember to be patient, as habits take time to release. And lastly, replace your old habit with something new that shows you and the world who you really are!

(Source: The Huffington Post)