Took me forever to read through this thread. I'm a little disappointed at some of the strawmen that have been tossed around, but I'm pleased that things took a turn for the better toward the end. I'm not a vampire myself, but I spend enough time with them that I feel justified offering my thoughts.
First, I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective on psychic vampirism that is partly a response to those who believe psychic vampires are unnecessarily taking from people when they could just as easily take from the Universal Source.
You see, I tend to regard the subtle body as fairly concrete, with discrete organs and such. I won't go into that too much. What's important is that I believe a specific organ (the navel chakra) is responsible for converting energy into a form usable by the subtle body.
This requires further explanation. Most of you are no doubt familiar with the concept of an "energy signature", a certain "taste" that pervades a person's energy. All things (in the model I use) have signatures like this, be they people or animals or tables or rooms or ideas or scents or constellations or times of year.
Now, in many traditions there is the practice of taking energy from various sources, to be used for some given purpose. Let us take, as an example, the sun. The sun's energy has a particular flavour to it: bright, powerful, fiery, and so forth. Suppose Joe feeds off the sun to energize himself. For a little while afterward, Joe's flavour will have a hint of bright, powerful and fiery. But soon, he will go back to tasting like himself. Why? Because his subtle body has processed the solar energy and converted it to his own energy signature.
Let's extend things a bit further. We know of lactose intolerance as a physical condition. How about solar intolerance as a subtle condition? Suppose that, to Jane's subtle body, the energy of the sun is just too harsh and irritating. Maybe she needs to feed off the moon, which reflects the sun's energy and changes its flavour in the process.
Now suppose that you've got this individual, whom we will name Vlad for humourous purposes, who is actually very bad at feeding off of most things. He finds that he must get his energy from vertebrate organisms or, even more specifically, from human beings. That would be one kind of vampire. Perhaps, however, it would be more appropriate to call Vlad an energy carnivore.
Now, what of the Universal Source? As most of you will probably agree, the Source has no particular flavour to it. In some models, however, this energy pervades everything, and everyone gets a steady flow of Source energy at all times. This energy, in my system, is also given an individual signature by each person's subtle body.
But suppose that mechanism breaks down. All of a sudden, the energy coming in is useless to the person's subtle body, and it begins to suffer. The only way it can sustain itself is by taking in energy that has already been processed by the subtle bodies of others. It's not a perfect match, flavour-wise, but it's enough to live on. This is what the majority of psychic vampires go through.
(I am not saying this is true - just that I believe it is true, most of the time. I'm offering it for debate.)
Now, as to the ethics of vampirism. Something that, much to my amazement, has been neglected the entire thread is that there has been a strong push in the vampire community toward ethics. This has been the source of The Black Veil (the link here is to the copy on Michelle Belanger's website, but it is mirrored in many other places). Note, in particular, the section on Donors:
Feeding should occur between consenting adults. Allow donors to make an informed decision before they give of themselves to you. Do not take rapaciously from others, but seek to have an exchange that is pleasant and beneficial for all. (Bolding mine.)
It may seem useless just to write this down and expect people to follow it. And I'll admit that some vampires are not the most ethical - whether consciously or unconsciously. But people who are openly unethical are generally ostracized from most of the mainstream vampire community (oxymoron notwithstanding).
As for feeding off large crowds, a distinction should be drawn: feeding off the crowd itself, and the ambient energy in the room, is different from feeding off the individual constituents of the crowd. One could say that, in a large crowd, everybody is feeding off the ambient energy, refining it, and pumping it back out as even more ambient energy. The psychic vampire simply feeds without pumping it back out. It's a little bit like a cow grazing, in that the energy (or grass) will be quickly replaced, with no substantial harm done to the crowd (or field). |
