THE PSYCHO PATH
THE PSYCHO PATH
What if enlightenment and psychopathy have something in common?
The Psycho Path follows a professional killer who is very good at his job for one simple reason: he has stopped believing in good and evil.
He does not fear death. He does not fear hell. He does not fear meeting his Maker. After all, if there is a Maker, then the Maker made him too.
To him, suffering comes from attachment. We fear death because we are attached to life. We suffer loss because we have decided something should not have been taken from us. We are tortured by guilt because we divide our actions into good and evil and then condemn ourselves accordingly.
He has abandoned those distinctions.
Through the story of how he became a killer, he offers a philosophy of radical detachment—a dark inversion of ancient teachings about suffering, desire, fear, and acceptance.
The most difficult part of killing, he explains, was never learning how to kill.
It was learning not to believe that killing made him evil.
The Psycho Path asks an uncomfortable question:
What if some of the qualities we fear most in a psychopath could teach us something about peace?
This is not the path of the psychopath.
It is the Psycho Path.
THE PSYCHO PATH — EXCERPT
This sounds like a nihilistic and dangerous view, but I would argue it’s as close to God as anything.
It’s also very natural.
You see, it’s hypocritical to think a psychopath is only a psychopath if he kills people. The same person who says life is sacred and would never dream of killing another human being will happily stomp an anthill to death or eat a thousand hamburgers without a second thought.
Countless deaths.
And yet he will tell himself that life is sacred.
Whose life?
Human life and nothing else?
If you had a choice between saving your child or your dog, you would save your child. Easy enough.
But what if the choice were between your dog and someone else’s child?
What if the child lived in another country, far away? What if no one would ever know what you chose? What if the dog slept beside your children every night? What if they loved him? What if he was part of your family?
The decision becomes a little more complicated.
You see, the value we place on life has less to do with some sacred quality of life itself than we'd like to admit. It has to do with distance. Familiarity. Attachment.
Life we know is sacred.
Life we love is sacred.
Life close enough for us to hear screaming is sacred.
Everything else becomes remarkably negotiable.
Most people can hear that thousands of strangers have died in some war on the other side of the world and continue eating dinner. They might shake their heads. They might say, Those poor people.
Then they take another bite.
This isn't necessarily because they're monsters.
It's because they're detached.
And that is where you and I begin.
Death becomes a small thing when you don't care about the life being lost.
And if even Death—the almighty terror waiting at the end of everything—can become small through detachment, then we have to ask a much more uncomfortable question:
What else can become small?
Pain?
Failure?
Shame?
Loss?
Fear?
Yourself?
All things die. Disease. Murder. Accident. Starvation. Age. Disaster. Exposure. Sometimes for no reason anyone can understand.
We spend our lives desperately trying to protect ourselves from the one event absolutely guaranteed to happen.
Perhaps our problem isn't death.
Perhaps our problem is how desperately we've decided life must matter.