part0016

When people are infected by the wetiko virus, they are the host for the wetiko parasite, which is like a psychic tapeworm, a parasite of the mind. The microbe of wetiko can also be likened to an amoeba, in that it is not hard-edged, has no fixed form, and is continually shape-shifting. Just the way certain computer viruses or malware infect a computer and program it to self-destruct, mind-viruses like wetiko program the human biocomputer to think, believe, and behave in ways that result in our self-destruction. People so afflicted, strangely enough, cling to the very thing that is torturing and destroying them. To quote a line attributed to the writer William S. Burroughs, “Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.” The wetiko bug is a “kleptoparasite,” a form of parasitism that thrives via theft. To the extent we are unconsciously possessed by the spirit of wetiko, it is as if a psychic parasite has taken over our brain and tricked us, its host, into thinking we are feeding and empowering ourselves while we are actually nourishing the parasite. Wetiko is a virulent, psychic pathogen that insinuates thought-forms into our mind which, when unconsciously enacted, feed it, and thus it ultimately kills its host. It doesn’t want to kill us too quickly, however, for to successfully implement its agenda of reproducing and propagating itself throughout the field, it must let the host live long enough to spread the virus. If the host dies too soon, the bug would be prematurely evicted and would suffer the inconvenience of having to find a new residence. Parasites far outnumber all other species on our planet. They are key players in both the ecological and evolutionary processes in our world. Parasitism is one of the most common forms of relationship in nature, so we should not be surprised to find human parasites.

Like a cancer of the mind that metastasizes, in wetiko disease a pathological part of the psyche co-opts and subsumes all of the healthy parts of the psyche into itself so as to serve its pathology. To quote Jung, “an unknown ‘something’ has taken possession of a smaller or greater portion of the psyche and asserts its hateful and harmful existence undeterred by all our insight, reason, and energy, thereby proclaiming the power of the unconscious over the conscious mind, the sovereign power of possession.” 1 Jung means something different than the Catholic Church, however, when he uses the word “possession.” Instead of the Church’s meaning of the word, which denotes extremely rare cases of being taken over by a supposedly objectively existing metaphysical entity such as the devil, Jung is using the word in a much wider sense. For him, possession is a frequently occurring psychic phenomenon in which certain psychic contents, the complexes , take control over the total personality in place of the ego, at least temporarily, to such a degree that the free will of the ego is suspended. The personality then self-organizes an outer display of coherence around this pathogenic core, which masks the inner dysfunction, making it hard to recognize. In a psychic coup d’état, the wetiko bug can usurp and displace the person, who becomes its puppet and marionette. Once the parasite becomes sufficiently entrenched within the psyche, the prime directive coordinating a person’s behavior comes from the disease, as it is now the one calling the shots. Like a parasite, the wetiko virus can take over the will of an animal more evolved than itself, enlisting that creature into serving its nefarious agenda.

In the current edition of the DSM-IV-TR, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , “possession” has been introduced as a mental disorder among the dissociative disorders (in Appendix B: Criteria Sets and Axes for Further Study). This proposed disorder, called “Dissociative Trance Disorder,” manifests in either trance or possession states whose chief feature is its involuntariness. This parallels a similar diagnostic category in the ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders , which the World Health Organization published in 1992. In Henri Ellenberger’s classic history of psychiatry, The Discovery of the Unconscious , possession is said to be experienced as “a kind of intrapsychic parasitism: just as a tapeworm can live in the body, so can a parasitic spirit live in the soul.” 2

Just as someone infected with the rabies virus will resist drinking water, which would flush out the infection, someone taken over by the wetiko parasite will have nothing to do with anything that will help them get rid of the disease. Wetikos are phobic toward the light of truth, which they avoid like the plague. To quote philosopher, mystic, and social activist Simone Weil, “Another effect of affliction is, little by little, to make the soul its accomplice, by injecting a poison of inertia into it.… This complicity impedes all the efforts he might make to improve his lot.… It is as though affliction had established itself in him like a parasite and were directing him to suit its own purposes.” 3 In advanced stages, this process takes over the individual so completely that we could rightfully say the person is no longer there; they are just an empty shell carrying the disease. In a sense there is just the disease, operating through what appears to be a human being. The person becomes fully identified with their mask, their persona, but it is as if there is no one behind the mask. To quote Jung, “the person in question becomes a mere automaton. Such a person is actually no longer there.” 4 It is as if their soul has become hijacked by a deeper, archetypal force, replaced with a pale imitation of themselves, a true “alter” personality, and, to the extent they have been taken over, they don’t even realize it. As wetiko takes over its victims, it works through them psychologically, clouding their judgment, disabling their discernment, making it harder for them to see reality, but, ultimately, it still leaves them with the responsibility for their actions.

In an outer embodied reflection of the process of wetiko that happens within an individual’s psyche, it is as if virulent parasites are insinuating and entrenching themselves into the hallowed halls of power in our government and are consuming and destroying it from within. Many of us Americans are still under the illusion that we live in a functioning democracy and imagine that we are free citizens of a country based on liberty, without suspecting that we increasingly inhabit a police state in which the powers-that-be rule with an iron fist hidden in a velvet glove. To quote eminent theologian and 9/11 truth activist David Ray Griffin, “Demonic power is now firmly lodged in the United States, especially in its government, its corporate heads, the ‘defense’ industries, its plutocratic class more generally, and its ideologues.” 5 The corruption that has infected our body politic is like a deadly virus that is exploiting weaknesses in our political immune system so as to feed and spread its pathology.

The U.S. government’s lying and criminality is so pervasive that we have become desensitized to its corruption, which is how this elephant-sized evil is able to make itself at home in our national living room. Our government’s evil has become so “normalized” that we are like people who regularly watch TV and become numb to the violence continually being portrayed: we have become anesthetized to the horror of what our government is doing right in front of our eyes day after day. We’ve learned—or, shall we say, become “programmed”—to accept the fact that our politicians are lying, for as the propaganda informs us, “All governments lie.” This process of desensitization to the evil playing out in our world is an externalized, collective iteration of how the same wetiko-inspired dynamic works to become a virtually invisible, yet toxic fixture within our psyches at an individual level.

Speaking in his own language about the predation of the wetiko virus, the Yaqui Indian spiritual teacher Don Juan, of the Carlos Castaneda books, mentions that the ancient Mexican shamans called this “the topic of topics.” 6 Don Juan explains, “We have a companion for life.… We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master.” 7

This sounds just like the state of affairs being pointed at in the Bible when, for example, the Gospel of John refers to the devil as “the ruler of this world” (14:30; 16:11); the Gospel of Luke has the devil say that “the kingdoms of the world are under his control” (4:5–6); the First Epistle of John says that “the whole world lies under the power of the evil one” (5:19); and Paul speaks of Satan as “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Gnostic Gospel of Philip, talking about the root of evil that lies within all of us, makes the similar point that unless this evil is recognized: “It masters us. We are its slaves. It takes us captive” (II, 3, 83.5–30).

Speaking about the evil predator, Don Juan continues, “It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so.” 8 It is striking how Don Juan’s description of the effects of this predator is being enacted in our increasingly militarized society, as our freedoms and liberties get taken away step by step. It is as if an inner, invisible state of affairs existing as a yet unrealized archetypal pattern deep within the soul of humanity is revealing itself by materializing in, as, and through the outside world.

To quote Don Juan, “Indeed we are held prisoner! This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico.” 9 Most of us can relate to this “ energetic fact ,” that there is “something” within us that stops us from expressing our true creative genius and attaining our full potential. These predators are “time-bandits,” consuming the precious hours of our lives, as if we are wage-slaves “doing time” on a prison-planet. Deepening his description of these predators, Don Juan elaborates, “They took over because we are food for them … we are their sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros , the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros .” 10 The wetiko virus particularly flourishes in over-populated cities, where people are “cooped up.” As history shows us again and again, when we buy into group-think and are enlisted as members of the herd, we become like cattle who are being raised by our leading psychopaths to be used in the service of their sinister agenda.

Don Juan continues, “The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind.” 11 It is as if these predators are in competition with us for a “share” of our own mind. The predator shape-shifts and assumes our form, and if we are unaware of its masquerade, we will identify with its invasive thought-forms and act them out as if they were our own. We will mistakenly believe that we are acting on our own impulses, with our best interests in mind. This predator, Don Juan asserts, “fears that any moment its maneuver is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied.” 12 The wetiko predator has an inner necessity, a brute compulsion born of terror, as it continually has to feed itself so as to postpone its ever-approaching death. Don Juan continues, “Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them [the predators].” 13 Cloaking itself in our form, this predator gets under our skin and “puts us on” as a disguise, fooling us to “buy” into its false version of who we are. (Interestingly, from the Christian point of view, the true believer is saved only by “putting on” Christ.) This is why the shortened name of malignant egophrenia is “ME disease,” referring to a distortion of our identity, that is, our sense of me-ness. Instead of being in our power and serving ourselves, we “unwittingly” (which means to be “out of our wits,” that is, not in our “right” mind) become the servant of the predator. Instead of being a sovereign being who creates with our own thoughts, we will then be created by them, as the predator literally thinks in our place. It is as if the predator is sitting in our seat. We truly need to (re)occupy ourselves.

Interestingly, such disparate thinkers as Jung and the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna hypothesized that the ET/UFO phenomenon might actually be an expression of the psychic fact that we have become so split off from our true self that we can only begin to experience it in the projected form of an “alien other.” Are the seeming appearances of ET/UFOs in the outer world simply an embodied reflection of this inner psychic process, as if an archetypal process deep within the human psyche is being dreamed up into materializing itself through our universe in order to show us something about ourselves?

Speaking of the predator’s scheme, Don Juan says that “it proposes something, it agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you’ve done something of worth.” 14 It is as if there is an alien “other,” an extraterrestrial metaphysical entity which is subliminally intruding its mind into ours in such a way that we identify with its point of view and disconnect from our own. Don Juan refers to this situation as a “foreign installation,” as if some alien race has set up a space station inside of our minds. This is exactly what the Gnostics are pointing at when they talk about alien predators or mind parasites called “Archons” who infiltrate and subvert the workings of our mind. 15 To the extent that we are not conscious of this alien takeover of our psyche, we become drafted into the predator’s sinister agenda, unwittingly becoming its slaves. This state of inner psychological warfare is mirrored by the sinister psy-ops being instituted by the powers-that-be in the outside world on our own minds. The disease feeds on our unawareness of it. Our task is to discern the predator’s mind within ourselves and refuse to be its food.

Stories, legends, and mythologies describing various monsters, zombies, vampires, and werewolves are actually expressing and pointing at the various manifestations of wetiko disease. Forbes writes, “The wetiko psychosis is a sickness of the spirit that takes people down an ugly path with no heart.… After all, the wetiko disease turns such people into werewolves and vampires, creatures of the European’s nightmare world, and creatures of the wetiko’s reality.” 16 The wetiko psychosis takes people down, period. Werewolves and vampires are shape-shifting creatures, symbolic representations of the horrific potential within all of us to be taken over by the archetypal shadow and to act it out, regressing to an archaic level of the psyche and becoming like a predatory animal or nonhuman creature. When these not-yet-humanized psychic energies break through into consciousness and are not mediated through consciousness, Jung writes, “they sweep everything before them like a torrent and turn men into creatures for whom the word ‘beast’ is still too good a name.” 17

Vampires, considered to be the darkest creature of evil’s arsenal, have haunted humanity’s imagination for ages, as they are representatives of a living process that exists deep within the human psyche. A vampire is not a human figure, but a soulless creature, a being who has lost its soul; or if it hasn’t lost its soul, its soul has been “damned,” which is a soul that is lost. Either way, there’s something missing. Isolated from the world, it has lost any connection with the part of itself that is related to everything else; from its point of view, the world exists simply for its use. Although it has lost connection with its heart and soul, a vampire hasn’t lost its mind (though in one sense it has), as vampires often have clever and incisive intellects that cloak their pathology, making their disease hard to see. This is reminiscent of the way people in a deep state of trauma can have brilliant minds at the same time, a gift that can hide the extent of their trauma, making their malady hard to recognize. The sharpness of the vampire’s mind, instead of being devoted to gaining insight into their malady and healing from it, however, is used for the “passing on” and propagation of their dark art. Vampires can manifest enormous intelligence, as if they have gained knowledge through many lifetimes.

One of the undead, a vampire is death taking living human form. The wetiko virus is ultimately not a living life-form, but rather a living form of death. People so afflicted are spiritually dead who believe themselves to be alive. Wetiko, like a virus, is “dead” matter; it is only in a living creature that viruses acquire a “quasi-life.” Members of the living dead, vampires are neither truly alive nor truly dead. Like a full-fledged vampire, full-blown wetikos have forfeited their humanity, becoming a conduit for the impersonal, transpersonal, and depersonalizing wetiko virus to incarnate through them. They are a living portal, an opening in the three-dimensional fabric of space/time through which this contagious, virulent higher-dimensional virus can spread itself throughout the field, both locally and nonlocally.

Lacking a sense of soul, wetikos are efficient machines, dedicated to preserving and serving “the state,” which is itself a creature of the wetikos who have seized control of its power apparatus. A full-fledged wetiko has become a robotic automaton, conditioned to react to certain stimuli like a reflex. They have become part of “the machine,” with no spontaneity, creativity, originality, or free thinking programmed in. Dehumanized, wetikos have lost touch with any sense of aesthetics, of appreciating the inherent beauty of life, and have become “an-aesthetic,” that is, anesthetized and numb to what it is to be a human being. The spiritual teacher G. I. Gurdjieff described the dehumanizing effects of wetiko in his own words:

An outer reflection of the perverse inner state of feeding the wetiko pathogen, people willingly, of their own free will, as if suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, invest in and support their own limitation and imprisonment in the greater body politic of the world. Emissaries of an authoritarian, militarized, patriarchal planetary “culture,” the wetiko bug breeds fascism, and terror. To quote Wilhelm Reich, “Fascism is the vampire leeched to the body of the living, the impulse to murder given free rein.” 19 Fascism is the outer, collective political expression of an individual’s ravaged inner landscape that has been crippled and suppressed by the authoritarian civilization of the machine.

As with vampires, in full-blown wetikos there is nobody home, which is one of the reasons why, symbolically speaking, vampires have no reflection in a mirror (which is supposed to reflect back images of the human soul). Full-blown wetikos are empty to the core, so there is nothing to reflect. Inwardly there is just an infinite void, a sponge that can never be saturated, a devouring black hole that is feeding on the universe. Their atrophied soul has been emptied out like a piece of wood hollowed out by psychic termites. Full-blown wetikos are so compulsively possessed by and identical with the unconscious in its destructive, consciousness-negating form that they are not able to see or self-reflectively think about themselves, which Hannah Arendt claims is one of the primary characteristics of evil. Unable to self-reflect, they cannot access within themselves the faculty of the psyche from which such activity derives. One of the reasons we can’t see a vampire’s reflection in a mirror, however, is that our own inner, unconscious vampire obscures the reflection, which is to say that the unacknowledged specter of our own shadow gets in the way.

A vampire casts no shadow. In order to cast a shadow, there has to be a source of light. In a vampire there is no light, only infinite darkness. Not being a living being, a vampire has no inherent reality, no substance. Only a thing of substantial existence can produce a shadow. Vampires can’t cast a shadow, however, because they are the very embodiment of and identical with the archetypal shadow. A shadow casts no shadow of itself, as the shadow itself has no substance. There are benefits that accrue to the vampire because of its ability to not cast a shadow—it is then easier for the vampire to hide its true identity, move in the hidden shadows, become invisible, and prey on people. Not casting a shadow, the vampire, a shape-shifter who is a master of camouflage and disguise, is able to easily seduce and entice the unaware, as sugar-coated vampires entrap us through our unconscious shadow and blind spots.

The loss and disowning of our own shadow can thus lead to vampirism. The vampire archetype gets activated within us when we turn our backs on our own darkness, rendering our shadow invisible to ourselves. We can’t see vampires because we have chosen not to see those aspects of ourselves that are most like the vampire. Our reluctance to see our own vampiric qualities blinds us to the vampiric energies in others.

In addition to the weak and defenseless, vampires seek out people who are on the verge of a quantum, evolutionary leap in consciousness, but have not yet fully integrated their realizations and come out the other side. These individuals are in an energetically sensitive and “charged” condition, and their openness and vulnerability invites the vampiric entities to help themselves and gorge on the light of their prey’s expanding awareness. Paradoxically, though thriving on the absence of light, vampires can be said to be “light-eaters,” as they draw and consume the light belonging to others into the cavernous black hole of their congenital emptiness. Economically speaking, vampires want to corner the market on energy, on light, so as to centralize their power and control. Unable to generate the light-energy source themselves, they need to steal and use the reserves of the beings harnessed in thrall to them. The emerging positive and healthy elements in the other person are either co-opted, neutralized, or corrupted. Once their victim is cornered, the vampire literally wants to keep their captives under lock and key. Paradoxically, vampiric wetikos try to destroy others’ light, as it reminds them of what they’ve killed in themselves, while simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves. Wetikos see their job as “arresting” the creative expressions of love, because genuine love threatens their reign of terror. Their hatred of the light which they at the same time so desperately crave is an expression of the intrinsic self-loathing of this figure, a self-hatred from which they must continually flee so as to avoid sight of themselves.

The strategy of these predators is to distract us so as to keep our attention directed outward, thereby stopping us from finding the light within ourselves, which would “kill” the vampires. If we hold up a mirror and reflect back the insanity being exhibited by those stricken by the wetiko psychosis, we run the very real risk of being accused of being the ones who are crazy. If we do manage to connect with the light within ourselves and try to share it with others, these nonlocal vampiric entities (what I have in previous writings called “nonlocal demons,” or NLD for short), not bound by the three-dimensional laws of space and time, will try, via their “connections” to the nonlocal field, to stop us by influencing other people to turn against us. This process can destroy us, or, if we have the meta-awareness to see what is happening and are able to skillfully navigate our way through, can serve to further strengthen our intention, deepen our connection with the light of lucidity, hone our skill of creatively transmitting our realizations, and cultivate more open-hearted compassion. It is as if these psychic, nonlocal vampires are guardians of the threshold of evolution.

Just like vampires, full-blown wetikos have a thirst for the very thing they lack—the mystical essence of life—that is, the “blood” of our soul. In “consuming” other human beings, wetiko disease is a feeding thing, a psychic eating disorder in which the stricken psyche consumes other psyches, as well as, ultimately, itself. Wetikos are what are called “psychophagic,” that is, soul-eaters. Savaged by the ferocity of their unending hunger, full-blown wetikos, like the hungry ghosts of Buddhist cosmology, have become possessed by an insatiable craving that can never be filled. Attempting to secure a self that by its very nature is never able to be secured, its appetites can never be quenched, in the same way that an illusion can never be satisfied. Wetikos are not in touch with the human sense of when “enough is enough.” They never stop, as animals instinctively do when bloated. This vampiric feeding is an unholy parody, a satanic reflection, of the self-renewal of life.

At the collective level, this perverse inner process is mirrored by the consumer society in which we live, a culture that continually fans the flames of never-ending desires, conditioning us to always want more . As if starving, we are in an endless feeding frenzy, trying to fill a bottomless void. This process of rabid, obsessive-compulsive consumption is a reflection of a deep, inner shared sense of spiritual starvation. The entity of the global economic system itself is a living symbol of out-of-control wetiko disease “in business.”

This energy of indiscriminate desire that wants to eat up and always wants more is symbolized by the hungry, ravenous wolf; the phrase “wolfing down one’s food” comes to mind. The wolf, though in its negative aspect is dangerously destructive, representing the principle of evil in its purest form, also has a very positive aspect. The Greek word for wolf is lykos , which is akin to the Latin lux , which means light (German: Licht ). In spite of being a nocturnal animal, the wolf is also a creature of the light, and is a highly intelligent animal. Yet, as revealed in fairy tales, it is when the wolf is taken over by greed that it loses its cunning reflection, which invariably leads to its downfall.

Jung felt that this wolflike energy is a drivenness even more primitive than power or sex; it is the desire to have and get everything. People who are taken over by the wolf energy are completely driven, as if the wolf is riding them; it is not really that they want it— it wants it. Their “it” (notice the similarity to Freud’s “Id,” which in his original German actually is the term for “the it,” das Es ) is never satisfied. When amplified, this figure wants to eat the whole world. Interestingly, the mythic figure of a werewolf or wolfman—another symbol for wetiko—illustrates this transformation of being taken over, being possessed by, and becoming this wolflike hunger whose only thought is to satisfy itself.

Once we are bitten by a werewolf, this wolflike energy can get into our system and take us over just like a virus takes over a living organism. Viruses like wetiko are all about copying themselves. A virus can’t replicate itself, however; it has to use some other vehicle as its means of reproducing itself. Viruses need us to be their birthing chamber. To the extent we are not aware of their ploy, these higher-dimensional spirit parasites put us on, wearing us like their three-dimensional space suits. These psychic vampires are compelled to replicate themselves through us so that we can then pass on and transmit the bug to others. Once we have completed the choice that weds us to an antithetical way of being, our depraved inner state becomes our occupation, in the sense that we now have no inner freedom of choice, but rather are compelled by an inner necessity to spread the contagion. The Gnostics even used the image of being bitten by a mad dog in order to describe the process of being infected by the Sons of Darkness. In advanced stages of rabies, like a rabid animal the victim will be taken over by the irresistible urge to bite other creatures so as to pass on the virus. People taken over by the rabies virus are a living, frothing symbol of what the wolflike psychic virus known as wetiko does in its full-blown virulent stage.

In a vampiric lineage, the wetiko virus’s self-propagation is accomplished through the medium of the “family system” (be it our family of origin or the human family), as the legacy of abuse (be it physical, sexual, political, emotional, psychological, or spiritual) gets passed down, both individually and collectively, and transmitted over generations, continually incarnating itself through the living. It is through the traumatic shattering of our wholeness that wetiko passes its fractured logic and distorted code into the body/mind of another. As if under a curse, our species has been suffering from a collective, inherited form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Remaking their victims in their own image, the wetikos’ victims join the legion of the damned, themselves becoming holders of an unholy lineage. This curse will continue until we intervene in the spreading of this vampiric mind-parasite, and stop the chain of never-ending abuse.