Wetiko: Disease of The Soul

Paul Levy writes: “Wetiko is a virus of the mind that cultivates and feeds on fear and separation.”

I lost a few followers here on WordPress since the US presidential election. I guess some people don’t like my absolute hatred for that orange POS, but it’s never been a secret how I feel about repression and criminal behavior and loss of reproductive rights, oh well…I’m grateful they chose to delete themselves. We are not the same.

Along with the results of the election where the decent candidate, Kamala Harris, conceded her apparent loss, there’s been an uptick in chat about wetiko. I’ve written about it before but now theres a resurgence of interest in anything that could possibly explain the toxic world we inhabit.

Wetiko is a disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a 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.

Drawing on insights from Jungian psychology, shamanism, alchemy, spiritual wisdom traditions, and personal experience, author Paul Levy shows us that hidden within the venom of wetiko is its own antidote, which once recognized can help us wake up and bring sanity back to our society.

A Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for more than thirty years, he has intimately studied with some of the greatest spiritual masters of Tibet and Burma.

“For millennia, humanity has struggled to understand the manifestation of evil in our world. In this regard Dispelling Wetiko is an extraordinary book, and author Paul Levy has made a great contribution to our understanding of the evil that is happening in our world today, as well as who and what we are.” says Hank Wesselman PhD., anthropologist and author of The Bowl of Light Previously reviewed here: https://enchantedseashells.com/2022/12/15/what-im-reading-the-bowl-of-light/

Wetiko in a Nutshell by Paul Levy, author of Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World

A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul 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.” 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.

Before being able to treat this sickness that has infected us all, we have to snap out of our denial, see the disease, acknowledge it, name it, and try to understand how it operates so as to ascertain how to deal with it — this is what my book Wetiko is all about.

The Normalization of Wetiko

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 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.

What Is Wetiko Really?

Wetiko is a cannibalizing force driven by insatiable greed, appetite without satisfaction, consumption as an end in itself, and war for its own sake, against other tribes, species, and nature, and even against the individual’s own humanity. It is a disease of the soul, and being a disease of the soul, we all potentially have wetiko, as it pervades and “in-forms” the underlying field of consciousness. Any one of us at any moment can fall into our unconscious and unwittingly become an instrument for the evil of wetiko to act itself out through us and incarnate in our world. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think they have the disease and we don’t, in seeing them as separate we have fallen under the spell of the virus ourselves.

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. 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 brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite (a process which will ultimately kill its host — us).

In wetiko disease, something that is not us surreptitiously, beneath our conscious awareness, takes the place of and plays the role of who we actually are. Shape-shifting so as to cloak itself in our form, this mercurial predator gets under our skin and “puts us on” as a disguise. Miming ourselves, we become a copy, a false duplicate of our true selves. We are then truly playing out a real version of the imposter syndrome.

The Sickness of Exploitation

Wetiko is powerless to control our true nature, but it can control and manipulate this false identity that it sets up within us. When we fall under the sway of wetiko’s illusion, we simultaneously identify with who we are not, while dissociating from and forgetting who we actually are — giving away our power, not to mention ourselves, in the process.

Disconnecting from our own intrinsic agency, we open ourselves to be used, manipulated, and exploited by outside forces. Indigenous author Jack Forbes, who wrote the classic book about wetiko entitled Columbus and Other Cannibals, refers to wetiko as “the sickness of exploitation.” Wetiko can be conceived of as being an evil, cannibalistic, vampiric spirit that inspires people under its sway to take and consume another’s resources and life-force energy solely for their own profit, without giving anything of value back from their own lives. Wetiko thus violates the sacred law of reciprocity in both human affairs and the natural world as a whole.

The main channel of wetiko’s transmission is relational. It exists through our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world at large. Like a vampire that can’t stand the light of day, the wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined. However, in seeing how it covertly operates through our own consciousness, we take away its seeming independence, autonomy, and power over us, while at the same time empowering ourselves. The way the vampiric wetiko covertly operates within the human psyche is mirrored by the way it works in the outside world.

Jung never tired of warning us that the greatest danger threatening humanity today is the possibility that millions — even billions — of us can fall into our unconscious together in a collective psychosis, reinforcing each other’s madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in creating our own destruction. When this occurs, humanity finds itself in a situation where we are confronted with — and battered by — the primal, primordial, and elemental forces of our own psyche.

The Internal Origins of Wetiko

The most depraved part of falling under the thrall of wetiko is that, ultimately speaking, it involves the assent of our own free will; no one other than ourselves is ultimately responsible for our situation. There is no objective entity called wetiko that exists outside of ourselves that can steal our soul — the dreamed-up phenomenon of wetiko tricks us into giving it away ourselves.

People under the sway of wetiko are implicated in and willingly subscribe to their own enslavement. They do this to the point that when offered the way out of the comfort of their prison they oftentimes react violently. They symbolically — and sometimes literally — try to kill the messenger who is showing them the path to freedom. Ultimately speaking, in wetiko disease we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves. Rather, the origin and genesis of the wetiko psychosis is endogenous; its roots are to be found within the human psyche. The fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means that the cure for wetiko is likewise within 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 continually recreate endless suffering and destruction in increasingly amplified forms, as if we are having a recurring nightmare. In my language, the inner situation within ourselves is getting “dreamed up” into materialized form in, through, and as the world.

In waking life we are continually dreaming right beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when we are under the influence of our unconscious complexes. In other words, when we are “under the influence” of our activated unconscious, we will unknowingly recreate our very inner landscape via the medium of the outside world. What can be more dreamlike than that?

Recognizing the correlation between the inner and the outer, between the micro and the macro, is the doorway into being able to see wetiko and wake up to the dreamlike nature that wetiko is simultaneously hiding and revealing depending on our point of view and level of awareness. Recognizing the connection between what is happening out in the world with what is taking place within our minds becomes a channel or secret doorway that leads beyond our merely personal psychological issues, empowering us to deal with the essential problem of our time.

To “heal wetiko,” which refers to a concept describing a deep-seated psychological pattern of greed, selfishness, and destructive behavior, according to author Paul Levy, you can focus on practices like increased self-awareness, shadow work, mindfulness, cultivating gratitude, connecting with community, and actively working to counter destructive behaviors by integrating your unconscious aspects and projecting positive intentions into the world; essentially, by consciously choosing compassion and generosity over self-serving actions.

https://www.innertraditions.com/blog/wetiko-in-a-nutshell

Key aspects of healing wetiko:

• Recognize and acknowledge wetiko within yourself: Pay attention to your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors where you might be acting out of greed, envy, or a desire to exploit others.
• Shadow work: Explore and integrate your shadow aspects, the parts of yourself that you might disown or project onto others.
• Mindfulness practice: Regularly practice mindfulness to observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment, allowing you to catch wetiko tendencies early on.
• Inner work through therapy or spiritual practices: Seek support from a therapist or engage in spiritual practices that encourage self-reflection and healing.
• Cultivate gratitude: Focus on the positive aspects of your life and express gratitude to shift your perspective away from negativity.
• Compassion and service to others: Actively seek opportunities to serve others and demonstrate compassion, counteracting the self-centered nature of wetiko.
• Community building: Surround yourself with supportive people who share similar values and encourage your growth.