part0012

The wetiko collective psychosis is a field phenomenon and needs to be contemplated as such. The field itself is not a separately existing thing but a dynamically evolving living process in which we are all participating, simultaneously creating and being created by. The field has to do with relations per se, rather than the seemingly separate entities doing the relating. Instead of relating to any part of the field as an isolated entity, it’s important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the “medium” through which wetiko (as well as everything else, for that matter) is articulating itself. The underlying field can only be perceived and felt when we step out of our habitual viewpoint of imagining that we exist as a fixed reference point, a center of volitional action, a “time-bound ego,” and connect with our timeless, and nonlocal being, which ironically, can only be found in the present moment. This is to say that the doorway to seeing the field, and therefore wetiko, is to fully enter the present moment. The psychic epidemic known as wetiko needs to not be viewed through the lens of the fragmented and fragmenting separate self, which by its nature objectifies individual people, who are mistakenly thought to exist in isolation from the field, from each other, and from ourselves. To view a person as an object existing separately from the field is to fall under a diabolical illusion. Individuals are embedded in, pervaded by, and contained within the greater field—family system, society, and planetary culture—and are expressions of this multifaceted field. To begin to see wetiko disease, we need to cultivate a more holistic vision that recognizes the existence of a single interdependently co-arising field that pervades all manifest existence.

We are all collectively dreaming up the field while at the same time reciprocally being dreamed up by it, what Buddhism calls “dependent co-arising” ( paticca samuppada —also translated as “interdependent co-origination”). Dependent co-arising is what the Buddha woke up to under the Bodhi tree. It is the aspect of Buddha’s impossible-to-describe-in-words enlightenment that can be expressed in conceptual terms. Dependent co-arising is not something created by Buddhas, but rather, is something that is continually re-discovered. It is the very condition of empirical reality. Dependent co-arising is not a final affirmation about reality, as it doesn’t seek to define a reality external to the observer, but rather, is a way of seeing that focuses on the process of how our experience of the world and ourselves arises. When asked by what authority he spoke, the Buddha would always cite the law of dependent co-arising; not any supernatural entity ruling our world, but the dynamics at work within our world. The Buddha said, “He who sees the Dharma [the truth, the way things are, the path, the law] sees dependent co-arising, and he who sees dependent co-arising sees the Dharma.” Dependent co-arising is not a belief or a theory to which one assents, but an insight that one is invited to experience and encouraged to win. Pointing to our interdependence with the entire universe, dependent co-arising illumines how we do not exist as discrete entities separate from the universe, but rather, in relation to other parts of the universe, which themselves don’t exist as isolated entities, but relationally as well. This insight reveals that there is no fixed, substantially existing, self-established entity or reference point anywhere. To top everything off, the emptiness that dependent co-arising is an expression of is itself empty of an inherent nature, which leaves us nowhere to stand except in the truth of who we have discovered ourselves to be. Dependent co-arising is considered to be a milestone in human thought; its ever-deepening realization is one of the greatest and furthest-reaching cognitive revolutions of our time .

Whenever the contents of the collective unconscious become activated, they have an unsettling effect on the conscious mind of everyone. When this psychic dynamic is not consciously metabolized, not just within an individual but collectively, the mental state of the people as a whole might well be compared to a psychosis. Jung never tired of warning that the greatest danger that threatens humanity is the possibility that millions of us can fall into our unconscious together and reinforce each other’s blind spots, feeding a contagious collective psychosis in which we unwittingly become complicit in supporting the insanity of endless wars; this is unfortunately an exact description of what is currently happening. Let’s look at how we are using our energy: we are literally investing our resources into developing engines of mass destruction so as to keep ourselves safe and protect ourselves. In the process, we are destroying each other, ourselves, and the biosphere—the life support system of life on earth—that we depend upon for our very survival. We are literally feeding and supporting our own genocide. Our greatest resource, our own mind, is continually being polluted and corrupted by the massive propaganda engines of wetiko that have become incorporated within our wetiko-saturated culture and internalized within our own minds. What modern-day humanity is confronted with, to quote the Trappist monk and social activist Thomas Merton, is “a crisis of sanity first of all. The problems of the nations are the problems of mentally deranged people, but magnified a thousand times because they have the full-straight-faced approbation of a schizoid society, schizoid national structures, schizoid military and business complexes.” 1 In his own language, Merton was describing and attempting to illuminate wetiko.

The part of us that is colluding in the creation of a collective psychosis like wetiko is the part of us that is mad, for why else would we be doing this? To the extent we’re not fully awake, we each have a part of us that’s mad, which gets acted out in our life. How can we not have a part of us that’s mad, living in a world gone mad, a world that is not separate from but rather a reflection of ourselves? The part of us that thinks we don’t have a mad part is itself our mad part. It is only by confronting what is insane and inhuman in ourselves, however, that we become truly human. Facing our inhumanity gives us the possibility of disempowering it, but not disowning it. It is crucial to face how we have been deceived and deviated by wetiko, for if we cannot see how we have been set off course, we can’t orient ourselves to find our true path. Seeing how we’ve been led astray is a form of illumination. Social historian Riane Eisler writes in her book Sacred Pleasure , “To realize that which cannot be lost, it is necessary to understand what really has been lost.” To see how wetiko operates with our cooperation is to gain critical insight into the elusive workings of our own mind.

We are currently in the midst of the greatest epidemic sickness known to humanity. Like a fish in water who doesn’t recognize water because it is everywhere, both outside and within the fish itself, many of us don’t realize the collective insanity in our midst, as our madness is so pervasive that it has become normalized. We have become conditioned to accept as normal the fact that we are in an endless war, and innumerable of our brothers and sisters all over the planet are impoverished and dying of starvation every day. It is important to realize that in a psychic epidemic, the majority of people can appear entirely “normal.” The fact that the underlying psychic roots of the collective psychosis are not even part of our planetary dialogue is itself a telling expression of the depth of the unconsciousness induced by this psychic epidemic. That the mental health community, which should be concerned with psychic hygiene (both personal and collective), is not even addressing the issue of a rampant collective psychosis is a clear indication that the mental health community is itself embedded in and hence infected with the very psychic epidemic it should be studying. By not recognizing the nature of wetiko disease, the mental health community has become its unwitting agents, helping the disease to propagate. What clearer sign do we need of a psychic epidemic than when our mental health system itself, whose job it is to study, monitor, and deal with such phenomena, not only doesn’t recognize that there is a collective psychosis running rampant in our society, but is itself infected with it? Ultimately speaking, it’s not a question of integrating wetiko disease into the existing diagnostic manual, but rather, of radically expanding, up-leveling, and re-visioning our understanding of the nature of both health and illness relative to each other.

Our collective madness has become transparent to us, as we see and interpret the world through it, rendering our madness invisible, thereby unwittingly colluding with the collective psychosis while it wreaks incredible death and destruction on our planet. Being “trans-parent,” our madness is beyond its mere appearance, which is to say, “beyond being apparent,” that is, not visible. Our collective psychosis is invisible to us, as it manifests itself both in the very way we are looking and in the unspoken ways we have been conditioned to not perceive. Due to its cloak of invisibility, we don’t see our madness, a psychic blindness which renders us complicit in the creation of our own madness. This complicity is potentially empowering news, however, since it also signals that we are indeed co-creators of our own reality, and not helpless victims.

Wetiko psychosis is highly contagious, spreading through the channel of our shared unconsciousness. Its vectors of infection and propagation do not travel like a physical pathogen, however. 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. In wetiko there is a code or logic which affects/infects awareness in a way analogous to how the DNA in a virus passes into and infects a cell. Forbes concludes that “the wetiko disease, the sickness of exploitation, has been spreading as a contagion for the past several thousand years. And as a contagion unchecked by most vaccines, it tends to become worse rather than better with time. More and more people catch it, in more and more places, and they become the true teachers of the young.” 2 Wetiko culture gets taught both at home and in “the academy,” where people become certified in the ways of its world, and are thus accredited and empowered to spread its corrupting ways on ever grander scales with ever vaster and more devastating consequences. Frighteningly, the wetiko psychosis is becoming ever more institutionalized and incorporated into our corporate culture and its way of thinking.

People who are channeling the vibratory frequency of wetiko align with each other through psychic resonance to reinforce their unspoken shared agreement so as to uphold their deranged view of reality. Once an unconscious content takes possession of certain individuals, it irresistibly draws them together by mutual attraction and knits them into groups tied together by their shared madness that can easily swell into an avalanche of insanity. A psychic epidemic is a closed system, which is to say that it is insular and not open to any new information or informing influences from the outside world which contradict its fixed, limited, and limiting perspective. In a co-dependent, self-perpetuating feedback loop, any reflection that is offered from others, rather than being reflected upon, utilized, and integrated in a way that supports the growth and evolution of the system, is perversely misinterpreted to support the agreed-upon delusion binding the collective psychosis together. Anyone challenging this shared reality is seen as a threat and demonized. An impenetrable field, like a protective bubble, is collectively conjured up around their shared psychosis that literally resists consciousness and perpetuates the spell-like trance of those in its thrall. There is no talking rationally, using logic or facts, with someone under the spell of the psychic epidemic, as their ability to reason and to use discernment has been disabled and distorted in service to the psychic pathogen which they carry. When a group of people are in agreement about anything, whether it is true or not, their alignment with each other exerts a contagious, magnetic field of force which can sway the unaware and attract them into itself. We are on guard, even paranoid, regarding contagious diseases of the body, but we are woefully asleep and unconcerned about, and hence more susceptible to, catching the more dangerous collective diseases of the mind, which are reaching pandemic proportions in our world today.

People taken over by the wetiko virus usually don’t suspect a thing about how they have been “conned,” or more accurately, how they have conned themselves. The wetiko culture offers no incentive for them to self-reflectingly speculate upon their increasingly depraved condition; on the contrary, the nonlocal field configures itself to enable, further cultivate, and deepen their psychosis. When someone is a full-blown, unrecognized wetiko, the field around them torques so as to protect, collude with, and feed into their psychosis in a way that entrances those around them. Similar to how an octopus squirts ink in order to hide, a psychic field gets conjured up around full-blown wetikos which obfuscates their malfeasance. Once under the wetiko spell, people lose the capacity to recognize the wetiko pathology in others. In a situation of “group narcissism,” wetikos at different stages of the disease assume particular postures and roles relative to each other that protect and shield themselves from their own insanity and darkness. They feed and reinforce each other’s narcissism because it enhances their own.

The greater the gap between the conscious and the unconscious, the greater the chance of falling under a collective psychosis such as wetiko. The less the permeability, and hence communication and dialogue between the conscious ego and the informing influence of the wisdom of the unconscious, that is, the greater the dissociation between the two, the greater the probability of being infected with the leprosy of collective thinking. In a full-blown psychic epidemic, the conscious and the unconscious actually trade places, which is to say the unconscious steps into the driver’s seat, which should be occupied by consciousness. People or groups who have fallen asleep and are under the thrall of the psychic epidemic are then “unconsciously” dreaming, that is, acting out their unconscious in fully embodied form, in contrast to being awake. The type of person ripe for falling prey to the wetiko infection is usually one whose strings are pulled and manipulated by others, who follows a life path dictated by others and is unaccustomed to think for themselves. Not in touch with their inner guidance, they project authority outside of themselves and become very suggestible to the agreed-upon consensus opinion of the dominant pack. When we give away our power, there is always someone bearing the authority of “the State” who is more than happy to accept our offering, feeding the insatiable will-to-power of the shadow, which becomes collectively mobilized.

Masses are veritable breeding grounds for psychic epidemics. Though using individuals as its instruments, evil needs the unconscious masses for its genesis and proliferation on the world stage. In a collective psychosis, people literally stop thinking for themselves and let others think for them, like sheep (or “sheeple”) who just follow wherever they are being led, even if it’s off the nearest cliff. Losing touch with their own discernment and ability for critical thinking, the “mass man” becomes part of the mindless herd and falls prey to “group-think,” whose members co-dependently enable each other to uphold their shared version of the wetiko world. Once the office of “perception management,” largely through the corporate mainstream media, convinces a critical mass of people of a particular viewpoint, there is a consensus or agreement that is reached among the masses as to what is objectively true. The agreed-upon version of reality takes on a weight and momentum of its own and thereby becomes the established dogma of what is collectively imagined to be really happening. Like a religious truth, it is irrationally believed like an act of faith by its card-carrying members, even if overwhelming evidence points to the contrary. Anyone who doesn’t buy into the arbitrarily established story is marginalized and demonized, and called either crazy, a conspiracy theorist, or even a terrorist (“You’re either with us or you’re with the enemy”). Such a group consensus about the nature of reality gets increasingly hard to sustain as time passes, however, as, like a house of cards ready to collapse at any moment, its vision of the world is based on the fundamental error of not being true. Strangely enough, people under the collective enchantment of wetiko become fanatically attached to supporting an agenda that oftentimes is diametrically opposed to serving their own best interests. This is an outer behavioral reflection of the inner state of being under the sway of the self-destructive wetiko parasite.

Speaking about the rapidly spreading wetiko contagion, Forbes writes, “It is spread by the wetikos themselves as they recruit or corrupt others. It is spread today by history books, television, military training programs, police training programs, comic books, pornographic magazines, films, right-wing movements, fanatics of various kinds, high-pressure missionary groups, and numerous governments.” 3 All of the mainstream, culturally sanctioned, corporatized institutions are in the business of indoctrination, telling us what to think and not think, as well as how to think. Our mind is continually being massaged into shape by the prevailing culture, our true face lifted as our spiritual pockets are picked. Our civilization has become the mouthpiece for the propaganda organ of the disease, entrancing us to “buy” into its viewpoint as we are bled to death of what really counts. The culture (sic) that in-forms and forms around wetiko illness is itself a channel of its transmission and growth. If we sign on the dotted line and subscribe to its viewpoint, its life-denying culture will gradually subsume us into itself, enlisting us as its agents who unwittingly do its bidding. This is how the ever-expanding, self-generating psychic empire of collective psychosis works, as it increasingly takes over and approaches “full-employment.”

We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is ultimately and actually not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself. People taken over by wetiko are the human instruments for the transpersonal “spirit of evil” to colonize and terrorize the world. In wetiko disease, we unwittingly become drafted into being foot soldiers in the war not on , but of and for , terror. The wetiko parasite feeds on and harvests the emotions of fear and terror. Terror is the essence of its insidious “ill-usory ill-logic.” In wetiko disease, the psyche takes the terror that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, is unwittingly taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world. We have then become the very thing we most feared, as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large. Wetiko is the bug which feeds the experience of terror within our mind and out in the world, fueling one of its more prominent manifestations in our world today: the “Global War on Terror,” which is truly a war on our consciousness.

People taken over by wetiko might be petty tyrants at home or at work but still count among the impoverished and oppressed, wielding no real power in the world at large. What Forbes refers to as “Big Wetikos,” however, are full-blown wetikos who have climbed the wetiko ladder, jumped through the wetiko hoops, and risen in the wetiko ranks so as to find themselves occupying positions of power where they can influence and control events in our world so as to rig and game the system to their own advantage and to the detriment of everyone else. The Big Wetikos who control the levers of power, be they the super-wealthy CEOs of corporations, bank presidents, or leaders of nation-states, are particularly dangerous, because they frame and define the terms of our dialogue by choosing the metaphors which dominate the agreed-upon historical narrative. Managing our perceptions through the propaganda engines of the mainstream corporate media which they control, Big Wetikos in positions of power craft the limits and parameters of our conversation and debate.

Wetiko is an ideological virus whose means of replication and propagation is through altering the syntax of our ideas. Wetiko deviates our mental syntax, the rules of how we form language, thereby distorting our semantics, the meaning we place on our experience of ourselves and the world. Wetiko is a semantic disorder, altering the core axioms and interpretive schemas through which the psyche maps its self-created meaning onto its inner and outer experience. Shaping even the meaning we place on meaning itself, the wetiko bug makes it appear that meaning objectively inheres in the outside world rather than realizing that we ourselves are the generators of meaning. The wetiko virus influences how we “spell” our words and conjure up our experience. The thought-forms and beliefs that express and represent wetiko act as an intrinsic, built-in control system, defining the limits of what we imagine our possibilities are, as individuals, nations, and a species. Wetikoism supports and perpetuates whatever prevailing myths, stories, dogmas, and (un)holy books reinforce its nefarious, evolution-inhibiting, and explicitly self-serving agenda. (Though seemingly self-serving, it is ultimately self- and other-destroying.) Books and other forms of information which don’t support wetikos’ warped version of the way things are, are “burned” metaphorically (or in some cases, literally —the U.S. government actually burned the books of the great healer and radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who, in describing what he called “the emotional plague,” was in his own way pointing at the evils of the wetiko virus) .

When the wetiko virus takes over a system, whether it be a person’s psyche, a group of people, or a nation, it institutionalizes its own “perception management” system in order to limit, manipulate, and control its subjects’ viewpoint so as to maintain the wetikoized ideology. The corporate mainstream media, the “wetiko-media” (media that is animated, inspired, informed, and employed by wetiko), is the propaganda organ of the wetiko virus in the United States. The wetiko-media mesmerizes people by reciting simple, repetitive, hypnotic phrases—the “party line.” Our leaders are in essence the talking figureheads and mouthpieces for the wetiko-media’s marketing campaign of distortion and falsehood bombarded into our psyches on a daily basis. These slogans, repeated again and again, are burned into the receptive subconscious mind with the permanence of an image engraved on a photographic negative. People’s minds then become programmed and “branded” with the desired ideological virus together with its reality framework. The sacred “Logos”—the Word—has been usurped and perverted to become the corporate “logo.” The media’s talking points, catchphrases, and buzzwords are their incantations which capture the attention of our minds. These magic words act as opiates to the fearful masses. Some of humanity’s most horrific acts have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases. This is the power of the Word. How do we make a word? We “spell” it. If we consent to the government-inspired, agreed-upon consensus reality, we are literally subscribing to the collective trance. Consensus reality is itself nothing other than a collective spell of mass-ive proportions. People who uncritically see the world through the lens of the consensus reality have no idea that they are under a spell, which is the very dynamic that ensures the strength and perpetuation of the spell.

Some of us haven’t developed sufficient psychic immunity to be able to ward off the toxic effects of the covert, fear-based psychological warfare waged by the powers-that-be. People who are not fully in touch with themselves and therefore haven’t developed their own center of independent thought, self-reflective awareness, and ability to discriminate are highly suggestible to being manipulated, be it by wetiko-inspired forces outside in the world or within their own psyche, to take on a viewpoint other than their own. People’s ability to discern truth from fiction has been crippled and rendered inoperative by the wetiko-media’s pattern of routinely taking liberties with the truth. Government propaganda has inverted the perception of what is actually happening: lies are presented as truth, and up is portrayed as down in a truly Orwellian universe of confounding doublespeak.

An expression of the success of our government’s psy-ops against us is the fact that there’s so little awareness of the powers-that-be’s assault on our minds that it’s hardly even a part of our national dialogue. The insidiousness of the covert manipulation of our minds is even found in the very term “Global War on Terror.” The Global War on Terror is a crazy-making, self-contradictory statement, as we can never stop terror with a war—on the contrary, wars induce terror! This term carries with it a false and self-negating premise that, if accepted, we have already given away our power and lost the game (as if the person flipping the coin tells us, “Heads I win, tails you lose”). If we leave this underlying assumption unquestioned, we unwittingly allow the powers-that-be to frame the agenda on their terms. We have then already fallen under their spell without knowing it, as our capacity to think and respond creatively is undermined. Our inability to creatively respond to the war on our consciousness is an expression of being immobilized in fear as if frozen in trauma. The war on terror is really a war on our psyche. It is ultimately about control—control of our minds, which is a reflection of the covert and subversive operations of wetiko.

If our world were a dream or fairy tale, we could say there is a curse or a spell that has befallen our land. Wetikos “charm” people, disarming and entrancing them, so that people will trust them and give away their power to them. The Big Wetikos’ most effective weapon is sustaining a climate of fear and intimidation. They “hook” people through their unconscious blind spots and by playing with their fears, which is how they are able to control and manipulate others. Like a black magician, the powers that control the wetiko-media prey on and feed off our hopes, needs, and fears so as to drain us of our power and co-dependently entangle us in their web of deceit. By inducing a primitive emotion such as fear, wetikos de-potentiate the linear and logical part of the brain, and speak directly to the reptilian-dominated right part of the brain, which is preverbal and has to do with our primal animal survival instincts. Mass psychology then becomes the order of the day, as our species, animated by fear—which the Big Wetikos are only too happy to cultivate—reverts to the primitive psychology of the herd. Collective amnesia ensues, continually fed by a self-generating web of endless denial and refusal to see, as the manufactured consent is re-created anew and repeatedly reinforced every moment. Our programmed refusal to see reality, our own ignorance, is the chief door in our lives through which the evil of wetiko enters. Once entranced, just like members of a cult, people give their power away and become passive and subservient, incapable of discerning what is real from what is made up. Propaganda is capable of making people believe both everything and nothing at the same time, as political theorist Hannah Arendt has observed. 4

Once the wetiko-media “captivates” our attention, it captures a part of our self-reflective, discriminative awareness, thereby restricting the range of our conscious awareness, which is the signature of a master hypnotist. Once the attention of the masses becomes entranced, the corporate/government media can then play with our minds by feeding us a fabricated version of reality that directly serves the Big Wetikos’ interests. The wetiko-media, because it dominates the way the majority of us receive our information, exerts a field of force that attracts the congregation of true believers, like iron filings aligning themselves around a magnet, conformed into the desired viewpoint. This unholy trinity of corporate/government/media, a.k.a. “the corporatocracy,” can create an obsessive fixation on certain superficial, sensationalized events that “seize” the collective imagination, thereby rendering it inoperative for dealing with more important events or for engaging in its higher potentials.

If we become too fascinated by, absorbed in, or reactive to the current play of the body politic as it performs in the national and world theater, it is as if we have fallen for a magician’s deception. We can then potentially become distracted and take our attention away from the deeper process employing our ruling class. Like a magician or evil wizard, the people behind the scenes create smokescreens to divert the public’s attention from what they are really doing. This is an outer reflection of how the wetiko bug, once it takes over an individual’s psyche, works its (black) magic of deception. If we fall under the spell being cast, we then marginalize, don’t engage with, and don’t notice the underlying corruption which those in overt positions of power are both an expression of and a smokescreen for. By not engaging with the real power lines which underlie what is manifesting in our world, we give away our power to effect real change. We become “spellbound” by the outer manifest forms of the universe.

Once the wetiko-media sufficiently fascinate us and “catch” our attention, we then become “fastened,” held fast to a particular viewpoint, which limits the fluidity and mobility of our consciousness, and takes away our internal freedom, as if we have fallen under a spell. Etymologically, the word “fascinate” is related to the words “enchantment” and “bewitchment.” When a group of people (or a nation) falls into mass psychology together, this collective fascination is a form of mass possession or madness whose underlying psychological dynamic breeds fasc-ism. If we fall under the spell of the wetiko-media, we are then colluding with the forces of wetiko as we enable each other to enact an unconscious, unspoken, collective decision to abrogate our power to creatively and consciously invent our world.

When we fall prey to the denial that is endemic to a society riddled by wetiko, we hold contradictory viewpoints simultaneously, while splitting off from the underlying contradiction, which is a self-induced, trancelike, dissociated state, in which we have fixated our attention, restricted our own awareness, and desensitized and hypnotized ourselves. This complex array of mental maneuvers involves both conscious and unconscious elements. In his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four , George Orwell called this mind-splitting activity “doublethink”: “to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both … to forget whatever it is necessary to forget, then to draw it back into the memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all to apply the same process to the process itself … consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then once again to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.” 5 This is a very apt description of the covert, autohypnotic operations taking place within a wetikoized mind. Once we have fallen prey to doublethink, we have then taken in and internalized within ourselves the psychological operations needed to exist within a culture of wetiko, resulting in a chronic and unavoidable state of cognitive dissonance within our own minds.

The wetiko bug influences and ingeniously manages our perceptions by stealth and subterfuge so as to obfuscate and hide itself from being seen. Wetiko bedazzles, bewitches, and bedevils consciousness in such a way that we become blind to our underlying, assumed viewpoint. Like a higher-dimensional, alien form of psychic foliage, the wetiko germ implants its seeds into, germinates, and takes root within our mind, thereby distracting and deviating us from our true vocation, calling, and spiritual path. The alien and alienating effect of the wetiko virus, the very thing we need to see, is disguised by the way we think, perceive, frame, and give meaning to our experience. When someone becomes a full, card-carrying member of the cult of wetiko, it is as if their mind has been colonized by the virus in such a way that they don’t have the slightest clue about their own pathological condition. Wetikos don’t experience themselves as needing help; for them other people are always the problem. They usually don’t mind their disease, or even recognize it, because it is all they know. The disease sees to it that they feel normal and do not notice anything odd about their condition. In addition, their leaders and the very society they live in encourage them in it and actively guide them toward more full-blown stages of the illness under the guise of advancing their careers. They become so enmeshed and entangled in a world governed by wetiko that they neither have an appreciation of their disorder nor do they realize how truly sick they are.

It can be hard to recognize someone afflicted with wetiko, for when someone is a carrier of wetiko, the person can seem completely normal, even more normal than so-called normal people. Wetikos can present a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presents of itself, in the same way that a wax rosebud or a plastic peach seems more perfect to the eye than the imperfect original from which it was modeled. It is not uncommon for full-blown wetikos to be pronounced perfectly “sane” by our psychiatric system (which is a striking expression that our mental health system itself is suffering from wetiko). The majority of wetikos are not in asylums, but are freely running around out in the world, oftentimes established in positions of great power to influence events. They can appear to have a thoughtful, reassuring, reasonable, and even-keeled demeanor. They can be quite charming, frequently having the seductive confidence of someone who is fanatically identified, like the typical fundamentalist, with only one side of an inherently two-sided polarity. Falling victim to one’s own deception can have a mesmerizing effect on others, as wetikos appear so sure of what they are saying that they are able to project this conviction to others. Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one believes oneself, or an evil deed or intention whose righteousness one regards as self-evident. Only someone who is gripped by an archetypal power greater than their own ego has a gripping and suggestive effect on others. A wetiko’s talent for hypnotizing others is proportional to the extent that they themselves are hypnotized. Because only a convinced person is immediately convincing, through the effects of psychic contagion they exercise a great influence on their contemporaries.

Wetiko disease is not an expression of the personal unconscious, though it expresses itself through individuals in unique ways; rather, it is a sickness of the soul that is an expression of a disturbance in the collective unconscious itself. Full-blown wetikos have fallen into, been taken over by, and been seized by the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious, a more powerful energy that is acting itself out through them. When an archetype common to all people comes to life, it has a power that fascinates people from within, as it is the power of the collective unconscious which is activated. When an archetype is activated, it gets us below the belt and not in our mind. It is our sympathetic nervous system that is gripped, so that rational logic and facts have little effect. When an archetype within us is mobilized, it affects us like a narcotic, having a peculiar hypnotic effect which renders us unconscious. The image of Dorothy and her friends falling asleep in the poppy field as they approach the Emerald City in the movie The Wizard of Oz symbolically expresses this archetypical situation of falling under a spell as we approach the sacred archetypal dimension.

When an unconscious content is activated and an archetype constellated, a person will be infused with the radiation of that awakened archetype. Typically, at first the person identifies with the archetype and steps into and plays out a mythic, archetypal role. The activated archetype transfigures the person from within so as to suit its purposes, seizing hold of the person’s consciousness and compelling them to act as the archetype wills. The power of the archetype is not controlled by us; we find ourselves at its mercy to an unsuspected degree. Psychologically speaking, when we are possessed by an archetype, it is as if an “entity” has taken us over and we are no longer there. We literally have no idea of our situation. When any of us become seized and unconsciously possessed by the archetypal dimension, we momentarily forfeit our humanity and develop a compelling charisma, which can have a gripping or enchanting effect on others. A person can then take on archetypal dimensions and exercise corresponding, almost superhuman effects. The potentialities of the archetype, for both good and evil alike, are like an amplifier that transcends our human capacities many times over. We can appropriate its power only by identifying with the daemon and allowing ourselves to become possessed by it as it acts itself out through us. Paradoxically, in being taken over and possessed by an archetype, we have become like an empty shell, a juxtaposition of subhuman/infantile/regressed and superhuman/inflated qualities at the same time. Everything that exceeds a certain human size evokes equally inhuman, fascist, and totalitarian powers in humanity’s unconscious. The part of the wetiko that is bewitched evokes the corresponding suggestible and bedeviled part of others’ psyches and hooks it, spellbinding it and entraining it into its archetypal spin. People taken over by wetiko become the magnets around which and the portal through which the spell of wetiko becomes cast in the surrounding environment. Conflated with and inflated by the hypnotically fascinating psychic force field of the archetype, people so possessed become amplifiers for the archetype to transmit and nonlocally extend and incarnate itself throughout the field of consciousness. A collective possession can result which can rapidly escalate into a psychic epidemic, as is evidenced throughout history, and as we see in today’s world.

It is perfectly possible, psychologically speaking, for the unconscious aspect of an archetype to take total possession of an individual. People so seized by an archetype can then be said to embody the archetype in human form. They become the instruments through which the formless archetype clothes itself in form, becomes visible, and incarnates itself in the third dimension. They can then be said to be the revelation of the archetype—a potential treasure chest of information for those seeking to understand this type of psychosocial phenomenon. Seen as a symbol in our shared waking dream, Christ can be said to be the “Incarnation” of the Word made flesh, that is, the conscious incarnation of the positive aspect of the archetype of the Self, embodying our wholeness (holiness) in living flesh and blood. Similarly, when someone is unconsciously taken over by wetiko, they can be said to be embodying, incarnating, and revealing the complete and polar opposite, or photographic “negative,” of this Self-image (and hence can be said to be an image for the anti-Self, as well as instrument for the “anti-Christ,” i.e., evil). Psychologically speaking, whereas Christ was consciously channeling the positive aspect of the archetype of the Self, which was enriching to the world at large, someone possessed by wetiko is unconsciously channeling the negative aspect of the archetype, which is always destructive for those within their sphere of influence.

When the archetypal dimension is constellated to such a degree, and someone, or a group of people, is unconsciously taken over by and hence channeling and incarnating the negative aspect of the archetype, the surrounding field will synchronistically reflect back and initially support this identification with the archetype (but only up to a point, beyond which always leads to self-destruction). This is similar to the situation in a family system where abuse is being enacted: the system will (arche)typically configure itself to “protect the abuser.” Being nonlocal, the archetype is an arranger of psychic forces, both inside our brains and outside, in the world at large. When someone becomes possessed by an archetype, the archetype fulfills itself not only psychically in the individual, but outside the individual, in the surrounding environment as well. This state of being taken over by and incarnating the archetype in fully human form is just like in a dream, where the inner process expresses itself synchronistically through the medium of the outside world, as the boundary between inner and outer has dissolved.

When someone is gifted in the art of touching the archetypal, they can play on the souls of people like the strings of a piano. Connecting with the archetypal is like plucking a higher-dimensional chord of our being, which immediately activates a resonance in the collective unconscious in whoever hears it. Just as the pendulum with the strongest swing entrains all the other pendulums into its swing, the person who is channeling the living power of the deeper, archetypal force can potentially entrain and entrance others. This power can be used for the highest good—helping people to awaken—or it can be used for the deepest evil so as to manipulate, disempower, and enslave other people. Being archetypal, this energy is fundamentally neither good nor bad, but can potentially manifest either way, depending upon our intent . Being unconsciously identified with an archetype is extremely dangerous, in that it is at the root of both individual and collective psychoses. Our tendency to unknowingly fall into the grip of an archetype is animating much of what is being acted out in the world theater, which is to say that the origin of world events lies hidden within the unconscious of humanity.