Are We Humans Terminally Insane or Just Waking Up?

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Levy

The following article was originally published on Awaken in the Dream.

“The world today hangs by a thin thread, and that thread is the psyche of man.”
– C. G. Jung

How does anyone possibly express in words the state of collective madness that humanity has fallen into at this time in our history? As if in a hypnotic trance, our species is enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale, rushing as fast as we can towards our own self-destruction. We are destroying the biospheric life-support systems of the planet in so many different ways that it is as if we are determined to make this suicide attempt work—using a variety of methods as a perverse insurance policy, in case a couple of them don’t do the job. What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all.”

In trying to find a way to write about this state of affairs, I find myself going “off-planet,” imagining what it would look like if some enlightened aliens, in their travels throughout the universe, came upon our planet. Observing from a distance, they would naturally see all the various living beings who call planet earth home as related members of one larger organism—a single eco-system—who literally depend upon each other for survival. From this vantage point, I imagine, they would be utterly baffled at why human beings—the seemingly most intelligent species ever to appear on planet earth—are acting out their destructive impulses practically without restraint in every corner of the globe. Contemplating the state of humanity, I imagine these awakened beings wondering, “What in the world has gotten into them?”

I imagine these illumined aliens, in agreement with Merton, would quickly conclude that human beings had become afflicted with some sort of psychological illness, a disease of the mind and soul that has caused us to turn on ourselves in self-and-other destruction. Apparently in a “fallen state,” we have lost our way, become disoriented, and, in our confusion, become quite deranged. It is as if our collective madness is so overwhelming—and by now so familiar and so normalized—that most of us, its sufferers, have no idea how to even think about it, let alone how to deal with it. Not knowing what to do, many of us inwardly dissociate—which only exacerbates the collective madness—and in our fragmented and disempowered state go about our lives in a numbed-out, zombie-like trance, making the best of what seems to be a bad situation.

The question naturally arises: how would these enlightened beings conspire with us to help wake us up? We can only imagine. For our part, it seems essential that we ask questions such as: what is the nature of this madness, and how can it be consciously engaged so that humanity can get back on the right track?

Seen as an organism, there is a systemic psycho-spiritual disease that has infected the whole body politic of humanity. At present we are having an acute—and potentially deadly—inflammation of this illness. As with any disease, in order to cure the pathology that ails us we must come up with the right diagnosis. Under the present circumstances, it is a healthy response for us to have an appropriate level of alarm. If we aren’t “alarmed” at what is happening in our world, we are still sleeping.

Economy

It’s difficult to appreciate how our behavior might appear strange—let alone completely insane—to an impartial observer. But engaging in a “benign onlooker” thought experiment—in this case, through the imagined insights of enlightened aliens—affords us some much-needed perspective. Even from this vantage point, though, the collective madness that humanity is acting out is hard to fathom. It is truly as if the inmates are running the asylum.

The first thing these aliens might perceive is a single living organism in crisis. What makes life itself possible is that every cell and organ of a living organism plays a uniquely vital role to the life and health of the greater organism; each part works together as part of an integrated and interdependent whole system. Our planet and its biosphere is a seamlessly interconnected whole system that operates as a macro-organism, and yet its supposedly most intelligent species has set up a global system for managing its rich diversity of natural resources that would kill a living organism in no time if such a system were implemented within the individual bodies of any of its members. If the human body was organ-ized and operated in a similar way to the global economy—where certain parts of the system demand disproportionate and ever-increasing shares of the existing resources—the body would die in no time.

At the heart of this reality is the fact that the way the global economic system has been crafted primarily serves the interests of the very few. Machine-like, “the system” relentlessly, and increasingly, sucks, drains and redistributes wealth from the majority of the populace—who more and more become impoverished and practically enslaved—into the hands of the already unthinkably wealthy. The powers-that-be then use coercive power to not only deny people the means to make even a subsistence living, but even denies them the basic human right to life on massive scales. This system doesn’t just passively allow people to fall below the poverty line, it actively pushes them under, as if poor people are being intentionally “left behind.” The most powerful and successful financial institutions have taken on the form of parasitic enterprises that have attached themselves to governments and people around the world, upon which they shamelessly and ravenously engorge themselves. These illumined aliens, with their clairvoyant vision, would surely find it revealing that the ones who own the wealth are—like vampires—energetically “feeding” off of the ones who barely have enough to eat.

The evidence is overwhelming. The current global economic system has brought us to a point where an incredibly small minority of human beings own a grossly disproportionate percentage of the planet’s resources. According to recent figures, the 62 richest people on the planet have more wealth than the poorest half of the global population combined, and over time this imbalance is increasingly getting worse. This is globalization at work. Much of this rising inequality is a direct result of the fact that globalization is the process by which multinational corporations are taking over sovereign governments—of the 100 largest economies in the world, over half are corporations.

These challenging economic times we live in are simultaneously the times of the greatest profits in all of history for certain select corporate conglomerates. Those at the top of the economic pyramid then use this ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor to further game the system—itself riddled with corruption—so as to protect their advantage even more. The United States government in particular, instead of being a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” has instead become a plutocracy—a government “of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.” It should get our attention that such economic stratification into the have and have-nots historically plays a crucial role in the collapse of civilizations.

These aliens would recognize that earth’s current way of “doing business” is unsustainable. Instead of creating value and wealth for the good of all, the way business is done on planet earth is actually destroying the genuine wealth and health of the whole system, with people, communities and the environment considered to be nothing more than collateral damage—all for the benefit of a small minority. If humanity is viewed as a family, there is abuse of power being perpetrated within the family system for the simple reason that those in the positions of power can act with total impunity and, in a case of “moral insanity,” can—and do—literally get away with murder.

These benign aliens would find it revealing that such a large percentage of earth’s resources—including humanity’s intrinsic ingenuity—instead of being used to care for each other and enrich life, are being used to create more potent and deadly weapons of mass destruction. In other words, humanity’s divinely inspired genius is being channeled into ever-more efficient ways of murdering each other! We have become conditioned to accept this astonishing cruelty and destruction as normal. We spend trillions of dollars to sustain a state of endless war against God knows who, while at the same time innumerable of our fellow brothers and sisters are impoverished and dying of starvation every day. These spiritually awake beings would realize that the destruction that humanity is playing out in the world is an unmediated reflection of an imbalance deep within the collective human psyche.

From the meta-perspective of the enlightened aliens, the behind-the-scene financiers who on the surface are benefitting the most from this diabolical set-up are themselves merely puppets in the hands of some darker forces that are informing the whole enterprise. To use writer Matt Taibi’s infamous phrase, a “vampire squid” is running rampant and feasting on the living body of humanity. To quote eminent theologian David Ray Griffin, “It does seem that we are possessed by some demonic power that is leading us, trancelike, into self-destruction.” Similarly, the Bible points out that our fight is not against “flesh and blood” (i.e., human forces), bot rather, against “powers and principalities” (spiritual forces). These forces are not only acting themselves out in our world, but are simultaneously interfacing with and covertly operating through our own minds.

It is as if we have become possessed by a self-created Frankenstein monster that is running amok, wreaking untold havoc all over the planet. This Frankenstein monster has seemingly gained a quasi-life and autonomous will of its own, independent of its creator—us—who it holds in its thrall, as we are unable to escape from the out-of-control hell of our own making. In any case, it certainly seems as if there is a force that is hell-bent on stopping us—both individually and collectively as a species—from reaching our full creative potential.

We are at a severe “crisis” point in our world, which, medically speaking, always tells us that our sickness has reached a dangerous climax. Our species is suffering from what the great doctor of the soul C. G. Jung calls a “sickness of dissociation,” which is a state of fragmentation deep within the collective unconscious that has seemingly spilled outside of our skulls and is playing itself out en masse on the world stage. This primordial rupture, which is a form of trauma on a cosmic scale, has become the in-forming force behind human history itself, conditioning the experience of each individual, as well as our species as a whole. Seen as a whole person, it is as if the undivided wholeness of the universe has split into cosmic multiple sub-personalities who are dissociated from and seemingly separate from each other, desperately in need of recognizing their connection so as to come together and reintegrate. Our sickness of dissociation and the world crisis we are facing as a result can be seen, as Jung points out, as the labor pains of a new birth.

Wetiko

Author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes in his foreword to the classic book Columbus and Other Cannibals by Native American scholar Jack Forbes, that it is “the most important book ever written on one of the most important topics ever faced by human beings: why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?” Oftentimes, the most important point in finding a solution to a problem is asking the right question; Jensen’s question feels like the right question, a question literally demanding to be answered.

Forbes’ book beautifully elucidates the Native American idea of “wetiko psychosis,” which can be likened to a mind virus that has infected the human psyche.[1] Jung never tired of pointing out that the greatest danger which threatens humanity comes from the psyche. We are living with the very real possibility that millions—maybe even billions—of us can fall into our unconscious together, reinforcing each others’ madness in such a way that we become unwittingly complicit in our own self-destruction. An inner disease of the soul, wetiko flavors our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen. Being an illness that afflicts the psyche itself, wetiko—a term connoting the spirit of evil—is a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul, a disorder of consciousness existing deep within the collective unconscious of humanity that is playing out writ large on the world stage. Like a cannibal, those taken over by wetiko—also called “cannibal sickness”—consume the life force of others, both human and nonhuman, for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back anything of real value from their own lives.

The idea of wetiko can be enormously helpful in creating a wider context that can assist us in getting a handle on the mass insanity that is playing out in our world today. Though using individuals as its instruments, wetiko—a “collective psychosis”—can’t replicate itself; it needs the unconscious masses for its genesis and proliferation on the world stage. Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness, rendering us oblivious to our own madness. This fluidly moving, nomadically wandering bug reciprocally reinforces and feeds off and into each of our unconscious blind spots, which is how it nonlocally propagates itself throughout the field. A psychic epidemic, wetiko is at the bottom, at the very root of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking upon ourselves, each other and the very biosphere we depend upon for our survival as a species.

Every wisdom tradition throughout history has been pointing at wetiko in its own unique way. The Gnostics (“the ones who know”), for example, were pointing at wetiko when they spoke of the “Archons,” who they thought of as “mind parasites” which had infiltrated the human mind. The Nag Hammadi text called The Apocryphon of John II describes these Archons, “They sought to overpower humanity in its psychological and perceptual functions…their triumph is in deception.” Wetiko/the Archons occlude us in such a way that our occlusion becomes self-perpetuating, the result being that we can’t even tell we are occluded. Wetiko bedazzles, bewitches, and bedevils 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. An intrinsic challenge to our investigation of the wetiko virus, therefore, is that it is incarnating in and through the very psyche which itself is the means of our inquiry. In our encounter with wetiko, we find ourselves in a situation where we are confronted—practically face-to-face—with the unconscious.

As Jung has pointed out, when it is a question of mass psychosis, nothing but “new symbolic ideas,” i.e., novel, creative, redemptive, archetypal conceptions, brought up from the depths—which embrace, express and help to re-contextualize the emerging chaos and disorder—can save us from the impending catastrophe. This is to say that in light of our current world crisis, a new creative achievement has become a necessity. The concept of wetiko and all that it stands for is precisely such a “new symbolic idea.” What Plato calls “the eyes of the soul,” ideas have real power, as they are the means by which we see the world and creatively envision and give meaning to our lives.

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, which is a realization that cultivates humility while simultaneously serving as an inoculation against wetiko’s pernicious effects. If we see someone who seems to be taken over by wetiko and we think that they have the disease and we don’t, we have then fallen under the spell of the virus, as wetiko feeds on the inner, psychological process of shadow projection which underlies and informs our experience of separation, polarization and the paranoid fear—and terror—of “the other.”

Wetiko can be conceived of as a cancer of the psyche that slowly metastasizes, gradually subsuming all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself to serve its sinister agenda. The personality then becomes one-sided, self-organizing an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which masks the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d’état, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace a person, who becomes its puppet and marionette. Like a parasite, the wetiko virus can take over and subvert the will of an animal more evolved than itself, enlisting that creature into serving its nefarious agenda. The psychological fact of being taken over by something “other” than ourselves finds expression in the belief in demons and their ability to possess humans, a belief found among all peoples from time immemorial.

Once the wetiko virus becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person’s behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one in the driver’s seat. As it commandeers and colonizes the psyche—centralizing power and control in the process—wetiko eventually incorporates a seemingly autonomous regime within the greater body politic of the psyche. Once it gains a sufficient sovereignty, wetiko forms something like a totalitarian “shadow government” within the psyche which dictates to the ego. Being an archetypal, transpersonal and daemonic energy, wetiko can not only take over an individual, but also a group of people, a nation or even—potentially—an entire species.

Wetiko is especially unique, in that, though an inner disease of the soul, it is able to inform, give shape to and configure events in the outer world so as to synchronistically express—and reveal—itself. For example, as if the boundary has dissolved between the inner and the outer, the internal landscape of the wetikoized psyche is mirrored in the external world through the totalitarian-like “shadow government”—with its ever-increasing centralization of power and control—that has taken over our seeming democracy. Both within our psyche and in our alleged “democracy,” we are allowed our seeming freedom, but only so long as it doesn’t threaten the sovereignty and dominance of the “ruling” power (interestingly, the word “Archon,” a synonym for wetiko, means “ruler”).

Wetiko covertly works through the projective tendencies of the mind to distract us, keeping our attention directed outside of ourselves, thereby obstructing us from finding and utilizing the immense light of intrinsic awareness within, which would “kill” wetiko, rendering it impotent. The “Buddha” (which means one who has woken up to the dreamlike nature of reality) realized in his enlightenment that the solution to the human predicament could never be found externally, but had to be discovered within the very nature of one’s own mind. If we don’t realize that our current world crisis has its roots within, and is an expression of, the human psyche, we are doomed to unconsciously repeat it, continually re-creating endless destruction in more and more amplified form—as if we are having a recurring dream. Our nightmare will then be fated to continue with ever-alarming intensity until we receive its message.

Wetiko can easily trick and deceive us by materializing itself in, as, and through the medium of the outside world, which we then assume—as if entranced—is distinct from our psyche. Once the ever-increasing sociopolitical insanity plays itself out on the world stage, we have all the proof we need that the conflict is outside of ourselves. It then becomes nearly impossible to convince anyone that the source of the conflict is to be found within the psyche of every individual. The psyche has then become exteriorized, as an internal psychic conflict takes place by way of projection in the outside world in living (and dying) flesh and blood. The sponsor of the whole project(ion), the wetiko bug remains behind-the-scenes, invisible and unnoticed.

Wetiko subversively turns our “genius” for reality-creation against us in such a way that we literally become entranced by our God-given power to create our experience of both our world and ourselves so that it boomerangs against us, undermining our potential for individual and collective evolution. Strangely enough, people under the enchantment of wetiko become compulsively, even fanatically, attached to supporting a social or political agenda that oftentimes is diametrically opposed to serving their own best interests. This self-sabotaging behavior is an outer reflection of the inner state of being under the sway of —and unwittingly serving—the self-destructive wetiko parasite.

An aberration of the psyche, wetiko cannot be ultimately healed by merely bringing about external reforms (although such reforms are welcome and needed); it must be dealt with where it originates—within the human psyche of each individual. Wetiko can’t be “legislated” out of existence via political or social means, but can only be transformed within the individual, who, as Jung reminds us, is the real carrier of life.

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. Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms and beliefs into our mind which, when unconsciously enacted, feed it, and ultimately, like a fatal addiction, kill its host—us. Beyond informing our addictions, wetiko psychosis is itself the addictive process taking living form so as to take life.

Savaged by the ferocity of their unending hunger, people who are sufficiently infected by the wetiko virus, like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist cosmology, have become possessed by an insatiable craving that can never be filled. Not in possession of their true selves, they try to possess something outside of themselves to both escape from and fill the void within—the result is a futile and never-ending grasping. Attempting to secure a self that by its very nature is illusory and thus can never be secured, their appetites can never be quenched, just as an illusion can never be satisfied.

At the collective level, this perverse inner process is mirrored in the outer world by the consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending and mostly unnecessary desires, conditioning us to always want more. As if starving, we are in an endless feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless spiritual void. In this regard, wetiko can be likened to a psychic eating disorder.

If the planet were seen as a single organism, and people seen as cells in the greater organism of the planet, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic, and had turned on themselves, destroying the very organism of which they are a part. Wetiko can be compared to an autoimmune disease of the psyche that is getting collectively acted out, writ large on the world stage. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism, in its attempt to protect itself against perceived attacks, attacks projected aspects of itself that falsely appear to be “other,” leading, ultimately, to its own self-destruction. Bewitched by its own projections—as if hypnotizing itself—the autoimmune system of the wetikoized psyche has fallen under its own self-created illusion and in its state of confusion and trauma, is tricked into creating the very problem it is trying to resolve. One glaring example of how this internal process is getting acted out in the external world: the way our nation is fighting terrorism is creating ever-more terrorists, as if in fighting a fire we are pouring fuel on it.

Once the wetiko virus takes root in our minds and incorporates itself in the world, it “manages our perception” by framing the terms of our inner and outer dialogue through determining the metaphors which dominate the accepted historical narrative, thus controlling the parameters of our conversation and debate. The consensually agreed-upon thought-forms and beliefs act as an intrinsic, built-in control system, defining the limits of what we imagine our possibilities are, as individuals, nations and a species. If we don’t consciously tap into and use the power of our creative imagination, others, particularly “the state,” will be more than happy to do so in our stead.

Just like vampires, full-blown wetikos have a thirst for the very thing they lack—the mystical essence of life—that is, the “blood” of our soul. Wetiko is a deceptive spirit that apes, mimes and imitates the real thing—called the Antimimon pneuma(literally, “counterfeiting spirit”) in the Apocryphon of John (Apoc. John III, 36:17). Impersonating us, if we identify with wetiko’s false version of ourselves, we have then identified with who we are not while simultaneously disconnecting from—and giving away—who we actually are. We then become a duplicate, a copy of ourselves, losing touch with the original.

Wetiko is an expert at imitation, but it has no creativity on its own. Once it “puts us on,” i.e., fooling us into buying into its version of who we are, it can then piggyback onto and plug into our intrinsic creativity, co-opting our creative imagination to serve its malevolent agenda. When we fall under wetiko’s spell, our life-force and God-given creativity become vampirically drained, as we are bled dry of what really counts.

This situation is a reflection of what happens when wetiko infects an organism (be it a person or species)—certain aspects within its bio-system become starved. In essence, when we are under the thrall of wetiko, the creative spirit within us, the very function which connects us to something beyond ourselves, becomes malnourished and impoverished. We then can’t even imagine things being any other way, let alone being able to actively imagine a way out of our dilemma. This points to the profound importance for each of us to intimately connect with the creative spirit living within us as a way of abolishing wetiko’s death sentence.

Many of the institutions in our world are embodiments of the formless wetiko virus taking on corporeal—and incorporated—form. The counterfeiting spirit of wetiko, a true imposter, imitates something but—in a process known as countermimicry—with the intention of making the copy, the fake version, serve a purpose counter to that of the original thing or idea. For example, the entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of wetiko disease “in business.” A “real” economy has to do with the production and distribution of goods and services—generating wealth in the process—while the virtual “bubble economy” that we living in is mainly an exercise in profiting from the manipulation of money—draining real wealth in the process. It is as if wetiko has managed to create a simulation of the real economy, replacing the real thing with a copycat version (what I call the “wetikonomy”) that has inverted its original purpose. This is a reflection in the outer world of the covert operations of wetiko within our minds.

Finding the Name

Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, manifesting itself both in the way we are looking at the world as well as the unspoken ways we have been conditioned—i.e., programmed—to not perceive. Wetiko has the power to induce—both individually and en masse—what writer Philip K. Dick calls a “negative hallucination,” i.e., instead of seeing what is not there, we cannot see what isthere. When we are afflicted with wetiko, we literally are unable to see what is right in front of our face. Wetiko is a form of psychic blindness that not only believes itself to be sighted, but believes it is more sighted than those who are actually clear-sighted. This looking away, this “conspiracy of denial” that is endemic to our culture is simultaneously both the cause and effect of wetiko.

Because wetiko is a psychic blindness, the cure for wetiko starts with seeing it—both seeing how it operates in the world and also tracking how it covertly operates within our own minds. In the medical model we describe the various pathogens that make us sick as cancers, bacilli, parasites, plagues, viruses, etc.. Due to the materialistic culture we live in, we are attached to the idea that for something to have “reality” it must be made of a material substance. The implication of this perspective is that if something is not physical it is not real, which disables our capacity to see wetiko. Though “immaterial,” wetiko is as real as we are.

We have to name something, however, before it can be seen, formally “discovered,” and brought into our shared collective cartography. To quote Jung, “For mankind it was always like a deliverance from a nightmare when the new name was found.” Mythologies and fairy tales the world over have been expressing this from time immemorial—finding the name of the offending demon takes away its power over us. This is why it is important to introduce the word “wetiko”—and the idea it represents—into our planetary dialogue.

Once we become more acquainted with the idea of wetiko and all that it entails, we can “spread the word”—creating a new meme in the process—thus conjuring up a living antigen to the heretofore unrecognized mind virus of wetiko. For nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come—wetiko is just such an idea, pregnant with new possibilities. Similar to how a vampire hates the light of day, however, the wetiko virus can’t stand to be illumined, for in seeing how wetiko covertly operates through our own consciousness or lack thereof, we not only take away its seeming autonomy and power over us, we empower ourselves.

Seeing the correlation between the inner and the outer—which is to say, seeing the dreamlike nature of reality—is the doorway through which we develop the requisite vision to see wetiko. In a dream, the inner psyche of the dreamer is expressed through, and is therefore not separate from, the outer forms of the dream. Similar to a dream at night, in the waking dream called life, events in the outer world symbolically—and synchronistically—express the inner psychological situation of the dreamer, which is all of us. We don’t have to try to create or fabricate this correlation between the inner and the outer; rather, we simply have to recognize it, for it is always already the case. Once we realize the dreamlike nature of our situation, we have started to develop the eyes to see wetiko, and hence, dispel its malevolent effects. We have then broken the seeming curse we have fallen under (please see my book Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil).

A Catalyst for Human Evolution

People taken over by wetiko—a word Jung never used, but in his writings he referred to the same idea by the phrase “totalitarian psychosis”—are often attracted to positions of power, where, as if compelled by forces beyond themselves, they can’t help but to create scorched earths as outer correlates to the inner ravaged landscape of their souls. Insanely enough, many of the people who are most taken over by wetiko are not in asylums, but are freely running around (and running) the world, oftentimes established in positions of great power to influence world events.

Fueled by the myopic vision that prioritizes the bottom line of corporate-driven profits above anything else, people motivated by the greed of the wetiko virus have little meta-awareness of the long-term and whole-system implications of their rapacious actions. All that the wetiko bug craves is to satisfy its narcissistic desires, experience orgasmic release, and glory in the seeming victory of short-term profits. Hiding behind the deceptive banner of “progress,” the Frankenstein monster of ever-enlarging empire, with its incessant, greed-driven need for endless growth, is like a runaway locomotive gaining speed, approaching the catastrophic event horizon of its inevitable crash. Meanwhile, this “progress” destroys people, families, communities and threatens our entire species, as we potentially trigger a “sixth mass-extinction event.”

At the heart of wetiko is our identification with and subsequent grasping onto an illusory “me,” a seemingly separate, independent self which doesn’t actually exist in the way we think it does. Clinging onto this false sense of self—a “lethal mirage” that becomes a self-perpetuating addictive process with a life of its own—our life-force then gets continually invested into protecting, defending and maintaining an illusion. Identifying with a self-constructed illusion whose originating conditions remain obscure is the stuff of which madness is made.

Reciprocally co-arising with the subjectively convincing and self-validating feeling of a separate “I” is the feeling of “mine,” the sense that this “I” can possess and own things. Modern humanity is, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, “demented with the mania of owning things.” We insanely devote so much of our time and energy—our precious human life—in trying to obtain material goods that we really don’t need and that bring no real benefit to us. Speaking of the white man, Chief Seattle said, “His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.” Along similar lines, Sitting Bull said, “the love of possession is a disease with them.” This love of possessing things to fill a void that can never be filled is wetiko disease in a nutshell.

Wetiko is a collectively “dreamed up” phenomena in which we are all ultimately implicated. This means that—at least in theory if not in practice—we have the capacity to dream it differently. In other words, because we’ve created wetiko, we can “un-create” it. We don’t yet know how to do this, however, or we wouldn’t be continuing to create it in a way that is destroying us. Our unconscious process of dreaming up wetiko in all its full-blown destructiveness is the way we are teaching ourselves how to not destroy ourselves, which we evidently haven’t yet learned or we wouldn’t be destroying ourselves. The fact that we wouldn’t have realized how to not destroy ourselves without wetiko’s arrival on the scene is to say that the seeming curse of wetiko actually has a hidden blessing secretly encoded within it.

Wetiko is a quantum phenomenon, in that it contains superposed within it both the deepest darkest evil imaginable, while hidden within it is its own medicine. Encoded within wetiko’s pathology is not only its own cure but a precious gift, as it can—in true quantum style, “potentially”—introduce us to our own agency in calling forth our experience of both the world and ourselves. In other words, the wetiko epidemic is revealing to us our nature as empowered co-dreamers/creators of a universe that is more malleable, plastic and dreamlike than we have previously imagined.

Similar to how the unconscious compensates a one-sidedness in the psyche through the dreams it sends our way, the totalitarian psychosis/wetiko running rampant throughout the world today is the psyche’s way of revealing to us that we are forgetting the crucial role it plays in creating our experience. Marginalizing our own authorship and authority, we then dream up totalitarian forces to limit our freedom and create our experience for us. The “totalitarian psychosis” known as wetiko is, in Jung’s words, “forcing us to pay attention to the psyche and our abysmal unconsciousness of it. Never before has mankind as a whole experienced the numen of the psychological factor on so vast a scale.” Literally demanding that we pay attention to our own psyche, wetiko is thus the greatest catalyst for human evolution that our species has ever encountered.

Wetiko can literally destroy our species through wrenching poverty, endless war and catastrophic environmental destruction. Or, if confronted, named and understood, it can introduce us to the dreamlike nature of reality, which changes everything. Wetiko is a living revelation that only reveals its gifts to us, however, if we recognize what it is a reflection of within ourselves. How it manifests depends upon how we dream it. The choice is truly ours.

It is as if through the instrument of wetiko, a higher intelligence is revealing to us the wholeness of our totality through our darker side. This darkness is revealing light by contrast to itself. As we recognize that the evil we see playing out in the world is a reflection of our own darkness, we notice that, paradoxically, with our increase in consciousness the good and positive features within us come more to light too. As we more and more recognize the correlation between the outer world with what is going on deep within our soul, the enlightened aliens, who have been signaling to us the dreamlike nature of our situation by synchronistically arranging events in the world to reflect back what’s going on deep within us, hide behind the scenes, laughing.

Understanding Evil: From Globalism To Pizzagate

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

I have spent the better part of the last 10 years working diligently to investigate and relate information on economics and geopolitical discourse for the liberty movement. However, long before I delved into these subjects my primary interests of study were the human mind and the human “soul” (yes, I’m using a spiritual term).

My fascination with economics and sociopolitical events has always been rooted in the human element. That is to say, while economics is often treated as a mathematical and statistical field, it is also driven by psychology. To know the behavior of man is to know the future of all his endeavors, good or evil.

Evil is what we are specifically here to discuss. I have touched on the issue in various articles in the past including Are Globalists Evil Or Just Misunderstood, but with extreme tensions taking shape this year in light of the U.S. election as well as the exploding online community investigation of “Pizzagate,” I am compelled to examine it once again.

I will not be grappling with this issue from a particularly religious perspective. Evil applies to everyone regardless of their belief system, or even their lack of belief. Evil is secular in its influence.

The first and most important thing to understand is this — evil is NOT simply a social or religious construct, it is an inherent element of the human psyche. Carl Gustav Jung was one of the few psychologists in history to dare write extensively on the issue of evil from a scientific perspective as well as a metaphysical perspective. I highly recommend a book of his collected works on this subject titled ‘Jung On Evil’, edited by Murray Stein, for those who are interested in a deeper view.

To summarize, Jung found that much of the foundations of human behavior are rooted in inborn psychological contents or “archetypes.” Contrary to the position of Sigmund Freud, Jung argued that while our environment may affect our behavior to a certain extent, it does not make us who we are. Rather, we are born with our own individual personality and grow into our inherent characteristics over time. Jung also found that there are universally present elements of human psychology. That is to say, almost every human being on the planet shares certain truths and certain natural predilections.

The concepts of good and evil, moral and immoral, are present in us from birth and are mostly the same regardless of where we are born, what time in history we are born and to what culture we are born. Good and evil are shared subjective experiences. It is this observable psychological fact (among others) that leads me to believe in the idea of a creative design — a god. Again, though, elaborating on god is beyond the scope of this article.

To me, this should be rather comforting to people, even atheists. For if there is observable evidence of creative design, then it would follow that there may very well be a reason for all the trials and horrors that we experience as a species. Our lives, our failures and our accomplishments are not random and meaningless. We are striving toward something, whether we recognize it or not. It may be beyond our comprehension at this time, but it is there.

Evil does not exist in a vacuum; with evil there is always good, if one looks for it in the right places.

Most people are readily equipped to recognize evil when they see it directly. What they are not equipped for and must learn from environment is how to recognize evil disguised as righteousness. The most heinous acts in history are almost always presented as a moral obligation — a path towards some “greater good.” Inherent conscience, though, IS the greater good, and any ideology that steps away from the boundaries of conscience will inevitably lead to disaster.

The concept of globalism is one of these ideologies that crosses the line of conscience and pontificates to us about a “superior method” of living. It relies on taboo, rather than moral compass, and there is a big difference between the two.

When we pursue a “greater good” as individuals or as a society, the means are just as vital as the ends. The ends NEVER justify the means. Never. For if we abandon our core principles and commit atrocities in the name of “peace,” safety or survival, then we have forsaken the very things which make us worthy of peace and safety and survival. A monster that devours in the name of peace is still a monster.

Globalism tells us that the collective is more important than the individual, that the individual owes society a debt and that fealty to society in every respect is the payment for that debt. But inherent archetypes and conscience tell us differently. They tell us that society is only ever as healthy as the individuals within it, that society is only as free and vibrant as the participants. As the individual is demeaned and enslaved, the collective crumbles into mediocrity.

Globalism also tells us that humanity’s greatest potential cannot be reached without collectivism and centralization. The assertion is that the more single-minded a society is in its pursuits the more likely it is to effectively achieve its goals. To this end, globalism seeks to erase all sovereignty. For now its proponents claim they only wish to remove nations and borders from the social equation, but such collectivism never stops there. Eventually, they will tell us that individualism represents another nefarious “border” that prevents the group from becoming fully realized.

At the heart of collectivism is the idea that human beings are “blank slates;” that we are born empty and are completely dependent on our environment in order to learn what is right and wrong and how to be good people or good citizens. The environment becomes the arbiter of decency, rather than conscience, and whoever controls the environment, by extension, becomes god.

If the masses are convinced of this narrative then moral relativity is only a short step away. It is the abandonment of inborn conscience that ultimately results in evil. In my view, this is exactly why the so called “elites” are pressing for globalism in the first place. Their end game is not just centralization of all power into a one world edifice, but the suppression and eradication of conscience, and thus, all that is good.

To see where this leads we must look at the behaviors of the elites themselves, which brings us to “Pizzagate.”

The exposure by Wikileaks during the election cycle of what appear to be coded emails sent between John Podesta and friends has created a burning undercurrent in the alternative media. The emails consistently use odd and out of context “pizza” references, and independent investigations have discovered a wide array connections between political elites like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta to James Alefantis, the owner of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. called Comet Ping Pong. Alefantis, for reasons that make little sense to me, is listed as number 49 on GQ’s Most Powerful People In Washington list.

The assertion according to circumstantial evidence including the disturbing child and cannibalism artwork collections of the Podestas has been that Comet Ping Pong is somehow at the center of a child pedophilia network serving the politically connected. Both Comet Ping Pong and a pizza establishment two doors down called Besta Pizza use symbols in their logos and menus that are listed on the FBI’s unclassified documentation on pedophilia symbolism, which does not help matters.

Some of the best documentation of the Pizzagate scandal that I have seen so far has been done by David Seaman, a former mainstream journalist gone rogue. Here is his YouTube page.

I do recommend everyone at least look at the evidence he and others present. I went into the issue rather skeptical, but was surprised by the sheer amount of weirdness and evidence regarding Comet Pizza. There is a problem with Pizzagate that is difficult to overcome, however; namely the fact that to my knowledge no victims have come forward. This is not to say there has been no crime, but anyone hoping to convince the general public of wrong-doing in this kind of scenario is going to have a very hard time without a victim to reference.

The problem is doubly difficult now that an armed man was arrested on the premises of Comet Ping Pong while “researching” the claims of child trafficking. Undoubtedly, the mainstream media will declare the very investigation “dangerous conspiracy theory.” Whether this will persuade the public to ignore it, or compel them to look into it, remains to be seen.

I fully realize the amount of confusion surrounding Pizzagate and the assertions by some that it is a “pysop” designed to undermine the alternative media. This is a foolish notion, in my view. The mainstream media is dying, this is unavoidable. The alternative media is a network of sources based on the power of choice and cemented in the concept of investigative research. The reader participates in the alternative media by learning all available information and positions and deciding for himself what is the most valid conclusion, if there is any conclusion to be had. The mainstream media simply tells its readers what to think and feel based on cherry picked data.

The elites will never be able to deconstruct that kind of movement with something like a faked “pizzagate”; rather, they would be more inclined to try to co-opt and direct the alternative media as they do most institutions. And, if elitists are using Pizzagate as fodder to trick the alternative media into looking ridiculous, then why allow elitist run social media outlets like Facebook and Reddit to shut down discussion on the issue?

The reason I am more convinced than skeptical at this stage is because this has happened before; and in past scandals of pedophilia in Washington and other political hotbeds, some victims DID come forward.

I would first reference the events of the Franklin Scandal between 1988 and 1991. The Discovery Channel even produced a documentary on it complete with interviews of alleged child victims peddled to Washington elites for the purpose of favors and blackmail. Meant to air in 1994, the documentary was quashed before it was ever shown to the public. The only reason it can now be found is because an original copy was released without permission by parties unknown.

I would also reference the highly evidenced Westminster Pedophile Ring in the U.K., in which the U.K. government lost or destroyed at least 114 files related to the investigation.

Finally, it is disconcerting to me that the criminal enterprises of former Bear Sterns financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his “Lolita Express” are mainstream knowledge, yet the public remains largely oblivious. Bill Clinton is shown on flight logs to have flown on Epstein’s private jet at least a 26 times; the same jet that he used to procure child victims as young as 12 to entertain celebrities and billionaires on his 72 acre island called “Little Saint James”. The fact that Donald Trump was also close friends with Epstein should raise some eyebrows – funny how the mainstream media attacked Trump on every cosmetic issue under the sun but for some reason backed away from pursuing the Epstein angle.

Where is the vast federal investigation into the people who frequented Epstein’s wretched parties? There is none, and Epstein, though convicted of molesting a 14 year old girl and selling her into prostitution, was only slapped on the wrist with a 13 month sentence.

Accusations of pedophilia seem to follow the globalists and elitist politicians wherever they go. This does not surprise me. They often exhibit characteristics of narcissism and psychopathy, but their ideology of moral relativity is what would lead to such horrible crimes.

Evil often stems from people who are empty. When one abandons conscience, one also in many respects abandons empathy and love. Without these elements of our psyche there is no happiness. Without them, there is nothing left but desire and gluttony.

Narcissists in particular are prone to use other people as forms of entertainment and fulfillment without concern for their humanity. They can be vicious in nature, and when taken to the level of psychopathy, they are prone to target and abuse the most helpless of victims in order to generate a feeling of personal power.

Add in sexual addiction and aggression and narcissists become predatory in the extreme. Nothing ever truly satisfies them. When they grow tired of the normal, they quickly turn to the abnormal and eventually the criminal. I would say that pedophilia is a natural progression of the elitist mindset; for children are the easiest and most innocent victim source, not to mention the most aberrant and forbidden, and thus the most desirable for a psychopathic deviant embracing evil impulses.

Beyond this is the even more disturbing prospect of cultism. It is not that the globalists are simply evil as individuals; if that were the case then they would present far less of a threat. The greater terror is that they are also organized. When one confronts the problem of evil head on, one quickly realizes that evil is within us all. There will always be an internal battle in every individual. Organized evil, though, is in fact the ultimate danger, and it is organized evil that must be eradicated.

For organized evil to be defeated, there must be organized good. I believe the liberty movement in particular is that good; existing in early stages, not yet complete, but good none the less. Our championing of the non-aggression principle and individual liberty is conducive to respect for privacy, property and life. Conscience is a core tenet of the liberty ideal, and the exact counter to organized elitism based on moral relativity.

Recognize and take solace that though we live in dark times, and evil men roam free, we are also here. We are the proper response to evil, and we have been placed here at this time for a reason. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it coincidence, call it god, call it whatever you want, but the answer to evil is us.

Catalyzing the Shamanic Archetype

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Levy

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from Awakened By Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father.

Spiritual awakenings oftentimes get precipitated by experiences of wounding, abuse and trauma, which is to say that in a genuine spiritual awakening there is often a co-joining of healthy and pathological factors. The idea is to nourish the healthy aspects of the process so that they become stronger, while allowing the pathological factors to naturally fall away as they become integrated into the wholeness of the newly emerging psyche. To quote the great Hindu saint Ramakrishna, “How to get rid of the lower self? The blossom vanishes of itself as the fruit grows, so will your lower self vanish as the divine grows in you.”

Being wounded almost always initiates and catalyzes the “shamanic archetype” to begin to form-ulate and crystallize itself in the unconscious. Shamanism is the root from which humanity’s various spiritual disciplines have issued; the earliest origins of modern psychotherapy known to history lie in archaic shamanism. When the shamanic archetype is activated, it precipitates a deeper part of the psyche to become mobilized, as people enacting the shamanic archetype journey deep inside themselves, flying on the wings of their creative imagination to become familiar with and address what has gotten activated within them. The shamanic archetype becomes catalyzed in us by a severe emotional and spiritual crisis, oftentimes organically growing out of unresolved abuse issues from childhood—this was certainly true for me.

The shamanic archetype is one of the major processes currently animated in the collective psyche of our species. We’d have to be truly “disturbed” if our emotions aren’t disturbed by the diabolic and dark shadow forces playing out their polarizing, manipulative and exploitive agendas in our world. How we hold what has gotten triggered within us as we both witness and participate in these distressing dramas determines whether the latent shamanic archetype within us manifests in service of our—and our planet’s—healing or not. Just as dreams are the unconscious’s way of balancing a one-sidedness in an individual’s psyche, the shamanic archetype is the dynamically evolving pattern of healing that is being constellated in the collective unconscious as a compensatory response to the trauma and abuse playing itself out on the world stage.

A person would never—if they were in their right mind—choose to be a shaman. It’s not the sort of thing that someone takes a weekend workshop or a class and then becomes a shaman. Becoming a shaman is a vocation, which is to say that it is something one is “called” to do; this calling is typically conceived of as coming from the spirits, i.e., from an autonomous spiritual factor deep within the psyche. Etymologically, the word “calling” has to do with hearing a voice—the voice of the other within ourselves—with which, like a living person, we develop an ongoing and deepening relationship. This inner figure has from time immemorial been referred to by a multiplicity of names—our muse, ally, guiding spirit, angel, genius and daemon, to name but a few. Attracting many names to itself is typical of something numinous; one name doesn’t quite “do it.”

If it is a true calling and we resist, however, we can fall ill, go crazy or even die; the point is that the stakes are high, and being called to shamanize is something to take seriously. It necessarily involves making a descent into the underworld of the unconscious—into the netherworld of the shadow—where we have to confront our own dark side and madness; this is why in a shamanic initiatory experience, the potential shaman looks like they’re having a psychotic break. A Siberian shaman reminds us, “If you find the spirit of madness, you will begin to shamanize.” Becoming a shaman is not for the faint of heart; the initiate typically has to go through a death experience, whose other side, if all goes well, is rebirth. The suffering involved—which is actually a purification—is intense. Speaking of what he calls “shamanic suffering,” Holger Kalweit, author of Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman, writes that the suffering a potential shaman goes through is “a suffering intense enough to kill.” I can totally relate; after the abuse from my father, it was as if the doors of my unconscious opened up, unleashing formidable energies that easily could have killed me.

A key part of the shaman’s initiation is to come to terms with evil. Mircea Eliade refers to shamans as “pre-eminently the antidemonic champions; they combat not only demons [who Eliade refers to as “the true enemies of humanity”] and disease, but also black magicians…. What is fundamental and universal is the shaman’s struggle against what we could call ‘the powers of evil.’” In my life, my encounter with the evil that came through both my father and psychiatry were the forms that my descent into the underworld took; if I hadn’t re-contextualized these experiences as being part of a deeper shamanic initiatory process, I would have been stuck in and personally identified with these experiences in their literal rather than symbolic form, possibly for the rest of my life, which would have been truly tragic. Von Franz wrote, “The symbolic inner experiences which the Shaman lives through during his period of initiation are identical with the symbolic experiences the man of today lives through during the individuation process…curing the soul of individuals and collective states of possession is really the principal task of the Shaman.” The mission of the shaman is to heal—both individually and collectively—the state of possession by unconscious psychic forces of the members of their community, as well as the community as a whole.

In indigenous, shamanic communities, the role of the shaman does not exist in isolation, but as a role that the community collaboratively dreams up for the health and sanity of the wider community. The role of the shaman is relational in nature—only taking on its meaning in relation to others as well as the surrounding environment—not something that exists independent of the field in which the shaman lives. Being a role in the field, in the ideal sense the position of shaman need not be monopolized by or restricted to one person; a shaman is a role that any and everyone can pick up as we become more creative and fluid within ourselves. In a genuinely healthy community, roles are very fluid, which is to say—in a form of “collective shamanism”—the role of the shaman can potentially be played out at various times by each of its members. Because the role is being shared by all of its members, different people can play the shamanic role without necessarily having to descend into the depths of hell; they are required, however, to self-reflectively deal with how their own unconscious darkness is contributing to the collective shadow that is getting dreamed up in and through the community.

We are all potentially “shamans-in-training,” in the sense that we are all being called—both individually and collectively—to deal with the darkness that seems to be ruling our world. The formless archetype of the shaman/healer is thirsting for sentient instruments to express and actualize itself in embodied form. Recognizing, and saying “Yes” to the deeper shamanic calling that is pulsing through our veins inspires us to breathe life into and incarnate the figure of the shaman who lives within us. We are being invited by the universe to step into our shamanic “garments” and consciously participate in our own evolution. Instead of our ritual implements being drums and rattles, however, as “modern-day shamans” our accessories might be something like the keyboard of a computer or the tools of multi-media, as we work to inspire change in the underlying consciousness of the field by a keystroke or the creative use of a video camera or website. Co-operating with our deeper shamanic calling constellates the universe to support us in our endeavor, as the universe itself is the sponsor of our calling. Assenting to our calling gets us “in-phase” with ourselves such that we become our own best ally.

The psyche is easily dissociable; due to trauma it can readily fragment into seemingly separate parts. Being wounded creates a dissociation in us, in the sense that we dis-associate from and lose connection with parts of ourselves. People of shamanic temperament, however, are able to turn the psyche’s natural ability to dissociate to their advantage. They are able to purposely dissociate, which is very different from the unconscious pathology of dissociative disorder. The shaman’s ability to dissociate, and fluidly travel between different reference points within themselves helps them to re-member their dis-membered selves, as well as to retrieve the split-off, and hence unconscious, soul of the community.

A shaman often suffers from the plight of their people. Due to their “standing” at the gateway between the conscious and unconscious aspects of their own mind as well as the community at large, they are able—like a healing enzyme—to act as agents transforming and raising unconscious contents into conscious awareness, making these contents available to the community. I think of Jung—a deeply shamanic personality—who was afflicted with dreams and visions of bloodbaths and catastrophes in Europe which he wasn’t able to understand until soon thereafter the First World War broke out, and he realized that his personal experiences reflected the collective situation that was brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s unconscious.

People going through a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation find themselves, as if living in an archetypal fairy tale, inhabiting a deeper mythic realm where everything that happens is in-fused with deeper meaning. This deeper meaning doesn’t come from outside of us; we are the arbiters of meaning—“meaning-generators.” Instead of being mute and having no say in things, our world is always speaking to us symbolically, speaking “through” things (so to speak); this can take a little while to interpret, integrate and to learn to navigate. The goal is to bring together the two worlds so that we can fluidly travel between the everyday world of ordinary reality and the deeper mythological, symbolic realm, a dimension which is always having its say—the question is whether we recognize what is being said. This is analogous to having a fluid back and forth, give and take relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds within ourselves.

A key part of the shaman’s vocation is to be able to “see” the spirits, which is to be able to recognize and develop relationship with the forces of the unconscious. Wetiko can be thought of as having its own spirit; this is why I am continually pointing out the importance of “seeing” how this spirit operates—out in the world, through others, via our relationships and within our own mind. Seeing “the spirits,” which von Franz points out is today simply called “the unconscious” takes away their autonomy and seeming power over us, while expanding the light of our consciousness in the service of individuation. The more individuated we become, the wider is our consciousness of the realm of the unconscious which spreads out before us in, as and through the world. To wake up to the dreamlike nature of reality is to realize that we are surrounded on all sides by the unconscious; dreams themselves are the unmediated expression of the unconscious. The process of becoming conscious doesn’t banish the unconscious, but rather, aids us in developing the trust to give ourselves over to it time and again, thereby learning how to receive its gifts of wisdom. When we shed light on the darkness of the unconscious, it’s not that all of its contents become illumined; rather, there becomes a more permeable boundary for the unconscious contents to emerge into consciousness, as well as for consciousness to step into the world of the unconscious.

The shaman is akin to and a kin of the figure of the artist. To quote anthropologist Carlton Coon, “Whatever else he may be, the shaman is a gifted artist.” Mythologist Joseph Campbell draws a parallel between artists and ancient shamans when, speaking about modern artists, he says that “the whole unconscious has opened up and they fall into it.” We continually deepen our individuation only insofar as we don’t cling to our conscious experience, but allow ourselves to submerge into the depths of the unconscious however and wherever it shows up, trusting that we will be able to creatively express—and hence, become conscious of—what is moving us. As Jung points out, “The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are it—we become unconscious of ourselves.” This ongoing dynamic of falling into and giving shape and form to the unconscious, then stepping out of and contemplating what has just come through us—going back and forth between the subjective and objective domains—furthers our realization of the unconscious, both within ourselves and in the world at large. Through this process, the shamanically-oriented person is adding consciousness to and assimilating the unconscious in the field, while simultaneously metabolizing the unconscious parts of themselves that have been activated.

The shamanic personality’s ability to fluidly navigate back and forth between the conscious mind and the deep waters of the unconscious contrasts with people who fall into their unconscious and, unfortunately, become overwhelmed by the experience, losing both the ability to creatively express their experience, as well as their sense of self. The shaman learns to swim, surf and snorkel in the waters of the unconscious while the failed shaman, whatever label we call them by (schizophrenic, bi-polar, etc.), drowns in the depth of its waters. This is why it is profoundly important, as Jung realized, to have a strongly developed sense of ego when we encounter these deeper, more powerful realms, for if we don’t we can easily get swallowed up and lose ourselves. We need a strong sense of self in order to get in relationship with these powerful energies.

As the shaman travels between the worlds of the conscious and the unconscious, the boundary between these two worlds becomes more permeable. There is no clear demarcation point between the conscious and the unconscious; an un-boundaried continuum, one starts where the other leaves off. In their journey, shamans create a bridge so that the conscious mind and the unconscious can more easily pass between, influence and illumine each other, which transfigures everything. Over time these two seemingly opposite realms begin to become indistinguishable from and turn into each other, while at the same time, paradoxically, becoming more distinct from each other. Inseparably and reciprocally co-arising in their interaction, both the conscious and unconscious minds are dynamically contained within the wider totality of psyche.

The psyche is simultaneously “historical”—in the sense that its development can only be understood in the context of its personal and collective past—and “trans-historical,” which is to say that the psyche atemporally abides outside of linear time, yet simultaneously generates events experienced by humans in historical time. Though within its very structure is written the whole history of humanity, the psyche is at the same time teleological, in that it is purposeful, seeking its own actualization. Jung writes, “Anything psychic is Janus-faced: it looks both backwards and forwards.” The psyche is like a pivot through which, both on the individual and collective levels, we choose either to look backwards and re-create the unhealed past, or step into consciously participating in our own creative future evolution in the present. In a spiritual awakening/shamanic initiation, it is as if we are connecting with a healed, whole and awake part of us that, atemporally speaking—outside of linear time—has always existed. We begin to cooperate with and surrender to a deeper impulse within us, as if we are allowing ourselves to be drawn into the strange attractor that is ourselves, a process which can only take place in the present moment. By becoming aware of and stepping into this higher-dimensional part of ourselves, we are attracting this particular part of ourselves, with its corresponding universe, into materialization; this is the sacred power of dreaming.

This seemingly bi-polar process of oscillating between the polarities of the conscious and the unconscious is an apt description of the shaman’s journey between the worlds. As this process unfolds in and over time, a center or mid-point emerges, which contains, embraces and unites the opposites: this is, in Jung’s language, “the Self.” The Self is an expression of the intrinsic wholeness within us, a wholeness which already exists but is paradoxically brought forth into consciousness via this process of collaboration with the unconscious. At points this descent can be experienced as if we are just recursively playing out our unhealed abuse issues (the iteratio stage of alchemy), but is in actuality a deepening descent down a spiral, a circumambulation which ultimately illumines the center point—the Self. Transforming consciousness, the Self acts like a magnet, attracting to itself that which is proper to it. Jung comments, “We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a center, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the center grow more and more distinct. Or perhaps we could put it the other way round and say that the center—itself virtually unknowable—acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice…. Often one has the impression that the personal psyche is running around this central point like a shy animal, at once fascinated and frightened, always in flight, and yet steadily drawing nearer.”

As the shaman’s accomplishment deepens, they are able to tap into and participate in the primordial, timeless source of creativity itself. A person’s ability to heal and facilitate healing for others depends upon their ability to link to the larger world of the “pleroma” (a field of abundant potential, boundless luminosity and creativity, and infinite sentience). Approaching the numinosity of the pleroma is therapeutic at its core—what Jung calls “the real therapy”—as it releases us from what he calls “the curse of pathology.” Connecting with this more expanded perspective within us alchemically transforms what seemed to be pathological into something expressing and leading us closer to the numinosum.

Archetypally, shamans take on and into themselves the illness of those they are working with, falling ill themselves. As a result of the abuse from my father, I feel like I have been sick for years, suffering under the burden of a shamanic sickness. The wetiko bug that used my father to get into me has activated my psychic immune system to go into overdrive to deal with this toxic invader. I have “taken on” my father’s pathology, which carries a double meaning: to “take on” means to confront, as well as to take within myself (so as to suffer with). I’ve been slowly transmuting the virulence of the wetiko germ that I “caught” from my father; this book is my latest attempt to shed light on—and “make light” (of)—what has gotten triggered within me. What makes a shaman an accomplished shaman, however, is that they are somehow able to work with and metabolize the illness, integrating it into the wholeness of their being and subsequently finding their way back to health; this process nonlocally helps the person(s) who were originally ill. In addition, this helps the whole universe, by eliminating that personalized quanta of sickness from the collective field—“lightening” the shadow in the collective unconscious ever so slightly.

I am in no way claiming that I am an accomplished shaman—this is true only in my wildest dreams—but what I am saying is that the archetype of the shaman—which is related to the archetype of the wounded healer—is one of the deeper processes that has shaped and given meaning to the experiences in my life. In addition, the shamanic archetype is one of the fundamental underlying patterns that is informing all of our processes, both individually and collectively, as a species. Humanity as a whole is going through a profound shamanic initiation of epic proportions, writ large on the world stage as well as within each of our hearts and minds. When we realize this, we can connect with each other so as to collaboratively help each other successfully pass through our shared ordeal. What a radical idea!

Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World

Posted on July 26, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Wargo

Source: The Nightshirt

You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery—or really, outrage—of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the wider world to produce unmistakeably uncanny outcomes. Even if we believe in God, many people aren’t comfortable living in a world of miracles and signs.

This was the problem faced by Philip K. Dick, whose Christianity couldn’t countenance fully divine meddling in his psyche and life. The story had to be more complex and also more rational. Hence, he tended to think that the synchronicities he experienced in 1974 reflected his own enlarged self haunting him from an orthogonal dimension of time, perpendicular to the four spacetime dimensions we ordinarily experience.

My last post sparked an interesting discussion in the comments about the apparent role of coincidence in synchronicities if they are really, as I argued, cases of misrecognized precognition or premonition. For instance, even if Jung’s famous scarab arriving at the window of his office was a purely random event that his patient had dreamed about the night before, there is still a coincidental element to it: Why a scarab, which has an archetypal meaning connected to the patient’s therapeutic situation, as opposed to some other insect?

Here’s where I think we really need to take seriously the revised picture of time that Dick grappled with through his 8-year frenetic journaling in his Exegesis: What is the connection between the archetypal world and the multidimensional nature of time? In a Eureka moment (not unlike the hundreds recorded by the manic Dick), I think I figured it out: Archetypes are an illusory effect produced by our failure to recognize self-confirmatory actions (feedback loops) made possible by the looping nature of time. Temporal feedback loops amplify the personal significance of symbolic formations, which (because we fail to recognize psi) appear as somehow objective or external to us.

For reasons I discussed in my Psi of Regret post, most information from the future should be negated by one’s own and others’ willed actions; but in a minority of cases, a self-confirming feedback effect could arise which would actually intensify or amplify the significance of the stimulating event in the future. This would happen specifically when that event involves a minor random coincidence (which are myriad) and/or fulfills some kind of unconscious thought or desire we had harbored.

Through this time-loop mechanism, minor coincidences, when they resonate with our own personal meanings and priorities, can be the nuclei of major significant moments (synchronicities) as well as meta-symbols (archetypes). Small coincidences, in other words, may be like grains of sand around which time’s oyster builds Platonic-Jungian pearls.

Bootstrapping Ourselves Toward Meaning

The idea of information from the future reaching us in the present should be unproblematic to parapsychologists and Forteans, yet we still tend to think of it somehow as a very special case. But if we grant the experimental results of Daryl Bem and Dean Radin and the observations of J.W. Dunne and others, then information must indeed be constantly rippling backwards in the time stream; this would have to produce all the paradoxical effects familiar from time travel stories in science fiction: doubling or multiplication or intensification of information (not unlike what happens in the interesting 2004 sci-fi film Primer), as well as self-cancelling effects such as I discussed in the context of Dune Messiah, and perhaps even wholesale self-negation (the famous grandfather paradox). If I am right about the future not being etched in stone (or glass, as in the Minkowski glass football)—that is, as subject to free will—then precognitive material cannot be about what is definitely going to happen but about what is probabilistic, and much of that information will be rendered inaccurate by our willed actions, and thus we would have no way of knowing it (i.e., because it didn’t come true or wasn’t close enough to how events unfolded to be discernible). It wouldn’t even be information, just noise.

However, in special circumstances, for instance when there is a slight perceived (and random) coincidence, such as between a specific genus of insect and the theme of therapeutic rebirth, it could instead have the effect of entraining our actions to the signal, in turn amplifying the felt significance of the signal into the past, generating a precognitive or premonitory experience which in turn feeds forward to intensify the uncanniness of the stimulating event, in turn boosting the signal into the past, and so on … The result would be an informatic/emotional time-loop feedback effect centered on what emerges as a truly uncanny, meaningful, and even decisive coincidence (the ’synchronicity’) that could even alter the course of a person’s life in a significant fashion going forward.

Within Jung’s larger and less radical paradigm of “individuation,” the unconscious is ever seeking out opportunities to progress and develop and change toward wholeness, and its capitalization on significant coincidences provides a way for the individual to bootstrap him/herself toward integration. The unconscious has no sense of time, so it doesn’t recognize this operation of atemporal time-looping—that is, the artificiality of the apparent coincidence (i.e., the fact that the person him/herself created the apparent coincidence through his/her actions and attributed it to objective external reality). The tendency of ‘synchronistic’ events to have a recursive, fractal, or self-similar quality, in some way being ‘about’ the whole notion of synchronicity or coincidence, reflects the tendency of the coincidence-receptive person to be attuned to coincidences in the first place. It is, quite literally, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Jung and Plato Must Die (that Psi May Live)

Thus the kinds of events that spark an emotional ripple into the past will be ones that support the ‘prophetic enjoyment’ I mentioned in the last post: Synchronicities are self-confirming effects produced by misrecognized precognition within an overall attitude of receptivity to mystery, magic, and meaningful coincidence. Belief in synchronicity produces synchronicity, which further reinforces the belief. In a larger sense, this mechanism may underlie the “law of attraction” in all its forms. It really is just like the “strange attractor” in Chaos Theory (and which is also identical to what Lacan and Žižek call the “symptom”).

What this suggests—and this is my Eureka—is that “archetypes” as such—as well as the Platonic world of “forms” that Dick suggested was the “fifth dimension” (printing out archetypes on the paper of history as on an IBM Selectric typewriter)—are really an illusory or anamorphic effect produced by not seeing or recognizing these self-confirmatory time loops, these informational/emotional eddies in the spacetime continuum, and failing to see our own role in feeding them through our perceptions and actions. We ourselves make meaning, including the intensified meaningful nuclei in the collective unconscious that so fascinated Jung and that formed the centerpiece of Platonic metaphysics.

At times, Dick came close to saying this: He suggested that synchronicities occur because we in the future are time traveling, cultivating our own development; that our own enlarged consciousess has the power to “stage manage” not because it is a white-bearded deity sitting up in a cloud reaching down and playing with us like chess pieces, but because of the nature of time itself. Coincidences may be the product of time tampering, our own time tampering in the future.

Where I’m departing from this notion is in emphasizing misrecognition and the role of the unconscious: Instead of our future (conscious) selves meddling in the past, our unconscious minds are constantly receiving and reacting to future information without knowing it comes from the future; through our actions, we thus sometimes confirm this information, particularly when it resonates with our priorities and unconscious beliefs about meaning or our own significance in the bigger cosmic picture. That sort of information will act as an ‘attractor’ in the Chaos Theory sense and give rise to the illusion of BIG coincidences and the meta-symbols that are necessary (in Jungian thinking) to make sense of them.

We live in a world that curves and bifurcates and loops back on itself, and these loopings and crossings and doublings and cancellations exert a shaping force on our lives and larger events via what we call psi, but we (a) think linearly and do not believe in time travel, (b) generally disbelieve in psi, and (c) fail to include the knower in the known even when we do believe in those possibilities. Consciously being open to coincidence and ‘larger meaning’ but failing to recognize our own role in creating significant moments, we inevitably imagine a Higher Knower who recognizes and certifies these eternal forms or archetypes, stage-managing these amazing occurrences as signals or signposts for us. But this is a mistake.

I’m suggesting we kill both Jung and Plato here in one stroke … maybe even God. Not only synchronicities but also archetypes and Ideal Forms are illusions caused by our failure to recognize the truly science-fictional way that informational-emotional time loops may intensify the potency of confluent events and symbols in our lives, and the role we ourselves play in the process.

We live in a science-fictional universe. To move forward, we need to recognize that fact.

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Jung

Catalyzing the Shamanic Archetype

Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World