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Part 3
In the first part of this series, we contemplated the idea of a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul that has been wreaking havoc throughout human history that Native Americans call wetiko.
In part two, we inquired into how the wetiko bug disrupts and deranges a living system, using the world financial system as our case study. The wetiko virus is like a parasite that literally feeds off, takes over and aberrates the curren(t)cy of the infected system.
The wetiko pathogen originally manifests as a disturbance in the field of the collective unconscious of humanity itself, creating the psychic ley lines upon which world events are erected and energized. The origin of this virulent disease is to be discovered within the psyche (see It's All in the Psyche). Because of the psychic nature of wetiko, it serves us to understand the psychological underpinnings of the virus, which is to say, how it affects our day to day relationships and lives.
We begin to ‘see' the bug when we are
able to get in focus and recognize ‘its' psychological signature in
both ourselves and others. The fact that the source of the wetiko
germ is within the psyche means that the cure for this disease lies
hidden within the psyche as well.
As a species, we need to step into and participate with our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this ‘topic of topics' before this virulent madness destroys us. Up until this point in our history we have been too easily distracted by the ruses of the wetiko bug itself. The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will kill us. Its cure is the most pressing and fundamental issue facing us today.
Author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes in his foreword to Jack D. Forbes book about wetiko psychosis,
Historian Arnold Toynbee points out that a civilization doesn't die from being invaded from the outside, but unless it creates culture which nourishes the evolution of the creative spirit, a civilization invariably commits suicide.
As if possessed, our civilization is, trance-like, sleepwalking in a death-march towards our own demise.
The most pressing and inevitable question of our time is not just
‘why?' but more urgently, how can we stop this seemingly
out-of-control, self-destructive, hell-bent part of ourselves?
Shadow projection is a process in which we split-off from and project out our own darkness onto others. It is our misguided attempt at a ‘final solution' to the problem of the evil within ourselves which actually deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Projecting the shadow opens up the door and invites in the vampiric entity of wetiko to make itself at home in the most intimate spaces of our own psyche.
It is through the dynamic of shadow projection that the wetiko bug digs in and entrenches itself within our psyches, where it is then able to commandeer the executive function of the psyche to its own ends.
When we project the shadow, we unwittingly become a conduit for evil to possess us from behind, beneath our conscious awareness, and to act itself out through us. When there is mutual shadow projection between individuals, groups or nations, each side has an unconscious investment in the other playing out the projected evil so as to prove their own self-righteous innocence, a dynamic which becomes self-reinforcing and continually feeds the polarization in the field.
Shadow projection, as it collectively plays out en masse on the world stage is an outer reflection of the initial process within ourselves of our be-nighted effort to exterminate our own darkness (see Shadow Projection: The Fuel of War).
When shadow projection
happens en masse, it is as if the archetype of evil emits its toxic
radio-activity underground, through the shared unconscious of the
collective, and manifests collectively as destructive psychic
epidemics.
Evacuating and relocating our inner darkness outside of ourselves by demonizing the ‘other' seemingly protects us from feeling our vulnerability and pain.
Our inner anxiety about our existential 'power to be' attempts to resolve itself in the power to act free from restraint. In an unmediated expression of our disempowered inner condition, our unconscious acting out does not surmount the need for compulsive repetition, however, but rather, assures it.
Wetikos' modus
operandi, their 'M.O.,' becomes to root out and kill everything that
feels tender, vulnerable and alive within themselves, thus
systematically murdering anything and everything within them that
could possibly melt or produce a crack in the ice that encases their
heart.
The wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless, vampiric lineage of abuse.
Full-blown wetikos induce and dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have split off from and denied, and are thus not able to consciously experience - the part of themselves that has been abused and vampirized. In playing this out, wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness to others in a perverse form of trying to deal with their own suffering.
Paradoxically, wetikos both try to destroy others' light, as it
reminds them of what they've killed in themselves, while
simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves.
To use an extreme, but prototypical example, it is like someone screaming that you're killing them as they kill you. If their insanity is reflected back to them, they think it is the mirror that is insane. Suffering from a form of psychic blindness that believes itself to be sightedness, full-blown wetikos project out their own unconscious blindness and imagine that others, instead of themselves, are the ones who are not seeing.
Governed by the insane, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia, those taken over by the disease fear that if they don't attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves.
In their convoluted, upside-down, flawless illogic, wetikos re-act to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are other than themselves, thinking that they themselves have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting (see Aparticipatory Delusional Syndrome - ADS). Someone fully taken over by the wetiko bug is like a kitten endlessly reacting to her reflection in a mirror as if it is another kitten separate from and other than herself.
The evil we see in the full-blown wetikos is a reflection of our own evil; if we don't recognize this, we will just be projecting our shadow onto them. We are then guilty of the very same thing (shadow projecting) we are essentially reacting to and of which we are accusing them.
Wetikos are the human instruments for the transpersonal ‘spirit of evil' to terrorize the world.
In wetiko disease, we unwittingly become drafted into being foot-soldiers in the war not ‘on,' but ‘of' and ‘for' terror. The wetiko parasite feeds on and harvests the emotions of fear and terror. Terror is the essence of its insidious ‘ill-usory ill-logic.'
In wetiko disease, the psyche takes the ‘terror' that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, unwittingly becomes taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world. We have then become the thing we most feared, ‘creatures of the European nightmare world,' as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large.
Wetiko is the bug which feeds the
experience of terror within our mind and out in the world, fueling
one of its more prominent manifestations in our world today: the
‘Global War on Terror.'
Ultimately deceiving themselves as they believe in the propaganda of their own lies, full-blown wetikos become strangers to themselves.
Wetikos continually have to invest their life-force in lying to themselves, while at the same time fooling themselves into believing that they are not doing so, a version of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublethink.' Suffering from amnesia, they have forgotten what it is to remember, and to ‘seal' the deal, they have forgotten that they have forgotten.
The result is that they split their mind in two.
Falling
into denial, and yet denying they are in the state of denial,
becomes a process that they are invested in at all costs, or it
would blow their denial. Anything that threatens their perverse
state of affairs has to be destroyed. Hiding from their lie, they
are in essence hiding from themselves, which is pure madness.
All of their energy gets invested in fueling their own, and others, deception.
Their will becomes dedicated to hiding from the truth of what they are doing, a truth which endlessly pursues them, as they continually avoid relationship with themselves. Wetikos become wedded to the full-time occupation of keeping one step ahead of themselves, a process which, once it gains a certain momentum, attains a seeming autonomy that is self-generating (see Autonomous Complexes).
As this inner process progresses, it gains a sovereignty over their psyche, as if a self-created Frankenstein monster has come to life in the flesh. The wetikos have then created their own sci-fi nightmare, with themselves in the starring role. Once created, a mind-virus like wetiko, just like the Frankenstein monster, gains a seeming life of its own, independent of its creator.
It then holds its creator in
its thrall, unable to escape from the out-of-control hell of their
own making.
Wetikos become unreal to themselves, a simulation of themselves.
Split in two, they become schizoid, dissociated from themselves, duality having seemingly established itself as the reigning logic at the core of their being. Different parts of the person taken over by wetiko become compartmentalized, neither connected to each other nor to the whole. This process of inner fragmentation serves to hide from the wetikos what they are doing to themselves, as they become their own never-ending ‘cover-up.'
This psychological dynamic is kept in place by how
painful it is to behold and contemplate the modes of avoidance they
construct to protect themselves from what they do not want to know.
And yet, as painful as it is, it is only in the seeing of what they
are doing (to themselves) that there is any possibility of becoming
free from this malignant malady.
They are unable, however, to grasp emotionally the meaning implicit in the thoughts and feelings they are exhibiting.
They lack insight into how they differ
from others, for they do not differ from others as they see others.
They are skillful at pretending love and devotion, as if they are
imitating a person. Impersonating themselves, their existence is a
true parody of life. They can't distinguish between their mimicked
(pseudo) responses of love, remorse, etc., and the genuinely felt
responses of a healthy person.
Suffering from a deep disorder of feeling in which they can not allow themselves to consciously feel, they typically swing between numbness and rage. Fixed in their own limited and myopic point of view, they have no capacity to see themselves as others see them. Proclamations to the contrary, they have no empathy nor compassion.
They can't see the world through others point of view, only through their own, which in Hannah Arendt's opinion is a primary characteristic of what she calls the ‘banality of evil.' Wetikos don't relate to others as autonomous, independent beings, but rather, as pawns to be used as means to their own selfish ends, objects to be manipulated for their own narcissistic benefit, rather than as ends in themselves, subjects with their own intrinsic value and valid viewpoints.
Because they have lost connection to their soul, they cannot hear the pleas of nor see the soul in others.
They refuse to see the harm their actions are doing to others, as this would injure their overly-positive, inflated narcissistic self-image, which protects them from consciously feeling their shame and guilt (read Malignant Narcissism). Seemingly unable to consciously experience their guilt animates more shadow projection, which fuels the wetiko pathogen in a continually self-regenerating feedback loop.
Unwilling
to experience their guilt, wetikos are afraid of being exposed, of
being found out, which is an outer reflection of the terror that the
wetiko parasite within us feels at potentially being illumined.
This sense of guilt
itself is the very feeling from which we split-off. Our guilt does
not allow us to feel our guilt, which is what we secretly feel
guilty over. To the extent that we don't consciously experience our
guilt, we become caught in an infinitely-perpetuating double-bind in
which we project out our guilt and darkness, which just perpetuates
the very thing we feel guilty about, ad infinitum.
Many of our society's historians,
themselves infected by the wetiko virus, exalt aggressive and
exploitative behavior, categorizing as ‘primitive' and ‘backwards'
those who don't forcibly ‘conquer' others, thereby subtly and
subliminally brainwashing the young into the ways of the world of
wetiko.
The multi-headed hydra that is the wetiko collective psychosis materializes itself in families, groups, nations, and in whole species such as ours. Wetiko's ‘body politic' has an intrinsic and insistent need for centralizing power and control, fueled by the bottom line of corporate-driven profits.
Speaking about the monster of ever-expanding empire, Forbes writes,
A ‘front' for the underlying wetiko virus, the military-industrial-criminal-complex, with its ultimately self-destructive, built-in need for endless expansion is like a systematic runaway in cybernetic theory.
The Frankenstein monster of ever-enlarging empire is like a runaway locomotive gaining speed, approaching the event horizon of its inevitable ‘crash,' all under the deceptive banner of ‘progress.'
Meanwhile, this ‘progress' destroys people, families, communities, and potentially, the biosphere itself upon which human life depends.
Evil is like a pathogen that enters a system, be it an individual, nation-state, or world-system, and exploits the system, knocking it off balance.
Such disturbances can transform something wholesome, such as the drive to reproduce, into something evil - the drive to rape. Etymologically, the meaning of the word ‘evil' has to do with ‘excess' as well as to ‘transgress boundaries.' Full-fledged wetikos are rapists of the human soul.
The
word ‘rape,' etymologically speaking, is derived from words that
mean to overwhelm, to enrapture, to invade, to
usurp, to pillage,
and to steal, which are all characteristics of someone who is taken
over by the wetiko virus.
It is a living death sentence that, if left unchecked, destroys everything within its dominion, including itself. Wetiko psychosis ensures that everything is sacrificed on its altar of death and destruction. From a galactic perspective, our planetary so-called ‘civilization' is a living, spreading outbreak of wetiko psychosis that is threatening to destroy not only its human host, but the entire planetary biosphere which makes life on earth possible as well.
Speaking of wetikos' ravenous hunger, Forbes points out,
Forbes continues,
Untreated, this psychic infection gradually takes hold of the wetikos' being, corrupting their heart, poisoning their psychic body politic from within.
Like the virus of
evil insinuating itself into the soul in incremental, un-noticed
steps, at a certain point this leukemia of the soul becomes
irreversible, inevitably leading to its host's destruction. The wetiko virus's pathogenic effects within an individual are a
microcosmic fractal iteration of the collective, macrocosmic
dynamics of the disease; how wetiko works within each of us is
synchronistically mirrored with stunning perfection in how it is
playing out throughout the greater body politic.
Forbes writes,
Wetikos can't help themselves.
Suffering
from a compulsion to destroy, if left to themselves they are unable
to stop their suicidal behavior. Having lost their internal freedom,
they are singularly lacking in options.
Like the subject of a master hypnotist, their attention becomes attenuated, narrowed and constricted to their limited and particularized viewpoint.
After a certain point, wetiko disease becomes so completely internalized that the person so afflicted, as if compulsively repeating their initial moment of trauma, moment by moment recreates their own psychosis without any external stimulus at all. Having unconsciously identified with the aggressor, they become their own perpetrator, police state and control system.
Their pathological inner state
in-forms their actions in the outer world, which becomes the channel
through which their ravaged inner landscape plays itself out and
takes on embodied form.
Wetiko nonlocally in-forms, gives shape to 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 expressing an inner, psychological situation (see The World is Psyche).
Wetiko can only be ‘seen' when we snap out of our literal way of interpreting our experience and start seeing with symbolically informed awareness.
At the same time, wetiko itself can become the impetus for expanding our consciousness
and recognizing that the world itself is a continually unfolding,
living revelation of itself that is speaking symbolically, which is
the language of dreams.
Forbes says,
It is no great accomplishment to adapt to and be considered sane in and by an insane society.
The culture of wetiko promotes the systematic destruction of the human heart, which when fully internalized, alienates us from everything in ourselves, save what reproduces the conditions of the system. Adopting the values of our oppressors, however, insures the continuation of our own dehumanization.
The system is set up to be a set up such that, to quote Forbes,
Big Wetikos learn to exploit every situation to their advantage and sacrifice in themselves everything that doesn't advance this motive.
To become a "Big Wetiko," Forbes comments,
Speaking about how "very, very easy" it is to become a wetiko in our society because of all of the perks and incentives, Forbes writes,
Because of all of the ‘benefits' of the
role, there is not merely a passive disinterest, but rather, an
active resistance and counter-incentive for wetikos to self-reflect,
a contraction which simply feeds their compulsion and further
reinforces their addiction to power.
It should be noted that indigenous people are not free from the wetiko virus as well.
There are indigenous cultures that are governed by wisdom, but there are also indigenous cultures that are ruled by wetiko. We should be careful to not romanticize and idealize indigenous, aboriginal cultures as opposed to European cultures, which would be too simplistic, and dualistic of a view. [xvi]
When wetikos possess power in any culture, or more accurately, when power possesses them, they are in a position to influence, define and create a certain level of reality that, though based on falsehood, operates as if it is real.
In words that would be just as relevant with regards to the current Obama administration, author Ron Suskind quotes a neocon in the previous Bush administration as saying,
If left in positions of power, wetikos
will ultimately become and dream up into full-bodied materialization
their own, as well as our, worst nightmare into reality.
Forbes says,
Many ‘isms' themselves are simply thought-forms used by wetikos themselves to justify their rape, criminality, murder and evil.
Wrapping their cause in the mantle of
goodness allows Big Wetikos, who are in fact full-fledged predators,
to sleep at night, seemingly guilt-free. In a form of
self-entrancement, they have so thoroughly convinced themselves of
the rightness of their actions that they rarely, if ever, have any
ethical qualms about what they are doing. Where the evil of wetiko
is endemic, there tends to be an ethical, developmental arrest in
both individuals and throughout the society.
This is why, to quote Forbes,
In other words, cultures dominated by wetikos tend to organize themselves around the calcified, archetypal mythic pattern of the ‘negative patriarchy,' which, simply put, is based on domination over others (read The Archetype of the Negative Father).
To quote Forbes,
These slogans are the mantras, or words of power, by which the collective spell of group-think is disseminated throughout the collective psyche.
Any rationalization
will do, as long as it serves as cover for the wetikos to continue
to exploit others, centralize power and feed their sickness.
The wetiko virus can only thrive in the global human family if, just like in any family system, each member enables and is complicit in the abuse.
Being a field phenomenon, wetiko incarnates by embodying itself through various interconnected, form-fitted roles arising in the field, all at different stages of the disease. Each of these figures are various re-presentations of the multiple faces of the underlying pathogen.
Wetikos can be hard to recognize because the people who are its
instruments seem like normal, well-intentioned, innocent looking
people, and yet, it is these seemingly regular people, just like you
and me, who often become the ‘secret carriers' of the disease. To
the extent that we are not aware of this insidious, nonlocal,
psychological disease, both in others and potentially within
ourselves, we can very easily become its ‘secret carriers,' its
unwitting accomplices.
The Big wetikos could never get away with the murder that they do without ‘the nice people in the offices' enabling them.
These ‘typists, lab technicians and clerks' are just ‘following orders,' and yet, are complicit in the insidious evil that is being spread throughout the world with their co-operation.
Modern, corporate, technological systems are set up to distance us, both physically and psychologically, between what we do for a living and the ultimate, potentially destructive consequences of our actions.
Even ‘the nice people in the offices,' people just
like you and me, to the extent that we are not aware of how we are
feeding, and being fed by, the wetiko virus, are tiny cogs in the
great predatory machine, complicit in the impersonal evil of the
faceless system and in the destruction it wreaks upon all life.
It serves us to differentiate the interdependent roles in the field which ‘conspire' (which literally means to ‘breathe together') to create and sustain the wetiko disease. All of these figures collaboratively enable the bug of wetiko to play out its reign of (t)error.
Forbes writes,
The full-blown, Big Wetikos, the ‘master predators' in positions of power, can be suave and sophisticated, with refined tastes, highly intelligent, educated people, with offices in places like New York and London, and can be highly respected by society, all of which makes their malady hard to recognize.
Others are cast in the role of ‘protecting' the abuser - the master predator's handlers, minions, sycophants, enablers, supporters and followers - while others are complicit by simply remaining silent and looking away.
Some pick up the role of feeling powerless, thinking ‘what's the use?'
Some politically active sorts
can pick up the role of attempting to fight the disease in a way
that simply strengthens the diabolical polarization in the field,
which just feeds and is the signature of the disease itself (see
Spiritually-Informed Political Activism). Whatever
the role, it's all just multiple guises wearing the same underlying
uniform.
It is like when Toto, in The Wizard of Oz pulls away the curtain, but instead of their being a man behind the curtain, there is no one there but the formless archetype itself. If the master predators are removed from their positions of power, but if the underlying system which spawned them remains in place and not dealt with, over time others will simply pick up their ‘vacant,' and vacuous roles.
These power-mad roles exist as potentials in the field waiting to be filled, fleshed-out and incarnated, as these roles are an expression of the full spectrum of possibilities implicit in the underlying field, reflecting, as it always does, this same range of potentials within ourselves.
The nonlocal field is seamless, and the roles do
not, and cannot, exist in isolation, but rather, in co-relation to
each other, as well to the whole field itself, in an interconnected
web of infinite relatedness.
To concretize a localized manifestation of the pathology in an individual would be analogous to only seeing the circle that a three-dimensional sphere makes as it passes through a two-dimensional plane. The circle is a lower-level reflection of a higher-dimensional entity (the ‘sphere' of wetiko's influence), just as the person taken over by the wetiko bug is a surface expression of a deeper, more fundamental pathogen that pervades the underlying field.
To use another example, the person momentarily afflicted with wetiko is like a shadow on a wall - cast from a globe hanging from the ceiling - relative to the globe.
The shadow on the wall is a re-presentation and projection of the higher, three-dimensional entity of the globe into a lower dimension of space. Studying the shadow within its proper context relative to the globe is the way of understanding the object casting the shadow (the higher-dimensional entity of the ‘global' wetiko psychosis). In these examples, the point is not to focus on the personal manifestation of the disease, but rather, to see the deeper, nonlocal field that is giving shape to, in-forming and pervading the particular, localized outbreaks of the disease in the greater body politic.
Seeing, in Jung's words,
...IS the very expansion of consciousness which becomes the doorway connecting us to a deeper part of ourselves, as well as to each other.
Recognizing the underlying field paves the road to healing.
This process couldn't play itself out without all of its parts reciprocally co-arising relative to each other.
The whole field, with all its myriad, fluid and unfixed roles
- each of us at various moments in time picking up the different
roles - are mutually conditioning each other in a seamless,
interpenetrating net of relations, as if appendages of a
higher-dimensional organism that is revealing itself through our
nonlinearly orchestrated and coordinated interplay.
In modern physics, the field - the invisible organizing principle of the universe - has become more fundamental than matter.
Instead of relating to any part of the field as an isolated entity, it's important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the ‘medium' through which wetiko manifests itself. The native American concept of wetiko disease is a social phenomenon, a relational dynamic of the field itself that can not be understood, and does not exist in isolated individuals apart from the social milieu in which they move, interact and have their being.
Seeing the nonlocal field drives a stake into the very heart
of the prevailing scientific, materialistic perspective, which
ironically enough, still attempts to see the world as ‘machine.'
Seeing ‘through' the illusion of the separate self, rather than seeing ‘through the separate self' as a lens through which we view the world, entails recognizing that even the full-blown wetikos, the master predators themselves, are not separate from us.
The Big Wetikos are fully embodying, in personified form, a pathological
tendency that exists in potential within ourselves. It is as if they
are the externalized materialization of this potential within
ourselves that we've projected outside of ourselves and literally
collectively dreamed up into manifestation. Recognizing this
generates compassion for this part of ourselves. It is only through
compassion that we immunize ourselves from the virus.
The person so possessed (think of, like I did in my book, George W. Bush, as one example) is the ‘revelation' of the pathology in living flesh and blood. The person so stricken is showing us, in fully embodied, personified form, the underlying infrastructure and dynamics of this trans-human disease.
When someone is so possessed, they are the local crystallization ‘in form' of a nonlocal, and ultimately ‘formless' phenomenon. The person taken over has been dreamed up into materialization to be a living, breathing ‘symbol' of the nonlocal disease, an embodied reflection of an archetypal, and yet pathological, part of ourselves.
Recognizing this is to realize that this person doesn't exist as an isolated, discrete entity, a skin-encapsulated ego, separate from the surrounding field. Seeing the person so possessed in their true context - as literally inseparable from all of us - becomes a portal through which we can refine our inner vision and see through the transparent illusion of the separate self. Seeing that the person so taken over is not separate from the field is a reflection of our own condition.
Seeing the other's transpersonal
nature enables us to not personalize ourselves.
We've all had our wetiko ‘moments,' that's just the way it works.
Recognizing this cultivates humility, which helps to psychically immunize us from the pernicious effects of the disease. This realization ultimately collapses the boundary between those who have the disease and those who don't. Wetiko's nonlocal nature ultimately makes the question of who has the disease irrelevant, as we all have it to varying degrees, or rather, it has us. We are all in the soup together.
This realization engenders both
compassion and forgiveness. This does not mean, however, that the
Big Wetikos are not ethically, spiritually, and legally responsible
for the unimaginable carnage they have caused.
As we shed light on wetiko, we become sensitive to its movements within ourselves. At this point the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, for there is no place for the spirit to hide. We are then in a position of having access in our lucid, self-reflective awareness to a sacred vessel which can nourish the very spirit which is to be venerated.
To come full
circle and successfully accomplish the original, healing intent of
our magic ritual, the hidden, powerful spirit of wetiko needs to be
‘contained;' this is the archetypal point behind the sacred
alchemical idea of a mystical vessel which transforms the entire
universe.
This higher-dimensional mystic container is forever stimulating, stabilizing and strengthening itself in a positive feedback loop which literally gives birth to and inspires the creative spirit. This jewel-like higher-dimensional entity composed of consciousness itself is a lucidity generator that is tapping into the zero point energy of the mind, a form of higher-mind technology that attracts the rest of the universe into itself.
When we recognize that we exist not apart from, but relative to each other, our connection with each other is ‘hermetically sealed' with the stamp of Hermes. We then relate with each other in such a way so that none of our projections unconsciously leak out into the world, for the simple reason that the world is recognized to be our projection.
This is the very realization which bonds us together and through which we are united with the world, each other and ourselves. Becoming ‘tight' in this way, we are ‘blessed' by the master magician ‘Hermes/Mercury,' the God of the sacred art of alchemy (please see my article The Sacred Art of Alchemy).
‘The Force' is then with us.
Empowered, we are able to trans-fix, trans-mute, trans-form and
liberate the vampiric spirit of wetiko, while simultaneously
snapping out of our en-trance-ment of ourselves.
Or on the other hand, is the suggestion that the devil does exist that is implicit in the previous statement a deception of the devil (who is, after all, considered a liar), and as such, is a disguised form in which the devil has insinuated himself into not only our conversation, but into the world at large?
It is important to shed light on this murky area:
The devilish wetiko virus, like a vampire, if left to its own devices, would die, as it is only able to exist if there is someone outside of itself on whom it can feast.
A vampire has no intrinsic, independent, substantial existence in its own right, it only exists relative to us. The pathogenic, vampiric, mind-parasite called wetiko is nothing in itself, yet, it has a ‘reality' such that it can destroy our species.
The fact that something that only exists as a function of ourselves can destroy us is pointing at the incredibly vast invisible power that is inherent within our being.
Ultimately speaking, in wetiko disease we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves, but rather, the origin of the wetiko psychosis is within us. The fact that a vampire is not reflected by a mirror can also mean that what we need to see is that there's nothing, no-thing to see, other than ourselves.
The
fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means
that the cure for wetiko is within us as well.
Wetiko forces upon us the evolutionary responsibility to come to terms with the evil within our own hearts.
To the extent we have not rooted out the wetiko bug within ourselves we are complicit in the co-creation of the evil playing out in the world. The part of us that is colluding in the creation of a collective psychosis like wetiko is the part of us that is mad, for why else would we be doing this? To the extent we're not fully awake, we each have a part of us that's mad, which gets acted out in our life.
How can we not have a part of us that's mad, living in a world gone mad, a world that is not separate from, but rather, a reflection of ourselves?
It is only by confronting what is insane and inhuman in ourselves that we become truly human. It is important to face how we have been deviated by wetiko, for if we cannot see how we have been set off course, we can't orient ourselves to find our true path in life. Seeing how we've been led astray is a form of illumination.
To see how wetiko operates with
our co-operation is to gain critical insight into the elusive
workings of our own mind.
We are all dreaming up the wetiko epidemic together. Seeing through our experience in this way gives world events a certain transparency, as well as rendering us transparent to ourselves. Seeing through ourselves makes it unlikely that we would fall prey to and be seduced by any wetiko inspired impulses that pulsate through us.
This intimacy with ourselves enables us to step into and embody a role in the field of being like a ‘psychic T-cell' that helps to heal the malignant cancer in the collective body politic of the world soul. Seeing the dreamlike nature of the world and ourselves helps to generate a culture of compassion, which is a ‘wetiko dissolver' par excellence.
Compassion can, however, when necessary,
set a fierce boundary, displaying itself in the most fearsome of
ways.
Flooding light on wetiko's machinations takes away its seeming autonomy and alleged power over us, such that it can no longer compel us to act it out unconsciously. Paradoxically, ‘seeing' this vampiric parasite is to relate to it as other than ourselves, while at the same time recognizing it within ourselves.
Though the vampire is a figure within us, it is not us.
In differentiating ourselves from the vampire, we recognize the
difference between ourselves and it. Seeing the vampire, we don't
identify with our subjective experience of the vampire within. This
is to say that in seeing the vampire, we free ourselves from our
unconscious identification with and possession by it, and step back
into ourselves.
When we see people who are taken over by wetiko and we feel superior to them, our feeling of superiority is itself a symptom of the disease.
If we unconsciously react against wetiko, having judgment, anger, hatred, etc., we are then acting out, however well-intentioned, the same process of shadow projection that underlies the wetiko disease in the first place - which is to dissociate from, project outside of ourselves, and react to our own evil. We are then unconsciously reacting to the unconscious part of ourselves which the wetikos embody.
This re-action is an unconscious ritualistic invocation and re-enactment of the initial impulse within ourselves of turning away from and contracting against a part of ourselves.
This is the timeless, primal act which called forth and spawned the spirit of wetiko in the first place. To the extent we are unaware of what we are doing, we, as ‘reps' for wetiko, are compulsively re-enacting our trauma, participating in re-creating the wetiko virus in this very moment. We are then playing out our unresolved internal affairs in the outside world by, in and through our reaction, unwittingly becoming a vector that is carrying the wetiko bug out into the world (see Triggered by Evil).
Instead of unconsciously reacting and projecting the shadow
outside of ourselves, when we consciously relate to and take
responsibility for the evil within ourselves, we are energetically
withdrawing and dis-investing from our complicity in the continual
re-animation of evil in the world.
Just as the way to cut off the head of the mythic Medusa is to look at her reflections in the mirror-shield, the way to stalk the vampiric entity of wetiko is to track and sense its fingerprints within ourselves by looking into the mirror of our own mind.
The evil of wetiko can be too much to stare at directly, however, just as looking at the snake-haired Medusa face on turns us to stone.
Vampires are ‘petrifying,' which means both ‘terrifying,' as well as ‘paralyzing' and ‘turning to stone.' They petrify their victim, just like a mouse becomes immobilized by the transfixing gaze of the serpent. Vampires are not a creature to be messed with by the frivolous. Mapping wetikos nonlocal footprints, both out in the world and in the co-responding places within ourselves that are being touched, is to discover the nonlocal multi-dimensional ‘anatomy' of wetiko.
It is impossible to encounter wetiko and not be activated, as wetiko's nonlocal force-field is activating by its very nature, in that it is co-extensive and interwoven with our own.
Our unconscious, knee-jerk
reactivity is the primary way that the wetiko psychosis regenerates
and propagates itself in the field. Like a pathogen invading a body,
this virulent psychic bug strikes and hooks us through our weakest
point in the unconscious, the tenderest and most vulnerable spot
within ourselves through which we are most likely to re-act.
Humanity's highest virtues are called upon when we are confronted by evil. Encoded within the evil of the wetiko virus is its own psychic vaccine, a potential inoculation against our own ignorance and laziness, which if not overcome, will overcome us. The wetiko bug's existence requires us to strengthen our muscle of discernment. The virus demands that we cultivate impeccability within ourselves, or we don't stand a chance.
Wetiko literally demands that we step into our power and become resistant to its oppression such that we discover how to step out of bondage and become free, or else! Instead of a typical virus mutating so as to become resistant to our attempts at healing it, the wetiko virus forces us to mutate relative to it. It is as though the evil of wetiko is itself the instrument of a higher intelligence.
This
higher power, through the revelation and understanding of wetiko,
connects us to a sacred, creative source within ourselves. The
wetiko bug is the greatest catalytic force of evolution ever known -
as well as not known - to humanity.
Finding the name for this higher-dimensional, malignant virus of the psyche helps us to more easily recognize it and get a ‘handle' on it, which is the first step in taking away its destructive power over us.
Seeing wetiko and calling it by its rightful name initiates a process that resigns it to the ranks of the unemployed, leading to the wetikonomy that it animates being put out of business. The energy that was being invested and bound up in feeding the wetiko pathogen then returns to nourish and be nourished by the creative wholeness of the psyche. Naming something creates ‘currency' in the economy of the psyche.
To
name something is to evoke it, to call it out, which is an
expression of an intrinsic, magical power that we all have within
us. This is related to the
Australian Aboriginal belief that we
‘sing' the world into being - that we are creating as we name
things.
Jung says,
It will serve us greatly as we introduce the word ‘wetiko' into our planetary dialogue, making wetiko part of our day to day vocabulary.
In ‘spell'-ing a word, we are casting a spell, calling forth a spirit, and creating a universe, all while discovering our ability to name. In divining the true name we are de-‘literal'-izing language, as we create language to ‘symbol'-ize our experience. The word wetiko, being a sacred name, is like a mantra, a word of power, in that the speaking of it empowers the idea.
Let us therefore ‘spread the word.' We are only able to name ‘wetiko' when we see, and register, its nonlocal nature, both throughout the world and within ourselves.
This can only be done when we ourselves become acquainted with our nonlocal nature, to the part of us that is woven into both the evil of wetiko and the wholeness of the divine.
Like that great maxim of medicine states,
The famous Greek philosopher Socrates reminds us that if we want to understand something, we first must name it.
Naming
something means to find our experience of its nature within
ourselves. Indigenous, wisdom-based cultures understand the exorcistic power of finding the right name of a ‘demon,' which is
precisely what they would understand the wetiko pathogen to be
(see
The Daemonic).
There is no one definitive model for this disease, however, as each model has both its utility as well as its limits.
When all of these models are
combined and looked at together, it gives us a greater resolution
and capacity to see what no one particular model by itself can
reveal.
Wetiko is the word made flesh in its most depraved form. In finding the name, however, we are accessing the divinely sponsored power of the word to create an idea, which is a living psychic organism of real value and merit, with an intrinsic power all its own. Ideas are ways of regarding things, the means by which we see, as well as perspectives through which we view the world.
The word ‘idea,' etymologically speaking, has to do with both ‘to see' as well as ‘to know.' In other words, a novel idea opens our inner eye and helps us know by giving us in-sight into something previously unconscious.
What Plato called the "eyes of the soul," ideas are the modes of consciousness through which we envision and create our life. In finding the right name(s), we are impregnating and incubating a novel idea. We can then spread and give birth to our meme by sharing it, as we create our own mind anti-virus, a living antigen to the heretofore unrecognized mind-virus of wetiko.
As Communist China's Chairman Mao openly
confessed, the one thing he was most afraid of was a new idea. For
nothing is more powerful than a magical idea whose time has come.
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