(29) The New Story of Narcissus

Notes: re his realisation that life, without enlightenment and its vehicle of compassion, is a zero-sum game of infinite duration in an infinite universe, that consciousness is a passive perceptor of conditioned responses, that the only escape from this causal predetermined 'fado' is constant awareness and compassionate action, that (and this is what caused his peers to stone him to death by the pool) a solution to any issue of social contention that contributes to violence is less of a solution and more the malefactor, that..
from BUDDHA NATURE

In an addition to common definitions of "narcissism" the answer to a question that has occurred to me is that if our mind and our body and the sense bases involved are our only tools to experience the world and abstract an enlightenment therof, as any practical mechanic, or real world scientist, would tell you: tools, to be effective, must be kept in reasonably good condition. So, narcissism, if coupled with a realization of the one-ness of all material phenomena and compassion for other abstracts of reality, seems to be a healthy perception of the configuration of reality, in a system where the ultimate realities are: consciousness, mental formations, material phenomena and Nibbana (read oneness with God, if you are so inclined).