part0011

“What is wetiko?” is indeed a question worthy of our deepest consideration; as we will discover, it is not a simple question to answer. The inquiry itself can potentially inspire more questions, confusion, and uncertainty. We might do well to recall Rumi’s counsel to “sell certainty and buy bewilderment” as we seek to understand the multidimensional trickster that is wetiko. Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn’t, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language. This is to say that wetiko doesn’t easily lend itself to language nor to words. In using language to describe a factor such as wetiko, we run up against the limits imposed by the logic and grammar built into the language we are using. The English language, relying on nouns (separate things) interacting, does not coincide with the actuality of the underlying process informing our world. Interestingly, the Algonquian language, which gave birth to the word “wetiko,” is more verb and process oriented. The more we develop intellectual concepts, and the more abstract our thinking becomes, the more we run the risk of having our language become dissociated from the fundamental ground of Being. A language composed of living words that discloses reality can only develop and organically emerge from intimate, direct experience of the reality of the Logos, which is the ground of language itself. The nonlocal wetiko factor is a transcendental concept which cannot be adequately expressed in terms of language or our Western philosophical views, which are contained within categories of space and time. Every language carries and is the embodiment of a prevailing worldview, along with a built-in assumption that it is not restricting our worldview in any way, but simply describing “reality.” Given the inherent limiting and distorting factor of the English language, the best we can do is to use this very same language to point out, clarify, and deconstruct this problem with language to the best of the language’s ability to do so. In addition, we can create new words to more accurately language our experience. Truly “unspeakable” in words, in that wetiko is impossible to “capture” in the limited medium of language, it can also inspire truly unspeakable acts of evil to be perpetrated that are beyond the scope of language to convey. Certain violations of the social contract are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Wetiko needs to be approached imaginatively, which is to say we must be “full of imagination” to understand and begin to get a handle on it. To quote philosopher and visionary Buckminster Fuller, if we are not full of imagination, we are “not very sane.” In describing wetiko, we are in a circumstance that is similar, I imagine, to that of the ancient alchemists, who in contemplating an indescribable divine mystery, did not really know, at least with their conceptual minds, what they were writing about. Not knowing what they were trying to articulate, the unconscious itself was simultaneously living through the alchemists as it revealed itself to them, which is the same situation we find ourselves in as we attempt to illuminate wetiko. In trying to articulate what wetiko is, I feel the way I imagine the ancient alchemists used to feel when they would try to describe their God-image , Mercurius, the multisided, trickster-like deity who was the object of their veneration. Mercurius, whom the alchemists never tired of drawing attention to as being a “psychic phenomenon,” has, like wetiko, material and spiritual aspects, such that to describe it in terms of one or the other was to misrepresent the nature of this entity whose being embraces multiple categories which are usually conceived of as being mutually exclusive. A conjunction of opposites, Mercurius 1 contained and combined elements of both God and the devil in one being.

Speaking of the devil, supposedly his greatest ruse is to convince us that he doesn’t exist. Or, on the other hand, is the suggestion that the devil does exist, implicit in the previous statement, a deception of the devil (who is, after all, considered “the deceiver”), and as such, is a disguised form in which the wily devil has insinuated himself not only into our conversation, but into the world at large? It is important to shed light on this murky area: an evil, archetypal figure like the devil doesn’t exist in the way we have been imagining he does if we have been imagining that he exists objectively, as something independent from ourselves. The very imagination that we are using to try and get a handle on this figure is the very same faculty through which this seeming entity operates and takes on the appearance of existence. Herein lies a portrait of one aspect of why our task of illuminating wetiko is so challenging and so full of paradoxical conundrums.

Similarly, wetiko cannot be said to exist separate from our own selves. The devilish wetiko virus, like a vampire, if left to its own devices, not only has no power but would die, as it is only able to exist if there is someone seemingly outside of itself on whom it can feast. It requires the self/other dichotomy in order to take root and flourish. A vampire has no intrinsic, independent, substantial existence in its own right; it only exists in relation to us. The pathogenic, vampiric mind-parasite called wetiko is nothing in itself—not being able to exist from its own side—yet it has a “virtual reality” such that it can potentially destroy our species. This is literally true! The fact that something that only exists as a function of ourselves can destroy us is pointing at the incredibly vast, invisible, yet mostly untapped power that is inherent within our being. As Jung reminds us, “only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.” 2 To be capable of the conscious pursuit and creation of the highest values renders us at the same time capable of the greatest destruction. Ultimately speaking, in wetiko disease we are not being infected by a physical, objectively existing virus outside of ourselves, but rather, being psychogenetic, the origin and genesis of the wetiko psychosis is entirely within us. The fact that a vampire is not reflected by a mirror can also mean that what we need to see is that there’s nothing, no-thing to see, other than ourselves. The fact that wetiko is the expression of something inside of us means that the cure for wetiko is within us as well. The critical issue is finding this cure within us and then putting it into effect.

Wetiko is nonperceptible and irrepresentable in itself, in that it can’t be directly seen, solidified, or fully defined. Since it doesn’t accord to the usual logic of thought, wetiko can’t be completely articulated without introducing paradoxes and seeming contradictions. Many of its manifold aspects are not consistent with each other. Wetiko is irrepresentable because it lacks a specific content, in the sense that, just like the archetypes of the collective unconscious, it is nothing but a range of potentialities. Wetiko seeks situations to fill itself out in embodied form, drawing the stuff of experience into its empty form, representing itself in the facts of experience rather than representing facts. The sensory data of the world are selected and exploited by wetiko so as to give shape and form to itself and thereby reveal its underlying structure. Wetiko becomes experience-able only through the shaping of the stuff of experience. We are only able to know it as it reveals itself to us by continuously contemplating its multidimensional expressions. Just as we approach an overwhelming trauma by studying its symptoms, we come to know wetiko by contemplating its reflections and tracking its footprints in the third dimension, as well as by the traces it leaves in the inner psychic landscape of our minds. This is similar to how we can’t directly see an archetype, but through the archetype’s effects we can infer its nature and qualities. Another example is in physics, where the smallest subatomic particle can’t be directly seen but can be inferred by its effects, through which we can build up a model of its nature and qualities.

As we begin our contemplation of wetiko, it is important for us to become acquainted with the peculiar nature of the beast with which we are dealing. Strictly speaking, the wetiko virus doesn’t exist as a “thing” in the third dimension the way a biological virus does. In our Western, scientific, materialistic culture we have an absurd prejudice that something is real only if it exists in physical, quantifiable terms, while the indisputable fact is that the only form of existence we have immediate knowledge of is psychic. Wetiko can’t be objectified, and said to be “this” or “that,” as it is a nonobjectifiable phenomenon that is embedded in, operates via, and potentially alters the way we see. Wetiko acts as both a filter through which and a mirror in which we see ourselves. Wetiko is “ineffable,” in that it transcends both of the extremes of existence and nonexistence. From the absolute point of view, the wetiko virus doesn’t actually exist as a substantial entity. If we think wetiko is real, however, we have seemingly made it real, and fallen under its spell, simply by thinking so. And yet, if we decide wetiko doesn’t exist, and that we shouldn’t give it our attention, this stance is a form of ignore-ance which only ensures wetiko’s continued reign over our psyche. This shows us that wetiko, though ultimately having no substantial existence, is more than merely just an “appearance” conjured up by the way we are viewing it, while at the same time it is a “no-thing” that is precisely a display of how we are viewing it.

So if we think wetiko actually exists, we are under its thrall. And if we think it doesn’t exist, we are under its thrall. What gives? The fact that we find ourselves in such a conundrum when we contemplate wetiko is itself providing us with a source of potentially useful information about wetiko and its underlying logic. As an added bonus, this paradox is showing us something about its—and our—nature.

Wetiko has its origin in the imagining and image-making psyche . This is not to say, however, that wetiko is “all in the mind,” that it is merely our imagination and projection and hence “unreal.” This would be to conclude that if we don’t pay attention to wetiko, it doesn’t exist, which is clearly and simply not true. Our naiveté about the virulent nature of wetiko could then be compared to the situation of people in the vicinity of patients stricken with cholera who remained unconscious of and didn’t recognize the contagiousness of the disease. To think there is no such thing as cholera is the best means to cause a world epidemic. Wetiko abides in a higher-dimensional space beyond simply being our projection. Though from the absolute point of view wetiko can be said to not have any real existence, from the relative point of view wetiko and its effects need to be most seriously taken into account and dealt with. The absolute and relative dimensions of reality, though separate on one level, interpenetrate so fully that they are not to be thought of as separate, but as an indivisible unity. Reciprocally co-arising together, neither one should be marginalized. Wetiko is real as much as we, who are relative beings, are real.

Wetiko doesn’t objectively exist, and yet, at the same time, it is not merely our projection or imagination. Instead of an either/or universe, where phenomena like wetiko are either real or unreal, there is an area in between in which it is both/and—both real and unreal at the same time. The psyche itself does not trouble itself with our limiting Aristotelian categories of existence such as whether wetiko is real or not; from its point of view, everything that has an effect and “works” on it is real enough. Wetiko behaves as if it exists, and that is good enough for the psyche; the psyche can take it from there and produce real effects. The effects of wetiko are so real that it molds the psyche, “casting” it in a form that we can only imagine. Wetiko is as real as we—as a psychic entity—are real.

Wetiko is a twilight phenomenon in that it bridges the two worlds of what is real and unreal, of existence and nonexistence. Wetiko is a living symbol pointing beyond itself, an emanation of something divined but not yet fully realized. Wetiko has a kind of existence that is not imaginary but “imaginal,” which is an in-between or intermediate domain between two other realms, such as existence and nonexistence, sharing in the attributes of both sides but being the same as neither. Fully endowed with its own type of reality, an imaginal reality is both the same as and different from each of the two sides that define it. A prototypical example of an imaginal reality is an image in a mirror, which acts as a bridge or isthmus between the object reflected and the mirror, partaking of the qualities of both the object it is reflecting and the mirror. On the one hand, it is indivisible from the mirror while at the same time being different from it. Nor can the image in the mirror be separated from the object it is reflecting, while, at the same time, it is not identical with it .

The fact that the imaginal realm is not simply mere imagination, and hence is not unreal, is related to one of Jung’s greatest discoveries, what he calls the “reality of the psyche.” By the phrase “reality of the psyche,” Jung means that the psyche exists in its own right, has its own category of existence per se, in its own open-ended sphere of seemingly unlimited influence. The psyche’s order of reality is, ontologically speaking, no less real than what we call physical reality. The psyche is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be neither reduced to the brain nor elevated to metaphysics. Though psychic contents aren’t quantifiable, don’t occupy space, and don’t have a physical mass, they have a living reality all their own. It was Jung’s opinion that the idea of the reality of the psyche is the most important achievement of modern psychology, even though most people don’t even know about this profound discovery. Many people have been conditioned, on the other hand, to devalue the psyche, thinking of the contents of the psyche as mere nothings, empty fabrications. To realize the “reality” of the psyche is to recognize that, quite to the contrary, its contents have a living existence that greatly affects us in ways we can only imagine. By saying the psyche is “real,” Jung is pointing out that the psyche informs our experience of ourselves and the universe in the most fundamental of ways. It is through the medium of the psyche that we give shape to both ourselves and the world around us. It is the source of all that makes us human, as well as being the doorway through which we interface with a part of us that’s transhuman, in that it introduces us to a part that’s greater than ourselves.

In a Copernican revolution of the mind which turns our Western, scientific, materialistic perspective on its head, from the point of view of the reality of the psyche, we might as well say that it is physical existence that is merely an inference, since we know of matter only insofar as we perceive psychic images. From the point of view of the “other side”—the psyche—our unconscious existence is the real one, while the physical world is like an illusion or apparitional reality created for the purpose of the psyche to express itself and integrate its unconscious aspects. We are so willing to offer our opinions about the psyche, but are not so open to reflect upon what the psyche thinks about us. From the perspective of the psyche as imbued with living reality, the material world is experienced as being like a dream that continues to seem like reality as long as we are in it. Interestingly, this is the point of view of Eastern wisdom traditions when they refer to the physical world as being an unreal illusion or maya . The Sanskrit word maya refers to the source of illusion as well as the divine play of the creative spirit. What would happen, I find myself imagining, if more people investigated and more fully realized—not intellectually, but experientially—the living reality of the psyche? What would it bring to light? Since recognizing the psychic nature of reality simultaneously affects both the psyche and our experience of “reality,” how would the psyche, and the world, reflect back this realization? Because there are no absolute boundaries between an individual’s psyche and any other part of creation, none of us are separate from the cosmic creative principle itself; in fact, we are that principle incarnated in human form.

The wetiko bug originates and operates within the realm of the psyche; the moment we recognize the reality of the psyche is when we begin to engage with wetiko in a way that may potentially lead somewhere. When we realize that the psyche has a reality all its own, we enter into the dimension of experience where our imagination and experience of ourselves and our world intersect, interpenetrate, and mutually influence each other in a conscious and consciousness-generating way. Paradoxically, wetiko simultaneously obscures us from, while potentially introducing us to, the reality and potency of the sacred creative imagination. If we lose contact with the living reality of the imagination within ourselves that is connected to something greater than and beyond ourselves, we become truly disoriented. We then become easy prey for the wetiko bug, which literally in-forms our lack of imagination so as to feed itself. If we don’t use our gift of imagination, other people will use it for us. We then find ourselves unable to imagine a world other than one informed by wetiko. The most decisive and telling question for humanity is, to put it simply, “Are we related to something infinite, something beyond our limited ego … or not?”

It is as if humanity is an experiment of the divine imagination, endowed with a faculty corresponding to the divine power that produced it. There is an interface between the world-creating imagination of God and our personal imagination in which the two partake of each other. The human psyche is the organ through which we imagine God while God simultaneously imagines Itself into incarnation through our imagination. It is as if God has put on the flesh, crept under our skin, and empowered our creative imagination to materialize itself as our experience of ourselves and our world. How we view the role of imagination influences how we in fact imagine, as well as how we respond to the demands of the imagination. In alchemy, the concept of imagination is perhaps the most important key to the understanding of the magnum opus , or “great work.” For the alchemists, the imagination is the divine body in every person, a refined, rarefied “subtle body” that is not humanly constructed but divinely implanted in us from a source beyond ourselves. 3 When the alchemists talk about the “imaginative faculty of the soul,” they are giving a clear indication of the secret essence of the alchemical art. The imaginative faculty of the soul is not merely a human attribute, but a divine activity of the soul in which the human imagination participates and bears witness. The human imagination is enveloped in and suffused with—and is a reflective iteration of—the unconditioned divine creative imagination, the imagination that is imagining/dreaming/creating the whole universe in this very moment. The imagination that the alchemists were interested in was the world-creating imagination of God, the imagination where what is imagined affects what is happening in our world in a way that can only be imagined and is beyond imagination at the same time. Through the alchemical art of imaginatio , the soul is empowered to become an instrument for the divine imagination in such a way that can literally change the world.

Our creative imagination is truly divine, in that it literally affects the suprasensory blueprint underlying this seemingly mundane and solid material world. Our divine creative imagination is the part of us through which God imagines this world into materialization. This waking dream we are living in, however, being of a more dense vibration than a night dream, is more solidified, more crystallized into materialized form, and hence “slower” in the way it is a function of our creative imagination. Due to the seeming solidity of this waking dream, the effects of the creative imagination on the way our universe actually gets dreamed up are visible only with much more subtle, refined, and rarefied vision. Our physical universe very convincingly appears to have the continuity of being something that seems solid and objectively existing, but we shouldn’t be fooled or entranced by the seeming concreteness of the universe’s dreamlike display.

It is important to differentiate the alchemists’ notion of imagination, which is a creative activity originating out of and expressing the wholeness of the Self, from mere fantasy, which is a repetitive and self-soothing activity of the ego whose fundamental purpose is to avoid relationship with life. It is the alchemists’ version of imagination that Einstein was referring to when he is reported to have said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Language itself is a tool of the imagination, which is to say that, one way or another, imagination becomes embodied in and through language, while at the same time, language takes on form through imagination. Wetiko can potentially cripple our sacred imagination and turn it against ourselves in a way which serves its agenda. Disabling our divinely inspired creative imagination, the wetiko bug can support magical thinking and mere fantasy, which further serves our escaping from dealing with the reality of life, ourselves, and the wetiko bug itself. In wounding the imagination, which is our inborn visionary power, wetiko is preventing our species from evolving its narrative and myth-making faculties. Wetiko can even make us think that we can’t affect reality with our thoughts, imagination, and visionary capacities. Inquiring into how wetiko impacts upon our imagination, however, shows how encoded within the apparent problem is a revelation containing in hidden form the seeming problem’s own resolution. This will be a recurring theme as we inquire into the nature of wetiko.

An example: For those of us who experience ourselves as not having much of an imagination, it is as if we are imagining that we don’t have much of an imagination. Our imagination of not having an imagination is itself the most far-out (in the sense of being far off the mark) imagination of our divine imagination. Imagining we don’t have much of an imagination, just like within a dream, we will draw all the evidence to ourselves to confirm the seemingly objective truth of our viewpoint, which only further entrenches us in our conviction of not having a good imagination. Our lack of imagination reveals the potency of our imagination, however, for it is secretly revealing how we literally create our experience of ourselves through our imagination. If we lack imagination, our creative imagination, instead of serving our fulfillment, is then perversely being used against us in crippling ways that dramatically reduce our human potential. Our only “problem” is a lack of imagination. Our lack of imagination is itself imaginary, however, as our thinking that there’s a problem is merely a product of our imagination. Being ultimately the revelation of our imagination itself, our lack of imagination is a problem that asks to be approached imaginatively, which is to say that hidden in our very problem—our lack of imagination—is its own resolution and healing. Imagine that!

Wetiko is a mysterious “no-substance” which is empty of independent, inherent existence, inseparable from consciousness itself, yet it physically displays itself and “fleshes out” its immaterial, transcendental nature in, through, and as the seemingly embodied, substantial forms of our universe. Though the subtle body of wetiko is not located in the third dimension of space or time, literally existing in another dimension, it is able to affect our ordinary lives by mysteriously interpenetrating into our three-dimensional world. Not consisting of mere matter, the wetiko virus somehow has the ability to materialize itself through the physical universe. To the extent that we don’t realize that what is the matter with matter is our own imagination, so to speak, we become bewitched by the reality-creating function of our imagination. The subtle body of wetiko incarnates itself in and through matter, which is the place of its appearance, but its physical manifestation mysteriously does not contain its substance. This is similar to how a mirror is merely the place of the appearance of the image it reflects, but the substance, the thing-in-itself which the image represents, doesn’t reside in the mirror. The revelations of wetiko through the forms of the world are both itself and other than itself at the same time, in the same way that the reflections in the mirror are inseparable from the mirror but are themselves not the mirror.

In actual fact, wetiko is an illusory disease, in that the idea that the disease actually exists in a real, concrete way is itself a symptom of and a delusion induced by the disease. The notion that we have discovered a disease and are going to cure it is a delusional construct that is itself a symptom of the disease. Wetiko disease makes us think it’s a problem that needs to be cured (which is so convincing because from one point of view this is true), and yet, seeking the cure for wetiko can be an expression of the disease. This seeming double-bind reveals the limitations of the disease/cure paradigm to adequately illumine the essential nature of wetiko. To be in this paradigm is still to be under the thrall of the two-valued logic—where things are either true or false—of a wetikoized mind. It is impossible to grasp wetiko with our conceptual, cognitive, and rational mind. There is no way out of wetiko within the mind, as the mind is the “play”-ground of wetiko, for it is through the vehicle of the conceptual mind that wetiko wreaks its most destructive havoc upon the human and natural world. To operate and solely subscribe to the two-valued logic of the conventional mind is to be trapped in “the Matrix” (a word related to both “mother” and “matter”) of wetiko. And yet, the nonbinding and ungraspable nature of wetiko is symbolically reflecting back to us the part of ourselves that is not able to be bound, which is to say wetiko is secretly revealing to us our intrinsic freedom.

To be able to deal with—and become free from—wetiko is to literally have an expansion of consciousness and step “out of our minds,” which is not to be crazy, but rather, to find ourselves “inside of our minds,” that is, to realize that being in this world is to be in, and surrounded by, the nonlocalized psyche. This realization is equivalent to being within a dream and to realize that we are dreaming, which is to realize that the boundary between the inner and the outer has dissolved. To become lucid and realize that we are dreaming while within a dream is to recognize that the seemingly outer landscape which the moment before seemed so solid, real, and external to ourselves is actually an unmediated expression of a process going on deep within ourselves. Strangely enough, this realization is inspired by wetiko, which is to say that we might not have had this shift of identity and expansion of consciousness without wetiko prodding us to wake up.

Here we touch another recurring theme: is wetiko simply evil, or is it a disguised form of the divine that is literally helping us awaken? The more we understand wetiko, the more we gain insight into how wetiko, just like the alchemists’ Mercurius, contains both of these opposites cojoined in a superposed state—a true conjunction of opposites.

Thus a very different framework of understanding is required—demanded by wetiko itself—when it comes to dealing with wetiko. In a sense, contemplating and writing a book about wetiko, referring to it as a disease, virus, parasite, vampire, etc., is an act that itself is potentially spreading the disease if people reading the book don’t have a more refined, rarefied, nuanced, and sophisticated way of understanding what is being pointed at. Wetiko has the most disturbing characteristic of usurping even the most well-intentioned attempts to illumine it, so as to serve its diabolical agenda. Wetiko incubates and grows stronger in the shadowy realms of our psyche; it thrives in direct proportion to which it is not clearly seen or truly understood. Wetiko cannot be understood by the mind, however, and yet it is by seeing how wetiko operates through our mind that we begin to understand wetiko.

What is the origin of wetiko? “When, how and where did wetiko start in our world?” seems like a reasonable point of departure for our contemplation. Does wetiko have a creation myth? Many Native American traditions talk about the “mental” nature of creation, as if the universe is a thought or a conception in the mind of its creator. Interestingly, the word “conception” refers to both origination and cogitation. In their cosmology, the universe is created through a thought process similar to imagination and dreaming. Native American cosmology, like Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, regard the universe as a dream of the creator, a dream in which all the dream characters dream, too.

In Native American tradition, the wetiko monster is regarded as a legendary, mythic being of supernatural powers, a creature of the Algonquian 4 imagination, while at the same time, when read symbolically, it can represent a living psychic reality having relevance for all of us. Native American mythologies portray the mythical figure of wetiko as a cannibalistic spirit who embodies greed and excess and can possess human beings. The wetiko was once a human being, but because of its gluttony and selfishness it was transformed into a predatory monster. In indigenous mythology, indulgent, self-destructive habits are thought to be inspired by the wetiko virus. In the Native American’s usage of the term, those who have become wetikos are individuals who have “lost their wits,” which connotes not only being out of their (right) mind, but also not knowing what they are (“unwittingly”) doing. To not know what they are acting out implies that they have been taken over by something other than themselves, which is acting itself out through them. It is as if their self has become corrupted such that they are “no longer themselves.” The mythology surrounding the figure of wetiko can be read as an expression of the phenomenon of a powerful, transhuman spirit that can take possession of people’s body and mind. Commenting on how in wetiko psychosis a spirit agency exerts influence over other beings by inhabiting their bodies or otherwise determining their thoughts and behavior, anthropologist Robert Brightman writes, “Some kind of spirit gets into them up there in the Northwest Territories and they go crazy.” 5

The wetiko myth thus serves as a teaching to encourage moderation, self-control, and cooperation among members of the Native American community. The Ojibwa word for wetiko, windigo (or weendigo ), seems to have been derived from ween dagoh , which means “solely for self,” or from weenin n’d’igooh , which means “excess.” According to Native American lore, the wetiko monster can only prey on human beings who, like itself, have indulged in excess. This is to say that human beings’ propensity for excess makes them vulnerable to becoming possessed by and transformed into a wetiko, illustrating the lesson that evil preys and thrives upon excess. Etymologically, the word “excess” is one of the meanings related to the word “evil.” Evil turns in upon itself, continually feeding and impregnating itself as it endlessly expands its own compulsive appetites. The earliest known use in the English language of a variant form of wetiko was recorded by a trader, James Isham, who traded at York Factory on the west coast of Hudson’s Bay and who wrote an account of the Cree Indians’ beliefs. The word appears in a vocabulary of Indian and English words. It simply reads, “the Devil … Whit te co.” 6 Likewise, trader David Thompson wrote, “The word Weetigo [wetiko] is one of the names of the Evil Spirit.” 7 Emphasizing its predatory aspect, Thompson comments that “Wee tee go [wetiko] is the evil spirit that devours humankind.” 8 In Native American legends, no one emerges unscathed from even the slightest encounter with wetiko.

Native Americans often portrayed the wetiko as having a frigid, icy heart, devoid of mercy. The living heart is the seat of feelings of love, of the tender-heartedness of compassion, of empathy, of feelings in general, and of human relatedness. The organ of the heart becoming frozen and hardened as ice can be read symbolically as representing the state of inner rigidity and deadness that afflicts those suffering from wetiko disease. Like a werewolf, the wetiko is oftentimes portrayed as a shape-shifter who can even appear disguised as a good spirit. 9 In the indigenous legends, whenever the wetiko ate another person, it would grow larger in proportion to the meal it had just eaten, so that it could never be full or satisfied. This image of gorging itself while at the same time being emaciated from starvation symbolizes never being able to fill the insatiable void at the center of the wetiko’s being and, therefore, always craving more. A similar condition is represented in Buddhism by the figure of the “hungry ghost,” who, with its pinhole mouth, constricted neck, and huge, unfilled stomach can never satisfy its insatiable cravings. These images portray a pathologically perverse state into which any human being can potentially fall .

The wetiko mythology emerged out of the long, cold, dark winters during which food became increasingly scarce, resulting in the possible danger of famine and starvation. Symbolically, this is to say that situations of profound lack and resource scarcity gave birth to the idea of wetiko. Interestingly, some of the wetiko complex’s main images—eating, consuming, devouring, cannibalizing—represent a number of different processes at the same time: getting nourishment, receiving communion with what is being ingested, as well as dominating and destroying that which is being assimilated.

In Native American mythology, a wetiko cannot be killed by ordinary means, and certainly not by ordinary people. Thus, people entrained in the mind-set of consensus reality don’t stand a chance against this formidable and uncanny energy. In the mythic context, a wetiko cannot be killed by anything short of a “silver bullet” or a magical ritual performed by an accomplished shaman. This can be read symbolically to mean that the wetiko phenomenon operates through the daemonic, archetypal, and magical levels of the psyche, and can only be dealt with through similar channels.

In the biblical lore that has influenced Judeo-Christian civilization, the story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden certainly seems like the timeless archetypal moment of wetiko entering into the human realm, as spoken in the language of mythology. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—knowledge of good and evil, that is—resulted in “the Fall” of our species. This “sin” was inspired by the snake—but if we see the snake as a disguised form of God, since God created all and everything, then the process of discriminating between good and evil was a necessary step for humanity. Other mythologies that seem to refer to wetiko talk about some alien, and alienating, influence that came down from the sky (or up from the underworld) and corrupted our originally pure human nature. Still other legends talk about an “error” being implanted within us that deviated the programming of our minds, or even compromised our DNA. In any case, it certainly seems “as if” deep in the past, thousands of years ago, our species suffered some sort of incredible trauma that created an aberration in our development and evolution. And yet, when the whole picture is contemplated, this seeming mistake is potentially catalyzing our species to evolve in ways that might not have occurred otherwise.

In our prevailing Christian culture’s myth of the Incarnation of God, it is the darker figure of Judas, the one who betrayed Christ, who set the cosmic forces in motion that were crucial for the redemption of humanity. In this divinely choreographed drama, Satan returns in person, so to speak, entering into Judas so as to initiate the dynamic that would lead to the Crucifixion. This brings up a question: is evil a factor that obscures the unfoldment of the cosmic drama, or is it a necessary ingredient in the mystery of divine Incarnation? Wetiko demands that we take a closer look at the role that evil plays in our cosmos. Jung goes so far as to call Satan “the godfather of man as a spiritual being,” 10 by which he means that the figure of Satan can potentially activate in humankind a process of spiritual awakening that would have been impossible without his intervention. The truth would not have the same value to humanity without contrast to the lies and deception of “the deceiver,” from which we must learn to discriminate the truth. The human will becomes conscious through its collision with opposition, coming up against an adversarial will. (One of the meanings of the Hebrew word for Satan is “the adversary.”) So a potentially positive aspect of this adversarial, evil-seeming figure is that it is the catalyst for and creator of individual consciousness. By opposing God, Jung continues, “Lucifer was perhaps the one who best understood the divine will struggling to create a world and who carried out that will most faithfully. For, by rebelling against God, he became the active and activating principle of a creation which set up, in opposition to God, a counter-will of its own. Because God willed this, we are told in Genesis 3 that he gave humanity the power to will otherwise.” 11 Allowing a counter-will to his own opens up a new freedom in the depth of God’s being, as well as our own. In any case, when contemplated from this meta-perspective, if we were somehow able to magically exterminate all evil in the world today, we would be amputating an essential part of the deity itself. Commenting on the mysterious role that evil plays in the cosmic drama, Jung writes, “Satan, who, with good reason, later on received the name of ‘Lucifer’ [the morning star, the bringer of the light], knew how to make more frequent and better use of omniscience than did his father.” 12 It was this evil figure who had the initiative to create the seeming “problems” in God’s creation that omniscience knew to be necessary and indeed indispensible for the unfolding and completion of the divine drama of Incarnation. Our mind naturally boggles at the idea that both good and evil are contained in God. (Isa. 45:7: “I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil.”) We should be careful, however, not to pare down God’s omnipotence to the level of our human opinions.

To quote Paul Ricoeur, author of The Symbolism of Evil , “In the historical experience of man, every individual finds evil already there; nobody begins it absolutely. If Adam is not the first man, in the naively temporal sense of the word, but the typical man, he can symbolize both the experience of the ‘beginning’ of humanity with each individual and the experience of the ‘succession’ of men. Evil is part of the interhuman relationship, like language, tools, institutions; it is transmitted; it is tradition, and not only something that happens. There is thus an anteriority of evil to itself; as if evil were that which always precedes itself, that which each man continues while beginning it, but beginning it in his turn. That is why, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent is already there; he is the other side of that which begins.” 13 Ricoeur is pointing to the a priori, primordial, and beginningless nature of evil, a nature which is part of our nature, as it is transmitted through humanity over multiple generations.

Other creation myths talk about our dilemma existing from beginningless time, which is suggesting that to look for the origin of wetiko at a point back in historical time is both unanswerable and irrelevant. Phenomenologically speaking, the fact is that wetiko is potentially generated and re-created anew each and every moment, including this one. Since only the present moment truly exists, the cause of wetiko lies in the present, since it only exists in the Now. It is not a “hangover” from the past, a caput mortuum (an alchemical term meaning a residue left over after the distillation of a substance), It is only in the today, not in our yesterdays, that wetiko can be found and “cured.”

To “know” and understand wetiko, we have to know and understand ourselves. God has slipped the most terrible weapons of mass destruction into our hands, endowing us with the power to destroy ourselves en masse and empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on the entire planet. Because we have been granted an almost Godlike power, we can no longer remain blind and unconscious. The deadly and potentially death-creating situation we find ourselves in demands that we come to know something of the Divine within ourselves. In Jung’s words, we must achieve “gnosis of the Divine” in order to survive. Wetiko is potentially the prompt and catalyst for our achieving this inner knowing, without which our process of awakening would be only partial and incomplete.

The greatest protection is when we’re in touch with “reality,” that is, with our true nature, which is outside of the conditioned limitations of space and time. When we’re in touch with our true selves, wetiko can’t affect or touch us, because we realize that it has no substantive, independent existence. This is to say that the best way to deal with the evil of wetiko is to be in touch with our inherent wholeness, what Jung calls the Self, which acts as a sacred amulet or talisman, shielding and protecting us from evil’s pernicious effects. The divinely sponsored wholeness within ourselves is the “weak point” of the evil one. The way to “defeat” evil is to not to try and destroy it (for then, in playing evil’s game, we have already lost), but rather, to find the invulnerable place within ourselves where evil is unable to vanquish us—this is to truly “win” our battle with evil. It is worth noting that we wouldn’t have accessed this place within us, the true “pearl of great price” (one of our true nature’s many names), without the evil of wetiko.

Some years ago, an esteemed Tibetan lama in America gave an empowerment/blessing ceremony for a practice that dispels curses and spells. He made the point that this empowerment would not dispel the curse, as this presumption invested the curse with a seeming reality that was unwarranted. Rather, he clarified that this blessing would help to dispel our belief that we were under a curse, which itself was the disguised and cloaked form of the curse and the hidden means through which it afflicts us.

A real “cure” for wetiko involves a radical phase shift in consciousness out of the limited and limiting two-valued logic of the conventional mind into a more expanded and expansive logical framework. In other words, the cure for wetiko is an expansion of consciousness in which we awaken into a higher-dimensional space of not just our being, but Being itself. This is to step out of any reference point, and to simultaneously step into the ground of our being, which is truly groundless. This is to discover that there is no place to take refuge, except in the true nature of our being. Taking refuge in the impermanent physical forms of the world is, ultimately speaking, like taking refuge on shifting sand. Only what is truly ourselves has the power to heal. In a very real sense we do not cure wetiko—wetiko cures us of our wrong attitude. Our quest to comprehend the nature of wetiko activates this very self-curative process. Our illness is nature’s attempt to heal us and to raise us up to an entirely new level of wholeness.

The apparent paradoxical nature of wetiko cannot be resolved within the framework of the standard Aristotelian, two-valued logic which is basic to Western analytical thought, where things are either true or false, or either exist or don’t exist. This paradox is itself a direct function or artifact of the intrinsic limitations built into the nature of a mutually exclusive, binary, two-valued logic. Having a definite utility, two-valued logic works by contrast, giving attributes to things and making distinctions, thereby limiting them; something is “this” only by defining it as not “that.” Our very language itself, in categorizing things and ideas, conditions us into a dualistic, two-valued logical way of thinking. The axiomatic set through which we view the world and its logic conditions our minds. To get insight into the nonordinary reality of wetiko, we have to introduce a higher form of logic in order to wrap our minds around what we are dealing with.

The solution to such apparent paradoxes as wetiko lies outside our conventional way of thinking; its re-solution lies outside the box. An example: something as basic and universal as the wave/particle paradox of light requires an expanded logic to be addressed. It is well known that under the conditions of various experimental arrangements, light displays either wavelike or particle-like properties. But what, then, is the essential nature of light? This question is not amenable to the usual two-valued logic, and may be better addressed by what is known as four-valued logic, 14 a type of logic that is foreign to and outside of Western thought. Two-valued logic is based on the law of the excluded middle, in which things are either (1) true or (2) false. By contrast, four-valued logic includes the middle and the ends surrounding it, so that things are (1) true, (2) false, (3) both true and false, or (4) neither true nor false.

It is impossible to use exclusively two-valued logic to show the full range of possibilities in any given situation. The alternatives offered by four-valued logic, however, represent all the possible standpoints from which every problem can be viewed. Four-valued logic covers the range of any idea we could possibly have about something. Four-valued logic lies between the polarities created by the two-valued logic of duality. Four valued logic is the logic of interdependence, unlimited wholeness, and the unity of all things. Overcoming the arbitrary confines of the rational mind, four-valued logic deconstructs the conditioned mind into its natural state of seeing holistically. It literally changes the awareness of the mind to allow for a new and expanded understanding of reality, allowing the mind to transcend its own grip on and grasping of reality and thought. Truly subversive, four-valued logic undermines our ability to hold on to any fixed position whatsoever. By rejecting any one view as well as all views, four-valued logic is in essence rejecting the competence of standard Aristotelian reason to comprehend the fundamental nature of reality, a reality which ultimately transcends thought. Expanding the dimensionality of logical thought, four-valued logic describes and is an expression of a nonconceptual system of thought that leads beyond thought itself, engendering an intuitive awareness of the timeless existence of the underlying nonlocal field that pervades everything.

Quantum physics points out that our seemingly objective universe is more like a dream than we ever imagined. The dreamlike nature of our universe is articulated in a modern scientific context through what is called the Observer Effect, which points out that, just like within a dream, in the act of observing we affect and evoke the very universe that we are observing. It therefore makes no sense to talk about an apparently objectively existing world separate from an observer such as ourselves, or an independent observer such as ourselves separate from the world observed. Just as in a dream, the observer is the observed; we live in a participatory universe. Returning to our example, the true nature of light is not accommodated by either a wave or a particle, because the way light manifests depends upon how it is observed (“dreamed up”). Speaking of the wavelike quality of light, for example, four-valued logic would assert that light is a wave (which under certain conditions it is), light is not a wave (which under other conditions is true), light is therefore both a wave and not a wave, and light is neither a wave nor not a wave. This truly encompasses all possibilities. Likewise, wetiko exists, it doesn’t exist, it both exists and doesn’t exist, and it neither exists nor doesn’t exist. To be able to see through this more holistic view of the world is to be in an expanded state of consciousness in which we are not creating or investing in an unnecessary state of duality.

Both light and wetiko are inscribed in and expressions of the same underlying unified field. Like wetiko, light is not an object that solely exists in space and time. Its photonic aspect exists in three-dimensional space and time, but another aspect of light does not. Four-valued logic gives us a greater range of possibilities with which to grasp the reality of certain phenomena such as the nature of light, and four-valued logic will assist us in getting a handle on the nature of wetiko. A spiritual path in itself, four-valued logic is a mind-expanding and mind-freeing path to spaciousness and compassion.

Another example of four-valued logic is the Schrödinger’s cat paradox, a famous thought experiment in quantum physics which showed that the universe can’t be said to exist in a particular form until there is an observer to experience it. The key to this paradox is what is referred to as the principle of “superposition,” which states that until we look and collapse the infinitude of the wave function, the universe is actually in all possible states simultaneously. This is to say that in Schrödinger’s experiment, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until it is observed. On the level of the conventional mind and ordinary reality, this is obviously false and nonsensical, but it shows the limits of Aristotelian logic, which is to say that this paradox is not consistent with two-valued logic. Just as with the light paradox, using four-valued logic we can say that the cat is neither alive nor not alive at the same time; this is the real meaning of the superposition of states in the quantum mechanical wave function. To say that Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive nor not alive is a statement that can potentially dissolve the conventional strictures of the conceptual mind so as to reveal naked awareness itself, the basic essence of unconditioned mind. We are unable to conceptually understand four-valued logic, however, with a mind that has been conditioned to think with two-valued logic. Four-valued logic points to and introduces us to a direct experience of reality beyond the straitjacketing conditioning of two-valued logic. Seeing the world through four-valued logic gives us greater degrees of freedom of choice, in that it actively empowers our free will.

Four-valued logic sheds light on who we are. For example, on one hand we are a body existing in space and time. But on another hand, we are clearly not just a body. As a bodily organism, we are finite, mortal, and subject to suffering, but at the same time, we are not a body but a consciousness, living in a multidimensional universe. We are part of a consciousness outside space/time, participating in a higher-dimensional, nonlocal universe. We are both a body and not a body. And we are neither a body nor not a body. Four-valued logic illumines how we are able to be both a self and not a self, both separated as bodies and not separated in consciousness. Four-valued logic, the logic that wetiko demands in order to be understood, introduces us to who we actually are beyond the constraining limitations of the mind/body dualism .

As we deepen our contemplation of wetiko, it is becoming clear that wetiko is the source of the darkest evil, while at the same time potentially freeing our mind, curing us of our wrong attitude, expanding our consciousness, shifting our identity, helping us to achieve gnosis of the divine, and potentially waking us up. Can we therefore still say that wetiko is evil? Four-valued logic would assert: wetiko is evil, it is not evil, it is both evil and not evil, and it is neither evil nor not evil. In other words, wetiko is not only the archetype of evil, but understanding wetiko also means gaining insight into the deeper place that evil plays in the cosmic plan of creation, salvation, redemption, and incarnation of the Divine.

Though one of the channels that wetiko manifests is through individuals, ultimately speaking, wetiko can’t be said to exist in individuals separately from the surrounding field, for the simple reason that individuals, as separate, discrete entities isolated from the surrounding field, don’t exist in and of themselves. Unable to be seen or understood from the fixed viewpoint of the separate self, wetiko is a relational phenomenon, in that wetiko happens in the space between us (as well as the space between “parts” of ourselves), as we relate to each other, ourselves, and the world at large. It is as if wetiko “places” the unconscious between self and other. There is no wetiko disease that only exists in one individual. Being imaginal, wetiko does not exist as an isolated, objective entity separate from our subjective awareness. The subtle body of wetiko is an (im)materialization of the interactive field between us. Wetiko exists in the “in-between” place in which we are all inseparably interconnected and, in the deepest sense, don’t exist as isolated entities. We are not the passive victims of the wetiko psychosis. Wetiko is something that we are potentially participating in and are actively co-creating with each other in each and every moment. Wetiko is a dreaming phenomenon, in that we are all dreaming up the wetiko epidemic together.