Can a psychopath become enlightened?

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Based on what I know and have experienced and studied regarding enlightenment, and what I know about psychopathy, my answer would have to be, no, at least, not in the traditional fashion.

Divorcing yourself from the mind’s tendency to identify with the gaggle of cells that you call your body, and the bundle of accumulated patterns that you call your mind, as well as the sensation of being at the center of a movie being made about yourself that we call awareness, at this point in time, invariably requires doing something we call mysticism.

If we ever come to a more scientific understanding of enlightenment, extremely difficult but not completely improbable, then it could become possible in the future to become enlightened without doing any mysticism. Right now, though, you have to get comfortable operating in the realm of woo-woo fairy time belief.

You might look at my Quora credential, “Enlightened from birth” and think, “oh no Vincent, if you need mysticism to become enlightened, how could you have been enlightened from birth? Well, I’ve done a lot of mysticism myself, and that mysticism was crucial to understanding what enlightenment even was, so that I could decide that I was, in fact, already enlightened! That second pathway is still something I actively investigate.

Because you need experience with the illusion in order to see through the illusion, and not believing in the illusion altogether won’t cause you to start investigating it. Investigating the illusion is how you learn how to surrender your involvement in it.

And I have yet to see a self-identifying clinical psychopath display any interest in even meditating, much less following a mystical path. And it’s altogether probable that they lack the necessary brain wiring for any kind of concentration practice to bear any experiential fruit.

I’m sure you might be able to find a hundred wannabes who will proclaim that meditation has helped them reach their edgelord goals faster, but real psychopaths are pretty much biologically hardwired for materialism, and true materialism is not compatible with insight meditation.

Of course, Buddhism invented enlightenment, so they may have found a way for psychopaths to do meditation practices. The more I learn about the mind, the more culture looms large in determining behavior over individuals. Perhaps psychopathy isn’t really much of a thing in Asia. Many Western things aren’t.