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Recognizing the Way Our Minds Recreate the Same Problems
- Paul Levy
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Welcome to Healing From Within with your host Sheryl Glick RMT author of the newest book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening which shares messages and stories of Spirit that show us our challenges are not merely economic political or societal but a spiritual disconnect from our true being or soul wisdom. Today Sheryl is delighted to welcome Paul Levy author of Wetiko which offers insight into the Native American meaning of Wetiko an evil cannibalistic spirit that can take over people’s minds leading to selfishness, insatiable greed and consumption destructively turning our intrinsic creative genius against our own humanity.
As listeners of Healing From Within are well aware Sheryl and her intuitive guests share intimate and insightful experiences that help us answer questions of Who Are We? What is Life really all about? How can we find peace and happiness in a world suffering from so much despair? In discovering more about the duality of life: our physical and energetic life, we come to know we are much more than we appear to be and by merging our energies we can improve the quality of life personally and collectively.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within Paul Levy will explore how artists philosophers and spiritual traditions across time and space have been creatively symbolizing the deadly pathogen of the psyche to help us see and heal the concept of Wetiko which has appeared in Kabbalah, Hawaiian Kahuna shamanism, Buddhism and mystical Christianity through esoteric concepts like demons, counterfeiting spirits, and psychic vampires. We explore how the projection of the shadow, self-scapegoating is the underlying psychological mechanism fueling Wetiko and how Wetiko can be seen within the Covid -19 pandemic so we can find the lessons and opportunities offered by it. Paul sheds light on the Wetiko mind-virus and how to recognize the power of imagination to shed light on this destructive thinking that infects so many in these challenging changing times
Paul when asked to think back to his childhood and remember a person place event that may have shown him the lifestyle and interests he might pursue as an adult describes his father who though he did not physically abuse him set up an environment that caused distress and discomfort for him. Perhaps that led him to want to know more about the issues in people’s minds that lead them to destructively use their creative imagination and talents in less than purposeful and evolving ways.
Paul goes on to tell us about what Wetiko is and his interest in that energy that disturbs most of us. Wetiko is a contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” An inner cancer of the soul, wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Wetiko bewitches our consciousness so that we become blind to the underlying, assumed viewpoint through which we perceive, conjure up, and give meaning to our experience of both the world and ourselves. This psychic virus can be thought of as the “bug” in “the system” that informs and animates the madness that is playing out in our lives, both individually and collectively, on the world stage
Wetiko is also a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains within itself the potential to be either the deadliest poison or the most healing medicine. Will wetiko destroy us? Or will it catalyze our evolution and wake us up? How wetiko ultimately manifests depends upon nothing other than whether we recognize what it is revealing to us. How dreamlike—the very thing that is potentially killing us is at the same time helping us to remember who we are. How wetiko manifests depends upon how we dream it. Before discovering the Native term wetiko, Paul was calling this pathological aberration of the psyche “Malignant Egophrenia”— whose acronym is “ME” disease. For when all is said and done, wetiko stems from our mis-identification of who we think we are (our sense of “me-ness”). In a very real sense, we are not who we believe ourselves to be if we experience ourselves as a “separate self ” who exists separate from other (imagined) separate selves—not to mention the whole rest of the universe. From this misguided thought springs a case of mistaken identity, out of which grows the pestilence of wetiko
Paul tells us how he first encountered Wetiko in his own life. Paul writes, “When I first directly encountered wetiko, the experience literally drove me “out of my mind” (some people think I haven’t yet returned, but that’s another story) and destroyed my entire family. I have written a book about this, Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father. One of the gifts of this nightmarish experience is that it has given me an authority to write about such heavy matters as wetiko and evil in a way that no amount of intellectual study could have provided. Through this traumatic set of experiences I received a direct transmission/transfusion of the wetiko virus into the veins of my soul, which, besides making me sick and almost driving me permanently crazy, changed the trajectory of my entire life. This destined me to commit to healing myself from this ill-fated happenstance and to try and understand this seemingly otherworldly force with which I had come into contact (or which had contacted me). Fortunately, my “close encounters of the wetiko-kind” have helped me find my voice and discover my work—this book being just one example. If I hadn’t connected with my creative nature, I would have been in deep trouble and undoubtedly would have become another one of wetiko’s seemingly endless casualties. The point is that I have not written this book as an intellectual, academic, or scholar comfortably sitting in an ivory tower philosophizing or creating theories about wetiko. Rather, I’ve written it as a way of coming to terms with my own harrowing experience with the subject matter, barely escaping with my life and my sanity intact.”
Paul goes on to tell us of his personal encounters with wetiko. He felt convinced of the profound importance of something that many people seem either unaware of, disinterested in, judgmental of or possessed by. It can be a very lonely experience to see something that many other people aren’t seeing. However, I’ve learned to persevere in my vision and continually refine my ability to transmit what I’m seeing in a way that can be helpful for others.
He noticed that it is typically people who have really suffered, be it from going through some sort of wounding experience, emotional trauma, abuse, addiction, and so on—and then have done their inner work—who recognize what I am talking about when I point to the insidious workings of wetiko. These are usually people who have found that traditional religions no longer satisfy their deeper spiritual needs and that mainstream cultural values no longer speak to their souls. Not contained in a faith, these are people who don’t feel that they are in possession of some absolute truth, but are really open to what resonates with their immediate, lived experience.
A few years ago I ran into a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a while. He asked me what I had been up to. I answered that I was writing about the collective psychosis (wetiko is a collective psychosis) that our species had fallen into. His response was telling. He asked me what made me think there was a collective psychosis going on. His question left me speechless; I literally didn’t know how to respond. What made him think there wasn’t a collective psychosis going on, I wondered. Could he give me one piece of evidence? Our collective madness had become so normalized that most people—my friend was extremely bright, by the way—didn’t even notice. Many of us have become conditioned to thinking that if we were in a middle of a collective psychosis it would mean that people would be doing all sorts of “crazy” things such as running around naked and screaming, for instance. This ingrained idea, however, gets in the way of recognizing the very real collective insanity in which all of us are—both passively and actively—participating. If we want to envision what a collective psychosis could actually look like, it might be a real eye-opener to realize it would look exactly like what is happening right now in our world
Paul says that wetiko has been pointed at since time immemorial. Many famous philosophers scientists healers have observed this mind-virus Called by many different names throughout history, the spirit of wetiko renders every other issue secondary. Wetiko is the overarching umbrella that contains, subsumes, informs, and underlies every form of destruction, of ourselves and others, that our species is acting out in our world on every scale. If we don’t come to terms with what wetiko is revealing to us, nothing else will matter, as there will be no more human species.
Humanity is facing the most important question in our history— whether human life will survive in anything that resembles what we now know it to be. We are answering this question with governmental policies and collective behavior that, for the most part, only increase our acceleration toward multiple disasters—as we madly compete with each other to race off the nearest cliff as quickly as possible. Instead of telling the future, I am trying to shed light on a dynamic happening within the human psyche that has been rendered unconscious—and hence forgotten—a dynamic that will shape this present moment and will produce our future. We won’t be able to effectively deal with the horrors that lie in front of us if we can’t face the horrors that lie both behind and within us.
This deeper dynamic had been happening in, as, and through the whole course of human history for millennia, but in recent times it’s becoming more evident and harder to deny. I was—and still am—simply pointing at a deeper longtime pattern that is revealing itself through the behavior of our species.
Once we recognize this wetiko-inspired pattern, we cannot “unsee” it; our aptitude for vision expands accordingly.
The contributions of C. G. Jung being ahead of (as well as outside of and an expression of) his time, the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung, who, it should be noted, considered himself a philosopher in disguise, was tracking wetiko (although not using the indigenous name). He referred to it by a number of different names (for example, oftentimes referring to the dangers of psychic epidemics, collective psychosis, the germ/infection of evil, totalitarian psychosis, imperialistic madness, counterfeiting spirits, powers of darkness, the demon of sickness, etc.). Jung’s wisdom and insight on this topic deeply inform this book. Finding Jung’s work was instrumental for me to get a handle on my own personal encounter with the mind-numbing evil of wetiko. I shudder to think where I would be if I hadn’t come across his writings. It can be so helpful when we are experiencing something that is not culturally sanctioned or recognized to discover someone who has found the words for our seemingly unspeakable experience. Other people have described me, to my horror, as a “Jungian.” (In this I think of Jung saying, “Thank God I’m Jung and not a Jungian.”) I have never even taken a course on Jung. I am simply a independent researcher who follows what inspires me, which Jung does no end. I am totally self-taught regarding Jung. Indeed, he himself felt that his work would more speak to ordinary people than to the scholars and experts. I am a case in point. I am only interested in the parts of his work that speak to my personal experience and help me to alleviate my suffering.
In a sense, Paul’s work on wetiko is a collaboration between him and unknown Native American philosophers, psychologists, and shamans. They lived in a world of tight communities and mutual responsibility for daily survival, in harmony with nature. They had no cars or mass weaponry or stock markets or telecommunications. But they were human like us. They, too, had to deal with the ins and outs of the human psyche. They fought wars and dealt with psychosis, crime, evil, and people of the lie. They had to protect themselves and their societies.
When dark forces arose within the group, they had to identify them and know what could be handled and transmuted by the tribe and what was so toxic that it needed to be exiled for the safety of the rest. Their shamans and medicine women and men understood the nature of demons, possession, and evil in a way that could be most instructive for modern humanity. They provide us with a brilliant diagnosis as well as an urgent warning.
The followers of the Buddhist path can’t monopolize or copyright the idea of “Buddha-nature”—for they are pointing at something that is intrinsic to the living experience of being a human being. In the same way, what the Native American wisdom-holders are illuminating in their conception of wetiko is a universal, archetypal experience that is an essential aspect of our experience of being human. The Native American conception of wetiko can add to, complement, and flesh out the articulation of this same malady by other spiritual traditions.
In describing wetiko, the Cree describe giants that grow with each human meal, so they are simultaneously huge and emaciated—never able to fill their inner void—searching desperately for their next victim, driven by excess. In coming across the Native American idea and description of wetiko, I recognized it in my own life as well as within my own mind. I have no doubt whatsoever that what the Native Americans refer to as wetiko is a universal condition afflicting everyone; it is something we are all fated to come to terms with in our lives
Paul talks about the fact that wetiko is a form of blindness. Wetiko is the overarching umbrella that contains, subsumes, informs, and underlies every form of destruction, of ourselves and others, that our species is acting out in our world on every scale. If we don’t come to terms with what wetiko is revealing to us, nothing else will matter, as there will be no more human species. Humanity is facing the most important question in our history— whether human life will survive in anything that resembles what we now know it to be. We are answering this question with governmental policies and collective behavior that, for the most part, only increase our acceleration toward multiple disasters—as we madly compete with each other to race off the nearest cliff as quickly as possible. We have fallen blind—as if in a hypnotic trance—while a seemingly demonic force compels our species toward its own self -destruction. To quote eminent theologian David Ray Griffin, “Our battle seems to be against ‘flesh and blood’ less than against some demonic power to which human civilization is in bondage.
Strangely enough, the hardest of the hard sciences—quantum physics—comes to our aid to serve as medicine to protect us from the psychological danger of becoming absorbed in our despair. By revealing that we live in a thoroughly quantum universe, quantum physics is placing the keys to our future in our own hands. The question is,” Do we know how to use the gift that is being freely offered to us?”
A little insight into the essence of what quantum physics reveals to us about the nature of our world and how we operate within it can be the best antidepressant imaginable. Quantum physics is empirically showing us the malleable and dreamlike nature of our universe. As quantum physics has revealed, our act of observing the universe influences the universe that we are observing. This is to say that our act of observation is creative. We are not passive witnesses of our world, but—whether we know it or not—active cocreators with it. What this means is that we hold enormous power in shaping our world. Quantum physics points out that even if something is incredibly, ridiculously unlikely, it can still manifest “in reality” in this very moment. Highly unlikely is not quite the same as impossible. An infinitesimally small or “nonzero” probability is radically different than something that is impossible; we should be very careful what we assign to the trash bin of the impossible. The implications of this, both in “the real world” and within our minds, are truly uplifting and inspiring. In questioning and shedding light on the boundary between the possible and the impossible, quantum physics is expanding the realm of the possible to previously unimaginable degrees. In a time such as ours, filled with lies, propaganda and disinformation it becomes nearly impossible to tell what is true or false. It thus greatly behooves us to at least be able to say what is within the realm of possibility.
Wetiko induces in us a proclivity to see the source of our own pathology outside of ourselves—existing in “the other.” Wetiko feeds off of polarization and fear—and terror—of “the other.” Seeing the world through a wetiko-inspired lens of separation/otherness enlivens what Jung calls “the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul,” and simultaneously plays itself out both within our soul and in the world at large.
Wetiko subversively turns our “genius” for reality-creation against us in such a way that we become bewitched by the projective tendencies of our own mind. Falling under wetiko’s spell, we become entranced by our own intrinsic gifts and talents for dreaming up our world in a way that not only doesn’t serve us, but rather is put at the service of wetiko (whose agenda is contrary to our own). Our creativity then boomerangs against us such that we hypnotize ourselves with our creative genius, which cripples our evolutionary potential
Paul says wetiko is the most important thing to understand in the world today
To understand how important wetiko is to understand in the world today we begin with Egregores are similar to the Tibetan conception of tulpas, which are animated thought- forms visualized by a solitary practitioner that actually take on a seemingly autonomous existence and materialize into physical form.
As hard as a tulpa is to create, these self-created thought-forms are considered even more difficult—once having taken on form—to uncreate and dissolve. Imagine how much more challenging it would be to dissolve a collectively dreamed up egregore (a human created, mutually shared thought form). This challenge, however, starts with each one of us right now, in this moment. Once a critical mass is reached—of people who are dreaming up the tulpa/ egregore’s dissolution—the tulpa/egregore will indeed dissolve in no time at all.
This is an expression of the incredibly potent, mostly untapped power we all have to creatively transform our world when we get in synch with each other. Evil is, psychologically speaking, terribly real. Today as never before it is important that we not overlook the danger of the potential evil lurking within us. Only someone really asleep, blind, or infantile can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere. The more unconscious we are of the role that evil plays in our world, the more the devil drives us. When we are taken over by the egregore of ‘e‘epa/ wetiko, this darker spirit rides us, sitting in the driver’s seat of our human vehicle. It’s the one calling the shots, all the while convincing us of the exact opposite—making us feel like we are in charge of our lives while we are actually playing the role of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Wesselman is of the opinion that there is an egregore astride our Western society. These egregores encourage us to create false beliefs, distracting and inhibiting us from realizing our true potential so that we cannot be of optimal benefit to humanity.
Practically all of our modern social, political, economic, military, and religious institutions have egregores as appendages that have been incorporated into the body of the organization. These egregores are like psychic-energetic attachments that are greatly influencing the institutions off of which they are feeding. These egregores could not negatively influence us, however, if we didn’t have the unconscious potential for darkness latent within us.
Paul says wetiko is related to Covid and we can find ways to find opportunities to learn from this difficult world health challenge
With the coronavirus pandemic it is as if the immaterial wetiko virus has taken on corporeal form. It is a true game changer to recognize that the virus is a materialization in our world—a REVELATION— of the immaterial and heretofore invisible wetiko virus that exists deep within the collective unconscious of humanity.
What is playing out with the Covid-19 pandemic, with all the various political, social, and financial reactions to it, as well as what it brings up inside of our minds, can help us—in true quantum style, potentially—to see wetiko. Multiple Vectors of Transmission It is a limited and overly one-sided materialistic viewpoint that conceives of Covid-19 as solely being a physical virus. Having multiple facets of operation and channels of influence, the virus is multidimensional in its impact.
It is affecting our world in practically every way imaginable. Besides its obvious physical aspect, Covid-19 also has a psychological vector of transmitting itself into our minds (via our unconscious reactions of fear, stress, anxiety, etc.). The “mental” vector of the virus spreads much more quickly, as it is exponentially more contagious than its biological counterpart. It propagates itself through the channel of our shared unconscious blind spots and fears. Only Covid-19 Is a Symbol of a Much Deeper Infection. If we become enchanted by the forms of the outer world, entranced in thinking the virus is merely physical, we forget the outer world’s inseparable interconnection to the world within us— which splits our mind in two. We then become dissociated within— and from—ourselves, a state that forecloses on our being able to be of help to anyone, including ourselves. We have then unwittingly fallen under the thrall of the psychological aspect of the virus.
What would you like readers to take away with them after reading your book Wetiko?
An invisible specter in the field, the coronavirus is creating havoc in our world, disrupting business as usual as it ripples—both in our world and within our psyches—throughout the globe. To quote Jung, “Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered.” The coronavirus can be envisioned as a modern-day plague of Egypt. It is a living revelation that is dying to show us something about who we are and our place in the universe. What it is revealing to us about ourselves is crucially important for us to know. Our very survival depends upon receiving its message. We hear every day the phrase We are all in this together.
In the late 1950s, Jung wrote words that are as relevant today as they were then, “We are in the soup that is going to be cooked for us, whether we claim to have invented it or not. We are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic death.” In other words, we are fated to suffer an unconscious “literal” death if we don’t consciously go through a “symbolic” death. This symbolic death has everything to do with finding “the new way” that is demanding to be discovered by our current worldwide plague.
As we go through a species-wide dark night of the soul—the mythic night sea journey—our illusions about the world we live in—and ourselves as well—are being shattered. Seeing through our illusions is a symbolic death of the self that was wed to—and lived by—illusion. Being disillusioned—having our illusions dispelled—is to become sober, stepping out of our intoxicated state. Being disillusioned is truly mortifying, a real death. It is the dying of an overly one-sided—and bogus—image of who we are (remember—one of wetiko’s other names is “ME disease,” i.e., a misidentification of who we think we are).
Our species has gotten drafted into an archetypal death/rebirth experience. In symbolically dying to a part of ourselves that is no longer serving us, another part of us is being reborn. We as a species have been drawn into the cycle of the death and rebirth of the gods. Said another way, having become part of a deeper mythic, archetypal, and alchemical process of transformation, we are going through a cosmic death/rebirth experience of a higher order. The divine process of transformation is typically experienced as punishment, torment, an experience of death and then transfiguration. This divinely sponsored process is subjectively experienced by the human ego as torture. However, if we don’t personalize the experience, identify with it, or get stuck in its nightmarish aspect—a great danger—but allow this deeper process to refine us as it moves through us, it can lead to a transfiguration of our very being. *In alchemy, the torturing of the prima material was an allegory of Christ’s passion.
We thank Paul Levy for sharing a concept of age old source, Wetiko a Mind Virus that plagues our world still and for sharing creative ideas to heal the many issues created by the thinking and behaviors of this thought process.
In summarizing today’s episode of Healing From Within we have come to see that as Paul writes, “The source of the problems confronting humanity are fundamentally not economic, political, or technological, but rather are to be found within the human psyche. To quote Stanislav Grof, “In the last analysis, the current global crisis is a psychospiritual crisis; The Corona Virus and the Wetiko Virus as they reflect the level of consciousness evolution of the human species. It is, therefore, hard to imagine that it could be resolved without a radical inner transformation of humanity on a large scale and its rise to a higher level of emotional maturity and spiritual awareness. Radical psychospiritual transformation of humanity is not only possible, but is already underway. This is an important point to consider: There is undeniable evidence that an expansion of consciousness in the human species is not only a remote possibility but is already taking place. Grof concludes, “The question is only whether it can be sufficiently fast and extensive to reverse the current self-destructive trend of modern humanity.”
Paul Levy and Sheryl Glick invite you to see yourself in light of the wisdom that lies within you and to recognize your well-being, happiness and personal self-growth, do not lie in the expressions of the physical outside world, but within the soul wisdom and maturity that lies within and connects us all to each other and to Universal dimensions of eternal life. While it may not be possible to eliminate wetiko, it is possible to realize we can rise above its infectious trauma producing scenarios and move past the limitations that it imposes on our true spiritual gifts.
