Derivative Images

What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we then told you that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others – human and non-human – as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy. You may dismiss this line of thinking as New Age woo-woo or, worse, a leftist conspiracy theory. But this approach of viewing the transmission of ideas as a key determinant of the emergent reality is increasingly validated by various branches of science, including evolutionary theory, quantum physics, cognitive linguistics, and epigenetics.

The history of this infection is long, strange, and dark. But it leads to hope. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/seeing-wetiko-on-capitalism-mind-viruses-and-antidotes-for-a-world-in-transition/

According to Paul Levy: "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. 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. " https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/3472-dispelling-wetiko-breaking-the-curse-of-evil

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. Among his books are The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, May 2018), Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013), and Seeing Wetiko: Healing Our Mind Blindness (Inner Tradition, Fall 2021). An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 35 years. He was the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years.