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"Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein." Wilhelm Reich

Part 1
The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity
January 3, 2011



In the book Columbus and other Cannibals, indigenous author Jack D. Forbes lucidly explores a psychological disease that has been informing human self-destructive behavior that Native American people have known about for years.

After reading his book, it was clear to me that he was describing the same psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that I wrote about in my book, The Madness of George W. Bush - A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis. I introduce the idea that from the dawn of human history our species has fallen prey to a collective psychosis which I call malignant egophrenia.


Speaking about this very same psychic epidemic, Forbes writes,

"For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox." [i]

Indigenous people have been tracking the same "psychic" [ii] virus that I call malignant egophrenia for many centuries and calling it "wetiko," a Cree term which refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others.

Professor Forbes, who was one of the founders of the Native American movement during the early sixties, says,

"Tragically, the history of the world for the past 2,000 years is, in great part, the story of the epidemiology of the wetiko disease." [iii]

Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a "psychosis" in the true sense of the word as being a "sickness of the soul or spirit."

Though calling it by different names, Forbes and I are both pointing at the same illness of the psyche, soul and spirit that has been at the root of humanity's inhumanity to itself.

As if performing a magic ritual, in exploring the entity of wetiko, we first have to invoke its spirit and enter into relationship with it. We must contemplate and engage wetiko as objectively as we are able, as if it exists outside of ourselves, lest we get too "mixed up" with the object of our contemplation.

Due to its unique psychic origin, the epidemiology of wetiko is different than any other disease. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko virus is that it is incarnating in the very psyche which itself is the means of our investigation.

Aware of this conundrum, Forbes explains that he is attempting to examine the disease,

"from a perspective as free as possible from assumptions created by the very disease being studied." [iv]

If we are not aware of the frame of reference through which we are examining the wetiko virus, our investigation will be tainted by the disease, obscuring the clear vision needed to start the healing process.

Studying how wetiko disease manifests in others, as well as in the "other" part of ourselves, will help us to see "it" more objectively.

Seeing this psychological disease manifesting in the world is the looking glass through which we can potentially recognize this same illness as it arises subjectively within our own minds.

After evoking an entity like wetiko, in order to study it as objectively as possible, we have to hermetically seal it within an alchemical container.

This ensures that its mercurial spirit doesn't vaporize back into the invisibility of the unconscious, where it would act itself out through us. Jung continually emphasized the importance of developing a container or vessel in which to catch troublesome spirits like wetiko.

He writes,

"Therefore, if anything is wrong, take it out of its place and put it in the vessel that is between your neighbor and yourself... For love of mankind, create a vessel into which you can catch all that damned poison. For it must be somewhere - it is always somewhere - and not to catch it, to say it doesn't exist, gives the best chance to any germ." [v]

Wetiko is an elusive spirit that is challenging to pin down and say it is "this" or "that."

At the same time, it is critical that we attempt to delineate its properties. Unlike a physical virus, the wetiko bug can not be isolated materially, but its characteristic signature can be detected and seen in the peculiar operations of a psyche that is under its spell.

To not recognize the existence of the wetiko germ - "to say it doesn't exist" - allows the psychic infection to act itself out unrestrained.

Being "always somewhere" is to be nonlocal, which means that it is always around, even potentially, or especially, within ourselves. In calling forth the wetiko spirit, we are simultaneously creating, through our inquiry itself, the container in which we can study this bug so as to understand what in fact we are dealing with, see how it operates out in the world, in others, and subjectively, within ourselves.

In order to come full circle in our contemplative exercise/exorcise, we have to homeopathically take our contemplation back within ourselves.

As if in a dream where the inner is the outer, we can recognize that the wetiko virus that we have been tracking "out there," outside of ourselves, is a reflection of and co-related to the same process within ourselves.

Encoded in wetiko's symptomology is a revelation, something that is most important for us to know.


A Disease of Civilization

Wetiko/malignant egophrenia is a disease of civilization, or lack thereof.


To quote Forbes,

"To a considerable degree, the development of the wetiko disease corresponds to the rise of what Europeans choose to call civilization. This is no mere coincidence." [vi]

The unsustainable nature of industrial civilization is based on, and increasingly requires violence to maintain itself. Genuine "civilization," in essence, means not killing people.

Referring to the lack of "civility" in modern society, Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization and responded by saying,

"I think it would be a good idea."

It makes sense that native people would know about malignant egophrenia, as they were both oppressed by, but weren't, at least initially, under the "curse" of modern civilization.

Being under the sway of modern civilization can feel like something foreign to our nature is being imposed upon us, as if we are living in an occupied land.

Modern civilization suffers from the overly one-sided dominance of the rational, intellectual mind, a one-sidedness that seemingly dis-connects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. Due to its disassociation from the whole, wetiko is a disturber of the peace of humanity and the natural world, a sickness which spawns aggression and is capable of inciting violence amongst living beings. The wetiko virus is the root cause of the inhumanity in human nature, or shall we say, our seemingly inhuman nature.

This "psychic virus," a "bug" in "the system," in-forms and animates the madness of so-called civilization, which, in a self-perpetuating feedback loop feeds the madness within ourselves.

Forbes continues,

"this disease, this wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man." [vii]

We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity's psyche from the beginning of time.

Like a fractal, wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously - intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (between ourselves), as well as collectively (as a species).

"Cannibalism," in Forbes's words, "is the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit." [viii]

Those afflicted with wetiko, like a cannibal, consume the life-force of others - human and nonhuman - for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives.

One example that symbolizes our self-destructive, collective madness is the oil companies' destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, the lungs of our planet. This is literally a full-bodied revelation showing us what we are doing to ourselves.

Another literal example that is symbolically illustrating the wetiko complex in action is Monsanto genetically engineering terminator seeds that do not reproduce a second generation, thus forcing farmers to buy new seeds from Monsanto for each year's new crop.

This makes survival for many poor farmers impossible, which has triggered a wave of suicides among farmers, as Monsanto grows richer from the process.

Forbes writes,

"The overriding characteristic of the wetiko is that he consumes other human beings, that is, he is a predator and a cannibal. This is the central essence of the disease." [ix]

Predators, "full-blown" wetikos are not in touch with their own humanity, and therefore can't see the humanity in others.

Instead, they relate to others either as potential prey or as a threat to their dominance. As if a different breed who is more animal-like predator than ordinary human being, someone fully taken over by the wetiko psychosis consumes others' lives, physically, emotionally, psychically and meta-physically, beyond just the material body and physical possessions to the level of meaning itself.

Wetikos are the "anti-artists" of our culture, embodying the opposite of what creative artists do. Unlike an artist (see "The Artist as Healer of the World"), who creates life-enhancing meaning and enriches the world without robbing others, a wetiko takes and consumes without giving anything back, continually draining and impoverishing the planet of resources.

We are currently in the midst of "the greatest epidemic sickness known to man" (see "Diagnosis: Psychic Epidemic").

Many of us don't even realize this, as our collective insanity is so pervasive that it has become normalized. Our collective madness has become transparent to us, as we see and interpret the world through it, rendering our madness invisible, thereby unwittingly colluding with the collective psychosis that is wreaking incredible death and destruction on our planet.

Being "trans-parent," our madness is beyond its mere appearance, which is to say, "beyond being apparent," i.e., not visible.

Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, as it expresses itself both in the very way we are looking, as well as all of the unspoken ways we have been conditioned not to perceive. Due to its cloak of invisibility, we don't see our madness, a psychic blindness which makes us complicit in the creation of our madness.

Many of us can't fathom the level of evil to which full-blown wetikos have fallen prey, and of which they are capable. Our lack of imagination of the evil existing in potential in humanity is a direct reflection of a lack of intimacy with our own potential evil, which enables the malevolence of wetiko to have nearly free rein in our world (see "Shedding Light on Evil").

In our psychic blindness we are complicit in the spreading of the evil of the wetiko psychosis, a systematic evil whose depth is beyond the capacity of words to fully describe. Evil paralyzes the ability to language our experience, creating a seemingly unbridgeable gap between language and the event it is supposed to describe.

Finding that place of no words, we simultaneously discover and create a new language, a language which is universal and transcends language itself, a language known as art.


A Parasite of a Different Order

When people are infected by the wetiko virus, Forbes writes, they are,

"the host for the wetiko parasites." [x]

The wetiko germ is a psychic tapeworm, a parasite of the mind.

Just like certain computer viruses or malware infect and program a computer to self-destruct, mind-viruses like wetiko can program the human bio-computer to think, believe and behave in ways that result in our self-destruction. Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms into our mind which, when unconsciously en-acted, feed it, and ultimately kills its host (us).

It doesn't want to kill us too quickly however, for to successfully implement its agenda of reproducing and propagating itself throughout the field, it must let the host live long enough to spread the virus. If the host dies too soon, the bug would be prematurely evicted and would suffer the inconvenience of having to find a new residence.

Like a cancer of the mind that metastasizes, in wetiko disease, a pathological part of the psyche co-opts and subsumes all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself so as to serve its pathology.

The personality then self-organizes an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which "masks" the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d'etat, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace the person, who becomes its puppet and marionette. Like a parasite, the wetiko virus can take over the will of an animal more evolved than itself, enlisting that creature into serving its nefarious agenda.

Once the parasite becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person's behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one calling the shots. Just as someone infected with the rabies virus will resist drinking water, which would flush out the infection, someone taken over by the wetiko parasite will have nothing to do with anything that will help them get rid of the disease.

Wetikos are phobic towards the light of truth, which they avoid like the plague. In advanced stages, this process takes over the person so completely that we could rightfully say the person is no longer there; they are just an empty shell carrying the disease. In a sense there is just the disease, operating through what appears to be a human being.

The person becomes fully identified with their mask, their persona, but it is as if there is no one behind the mask.


Alien Intrusion

Speaking in his own language about the predation of the wetiko virus, the spiritual teacher Don Juan, of the Carlos Castaneda books, mentions that the ancient shamans called this "the topic of topics." [xi]

Don Juan explains,

"We have a companion for life... We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master." [xii]

This sounds just like the state of affairs being pointed at in the Bible when, for example, The Gospel of John refers to the devil as "the ruler of this world" (14:30; 16:11), and Paul speaks of Satan as "the god of this world" (Cor. 4:4).

The Gnostic Gospel of Phillip, talking about the root of evil that lies within all of us, makes the similar point that unless this evil is recognized,

"It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive."

(II, 3, 83.5-30)

Speaking about the predator, Don Juan continues,

"It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so." [xiii]

It is striking how Don Juan's description of the effects of these predators is being enacted in our increasingly militarized society, as our freedoms and liberties get taken away step by step.

It is as if an inner, invisible state of affairs existing as a yet unrealized archetypal pattern deep within the soul of humanity is revealing itself by materializing in, as, and through the outside world.

To quote Don Juan,

"Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico." [xiv]

Don Juan is referring to an "energetic fact" that I imagine most of us can relate to; i.e., there is "something" within us that stops us from expressing our true creative genius and attaining our full potential.


These predators are "time-bandits," consuming the precious hours of our lives, as if we are wage-slaves on a prison-planet "doing time."

Deepening his description of these predators, Don Juan elaborates,

"They took over because we are food for them... we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros." [xv]

The wetiko virus particularly flourishes in overpopulated cities, where people are "coop-ed up."

When we buy into group-think and are enlisted as a member of the herd, we become like sheep that are being led over the edge of a cliff, or cattle that are being raised to be slaughtered.

Don Juan continues,

"The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind." [xvi]

It is as if these predators are in competition with us for a "share" of our own mind.

The predator shape-shifts and assumes our form, and if we are unaware of its masquerade, we will identify with its invasive thought-forms as if they are our own, and act them out. We will mistakenly believe that we are acting on our own impulses, with our best interests in mind.

This predator, Don Juan continues,

"fears that any moment its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied." [xvii]

The wetiko predator has an inner necessity, a brute compulsion born out of terror, as it continually has to feed itself so as to postpone its ever-approaching death.

Don Juan continues,

"Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them [the predators]." [xviii]

Cloaking itself in our form, this predator gets under our skin and "puts us on" as a disguise, fooling us to "buy" into its false version of who we are. (This is why the shortened name of Malignant Egophrenia is "ME disease," referring to a distortion of our identity, i.e., our sense of "me"-ness).

Instead of being in our power and serving ourselves, we "unwittingly" (which means to be "out of our wits," i.e., not in our "right" mind) become the servant of the predator. Instead of being a sovereign being who is creating with our own thoughts, we will then be created by them, as the predator literally thinks in our place. It is as if the predator is sitting in our seat.

Speaking of the predator's scheme, Don Juan says,

"it proposes something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you've done something of worth." [xix]

It is as if there is an alien "other," an extraterrestrial, metaphysical entity which is subliminally intruding its mind into ours in such a way that we identify with its point of view and dis-connect from our own.

Don Juan refers to this situation as a "foreign installation," as if some alien race has set up a space station inside of our minds. This is exactly what the Gnostics - the ones who "know" - are pointing at when they talk about alien predators called "Archons" who infiltrate and subvert the workings of our mind. [xx]

To the extent that we are not conscious of this alien take over of our psyche, we become drafted into the predator's sinister agenda, unwittingly becoming its slaves. This state of inner, psychological warfare is mirrored by the sinister psy-ops (psychological operations) being instituted by the powers-that-be in the outside world.

The disease feeds on our unawareness of it.


Vampires

Forbes writes,

"The wetiko psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart... After all, the wetiko disease turns such people into werewolves and vampires, creatures of the Europeans nightmare world, and creatures of the wetiko's reality." [xxi]

The wetiko psychosis takes people down, period.

Werewolves and vampires are shape-shifting creatures, symbolic representations of the horrific potential within all of us to be taken over by and act out the archetypal shadow, regressing to an archaic level of the psyche and become like a predatory animal or nonhuman creature.

When these not-yet-humanized psychic energies break through into consciousness and are not mediated through consciousness, Jung writes,

"they sweep everything before them like a torrent and turn men into creatures for whom the word 'beast' is still too good a name." [xxii]

Vampires, considered to be the darkest creature of evil's arsenal, have haunted our imagination for ages, as they are representatives of a living process that exists deep within the human psyche.

A vampire is not a human figure, but rather, is a soulless creature, a being who has lost its soul; or if it hasn't lost its soul, its soul has been "damned," which is a soul that is lost. Either way, there's something missing. Isolated from the world, it has lost any connection with the part of itself that is related to everything else; from its point of view, the world exists simply for its use.

Although it has lost connection with its heart and soul, a vampire hasn't lost its mind (though in one sense it has), as vampires often have clever and incisive intellects that cloak their pathology, making their disease hard to see. This is similar to how people in a deep state of trauma can have brilliant minds as well, a gift that can hide the extent of their trauma, making their malady hard to recognize.

The sharpness of the vampire's mind, instead of being devoted to gaining insight into their malady and healing from it, however, is used for the "passing on" and propagation of their dark art.

One of the undead, a vampire is death taking living, human form.

The wetiko virus is ultimately not a living life-form, but rather, a living form of death. Wetiko, like a virus, is "dead" matter; it is only in a living creature that viruses acquires a "quasi-life." Members of the living dead, vampires are neither truly alive, nor truly dead. Like a full-fledged vampire, "full-blown" wetikos have forfeited their humanity, becoming a conduit for the impersonal, transpersonal and depersonalizing wetiko virus to incarnate through them.

They are a living portal, an opening in the third-dimensional fabric of space/time through which this contagious, virulent higher-dimensional virus can spread itself throughout the field, both locally and nonlocally.

Lacking a sense of soul, wetikos are efficient "machines," dedicated to preserving and serving "the state," which, to quote Forbes,

"is itself a creature of the wetikos who have seized control of its power apparatus." [xxiii]

A full-fledged wetiko has become a robotic automaton, conditioned to react to certain stimuli like a reflex.

They have become part of "the machine," with no spontaneity, creativity, originality, nor free thinking programmed in. De-humanized, wetikos have lost touch with any sense of aesthetics, of appreciating the inherent beauty of life, and have become "an-aesthetic," i.e., anesthetized and numb to what it is to be a human being.

Emissaries of an authoritarian, militarized, patriarchal planetary "culture," the wetiko bug breeds fascism, and terror.

To quote the great healer Wilhelm Reich,

"Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein." [xxiv]

Fascism is the outer, collective political expression of an individual's ravaged inner landscape that has been crippled and suppressed by the authoritarian civilization of "the machine."

Like a vampire, in full-blown wetikos there is nobody home, which is one of the reasons why, symbolically speaking, vampires have no reflection in a mirror (which, mythologically speaking, reflect back images of the human soul).

Full-blown wetikos are empty to the core, so there is nothing to reflect. Inwardly there is just an infinite void, a sponge that can never be saturated, a devouring black hole that is feeding on the universe. Their atrophied soul has been emptied out like a piece of wood hollowed out by psychic termites. Full-blown wetikos are so compulsively possessed by and identical with the unconscious in its destructive, consciousness-negating form that they are not able to see nor think about themselves, which philosopher Hannah Arendt claims is one of the primary characteristics of evil.

Unable to self-reflect, they can no longer access within themselves the faculty of the psyche from which such activity derives. One of the reasons we can't see a vampire's reflection in a mirror, however, is because our own inner, unconscious vampire obscures the reflection, which is to say that the unacknowledged specter of our own shadow gets in the way.

A vampire casts no shadow. In order to cast a shadow, there has to be a source of light. In a vampire there is no light, only infinite darkness.

Not being a living being, a vampire has no inherent reality, no substance. Only a thing of substantial existence can produce a shadow. Vampires can't cast a shadow, however, because they are the living embodiment of and identical with the archetypal shadow. A shadow casts no shadow of itself, as the shadow itself has no substance.

There are benefits that accrue to the vampire because of its ability to not cast a shadow - it is then easier for the vampire to hide its true identity, move in the hidden shadows, become invisible, and be able to prey on people. Not casting a shadow, the vampire, a shape-shifter who is a master of camouflage and disguise, is able to easily seduce and entice the unaware, as sugar-coated vampires entrap us through our unconscious shadow and blind-spots. This is to say that the loss and dis-owning of our shadow can lead to vampirism.

The vampire archetype gets activated within us when we turn our backs on our own darkness, rendering our shadow invisible to ourselves. We can't see vampires because we have chosen not to see those aspects of ourselves that are most like the vampire. Our reluctance to see our own vampiric qualities blinds us to the vampiric energies in others.

In addition to the weak and defenseless, vampires seek out people who are on the verge of a quantum, evolutionary leap in consciousness, but have not yet fully integrated their realizations and come out the other side.

These individuals are in an energetically sensitive and "charged" condition, and their openness and vulnerability invites the vampiric entities to help themselves and gorge on the light of their expanding awareness. The strategy of these predators is to distract us so as to keep our attention directed outwards, thereby stopping us from finding the light within ourselves, which would "kill" the vampires.

If we hold up a mirror and reflect back the insanity being exhibited by those stricken by the wetiko psychosis, we run the very real risk of being accused of being the ones who are crazy.

If we do manage to connect with the light within ourselves and try to share it with others, these nonlocal vampiric entities (what I have in previous articles called "nonlocal demons," or NLD for short), not bound by the third-dimensional laws of space and time, will try, via their "connections" to the nonlocal field, to stop us by influencing other people to turn against us.

This process can destroy us, or, if we have the meta-awareness to see what is happening and are able to skillfully navigate our way through, can serve to further strengthen our intention, deepen our connection with the light of lucidity, hone our skill of creatively transmitting our realizations, and cultivate more open-hearted compassion.

It is as if these psychic, nonlocal vampires are guardians of the threshold of evolution.

Just like vampires, full-blown wetikos have a thirst for the very thing they lack - the mystical essence of life - i.e., the "blood" of our soul. In "consuming" other human beings, wetiko disease is a feeding thing, a psychic eating disorder in which the stricken psyche consumes other psyches, as well as, ultimately, itself.

Wetikos are what are called "psychophagic," i.e., soul-eaters.

Savaged by the ferocity of their unending hunger, full-blown wetikos have become possessed by an insatiable craving that can never be filled. This vampiric feeding is an unholy parody, a satanic reflection, of the self-renewal of life. This perverse inner process is mirrored collectively by the consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending desires, conditioning us to always want MORE.

As if starving, we are in an endless feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless void. This process of rabid, obsessive/compulsive consumption is a reflection of a deeper, inner shared sense of spiritual starvation. The entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of out-of-control wetiko disease "in business."

Viruses like wetiko are all about copying themselves.

A virus can't replicate itself, however; it has to use some other vehicle as its means of reproducing itself. They need us to be their birthing chamber. To the extent we are not aware of their ploy, these higher-dimensional spirit parasites put us on, wearing us like their third-dimensional space suits. These psychic vampires are compelled to replicate themselves through us so that we can then "pass on" and transmit the bug to others.

This process is analogous to when someone is infected with the rabies virus. In advanced stages of the disease, like a rabid animal they will be taken over by the irresistible urge to bite other creatures so as to pass on the virus. People taken over by the rabies virus are a living, frothing symbol of what the wetiko virus does in its full-blown virulent stage.

In a vampiric lineage, the wetiko virus's self-propagation is accomplished through the medium of the "family system" (be it our family of origin, or the human family), as the legacy of abuse (be it physical, sexual, political, emotional, psychological, or spiritual) gets passed down, both individually and collectively, and transmitted over generations, continually incarnating itself through the living.

It is through the traumatic shattering of our wholeness that wetiko passes its fractured logic and distorted code into the body/mind of another.

As if under a curse, our species has been suffering from a collective, inherited form of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Remaking their victims in their own image, the wetikos' victims join the legion of the "damned," themselves becoming holders of an unholy lineage.

This "curse" will continue until we intervene in the spreading of this vampiric mind-parasite, and the chain of never-ending abuse is stopped.


Highly Contagious

Speaking about wetikos, Forbes says,

"they are insane (unclean) in the true sense of the word. They are mentally ill and tragically, the form of soul-sickness that they carry is catching." [xxv]

Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness.

Its vectors of infection and propagation do not travel like a physical pathogen. This fluidly moving, nomadically wandering bug reciprocally reinforces, feeds off of and into each of our unconscious blind-spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself throughout the field. In wetiko there is a code or logic which affects/infects awareness in an analogous way to how the DNA in a virus passes into and infects a cell.

People who are channeling the vibratory frequency of wetiko align with each other through psychic resonance to reinforce their shared agreement so as to uphold their deranged view of reality. Collaboratively supporting their mutual psychosis, groups of people drawn together by the unconscious can potentially become a socio-political force with which to be reckoned.

When a group of people are in agreement about anything, whether it is true or not, their alignment with each other exerts a contagious, magnetic field-of-force which can sway and attract the unaware into itself.

People taken over by the wetiko virus usually don't suspect a thing about how they have been "conned." The wetiko culture offers no incentive for them to self-reflectingly speculate upon their depraved circumstance; on the contrary, the nonlocal field configures itself to conspire, enable and further cultivate their psychosis.

When someone is a full-blown, unrecognized wetiko, the field around them torques so as to protect, collude with, and feed into their psychosis in a way that en-trances everyone around them.

Once under the wetiko spell, they lose the capacity to recognize the wetiko pathology in others. In a situation of "group narcissism," wetikos at different stages of the disease assume particular postures and roles relative to each other so as to protect and shield themselves from their own insanity and darkness. They feed and reinforce each others' narcissism because it enhances their own.

Speaking about the type of person who is typically susceptible to fall prey to the wetiko virus, Forbes writes that it is usually the individual,

"whose strings are pulled by others or who follow a life-path dictated by others. Thus they are ripe for the wetiko infection." [xxvi]

Not in touch with their inner guidance, they project authority outside of themselves, and become very suggestible to the consensus, agreed-upon opinion of the dominant pack.

Losing touch with their own discernment and ability for critical thinking, the "mass man" becomes part of the mindless herd and falls prey to "group-think," whose members co-dependently enable each other to uphold their shared version of the (wetiko) world.

Their group consensus about the nature of reality gets increasingly harder to sustain as time passes, however, as, like a house of cards ready to collapse at any moment, their vision of the world is based on the fundamental error of not being true. Strangely enough, people under the collective enchantment of wetiko become fanatically attached to supporting an agenda that oftentimes is diametrically opposed to serving their own best interest.

This is an outer reflection of the inner state of being under the sway of the self-destructive wetiko parasite.

By being "unclean," it is as if there is an un-holy or evil spirit that has taken up residence in the beings of those taken over by wetiko. They are unwittingly being used as instruments, as covert operatives of this darker, unclean spirit to proliferate itself in the wider field. Secret agents of the disease, wetikos' secret is self-secret, in that it is secret even to themselves.

As is true for any of us when we are taken over by something other than ourselves, carriers of wetiko don't know how possessed they are at any given moment. The experience of being taken over by something more powerful than themselves always happens in their blind spot (see "Are We Possessed?").

The wetiko bug influences our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to hide and obfuscate itself from being seen. Like a higher-dimensional, alien form of psychic foliage, the wetiko germ implants its seeds into and takes root and germinates within our mind, distracting and deviating us from our true vocation, calling and spiritual path.

The alien, and alienating, effect of the wetiko virus, the very thing we need to see, is disguised by the way we think, perceive, and give meaning to our experience.

When someone becomes a full, card-carrying member of the cult of wetiko (see "The Bush Cult"), it is as if their mind has been colonized by the virus in such a way that they themselves don't have the slightest clue about their own pathological condition.

Wetikos don't experience themselves as needing help; for them other people are always "the problem."

They usually don't mind their disease, or even recognize it, because it is all they know, and their leaders and the very society they live in encourage them in it. They neither have an appreciation of their disorder, nor do they realize how truly sick they are.

Forbes writes,

"one of the major traits characterizing the truly evil and extreme form of wetikoism is arrogance." [xxvii]

In being "full-blown," wetikos are arrogantly puffed up with their own self-importance, i.e., "inflated." Instruments for evil, wetikos are arrogantly, ignorantly and self-righteously convinced they are in possession of the truth and working for the highest good.

It is as if they are unable to know that what they are doing is evil, unable to register their actions as anything other than good.

Forbes concludes,

"In any case, the wetiko disease, the sickness of exploitation, has been spreading as a contagion for the past several thousand years. And as a contagion unchecked by most vaccines, it tends to become worse rather than better with time. More and more people catch it, in more and more places, and they become the true teachers of the young." [xxviii]

Wetiko culture gets taught both at home and in "the academy," where people become "certified" in the ways of its world, and are thus accredited and empowered to spread its corrupting ways on ever grander scales.

Speaking about the rapidly spreading wetiko contagion, Forbes writes,

"It is spread by the wetikos themselves as they recruit or corrupt others. It is spread today by history books, television, military training programs, police training programs, comic books, pornographic magazines, films, right-wing movements, fanatics of various kinds, high-pressure missionary groups, and numerous governments." [xxix]

All of the mainstream, culturally-sanctioned, corporatized institutions are in the business of indoctrination, telling us what to think and not think about, as well as how to think.

Our mind is continually being massaged into shape by the prevailing culture, as if our ‘true face' is being "lifted." It is as if our spiritual pockets are being picked. Our "civilization" has become the mouthpiece for the propaganda organ of the disease, entrancing us to "buy" into its viewpoint as we are bled to death of what really counts most.

The "culture" (sic) that in-forms and forms around wetiko illness is itself a channel of its transmission, and if we sign on the dotted line and subscribe to its viewpoint, its life-denying culture will gradually subsume us into itself, as we become unwitting agents doing ITS bidding. This is how the ever-expanding, self-generating psychic empire of collective psychosis "works," as it takes over and increasingly approaches "full-employment."

Full-blown wetikos might be petty tyrants at home or at work but still might be one of the impoverished and oppressed, wielding no real power in the world at large.

What Forbes refers to as "Big Wetikos," are full-blown wetikos who have climbed the wetiko ladder, jumped through the wetiko hoops, and have risen in the wetiko ranks so as to find themselves occupying positions of power where they can influence and control events in our world so as to game the system.

The Big Wetikos who control the levers of power, be they the,

super wealthy

CEO's of corporations

bank presidents

leaders of nation-states,

...are particularly dangerous, as they define the terms of our dialogue, dominating the agreed upon historical narrative.

Managing our perceptions through the propaganda engines of the mainstream, corporate media which they control (see "The War on Consciousness"), Big Wetikos in positions of power create the limits of our conversation and debate.

Wetiko is an idealogical virus whose "currency" is the syntax of ideas. Wetiko deviates our mental syntax, i.e., the rules of how we form language, thereby distorting the semantics, the meaning we place on our experience of ourselves and the world. Wetiko is a semantic disorder, as it alters the axioms through which the psyche shapes, casts and "spells" its words, thereby conjuring up its experiences.

The thought-forms and beliefs that express and represent the wetiko virus act as an intrinsic, built-in control system, defining the limits of what we imagine our possibilities are, as individuals, nations and as a species. Wetikoism supports and perpetuates whatever prevailing myths, stories, dogmas and (un)holy books reinforce its nefarious, self-serving agenda.

Books, and other forms of information, which don't support wetikos warped version of the way things are, are metaphorically speaking, "burned" (or in some cases, literally - the books of the aforementioned Wilhelm Reich, for example, were actually burned by the United States Government. In describing what he called "the emotional plague," Reich was in his own way pointing at the evils of the wetiko virus).

We live inside of a world that, like a dream, is an interactive mirror inseparable from our own inner being. A reflection of a condition deep within ourselves, wetiko disease is an unmediated, direct manifestation of the dreamlike nature of the universe, which is the very realization that wetiko is showing us.

Recognizing the dreamlike nature of our situation creates a living antibody made out of awareness itself that is custom-designed to neutralize the psychic pathogen of wetiko. This is to say that encoded within the deadly pathology of wetiko is an insight and revelation which is its own cure (see "Shadow Projection is its own Medicine").

Its own self-revelation, wetiko disease provides its own psychic medicine, but in order to receive its healing ‘benefits' we have to recognize and more deeply understand this miracle in psycho-spiritual health care. How amazing - the very thing that is potentially destroying us is at the same time waking us up. A potential catalyst for our evolution as a species, we are all co-creating and dreaming wetiko up together.

Wetiko is a truly quantum phenomenon, in that it is the deadliest poison and the most healing medicine co-joined in one superposed state.

Will wetiko kill us? Or will it awaken us? Everything depends upon if we recognize what it is potentially revealing to us. The prognosis for wetiko/malignant egophrenia depends upon how we dream it.

Now that we have the dia-gnosis and pro-gnosis, all we need is to discover the cure, which requires having ‘gnosis' itself...

References

[i] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. xv.
[ii] ‘psychic' is used throughout this article as the adjective form of "psyche" and not with any parapsychological connotation
[iii] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 46.
[iv] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. xvii-xviii.
[v] C. G. Jung, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, vol. 2, p. 1321.
[vi] Ibid., p. 39.
[vii] Ibid., p. xvi.
[viii] Ibid., p. 24.
[ix] Ibid., p. 49.
[x] Ibid., p. 60.
[xi] Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, p. 218.
[xii] Ibid., p. 218.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 218.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 219.
[xv] Ibid., p. 219.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 220.
[xvii] Ibid., p. 220.
[xviii] Ibid., p. 220.
[xix] Ibid., p. 229.
[xx] Please see Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, by John Lash. His website is metahistory.org.
[xxi] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 188.
[xxii] Jung, The Symbolic Life, CW 18, par. 1374.
[xxiii] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 153.
[xxiv] Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. xvii.
[xxv] Forbes, Columbus and other Cannibals, p. 18.
[xxvi] Ibid., p. 43.
[xxvii] Ibid., p. 52.
[xxviii] Ibid., p. xix.
[xxix] Ibid., p. 49.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_ ... ons17a.htm

"Dispelling Wetiko is one of those rare, courageous books that leads us where we would prefer not to go: into the depths of our own shadow. Yet this is the most essential journey for our present time.… It is a must-read, without a doubt."
—Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit

"Paul Levy summons us by Wisdom's call to community, action, and our higher humanity. Truly initiatory, this book is inviting us to step through the looking glass and consciously participate in our own evolution. In exposing our psychic blindness, Levy is helping us to open our eyes and see."
—Thom Hartmann, author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

"When I read Dispelling Wetiko, I was unprepared for a work of such true brilliance and depth. Paul Levy should be congratulated on writing a seminal work."
—Brad Steiger, author of Revelation: The Divine Fire

"The world is suffering from the globalization of selfishness, materialism, and militarism, and Paul Levy, in his magnum opus, Dispelling Wetiko, identifies their roots in a cancer of the soul.… An insightful and provocative manifesto on how to combat this global epidemic before it is too late."
—Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, chair of the Interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and author of The Left Hand of God

"Paul Levy hits the archetypal nail on the head when he identifies debt pushers, consumption pushers, and GOD (gold, oil, and drug) pushers as the cannibalistic offenders in today’s society.… I can’t express how brilliant I find this book."
—Iona Miller, coauthor of The Modern Alchemist: A Guide to Personal Transformation

"Paul Levy's Dispelling Wetiko is among the very best books on the nature of evil that I have ever read, and because it offers a workable way out of the universal psychosis that native peoples call Wetiko, possibly the most important on the subject that I have had the pleasure of adding to my library. A real treasure."
—Whitley Strieber, UnknownCountry.com, Dreamland radio show

Wombaticus Rex » Mon Apr 18, 2016 7:17 pm wrote:Unfortunately, there are several mirrors in this house.

Maybe I'll get drunk enough to smash them tonight, but I doubt it.

Unable to self-reflect, they can no longer access within themselves the faculty of the psyche from which such activity derives. One of the reasons we can't see a vampire's reflection in a mirror, however, is because our own inner, unconscious vampire obscures the reflection, which is to say that the unacknowledged specter of our own shadow gets in the way.

A vampire casts no shadow. In order to cast a shadow, there has to be a source of light. In a vampire there is no light, only infinite darkness.

Not being a living being, a vampire has no inherent reality, no substance. Only a thing of substantial existence can produce a shadow. Vampires can't cast a shadow, however, because they are the living embodiment of and identical with the archetypal shadow. A shadow casts no shadow of itself, as the shadow itself has no substance.

Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil

Printed in the Fall 2014 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Levy, Paul."Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil" Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 146-151.

By Paul Levy

We as a species are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity from the beginning of time. This psychospiritual disease of the soul—which Native Americans have called wetiko—can be thought of as the bug in the system. It informs and animates the madness that is playing itself out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage.

Native American mythologies portray the mythical figure of wetiko as a cannibalistic spirit who embodies greed and excess and can possess human beings. The wetiko was once a human being, but its greed and selfishness have transformed it into a predatory monster. Thus in indigenous mythology, indulgent, self-destructive habits are thought to be inspired by wetiko. In the Native American view, those who have become wetikos are individuals who have “lost their wits,” a phrase that connotes not only being out of one’s right mind, but also not knowing what one is doing (acting “unwittingly”). Native Americans have often portrayed the wetiko as having a frigid, icy heart, devoid of mercy. Like cannibals, those taken over by wetiko consume the life force of others—human and nonhuman—for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back anything of real value from their own lives.

The Ojibwa word for wetiko, windigo or weendigo, seems to have been derived from ween dagoh, which means “solely for self,” or from weenin n’d’igooh, which means “excess.” According to Native American lore, the wetiko monster can only prey on human beings who, like itself, have indulged in excess. Thus human beings’ propensity for excess makes them vulnerable to possession by, and transformation into, a wetiko.

Like a werewolf, the wetiko is sometimes portrayed as a shape-shifter who can even appear disguised as a good spirit. In the indigenous legends, whenever the wetiko eats another person, it grows larger in proportion to the meal it has just eaten, so that it can never be full or satisfied. Buddhism portrays a similar figure, the hungry ghost, who, with its pinhole mouth, constricted neck, and huge, unfilled stomach, can never satisfy its insatiable cravings. At the collective level, this perverse inner process is mirrored by the insane consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending desires, conditioning us to always want more.

Just as viruses or malware infect a computer and program it to self-destruct, wetiko programs the human biocomputer to think and behave in self-destructive ways. Covertly operating through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, wetiko renders people oblivious to their own madness, compelling them to act against their own best interests. People under its thrall can, like someone in the throes of an addiction or in a state of trauma, unwittingly create the very problem they are trying to resolve, clinging desperately to the thing that is torturing and destroying them.

People taken over by wetiko are suffering from an autoimmune disease of the psyche. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism perversely attacks the very life it is trying to protect. In trying to live, it destroys life, ultimately destroying even itself. In the same way, once wetiko has insinuated itself into a living entity, it acts like a perverted antibody, treating the wholesome parts of the system as cancerous tumors to be exterminated.

This problem is being collectively acted out on the world stage. Humans are destroying the biosphere of the planet upon which we all depend for our survival. Wetiko is at the bottom of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking on this biosphere. One example is the destruction of the Amazonian rain­forest, the lungs of the planet. Another example is the terminator seeds that are genetically engineered not to reproduce a second generation, forcing farmers to buy new seeds and making life impossible for many poor farmers. If the planet were seen as an organism, and people seen as cells in this organism, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic and had turned on the healthy cells, destroying the very organism of which they themselves were a part. Our species appears to be enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale.

By whatever name we call it, wetiko is undoubtedly one of the most important discoveries in human history. Indicating the supreme importance of developing knowledge about how this predator of the mind operates, don Juan from the Carlos Castaneda books refers to it as “the topic of topics.” (He doesn’t use the name “wetiko,” however, but calls it “the flyer.”)

This cancer of the soul manages our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bedazzles consciousness in such a way that we become blind to the underlying viewpoint through which we are giving meaning to our experience. Wetiko is a form of psychic blindness that fancies itself to be sighted.

Wetiko subversively turns our genius for reality creation against us so that we become bewitched by the projective tendencies of our own mind. People afflicted with wetiko react to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are separate from themselves, delusionally thinking that they have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting. Over time this activity of endlessly reacting to and becoming conditioned by one’s own energy tends to generate insane behavior, which can manifest internally or in the world at large. As if under a spell, we become entranced by our own intrinsic gifts and talents for dreaming up our world, unknowingly hypnotizing ourselves with our God-given power to creatively call forth reality so that it boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for evolution.

Though the origin of wetiko is within the psyche, at a certain point it develops enough momentum to become self-generating, attaining a seeming autonomy, like the Frankenstein monster. This pathological fragment can subsume the wholesome parts of the psyche into itself such that they become its slaves. As this process continues, wetiko gains sovereignty over the psyche, like the legendary tiger, which, when restored to life out of its bones, devours the magician who resurrected it. It then holds its creator in its thrall, and she is unable to escape from the hell of her own making. The person so afflicted has created her own sci-fi nightmare, with herself in the starring role.

https://www.theosophical.org/files/publ ... etiko2.jpg

To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic tapeworm or parasite has taken over our brains and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite. Noting our almost unlimited capacity for self-deception, psychiatrist R.D. Laing writes that we have “tricked ourselves out of our own mind” (Laing, 73). People are particularly susceptible to the spell of today’s masters of deception when they are out of touch with the living and self-authenticating reality of their own experience. Not sufficiently knowing the nature of their own minds, they are overly susceptible to taking on others’ perspectives, falling prey to the prevailing groupthink of the herd and to the wetiko parasite. When we are taken over by more powerful psychic forces, we don’t know that we are possessed by something other than ourselves, which is precisely the way the wetiko bug wants it.

Wetiko can also subliminally insinuate thought-forms and beliefs into our minds which, when unconsciously enacted, feed the virus and ultimately kill its host. Wetiko covets the creative imagination that it lacks. As a result, if we don’t use the divine gift of our creative imagination in the service of life, wetiko will use our imagination against us, with deadly consequences. The wetiko predator is in competition with us for a share of our own mind, wanting to sit in our seat. Instead of sovereign beings who consciously create with our thoughts, we will then be unconsciously created by them, as the wetiko pathogen literally thinks in our place.

If we are not aware of wetiko’s covert operations within us, it is as if an alien, metaphysical “other” has colonized our minds and set up a seemingly autonomous regime, a “shadow government” within the psyche (outwardly reflected by the “shadow government” in the world), so that we become oppressed within the domain of our own being. The wetiko virus paralyzes the ego into an immobilized, powerless state, in which the life force and energetic potential are vampirically drained away. Zombielike, we are pushed around like figures on a chessboard, played and manipulated like marionettes on a string. We are held in check by these impersonal, intangible forces, which, unbeknownst to us, are gaming us from a hidden position within our own unillumined psyches. As compared to existing “by virtue” of something, the wetiko bug can only exist by the “lack of virtue” of our own obscured and unexamined minds.

As this rogue, split-off part incorporates itself within the psyche, it “dictates” to the ego, tricking it into believing that it is directing itself. We are allowed our seeming freedom and the ability to live our “normal” lives, as long as these do not challenge or threaten the deeper agenda of these sinister forces to centralize power and control. This internal process is manifesting externally in the creeping tendency towards fascism in the global body politic.

Shape-shifting so as to cloak itself in our form, this mercurial predator gets under our skin and “puts us on” as a disguise, impersonating us as it fools us into buying into its false version of who we are. Falling prey to its artificial yet uncanny intelligence, we become unreal to ourselves. Bamboozled and hoodwinked by this imposter, we mime ourselves, becoming false duplicates of our original, true selves. When we are taken over by the wetiko spirit, we can subjectively experience ourselves as being most ourselves, while ironically being most estranged from ourselves. This is a simultaneous state of fusion and dissociation, as the parts of the psyche that have split off from consciousness overwhelm and take over the whole through its unconscious blind spots. No longer belonging to or possessing ourselves, we then identify with who we are not while forgetting who we actually are. In so doing, we have effectively lost our souls.

The psychiatrist C.G. Jung refers to wetiko by the name Antimimos, which he describes as “the imitator and evil principle” (Jung, 371). Antimimos refers to a type of deception that could be thought of as countermimicry. This antimimon pneuma—the “counterfeit spirit,” as it is called in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John (Robinson, 120), imitates something (in this case, ourselves) but with the intention of making the copy serve a purpose counter to that of the original. Antimimos is a maleficent force which tries to seduce us so as to lead us astray; it effects an inversion of value, transforming truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth, leading us to forgetfulness. When we fall for the ruse of this snake oil salesman of the spirit, we become disoriented, losing our sense of spiritual vocation, our mission in life, even our very selves. Writer and poet Max Pulver has said that “the antimimon pneuma is the origin and cause of all the evils besetting the human soul.” The revered Gnostic text Pistis Sophia says that the antimimon pneuma has affixed itself to humanity like an illness (Campbell, 254; cf. Mead, 247ff.).

The Gnostics (“the ones who know”) also call this subversive parasite of the mind the “archons.” Every wisdom tradition has its own way of symbolizing wetiko; indeed illuminating wetiko is what makes a wisdom tradition worthy of the name. Such traditions include Buddhism, Kabbalah, Hawaiian huna, mystical Islam, shamanism, and alchemy. It is helpful to find other lineages and traditions that illumine the wetiko disease in their own fashion. In this way our multiperspectival vision can enable us to see what no one particular map or model by itself can reveal.

Viruses like wetiko are all about copying themselves. But a virus can’t replicate itself; it has to use some other vehicle as its means of reproduction. Just like a vampire, the wetiko virus has a thirst for the very thing it lacks—the mystical essence of life—the “blood” of our soul, our very life force. The “undead” vampiric wetiko virus is fundamentally “dead” matter taking on apparently living form; it is only in and through a living being that it acquires a kind of life. These psychic vampires are compelled to replicate themselves through us so that we can then pass on to others. In wetiko there is a code or logic which infects awareness much as the DNA in a virus passes into and infects a cell. Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness. But its vectors of infection do not travel like physical pathogens. This bug both reinforces and feeds off our unconscious blind spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself. The greatest danger that threatens humanity today is the possibility that millions of us can fall into the unconscious together, reinforcing one another’s madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in our own self-destruction.

The most horrifying part of falling under the wetiko virus is that it ultimately involves the assent of our own free will, as we willingly, though unknowingly, subscribe to our enslaved condition. This is to say that no one other than ourselves is ultimately responsible for our situaion. Though “relatively” real, and definitely needing to be dealt with at this level, from the ultimate, absolute point of view, the wetiko virus has no objective existence separate from our own minds. There is no entity outside ourselves who can steal our souls; the dreamed-up phenomenon of wetiko, which arises entirely within the sphere of the mind, tricks us into giving it away ourselves.

With wetiko disease, we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves, which is why there is in reality nothing outside of ourselves to be afraid of. The origin of the wetiko psychosis lies entirely within the human psyche. The fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means that the cure for it is likewise within us as well. Though not objectively existing, the wetiko pathogen has a virtual reality such that it can potentially destroy our species. The fact that something that only exists as a function of ourselves can destroy us points us to the incredibly vast, invisible, yet mostly untapped creative power that is our birthright.

Wetiko is nonlocal in that it is an inner disease of the soul that expresses itself on the canvas of the outside world. Thus it is not constrained by the spurious subject/object dichotomy or the conventional laws of three-dimensional space and time. In fact one of wetiko’s unique ploys is to take advantage of the fact that there is no actual boundary between the inner and the outer.Wetiko nonlocally informs and configures events in the world so as to synchronistically express itself, which is to say that just like in a dream, events in the outer world are symbolically reflecting a condition deep within the psyche of each of us. If we don’t understand that our current world crisis has its roots within and is an expression of the human psyche, we are doomed to unconsciously repeat and recreate endless suffering and destruction in more and more amplified form, as if we are having a recurring nightmare.

To the extent we are unaware of this virus of the mind, we are complicit in its propagation. Since it pervades the underlying field of consciousness, potentially all of us have wetiko. Every one of us subjectively experiences the wetiko virus in his or her own unique way, regardless of what concepts or words we use to describe the experience, or whether we believe in such things or not. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko, leading us to think they have the disease and we don’t, we have fallen under the spell of the virus, because wetiko feeds on separation, polarization, and the fear of the other.

We start to become immune to wetiko when we develop the humility to realize that any one of us, at any moment, can potentially fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for this virus to act itself out through us. Like a vampire, wetiko can’t stand to be illumined, for in seeing how it covertly operates through our own consciousness, we take away its seeming autonomy and power over us while at the same time empowering ourselves.

The wetiko psychosis is a dreamed-up phenomenon, which is to say that we are all potentially participating in and actively cocreating the wetiko epidemic in each and every moment. Wetiko feeds on our policy of turning a blind eye to its operations; the less the wetiko virus is recognized, the more seemingly powerful and dangerous it becomes. Since the origin of wetiko is the human psyche, recognizing how this virus of the mind operates through our unawareness is the beginning of the cure. We normally think of illumination as seeing the light, but seeing the darkness is a form of illumination too. Wetiko is forcing us to pay attention to the fundamental role that the psyche plays in creating our experience of ourselves and of the world. Our shared future will be decided primarily by the changes that take place in the psyche of humanity, which is truly the world’s pivot.

Wetiko can only be seen when we begin to realize the dreamlike nature of our universe, step out of the viewpoint of the separate self, and recognize the deeper underlying field of which we are all expressions, in which we are all contained, and through which we are all interconnected. The energetic expression of this realization, and the dissolver of wetiko par excellence, is compassion.

Similarly, the greatest protection against becoming affected or possessed by wetiko is to be in touch with our intrinsic wholeness, which is to be “self-possessed”—in possession of the part of ourselves that is not possessable, which is the Self, the wholeness of our being. Being in touch with our true nature acts as a sacred amulet or talisman, shielding and protecting us from wetiko’s pernicious effects. We defeat evil not by fighting against it (in which case, by playing its game, we’ve already lost) but by getting in touch with the part of us that is invulnerable to its effects. Grasping the multifaceted ways that the wetiko virus distorts the psyche enables us to discover and experience the part of ourselves that is incorruptible, which is the place from which we can bring real and lasting change to our world. It is as though the evil of the wetiko virus is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence designed to connect us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves. Testers of humanity, these nonlocal vampiric forces are guardians of the threshold of our conscious evolution.

Thus, although it is the source of humanity’s inhumanity to itself, wetiko is at the same time the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known (as well as not known) to humanity, as it is the impetus for us to awaken to the dreamlike nature of the universe. While a typical virus mutates so as to become resistant to our attempts to heal from it, the mercurial wetiko virus forces us to mutate—and evolve—relative to it. In a paradoxical sense, we don’t cure wetiko; wetiko cures us. How amazing—the very thing that is potentially destroying us is at the same time waking us up! Wetiko is a true conjunction of opposites: it is at the same time the deadliest poison and the most healing medicine. Will wetiko kill us? Or will it awaken us? Everything depends upon our recognizing what it is revealing to us. The prognosis for the wetiko epidemic depends upon how we dream it.

Sources

Campbell, Joseph, ed. Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 4. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1968.
Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Mead, G.R.S. The Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Miscellany. Rev. ed. London: J.M. Watkins, 1921.
Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library. 3d ed. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992.

Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (2006).

https://www.theosophical.org/publicatio ... ne?id=3472

wombat wrote:

"Where is the virus link, though? I just read that and didn't see anything actually implicating or even identifying it."

Novem5er » Tue Apr 19, 2016 12:47 am wrote:How many here have actually come face to face with an evil person? Someone who, without a doubt, would inflict great pain on others? I'm sure plenty of people here have.

For my personal encounter, I shook his hand. Swapped stories. Gave him water from my fridge. Our kids played together. We went fishing. We were almost family. A few months later he broke in my mother in law's house and shot her twice: once in her neck and again in her head. We buried her a few days later while he sits in jail still awaiting trial.

Not sure what made him do it. I don't believe in the Devil. Not sure about spirit viruses, either.

Nordic » Tue Apr 19, 2016 2:08 am wrote:
Yikes. Dude ....

Novem5er wrote:How many here have actually come face to face with an evil person?

Modern civilization suffers from the overly one-sided dominance of the rational, intellectual mind, a one-sidedness that seemingly dis-connects us from nature, from empathy, and from ourselves. Due to its disassociation from the whole, wetiko is a disturber of the peace of humanity and the natural world, a sickness which spawns aggression and is capable of inciting violence amongst living beings. The wetiko virus is the root cause of the inhumanity in human nature, or shall we say, our seemingly inhuman nature.

Before you learn to speak, your brain is like a perfect computer, but without a program. When you are born, you don’t know a language. It takes several years for your brain to mature enough to receive a program. Then the program is introduced to you, mainly through your parents, as well as other people around you. They hook your attention and
teach you the meaning of words. You learn to speak, and the program goes inside you little by little by agreement. You agree, and now you have the program.

Well, if you are the computer, then knowledge is the program. Everything you know, all of the knowledge in your head, was already in the program before you were born. I can assure you that none of us ever has an original idea. Every letter, every word, every concept in your belief system is part of the program, and that program is contaminated with a virus called lies.

There’s no need to judge the program as good or bad or right or wrong. Even if we don’t like the program, nobody is guilty for sharing it with us. It’s just the way it is, and it’s wonderful because we use the program to create our stories. But who is running our life? The program! The program has a voice, and it’s lying to us all the time.

How can we know what the truth is when almost everything we learned is a lie? How can we recognize what is real in us? Well, it took some time for me to find out, but I found out. Our emotions are real. Every emotion that we feel is real, it is truth. I discovered that every emotion comes directly from our spirit, from our integrity; it is completely authentic.

You cannot fake what you feel. You can try to repress your emotions, you can try to justify what you feel or lie about what you feel, but what you feel is authentic. It is real, and you are feeling it. There is nothing wrong with whatever you feel. There are no good emotions or bad emotions; there is nothing wrong with anger or jealousy or envy. Even if you are feeling hate, it comes from your integrity. Even if it’s sadness or depression that you are suffering, if you feel it, there’s a reason for feeling it.

I discovered something very interesting about the human mind, something logical and important to understand. Everything you perceive causes an emotional reaction—everything. If you perceive beauty, your emotional reaction is wonderful; you feel great. When you are hurt, your emotional reaction is not so great. But you perceive not just the outside world; you perceive the virtual world you create in your head. You perceive not only your feelings, but your knowledge—your own thoughts, judgments, and beliefs. You perceive the voice in your head, and you have an emotional reaction to that voice.

Now the question is this: What is the voice in your head telling you? How many times has it told you, “God, I’m so stupid, how could I do that? I will never learn!” The voice of knowledge judges you, you perceive the judgment, and you have an emotional reaction. You feel the shame; you feel the guilt. The emotion is true, but what causes the emotion, which is the judgment that you are stupid, is not true; it’s a story. Again, this is just action-reaction. What is the action? The action is the perception of your point of view, which means the perception of your own judgment. What is the reaction? Your feelings are the reaction, and you react to the lies with emotional poison.
[....]
. Why do you react with anger? Well, because somebody kicked you, right? But who kicked you? The voice in your head, the main character of your story—what you believe you are.

You also perceive your image of perfection, what you believe you are not, and this also creates an emotional reaction. How do you feel when you cannot live up to that image:? The emotion is not pleasant, but your emotional reaction is real; it’s what you feel. But is it true that you need to fit that image? No, it’s a lie. What you are perceiving is just a lie that you agreed to believe in. You agreed, and that lie has become a part of your story.

Humans are victimized by knowledge, by what we know. If we make a mistake in front of someone, we try to justify the mistake to protect the image we project. Later, when we are alone, we remember what happened, and we punish ourselves all over again. Why? Because the voice of knowledge keeps telling us what we did from the same point of view that we had when we did it. The voice becomes a powerful judge, and it’s telling us, “Look what you did!” And it’s telling this to whom? It was the voice that made us do it in the first place!

The voice of knowledge is abusing the emotional body. What is not real is abusing what is real. The action is to believe a lie; the reaction is to feel emotional pain. The emotional body perceives the voice, reacts to the voice, and just like a tiger, it attacks. We lose control, and we do things and say things that we really don’t want to do or say. Now the voice of knowledge is afraid of our emotional reaction; it judges our reaction, and makes us feel ashamed of our own feelings.

Then we perceive the emotion of shame, and use knowledge to try to justify the emotion, which means the voice of knowledge is talking about what we feel. The voice starts lying about our feelings, and even tries to deny what we feel. Then we perceive that voice, we perceive the judgment, and we have another emotional reaction. Now we feel guilty because we reacted emotionally. Then knowledge tries to explain the emotion of guilt. The emotional pain is growing, and now we are depressed. Can you see the cycle?

The voice of knowledge makes a story about our emotions, we perceive the story, and we try to repress our emotions. Perceiving that repression creates another emotional reaction, and soon we just want to repress everything we feel. “I shouldn’t feel this way. What kind of man are you? Are you a wimp or what? Real men don’t cry.” We pretend it doesn’t hurt. Yes it hurts, but it hurts because we make a story, perceive the story, and drag more emotions into the story.

Why do we hate? Because someone is abusing us. That’s why we hate. Why do we suffer? Because something is hurting us. That’s why we suffer. It’s a normal reaction to being hurt. But what is hurting us? Well, now the answer is easy. What hurts us is the voice of the liar in our head that keeps telling us the way we should be, but we are not. The hate, the anger, and the jealousy are normal emotional reactions that come from what is real, which means they come from our integrity, not from who we are pretending to be.

That’s why there is nothing wrong with hate. If we feel hate, the voice of knowledge speaking in our head is causing us to hate. The hate is completely normal; it’s just a reaction to what we believe. If we change the belief, then the hate will transform into love. All of our emotions change when we no longer believe the voice because the emotions are the effect, not the cause. Emotional pain is a symptom of being abused; the pain is letting us know that we have to do something to stop the abuse.

Why do people abuse us? Because we allow them to abuse us, because in our judgment we believe we deserve to be abused. But if we go a little deeper, we see that we abuse ourselves far more than anybody else abuses us. We can blame other people who hurt us and say, “I grew up being abused,” and we can make many excuses. But in the present moment, who is abusing you? If you are truthful , you find that mostly it’s your own voice of knowledge.

Every time we lie to ourselves, we abuse ourselves. Every time we curse ourselves, we abuse ourselves. Every time we judge ourselves, every time we reject ourselves, of course we have an emotional reaction, and it isn’t pleasant! Again, if we don’t like the emotional reaction, it’s not about repressing what we feel; it’s about cleaning up the lies that cause the emotional reaction.

The message coming from our integrity is clear. The voice of integrity is screaming to us, “Please, save me!” That reminds me of the movie The Exorcist, about a little girl who is possessed by demons. Well, there is a little girl inside us saying, “Help me! I’m being possessed by the main character of my story!” Oh, my goodness—and it’s true!
[....]
We are possessed by a distorted image of ourselves, and that is why we are no longer free. How many times have you heard someone say, “If the real me comes out, I don’t know what’s going to happen”? We are afraid that something inside of us will come out and destroy everything. And you know what? It is true. If the real you comes out, it will destroy all of the lies, and that is frightening.
[....]
The universe is simple: it’s about cause and effect, action and reaction. If you don’t like the way you are living your life, this is a reaction to the program that is ruling your life. The liar, the program, is not even part of you, but at the same time, it is part of you because it’s the way you identify yourself. The program creates the story, then it tries to make sense of the story by explaining and justifying everything to the main character of the story. What a setup. What a creation. Humans create an entire culture, a whole philosophy of humanity. We create history, science, art, Olympic games, Miss Universe, you name it. It’s our creation, and it’s beautiful and wonderful, but it’s just a story!

The main character of your story is you, but the role that you are playing is not you. You have practiced that role for so long that you have mastered the performance. You have become the best actor in the entire world, but I can assure you that you are not what you believe you are. Thank God, because you are much better than what you believe you are.

I remember when my Grandfather told me, “Miguel, you will know that you are free when you no longer have to be you.” At that moment, I didn’t understand him, but later I knew exactly what he meant. I don’t have to be the way everybody wants me to be. I don’t have to be what I believe I should be according to my own lies.

Your story is your creation. You are the artist with the force of life flowing through you. If you don’t like your art, you have the power to change it. That’s the good news. You don’t have to be you anymore, and that’s the maximum freedom. You don’t have to be what you believe you are. You don’t have to be that anger or that jealousy or that hate. You can recover the sense of what you really are[....]

Sounder » Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:13 am wrote:

I like Gregory Bateson’s notion that we switched from an ethics of optima to an ethics of maxima by allowing rational consciousness to adopt the idea that more (intellect) is always better. ...

I prefer to trace things back to our split model of reality, as this seems more tangible and empirical than is talk of wetiko viruses.