part0017

Being multidimensional, wetiko demands to be contemplated from as many different angles as we can imagine, for no single way of studying wetiko is adequate to understanding it. This is because wetiko has so many diverse ways of operating and has such a wide array of channels through which it can interfere with the healthy, coherent functioning of individual and collective human dynamics. One of the primary categories of wetiko’s myriad forms of manifestation is that of trauma; in fact, wetiko is a living form of the soul-deadening process of trauma. Our species is suffering from a form of collective trauma, as we are not only destroying ourselves, but, like a person who has a learning disability that makes them seem practically uneducable, we insist on repeating our self-destructive behavior throughout history on ever-grander scales on the world stage. One of the most important and dangerous features of the traumatizing aspect of wetiko is that it disables our capacity for self-knowledge, that is, our ability to know ourselves and to acquire moral insight into our actions, while at the same time leaving intact and even augmenting our capacity for developing technological powers which can be used for killing and mass destruction on a previously undreamed-of scale. Understanding the nature of trauma, therefore, helps us to deepen our insights into the nature of wetiko and be able to lessen its potentially lethal impact on the world at large .

Trauma happens when we suffer an overwhelming event which we cannot assimilate into our being in the typical way; it is too off the radar to register in awareness through the previously established channels. Trauma is a form of psychological damage rooted in a kind of vital, visceral shock to the organism in which we feel our very being itself is at issue. Trauma is by definition that which cannot be signified. In a sense, that’s all we can say about it. When traumatized, we oftentimes aren’t able to eloquently articulate what our experience is, because trauma fragments, disassociates, and disconnects us from our own perceptions. Trauma incapacitates our ability to language our experience, as it involves a radical and sudden departure from all human norms of experience within which language is created and used. In trauma, people typically alternate between feeling numb and compulsively reliving the traumatic event in some form. When traumatized, our attempts to heal from our trauma tend to be dysfunctional and are the very actions which animate in ourselves, extend to others, and thereby tragically re-create the very trauma we are trying to heal from, in what becomes a diabolically self-perpetuating negative feedback loop that is truly crazy-making for everyone involved. When we are in trauma, we unconsciously act out the unhealed wound in literal and disguised form, both within ourselves and out in the world, traumatizing and terrorizing others around us as we, in our attempt to resolve our trauma, simultaneously retraumatize ourselves. When we are unconsciously acting out our trauma, we are not in the driver’s seat, but rather are being compulsively driven by the overpowering daemonic force encoded within the trauma. Trauma not only animates the separate self; the separate self itself is the primary trauma.

Trauma is a unique phenomenon all its own, as if it is an entity in and of itself. Trauma is a normal, healthy response to an insane and intolerable situation. If, for example, we put too much pressure on a bone and the bone breaks, the bone is not pathological, it simply was subject to more force than it was designed to sustain. Paradoxically, trauma is a form of disease which is an expression of basic sanity. “Shock” is our healthy response to experiencing an event that is overwhelming and awful. To the extent that we lose our connection with the ever-flowing novelty and majesty of our own life-force and creative imagination, we forget our fluid nature, becoming stunned into immobilization, alienated from and a trauma to ourselves. In order for the traumatized soul to break free from the spell that binds and transfixes it, the imaginative faculty of the soul, which has been unconsciously literalized into compulsive behavior, must be mirrored back to it imaginatively, in as many imaginative ways as can be imagined. Psychologically speaking, the compulsive actions of a traumatized soul are a frantic attempt at postponing the inevitable return of the repressed. Trauma is an experience that is incessantly fled and always returns. Intrinsic to trauma is the double-bind of having to deny what cannot be forgotten. When we are traumatized, part of our creative life-force becomes frozen back in time, stuck in the shock of the traumatizing event, etched into our flesh and bone. This traumatizing moment, seemingly cast in stone as if it is locked back in time, until liberated, is always informing the present moment, which is to say it is in disguised form accessible right now.

The shamanic archetype potentially becomes catalyzed within us by a severe trauma, setting into motion a process that demands we go in search of the lost, dissociated parts of ourselves, the parts of ourselves that have “split” (which has the double meaning of “left” as well as “dissociated”). Healing from trauma always involves some form of a shamanic journey “back in time” in the present moment such that time collapses and we can reexperience, relive, and release the traumatizing event so as to have a “corrective experience.” A shamanic journey involves joining two moments in time, the present and the past, so that in the present moment we recollect and retrieve the split-off part of our soul that is trapped back in time and had become unavailable to us due to the traumatizing event. Having a corrective experience involves releasing and discharging the energy that is bound up in and animating the compulsive re-creation and acting out of the trauma. Once freed, our life-force, instead of feeding our life-deadening, compulsive patterns, becomes available for living creatively without obstruction, freely flowing once again.

One of the unique things about trauma is that in the process of integrating and healing from trauma, we are compelled to unconsciously act out the role of the abuser. To the extent we haven’t dealt with our own trauma, we split off from and internalize the abuser, while unconsciously identifying with its original aggression (in the process called “identification with the aggressor”). Instead of opening to the pain we feel, we shut down by finding ways to deliver ourselves from our vulnerability, fashioning ourselves in the image of those who have the power to hurt. This aggression either gets turned inward, in a masochistic way toward ourselves, or outward, in a sadistic way onto others. To dissociate from and be unconsciously identified with the sadistic aggressor who perpetrated the original trauma is to become possessed by this figure, to be lethally compelled to repetitively act out its violence in a terrorizing, malevolent, and life-destroying way out in the world or within ourselves. Trauma polarizes consciousness into opposites; split in two, we become simultaneously perpetrator and victim. In trauma, we are potentially on the road to integrating these two figures within ourselves, depending on whether or not we bring consciousness to what we are unconsciously acting out.

When a healthy psyche is confronted with the unavoidable traumas of life, it digests and metabolizes the trauma over time. The trauma is sculpted into images, symbols, thoughts, and words so that it may be creatively expressed, invested with meaning, and consciously experienced, so as to discharge the deadening effects of the trauma. When a mind is under the rule of wetiko, however, a stunning reversal occurs, as if a psychic evolutionary regression takes place—each moment gets deconstructed back into the template of the original trauma, which remains unprocessed and unprocessable. To quote psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, “Raw, everlasting catastrophe takes the place where a psyche might have been. The psyche (what there is of it) becomes a ‘catastrophe machine,’ grinding any bits of possible experiencing into horrific nothingness.” 1

In the repetition compulsion intrinsic to trauma, Freud recognized not merely a personal but a daemonic force at work. Whatever we do more than once becomes a ritual, a religion; all numbers greater than one are an attempt to incorporate the first time. Our inability to entertain the traumatizing event as a fictional, malleable, creative work in progress solidifies it into a religion. Seized by something greater than ourselves, we are possessed by our compulsion to re-create our trauma, as our species performs a holy liturgy en masse on the world stage, structuring and ritualizing our experience as a way of potentially transforming it; everything depending, of course, on whether we become aware of what is being revealed to us through our unconscious enactments. The compulsion to repeat the trauma intensifies as the contents underlying the trauma move closer to consciousness. When unconscious contents get closer to potentially becoming conscious, they become translucent, in that they are simultaneously visible in one form while invisible in another, as if the traumatized parts of ourselves exists in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, the repetition compulsion serves to defend the ego from the threat of the anxiety of the ever-impending unresolved trauma surfacing into conscious awareness, as if the repetition is a shield against remembering the original traumatic experience. On the other hand, it is just as true that the compulsive repetition of the traumatizing event—returning to the scene of the crime, so to speak—is actually the psyche’s attempt to potentially “liquefy” (in the sense of transforming it from a concretized, stuck, solid state to one that is more “fluid”) and “liquidate” (in the sense of breaking up) the trauma complex so as to expand and liberate consciousness. Seen in this light, the psychic momentum built through numberless repetitions serves not the forgetting but potentially the re-member-ing of disparate psychic contents that must be given form through conscious experience. Repetition sets the ground for (re)cognition through the creation of a web of interlocking associative linkages and connective psychic tissues which serve as the prerequisite for the remembering, catching, and releasing of the disturbing unconscious complex into consciousness. Through the compulsive re-creation of the trauma, a context may coagulate that creates a field consisting of a sufficient inventory of comparable, analogous events such that the trauma can be absorbed and psychically digested. The traumatic event can then be relativized, particularized, and more fully experienced.

As in homeopathy, in which “like cures like,” in the repetition compulsion we retraumatize ourselves in order to heal our trauma. By regenerating and sustaining the trauma, we recover access to those existential choices we made when our being was initially assaulted, but now with the possibility of authoring a newly expanded edition in our souls. For if and when, within the retraumatizing moment, we find a new way to feel, respond, and hold ourselves, we literally create a new way to be. The healing of trauma involves restoring to the soul its capacity for experiencing events. It is as if the compulsion to repeat, so symptomatic of both the traumatized soul and those struggling with relapses in the process of addiction, is a disguised form of the agonizing process of birthing a new insight and revelation into consciousness. Thus, the experience of repetition, a symptom of the disease of trauma while at the same time integral to the process of its resolution, is orchestrated not simply by the ego or the fragmented traumatized complex, but also by the Self, the guiding and integrating function of our whole being. This is why people in trauma not only compulsively repeat the trauma but, to put it another way, and another way, attempt to tell it again and again, as the traumatized imagination works and reworks its metaphors until the event that has pierced it so deeply can be viewed in a way that serves its healing. How things turn out depends upon our having developed a strong enough sense of self to not simply get absorbed in the acting out of the trauma such that we continually retraumatize ourselves, but are able to recognize what is being revealed through our compulsive, repetitive behaviors. We are then able to release and relate to the whole process in new and creative ways that facilitate healing and resolution.

The compulsive fascination that the evil of the archetypal shadow exerts indicates that the representing by acting out the destructive aspect of the archetypal shadow which is animating the underlying trauma is a possible access to these lost levels of the soul. It is as if one of the essential functions of the archetypal shadow is to lead us back to our buried potentials. Trauma, like wetiko, is truly a quantum phenomenon, in that encoded within it is both its pathology and its cure in one superposed state. By their very nature, traumas are individual and individuating, forcing us to re-create ourselves anew. When our development is thwarted by trauma, mutation begins; turned back upon ourselves, we are forced to fertilize ourselves in an act of symbolic incest, which Jung interpreted as a sign of the drive for wholeness. The individuation process of the traumatized soul is a deviation or transmutation into something entirely new. Trauma propels us to not only create a new personal and collective mythology, but demands we connect more deeply with our mythologizing, dreaming, and imaginative powers themselves. Trauma is not a noun or a thing, but rather a verb, in that it is a dynamic process which has a timeless dimension that also unfolds itself over time. Unresolved trauma is “self”-employed, as it employs itself by attempting to work itself out over the course of time, its spirit being passed down transgenerationally, through multiple generations.

Full-blown wetikos are soul murderers who have severed all the bonds of relatedness to others, as well as to themselves, that must be sustained in order to keep their hearts open to experience so as to remain empathically connected to life. Because they continually re-create the ongoing process of killing their own souls, they are reflexively compelled to do this unto others; for what the soul does to itself, it can’t help but to do to others. In a perverse inversion of the golden rule, instead of treating others how they would like to be treated, wetikos do unto others what was done unto them. This is similar to how when we are traumatized, we compulsively give shape to our trauma by terrorizing and trying to kill in others what has been seemingly killed in ourselves. In a strange delusion occasioned by the cruelty of terror, we imagine that we are no longer a weak victim but are in fact one of the truly strong who has triumphed over the forces that once had power over us; yet in doing so, we tragically remain a slave to these very forces. Unconsciously acting out our unhealed trauma via our relationships in the world is the ritual memorializing of the scene of the original terror and trauma which haunt the psyche, but with the roles reversed. When we act out our unhealed abuse and trauma upon someone, we induce in our victim the experience we had when we were traumatized, as if we are attempting to reduce them to the feeling which we are no longer able to feel ourselves. Full-blown wetikos dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have denied and from which they have split off, and are thus not able to consciously experience—the part of themselves that has been traumatized, abused, and/or vampirized. This is one of the reasons why recipients of abuse typically, against all logical reason, feel guilty about being the victims of the abuse—they are being dreamed up to feel the very feelings of guilt that the abuser is unable to consciously feel. What we don’t remember, we act out upon others, as the “other” in ourselves acts itself out through our unconscious. The carrier of wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless vampiric lineage of trauma and abuse. In playing this out, wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness onto others in a perverse, misguided, and maladaptive form of trying to deal with their own suffering.

A physician must study a disease in order to heal it. Similarly, it is impossible to overestimate the importance of understanding the psychopathology of wetiko in the modern world. Wetiko is a growing phenomenon which has already greatly impacted all of our lives and is going to continue to affect us, both individually and collectively, in ever greater ways until we get a handle on this modern-day biblical plague. Unable to decide whether to use the word “sociopath” or “psychopath” to describe a full-blown wetiko, I’ve combined the two to make up the word “psycho-sociopath,” which “sounds” right. Robert Hare, an authority on criminal psychology, writes, “The fact is, compared with other major clinical disorders, little systematic research has been devoted to psychopathy, even though it is responsible for far more social distress and disruption than all other psychiatric disorders combined.” 2 Psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and ADHD are disabling to the individual and can be controlled by medication to one extent or another. The wetiko psycho-pathogen, on the other hand, is not disabling to the individual so afflicted unless certain other factors are present. Not even recognized as a disorder, wetiko cannot currently be medicated nor controlled by the very system which is itself infected with the disease. It is extremely helpful and of the utmost necessity to understand how the wetiko pathogen manifests in the individual who is under its thrall. People taken over by wetiko are potential goldmines of information, 3 as they are revealing to us what the pathology looks like in human form as it wreaks havoc in the inner landscape of their psyches and in their lives, as well as in the lives of those with whom they are connected.

Arrogance— hubris , as the Greeks called it—is one of the key traits that characterize and is the signature of being under the spell of wetiko. In being full-blown, wetikos are arrogantly puffed up with their own self-importance, that is, inflated. Unwitting instruments for evil, wetikos are arrogantly, ignorantly, and self-righteously convinced they are in possession of the truth and working for the highest good. It is as if they are unable to know that what they are doing is evil, unable to register their actions as anything other than good. The philosopher Nietzsche was, in his own words, describing an aspect of the pathology of wetiko when he came up with the term the “pale criminal.” 4 The pale criminal is an archetypal figure of the collective unconscious who symbolically represents the quintessence of the evil in humanity. The pale criminal is so disconnected from himself and has so fallen into the denial of self-deception that he has no idea that the “murder” he is getting away with is actually evil. This figure is so disjointed inwardly that he has no context with any preceding event, in a sense forgetting what he’s done because he has no continuity with himself. Only a person who is present in his inner life can look back, reflect, and remember his acts, and thereby feel remorse for his wrongdoings and consciously feel his guilt. Pale criminals will actually create “explosions” in the outside world as distractions so as to protect themselves from inwardly “imploding” at the sight of themselves. Nietzsche referred to this figure as a “pale criminal” because if this person were to self-reflect and look in the mirror, their breath would be taken away at seeing who they had become; they would become “pale” at the sight of themselves.

The words of the Buddha in the Maharatnakuta Sutra declare: “Lying is the origin of all evils.” Lying is one of the key strands in the epidemiology of wetikoism. Wetikos suffer from what is called pseudologia phantastica , a form of hysteria characterized by a talent for believing their own lies. Ultimately deceiving themselves as they believe in the propaganda of their own lies, full-blown wetikos become alien and strangers to themselves. R. D. Laing writes that our species, due to an almost unlimited capacity for self-deception, have “tricked ourselves out of our own minds.” 5 In a Faustian pact with the devil, they have sold their soul to the highest bidder, having allowed themselves to be manipulated by “darker forces” so as to continually feed their own narcissism , all the while hiding from themselves the depravity of what they are doing. These seemingly external darker forces are an expression of the shadow deep within themselves from which they have become estranged. Wetikos continually have to invest their life force in lying to themselves, while at the same time fooling themselves into believing that they are not doing so, a classic version of doublethink. Suffering from amnesia, they have forgotten what it is to remember, and to seal the deal, they have forgotten that they have forgotten. The result is that they split their mind in two. Falling into denial, yet denying that they are in denial, becomes a process that they are invested in at all costs, lest it blow their denial. Anything that threatens their perverse state of affairs must be destroyed. They can seem confident and self-assured, but in reality they are covering deep insecurities and fears through an inflated self-image. Intense feelings of revenge, fury, and out-of-control rage manifest when their fear is exposed and their narcissism threatened. This rage is not just a defense against their vulnerability and wound, but comes from a perverse desire to sadistically punish those whom they perceive as the cause of their rage. Hiding from their own lie, they are in essence hiding from themselves, which is pure madness.

Wetikos can psychopathically (and thus toxically) mimic the human personality perfectly. If it serves their agenda, they can be convincing beyond belief, making themselves out to be normal, caring, politically correct human beings. They can endlessly talk about taking responsibility, but they never genuinely face up to and become accountable for their actions. They are unable to genuinely mourn, being only concerned with themselves. They will feign grief, however, just as they will try to appear compassionate, if it is politically expedient to do so and, hence, to their advantage, as they are master manipulators. They are unable, however, to grasp emotionally the meaning implicit in the thoughts and feelings they are exhibiting. They lack insight into how they differ from others, for they do not differ from others as they see others. They are intuitively gifted at sensing what other people want them to give, as well as being skillful at pretending love and devotion, as if they are imitating a person. Impersonating themselves, their existence is a true parody of life. They can’t distinguish between their mimicked (pseudo) responses of love, remorse, etc., and the genuinely felt responses of a healthy person.

Full-blown wetikos are emotionally stunted, as their feelings are confined to the primitive, archaic emotions of anger, frustration, numbness, and rage. Suffering from a deep disorder of feeling in which they cannot allow themselves to consciously feel , they choose to think one way in order to avoid feeling another. They typically swing between numbness and rage. Fixed in their own limited, myopic point of view, they have no capacity to see themselves as others see them. Their proclamations to the contrary, they have neither empathy nor compassion. Unable to see the world through others’ point of view, only through their own, is what Hannah Arendt considers to be a primary characteristic of what she called the “banality of evil” in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem . Wetikos don’t relate to others as autonomous, independent beings, but rather as disposable pawns to be used for their own selfish ends, inanimate things to be manipulated for their own narcissistic benefit. They take delight in “putting one over on people” and getting away with something. Contemptuous of moral or human restraints, they relate to others as objects, rather than as subjects with their own intrinsic value and valid viewpoints. It is this denial of the humanity of the other that lies at the heart of the mystery of evil. To quote theologian and philosopher Abraham J. Heschel, “The opposite of humanity is brutality.… Brutality is often due to a failure of imagination. 6 … Man turned beast becomes his opposite, a species sui generis . The opposite of the human is not the animal, but the demonic.” 7 In full-blown wetikos there is a perverse enjoyment of domination over another person(s), which involves a process of dehumanization, of transforming a person into an object, a “thing,” in which the other’s freedom is taken away; this process is the very essence of the sadistic drive. Their sadism is a way of transforming their feelings of powerlessness and impotence into a delusional experience of omnipotence.

Paradoxically, at the same time that full-blown wetikos experience themselves as separate from others, who are experienced as objects, they dwell in a state of “unconscious fusion” with others. This is a form of trance which is ultimately an expression of a lack of differentiation and individuation within themselves. The state of a full-blown wetiko is extremely paradoxical: being the incarnation of the archetype of narcissism itself, on the one hand they treat others as separate objects who exist only for their own use, while, at the same time, they unconsciously experience other people as extensions of themselves. In the very act of relating to others as separate, they are enacting in the outer world their own inner state of fragmentation. By acting out and treating others so brutally, they are giving shape and form to what they are doing to themselves within the landscape of their own soul. Compulsively acting out their unconscious, they are reacting to and conditioned by their own projections of the world. At the same time that they are relating to others as objects separate from themselves, they are, at a deeper level, unconsciously identified with the other. It is as if the other represents what they have split off from within themselves. In their behavior they are literally and symbolically acting out and revealing to us what they are doing to themselves.

Because they have lost connection to their own souls, they cannot hear the pleas of others nor see their souls, as they are lacking in the element of eros, the principle of relatedness. Their hearts are like stones, beyond any appeal, from others or within themselves. They refuse to see the suffering their actions are causing others, as this would injure their inflated, narcissistic, overly positive self-image, which protects them from consciously feeling their own pain, shame, and guilt. In the process by which they make a basic choice to shut down that which opens them up to others, and feeling empowered to the extent they are able to pull this off, their shame and guilt has been inwardly transformed into what should be called by its right name—self-hatred.

One of the channels that the wetiko bug operates through us is our personal will , particularly as an instrument for gaining worldly power. Full-blown wetikos, particularly Big Wetikos in positions of great power, feel compelled to forcefully use the vastly creative multidimensional power of the human will as a tool for exerting power over others, and as a means of holding on to and preserving the power they have already secured for themselves, as well as for increasing the empire of their power without limit. Intoxicated by their insatiable attraction to power, such wetikos are extremely averse to yielding to others unless doing so is itself another hidden or disguised power play. Rather than allowing their will to be creatively subsumed and cooperatively interwoven into a vaster and more comprehensive universal network of co-creative intelligence—which would require the cultivation of their ability to release control over their will through developing the capacity for surrender, trust, and letting go—they become hardened, fixed, and chronically attached to their stance of self-willfulness. They have fallen into a chronic state of obsessive-compulsive willfulness, an unyielding and self-serving stance that disables the motility and flexibility of their volitional faculties, the fluidity of which is crucial in order to maintain a dynamic will attuned to and capable of co-creatively interacting with the greater will of the universe as a living dynamic whole-system. Such an imbalanced use of the will in only one direction—that of securing power and control over others without concern for or attunement to that which serves the highest collective good—I would like to name “volitional dystrophy.” Only being able to use our will for control and domination of others is a disabling limitation, just as it would be severely disabling to only be able to close our hand and clench our fist, without ever being able to open our hand, unclench our fist, and receive something from others. Falling into the evil of wetiko entails being swept away by one-sidedness, by only one single pattern of behavior.

Full-blown wetikos are psycho-sociopaths who are not constrained in their actions in the same way that they know that most people are. All force, in the last analysis, is based on the power to kill and to turn the other into a corpse. The person may not be killed but only taught a lesson, made an example of, deprived of their freedom, or cruelly humiliated. Behind each of these actions stands a capacity and sadistic “willingness to kill” (whether psychically or physically) so as to protect their psychic territory, power, and self-serving delusions. This makes people so afflicted particularly dangerous, as they will do whatever it takes , literally stopping at nothing to hold on to whatever position of power they find themselves in.

In social animals there is an intrinsic mechanism that limits aggression. For example, the display of submission expressed by baring the throat when attacked by a stronger opponent will result in the termination of the attack. This “violence inhibition mechanism” (VIM) is typically activated by nonverbal cues and communications of distress, pain, or suffering. Having a VIM is a prerequisite for the development of morality and for the continued evolution of human consciousness. The wetiko virus disables the VIM within people, thus arresting and taking captive their morality and literally incapacitating their ability to evolve.

The shape-shifting wetiko bug is the aping shadow of God, as well as ourselves, as it has the most disagreeable quality of appearing in our own guise. When we are taken over by the wetiko spirit, it assumes our seeming form, taking both our guise and our gaze, which we absorb into, identify with, and believe to be who we are. Bamboozled and hoodwinked by the slick “salesmanship” of this imposter and copycat of ourselves, we “buy” into its version of who we are. We then mime ourselves, becoming a master copy, a duplicate of our original and true selves. The spirit of wetiko impersonates us, fooling even ourselves, as it cloaks itself in our form. This mercurial spirit puts us on as a disguise, appearing as ourselves, or at least who we mistakenly imagine ourselves to be. In his book Psychology and Alchemy , Jung refers to this spirit by the name Antimimos, which he describes as “the imitator and evil principle.” 8 The word Antimimos refers to a type of deception that can be thought of as “countermimicry.” Referred to as the antimimon pneuma in the Apocryphon of John (Apoc. John III, 36:17), this counterfeiting, “anti-miming” spirit imitates something but with the intention to make the copy, the fake version, serve a purpose counter to that of the original thing or idea. This spirit inspires the devil himself to imitate an angel of light. The antimimon spirit is a maleficent force which tries to seduce us so as to lead us astray; it effects an inversion of value, transforming truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth, leading us to forgetfulness.

When we are taken over by the wetiko spirit is when we can subjectively experience ourselves as being most ourselves, while ironically it is in actuality when we are most estranged from ourselves. At one and the same time we disconnect from and lose ourselves while falling under an illusion and identifying with who we’re not. This is a state of dissociation and fusion simultaneously, as the parts of the psyche that have split off from consciousness overwhelm and take over the psyche. Gurdjieff said that we lie to ourselves constantly about who we are. But if we observe carefully, “You will see that you are different from what you think you are. You will see that you are two. One that is not, but takes the place and plays the role of the other [the real you].… Learn to look until you have observed the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. When you have seen your two natures, that day, in you, the truth will be born.” 9

Instead of living from and out of an awareness of the psyche, full-blown wetikos continually avoid awareness of the psyche, a habitual pattern which becomes their internal compass and continual default, their M.O. Taking refuge not “in” but “from” themselves, wetikos are continually fleeing from themselves, endlessly circling around in the hamster wheel of samsara. Their energy is invested in fueling their own, and others’, deception, a process which leaves them remote from themselves. Their will becomes dedicated to hiding from the truth of what they are doing, a truth which endlessly pursues them, as they continually avoid relationship with themselves. Wetikos become wedded to the full-time occupation of keeping one step ahead of themselves, a process which, once it gains a certain momentum, attains a seeming autonomy that is self-generating. As this inner process progresses, it gains a sovereignty over their psyche, as if a self-created Frankenstein monster has come to life in the flesh. This is reminiscent of the legendary resurrected tiger which devours the magician who restored it to life out of its skeletal bones. The wetikos have then created their own sci-fi nightmare, with themselves in the starring role. Once created, a mind-virus like wetiko, just like the Frankenstein monster, gains a seeming life of its own, independent of its creator. It then holds its creator in its thrall, who is unable to escape from the out-of-control hell of their own making. Our everyday figures of speech reflect this seemingly out-of-the-ordinary situation when we ask of someone who’s not acting like their usual self, “What’s gotten into you?”

“Autonomous complexes,” a term coined by Jung, are the psychologically equivalent term for what indigenous people would call “demons,” e.g., wetiko. To condescendingly think that we, as modern-day enlightened people, are too sophisticated to believe in something as primitive as demons is to not realize their psychological reality. These unconscious complexes alter our experience of ourselves. The psychic conditions which breed demons are as actively at work as ever. The demons have not disappeared but have merely changed their name and taken on another form—they have become unconscious psychic forces. Though we have dismissed the idea of demons on the altar of our rationality, to quote Jung, “Man himself has taken over their role without knowing it and does the devilish work of destruction with far more effective tools than the spirits did. In the olden days men were brutal, now they are dehumanized and possessed to a degree that even the blackest Middle Ages did not know.” 10 We, as “modern” people, to the extent we are acting out our unconscious, are as much “plagued” by possession as people in the Middle Ages. However, the weaponry we have at our fingertips is orders of magnitude more technologically advanced than in the past, sufficient to utterly destroy ourselves.

Autonomous complexes are parts of the psyche which have split off due to shock, trauma, or breach of our boundaries, and have developed a seemingly autonomous life and apparently independent will of their own. The demonic energy of a split-off, autonomous complex manifests as if it has an intentionality, as if it seeks us out, as if it were maliciously set against us. An autonomous complex behaves like an animated foreign body within our consciousness. A split-off, autonomous complex leads a life of its own in the subterranean levels of the psyche, and is prone to instantly projecting itself whenever it is constellated in any way—that is, whenever attracted by something analogous to itself in the outside world. The complex can usually be suppressed with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at the first suitable opportunity it reappears in its original strength. Due to its lack of association with the conscious ego, an autonomous complex is archetypically not open to being influenced, educated, or corrected by “reality.” An intruder from the unconscious and a disturber of the peace, an autonomous complex behaves like a goblin that is always eluding both our gaze and our grasp. The more we attribute seemingly external qualities to the autonomous complex, the further away we are getting from the psychological source of our experience. Not realizing that we are chasing a projection, we try to grasp the ungraspable as it eludes us like an ever-receding rainbow. Unreflected upon, however, these demons wreak havoc upon everyone within their sphere of influence, emitting the psychic equivalent of depleted uranium into the surrounding environment.

At a certain point, the autonomous quality of the complex gains enough momentum to emancipate itself from the wholeness of the psyche and become its own end. As it takes over and becomes more and more in charge of a person, a split-off complex such as wetiko incorporates a seemingly autonomous regime within the greater body politic of the psyche. As if an invisible coup has taken place within the psyche, an autonomous complex like wetiko commandeers and colonizes the psyche. When we are taken over by an autonomous complex, it is as if we, as natural rulers of our own psychic landscape, have been deposed, and are living under a “foreign occupation,” no longer masters in our own home. Once it gains a sufficient sovereignty, an autonomous complex forms something like a “shadow government” of the ego, in that the complex dictates to the ego. Once again, just as within a dream, we see the inner landscape of the wetikoized psyche being mirrored in the outer world through the shadow government that has taken over our seeming democracy. Both within our psyche and in our alleged democracy, we are allowed our seeming freedom, so long as it doesn’t threaten the sovereignty and dominance of the ruling power .

Over time, just as when we become taken over by compulsive addictive behavior, the conscious mind loses its power of leadership. Imperceptibly, we become the led, as an unconscious and impersonal process gradually takes control of the psyche. Thus, without noticing it, the conscious personality starts being pushed about like a figure on a chessboard by an invisible player, as if we are actually being led and manipulated like puppets. In the words of the poet W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.” 11 We do not notice when we are governed by an autonomous complex; we put all of our skills, talents, gifts, and cunning at the service of our unconscious master, thereby heightening its power a millionfold. Falling into self-deception, the conscious mind succumbs to the illusion that it is deciding, that it is in control. When we are under wetiko’s spell, we are like little kids sitting in the passenger seat of the family automobile, pretending that we are steering the car with our toy dashboard steering wheel. To the extent we are taken over by wetiko, we are complicit in supporting the dark overlords who master over us, both within our psyche and in the outside world. We fool ourselves, imagining, for example, that we live in a free country, in a functioning democracy that is governed by the rule of law, a delusion which feeds into the collective psychosis in the field as well as the madness within ourselves. Being nonlocal, this inner psychological situation can manifest, and is manifesting, both within our psyche and out in the world at the same time. Just like a dream.

A split-off, autonomous complex is, potentially, like a “vampiric virus,” in that it is fundamentally “dead” matter; it is only in a living being that it acquires a quasi-life. A dissociated autonomous complex becomes “entombed” in the dungeons of the unconscious, which only serves to give it more power. Just as a vampire revitalizes itself by sucking our life force, when we unconsciously identify with an activated autonomous complex, we are literally animating and enlivening the undead. Complicit in our own victimization, we then unwittingly give away our freedom, power, and life force in the process. Like cancer cells ravaging the body, disassociated autonomous complexes are “splinter psyches” that become overly swollen with psychic energy, and then will propagate and metastasize themselves within the psyche, consuming, devouring, and cannibalizing its healthy aspects. Drawing and attracting all of the wholesome parts of the psyche into itself, an autonomous complex can potentially warp and destroy the psyche of the person, nation, or species so afflicted, nonlocally infecting and spreading by psychic contagion its malaise to the surrounding field in the process. Paradoxically, autonomous complexes like the demon of wetiko only are real when they are not recognized as real.

Speaking of someone possessed by the wetiko virus, Forbes writes, “such a person cannot be authentic. Such a person is not merely a pimp, he is also a ghost, as it were, a mere imitation of a person. His life is an imitation of life.” But the life of such pimps “is less than that of a wild (free) animal who is, after all always authentic.” 12 Being ghostlike, full-blown wetikos cannot truly own or possess something, as they are not even in possession of themselves; all they are able to do is to grasp again and consume some more. Wetikos become unreal to themselves, a simulation of themselves. As if describing full-blown wetikos, the late psychiatrist R. D. Laing asserted that the ultimate destruction that can be done to human beings is to destroy their capacity to have their own experience. In order for wetikos to “divide and conquer,” they first have to divide people internally, to split them psychically. Different parts of the person taken over by wetiko become compartmentalized, neither connected to each other nor to the whole. This process of inner fragmentation serves to hide from the wetikos what they are doing to themselves, as they become their own never-ending “cover-up.” This psychological dynamic is kept in place by how painful it is to behold and contemplate the modes of avoidance they have so desperately constructed to protect themselves from what they do not want to know. And yet, painful though it may be, it is only in the clear seeing of what they are doing to themselves that is there any possibility of becoming free from this malignant malady.