part0018

Due to the horrific events playing out on the world stage, I find myself unable to avoid the topic of “evil,” which is a subject that demands our deepest reflection. Some of my readers have objected to my use of the term evil, because it triggers something in them which makes them feel uncomfortable, and sometimes even makes them stop reading. I find myself wondering, is there something being revealed to us when, for example, people are triggered by the mere mention of the word evil. There is an intrinsic problem with illuminating evil, however, as articulating the nature of evil can actually invoke it in the field. This is to say that even mentioning the word “evil” can constellate that very quality in the reader, as well as in myself. In coming to terms with evil, we have to take within ourselves a minute homeopathic dose, or we will not know whereof we speak. There is simply no getting around this, for to attempt to keep evil outside of ourselves is itself the play of evil. It then becomes a question of how do we relate to the very darkness within us which has been evoked? Do we react in fear, in which case the seeming evil has power over us? Or do we turn the light of consciousness onto the part of ourselves that is the source of the darkness, reflecting upon the very darkness which has been called forth within us? Reflective minds can be greatly enriched, however, and intellectual horizons considerably enlarged by the realization of the immense power of evil. Our sense of morality and humility is deepened, heightened, and strengthened when we realize that any of us are capable of potentially becoming evil’s instruments, unwittingly or not.

In writing about evil, I am talking from personal experience; I have not assumed the comfortable and safe posture of an intellectual, scholar, or academic sitting in an ivory tower, contemplating wetiko as an abstract idea, something outside of myself. On the contrary, in writing this book, I couldn’t stay separate from what I was writing about, in that the act of holding wetiko as an object of my contemplation activated within me the subjective experience of the very thing I was writing about. I’ve literally had to evoke and self-reflectively speculate upon how the wetiko virus operates within myself again and again so as to intimately experience from the inside what I am writing about. Writing this book has truly been an “inside job,” in that it’s all about ME. In authoring this inquiry, I feel like I “caught” wetiko, in the dual sense that it “infected” me, in a shamanistic manner, 1 while at the same time I “captured” it within the container of my contemplation; and, like Jacob wrestling with the dark angel, I wouldn’t let go till I received its blessing. My experience was like going from safely being in the comfortable confines of my home where I was contemplating a picture of an African jungle, and then realizing that I was in the very scene, surrounded by wild animals. In writing about wetiko, it felt as if I was writing about a living entity that knew I was writing about it, or at least I imagine. I could feel how it didn’t want to be seen, which gave me the feeling of being in a genuine encounter, a having it out, a coming to terms with a power greater than myself—in Jung’s oft-used term, an Auseinandersetzung , 2 a confrontation between ego-consciousness and contents of the unconscious. Thankfully, this process of objectifying and articulating the disintegrating effects of wetiko have had a deeply integrating effect upon me. Writing this book has been a key part of my own creative journey of healing.

Much that proves to be abysmally evil doesn’t necessarily come from people’s wickedness; it stems from their ignorance and unconsciousness. 3 When I talk about the evil of wetiko, however, I am not talking about a personal level of evil, but rather a transpersonal dimension of evil whose origin is beyond the merely personal. This archetypal, nonlocal evil is enfolded throughout the entire field and uses individual human beings as its instruments of incarnation. This is a holographic universe in the sense that, just like a hologram, every minute, microcosmic part of the universe—ourselves, for instance—contains, reflects, and expresses the macrocosmic whole. This is analogous to the way a dream fragment potentially contains encoded within it our whole process. Seeing how wetiko manifests in any one of us gives us deeper insight into how this nonlocal bug works en masse in the world at large.

The transpersonal evil of wetiko can be considered that tendency which—whether in ourselves or others—inhibits personal growth, destroys or limits innate potentialities, curtails freedom, fragments or disintegrates the personality, diminishes the quality of interpersonal relationships, and creates divisiveness in the whole human family. It limits and blocks our ability to love, to grow, to evolve. The heart of evil strives always and everywhere to annihilate, to turn all being to nothing. In the creation-drama, evil was, so to speak, the reverse, the other, of the act of creation; it is that which opposes the divine creativity of the universe. Evil is anti-life; it is life turning against itself. Evil diminishes the fullness of life; “live” reversed: “evil.” Evil is something a soul does to itself and, as a result, can’t resist doing to others. Evil is the desire to destroy people in their soul as a means of evacuating one’s inner condition outside of oneself while feeling righteous and justified in doing so. It is the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of one’s own sick self.

One situation that nourishes the germ of evil, and in Jung’s opinion is one of the worst sins, occurs when we have the possibility of becoming conscious of an unconscious content that is emerging into consciousness, and we choose not to, remaining artificially, unnecessarily, and willfully unconscious. Repressed individuation feeds evil, as does unexpressed or repressed creativity, which transforms the potentially helpful voice of the daemon into a destructive demon. If we don’t honor the creative light within us, instead of the daemon’s being a guide and healer of the soul, its spirit will mislead and delude us, transforming into a diabolical seducer. Instead of bringing light, the spirit of unrealized creativity turns satanic, as it becomes the Father of Lies whose voice in our time, amplified by mainstream corporate media, revels in orgies of propaganda and leads untold millions to ruin. Those with unlived creativeness try to destroy other people’s creativity, just as those with unlived possibilities of consciousness try to stop other people’s efforts toward consciousness; what the soul does to itself it can’t help but do to others.

When I talk about evil, I am talking about the psychological reality of evil, whose effects are all around us. I am not making a theological statement having to do with the metaphysical reality of evil, as I am not qualified to do so. Evil is, psychologically speaking, terribly real. Today as never before it is important that we not overlook the danger of the potential evil lurking within us. One must be positively blind to not see the colossal role that evil plays in the modern world. To quote Jung, “Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him.” 4 Evil today has become a visible Great Power. Its effects do not diminish in the slightest by being hushed up as a nonreality. Evil is not something that, ostrich-like, we can just turn our back on or a blind eye toward. Our denial of evil is itself a manifestation of the very evil we are denying, while at the same time, our denial engenders the very evil of which our denial is an expression. Disowned and unacknowledged evil becomes inhuman, monstrous, and sadistic. We must learn how to handle evil, since it certainly appears as if it is here to stay. We are clearly being asked—make that demanded—by the universe to come to terms with evil; our very survival as a species depends upon it.

Wetiko is the archetype of evil manifesting and revealing itself through our species. Experiencing archetypal evil is truly shattering, but it can so shake us up that it can potentially help us to become filled with inspiration. Being archetypal in nature, wetiko stands for a persistent force of evil that doesn’t take up limited residence in any one person, but rather incarnates through anyone who has ever enacted any form of evil. Who among us can say we have been free of this affliction? We might enact evil in our day-to-day lives in much more subtle, invisible, well-intentioned and inoffensive ways than full-blown Big Wetikos, but we are still iterations of the same fractal. Being transpersonal in nature, the evil of wetiko has manifested through various human beings in different ways over the centuries. Being multidimensional, there are a wide variety of domains, contexts, and configurations through which wetiko plays itself out. Wetiko moves each of us differently, making itself visible in a multiplicity of ways, as its agency has many different flavors, faces, and representatives. Wetiko never looks the same, and yet, in its essence, it remains the same wetiko bug in myriad (dis)guises and costumes.

Evil is like a pathogen that enters a system, be it an individual, nationstate, or world-system, and exploits that system, knocking it off balance. Such disturbances can transform something wholesome, such as the drive to reproduce, into something evil—the drive to rape. Etymologically, one of the meanings of the word “evil” has to do with “transgressing boundaries.” Full-fledged wetikos are rapists of the human soul. The word “rape,” etymologically speaking, is derived from words that mean to overwhelm, to enrapture, to invade, to usurp, to pillage, and to steal, all characteristics of someone possessed by the wetiko virus. Evil compels one-sidedness, and can inspire people to become fanatically attached to and fixed in their viewpoint. The philosopher Bertrand Russell writes, “Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” 5

Being “unclean,” it is as if an unholy or evil spirit, a spirit of destruction, has taken up residence and lodged itself in the beings of those taken over by wetiko. They are unwittingly being used as instruments, as covert operatives of this darker, unclean spirit to proliferate itself in the wider field. Secret agents of the disease, wetikos’ secret is self-secret, in that it is secret even to themselves. As is true for any of us when taken over by something other than ourselves, carriers of wetiko don’t realize how possessed they are at any given moment. The experience of being taken over by something more powerful than ourselves always happens in our blind spot.

To say that full-blown wetikos are evil is not quite accurate, however, as it is to conflate the personal dimension with the archetypal, attributing to a person contents that belong to the collective unconscious. Though evil does have a personal dimension, archetypal evil is a transpersonal energy that is beyond and of a higher dimension than the merely personal. It is important to clearly distinguish: when someone is possessed by wetiko, they are an instrument for evil, which is very different than “being” evil themselves. They are simply deluded human beings, who due to ignorance, unconsciousness, greed, etc., have allowed themselves to be used by darker forces to incarnate their power-hungry agenda. From the more holistic view of the field, they are getting dreamed up to pick up and play out a very unpopular role in a deeper, mythic, archetypal drama. If we concretize someone as being evil, we are shadow-projecting and unwittingly becoming instruments of the very evil we are reacting against. We don’t want to solidify anyone’s open-ended, multidimensional hologram, so to speak. Who we are, when we get right down to it, can be likened to the wave function in physics pulsating in and out of the void every nanosecond with infinite potentiality, re-created and re-creating itself anew each moment. How the wave function “collapses” into particularized form, as modern physics points out, depends upon how it is observed, or dreamed up. Like a dream, our universe is not written in stone in a solid state, but is very fluid, a work in progress. To solidify anyone, or the universe in general, is to ultimately concretize ourselves.

Evil can take many forms—political, social, economic, militaristic, and psychological. Predation can lurk under many guises and high-sounding names, such as patriotism, public welfare, national security, spreading democracy, free trade, and protecting our way of life. Evil oftentimes hides under idealisms, under “isms” in general. These “isms,” what Jung refers to as the “viruses of our day,” are simply thought-forms used by wetikos to justify their rape, criminality, murder, and other forms of evil. Wrapping their cause in the mantle of goodness allows Big Wetikos, who are in fact full-fledged predators, to sleep at night, seemingly guilt-free. In a form of self-entrancement, they have so thoroughly convinced themselves of the rightness of their actions as well as their claims to virtue that they rarely, if ever, have ethical qualms about what they are doing. It is the deluded sense of meaning —such as invading a country to “spread democracy”—that these pale criminals place on the violent acts they are committing which allows them to justify, at least in their own minds, their murderous actions. Where the evil of wetiko is endemic, there tends to be an ethical, developmental arrest, both in individuals and throughout the society.

Alchemy is an expression of the fact that light is hidden in darkness, that the deepest blessings are found in the distressing dark shadows of the human psyche. Jung recognized that whenever evil appeared in an individual person’s process, some deeper good almost always came out of the experience that would not have emerged without the manifestation of evil. Could the same thing be true on a collective scale? Might there be a parallel? Just as in a single individual, the emergence of darkness calls forth a hidden light, does the manifestation of a more collective darkness call forth a helpful light in the psychic life of a people? Is the dark shadow befalling our planet the harbinger of a great light? Just as evening gives birth to morning, from the darkness potentially arises a new light, which is the “morning star” (who is Lucifer, the “light-bringer”). As the Chinese yin/yang symbol illustrates, encoded in one of the opposites is the seed of the other, which is to say that hidden in the darkness is a speck of light. The evil that is incarnating in our world simultaneously beckons and potentially actualizes an expansion of consciousness, all depending upon our recognition of what is being revealed. It is as if hidden in the darkness is a spark of light that has descended into its depths, and when recognized in the darkness, this light returns to its source. Everything depends upon whether we are able to draw upon—that is, to evoke and to access—this “helpful light” of consciousness that is called forth by the darkness. If we are able to connect with this emerging light of consciousness and recognize what is being revealed by and through the darkness, we can creatively mediate, transmute, and express these darker, destructive powers in the service of all that lives. Might not our consciousness expand less rapidly without the emergence of evil and our struggles with it? Mythologically speaking, the evil spirit is hidden in the roots of the self, as if evil is the secret principle concealed within and spurring on the dynamic of individuation. In Goethe’s masterpiece Faust , Faust asks Mephistopheles (who represents the devil) who he is, and Mephistopheles replies that he is the “part of that force which would do evil, yet forever works the good.” In our coming to terms with evil, evil seems to be playing a key role in the divine mystery of the Incarnation through humanity. Jung writes, “We assiduously avoid investigating whether in this very power of evil God might not have placed some special purpose which it is most important for us to know.” 6 It is said that the horrified perception of evil has supposedly led to at least as many conversions as the experience of the good.

In the Gnostic Dialogue of the Savior , it says, “Whoever does not know the root of evil is no stranger to it.” 7 Wetiko forces upon us the evolutionary responsibility to become intimately related to and come to terms with the evil within our own hearts. The art of alchemy was an attempt at a symbolic integration of evil , locating the divine drama of redemption in humanity itself. This involved a process of coming to terms with the unconscious, which always becomes a necessity when we are confronted with its primal darkness. There is no escape from the world, the flesh, and the devil; they can only be truly renounced by being faced and overcome. The less evil is recognized, the more dangerous it is. To the extent we have not rooted out the wetiko bug within ourselves we are complicit in the co-creation of the evil playing out in the world. The Gnostic text The Gospel of Philip says,

The source of the demons lies within us. As compared to existing “by virtue” of something, demons can only live by the “lack of virtue” of our own obscured and unexamined minds. The above Gnostic quote brings to mind Paul’s famous passage from the New Testament, “That which I would do, I do not, and that which I would not do, I do” (Romans 7:15), a clear and simple expression of our human proclivity for being taken over by a daemonic power greater and seemingly other than ourselves and acting out evil if there ever was one. The unillumined and unrecognized autonomous complex of wetiko diabolically compels us to act contrary to our best intentions, as any of us who’ve struggled with any form of addiction knows from our own humbling experience. Being possessed by demons is a problem as old as humanity.

In Buddhism, Mara, known as the “Evil One,” is a symbol for the quintessence of evil. Mara, like the wetiko virus, is the upholder of false views and always and everywhere tries to prevent knowledge of enlightenment from being communicated to others. Those who threaten to break out of Mara’s realm are those against whom his greatest efforts are put forth, similar to the way the wetiko virus shadows forth its worst outbursts as we get closer to being free from it. The seeing and knowing of Mara’s presence and activities are a major element of Buddha’s enlightenment. Once he attained enlightenment, the Buddha always recognized the moment that Mara appeared; to recognize Mara is to immediately defeat him, as if deflating a balloon. This is why Mara exclaims with the utmost dismay and despair, “The Exalted One knows me!” (The Exalted One is the Buddha, the one who has awakened to the dreamlike nature.) Ignorance and darkness are two of the main qualities associated with Mara, who is also referred to as the “Dark One.” It is emphasized in the Buddha’s teachings that it was ignorance and darkness that were dispelled at the moment of enlightenment. Common to both ignorance and darkness is their capacity to “blind” humanity. Ignorance, darkness, and blindness—as well as “craving,” or always wanting more—are associated with Mara’s activity, as well as with wetiko. The image of Mara’s hosts being routed is often likened to darkness being dispelled by the sun. The Mara-image is a living symbol, the outcome of a radical religious insight—a “revelation”—of the Buddha. Without this insight, there was no knowledge of Mara, which is to say that previous to the Buddha’s revelation, Mara, like wetiko, could act itself out without restraint. When the historical Buddha, just like any one of us, sees Mara, this realization instantaneously registers in the collective consciousness of all humanity, thereby making this insight more accessible for all of us. Just as when the Buddha “knew” Mara, when we know wetiko, it has no power over us.

The goal of the sacred art of alchemy is to unlock the light encoded and imprisoned within the darkness. The mystery of the coniunctio, the central mystery of alchemy, has to do with the synthesis of opposites, which involves integrating the darkness, however it is represented, into consciousness. Jung says, “as long as Satan is not integrated, the world is not healed and man is not saved. But Satan represents evil, and how can evil be integrated? There is only one possibility: to assimilate it, that is to say, raise it to the level of consciousness … [this is a state] in which the devil no longer has an autonomous existence but rejoins the profound unity of the psyche. Then the opus magnum is finished: the human soul is completely integrated.” 9 This involves a genuine confrontation with both the personal and the archetypal shadow within ourselves. We become awake by making the darkness conscious. When there is light in the darkness that comprehends the darkness, darkness no longer prevails. The chains that were binding us fall back unto themselves, no longer imprisoning us, as if in ascending to our higher nature our lower nature is “left behind,” no longer having any power over us to compel us to act it out. When sunlight floods into a room, darkness is rendered powerless and is instantaneously evacuated. As the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in connection with publicizing societal injustices, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Although we think of illumination as “seeing the light,” “seeing the darkness” is also a form of illumination. In becoming illuminated, it is the darkness that illuminates us.

We are only able to bear the experience of the evil within us and not fall into overwhelming despair if we recognize the “transpersonal” origin of evil. Instead of personalizing or identifying with the evil we have found within, erroneously thinking it “belongs” to us individually, solidifying ourselves as being evil, we recognize that evil is “archetypal” in nature, belonging to the universe itself. Because evil is archetypal, we are not responsible for having these impulses, but only for how we deal with them. Realizing the archetypal dimension of evil is itself an expression that we are in touch with our intrinsic wholeness, which enables us to not split off from nor identify with, but rather contain, transmute, and liberate, evil’s deleterious effects. Becoming engaged with and intimately related to the transpersonal evil within us simultaneously acquaints us with the part of ourselves that is beyond the personal ego and plugged into something far greater and vaster than ourselves.

On the one hand, we don’t want to ignore the evil of wetiko, which, being an avoidance of what it brings up in us, simply feeds the wetiko virus. Ignorance is not bliss at all, because shrinking away from the specter of evil into denial only prolongs our suffering. On the other hand, we do not want to become overly fascinated with the evil of wetiko, which would only feed its intoxicating effects. Once we really see wetiko, however, we can choose to not focus on it too much. Instead of unconsciously reacting against it, we can make a conscious choice of how and where we invest our attention, a choice which empowers our sovereignty. Once we see wetiko and come from a position of choice as to how we respond to it, instead of it draining us of our life force, it then literally feeds our awareness. Once we have gotten to know wetiko within ourselves, we can choose not to unnecessarily give it our attention, which means we no longer offer ourselves as its feeding station. By withholding its food, we are effectively dispelling the curse of wetiko in no time. We can then consciously invest our attention in creating and re-engineering a world in which we want to live.

The multiheaded hydra that is the wetiko collective psychosis materializes and insinuates its nonlocal tentacles within families, groups, nations, and, indeed, in whole species such as our own. Just as the community of believers was described by the Apostle Paul as the “body of Christ,” so can the individuals taken over by wetiko be considered to be the physical “organs” of this higher-dimensional, metaphysical energy. In a sense, these individual organs of wetiko compose the physical body of wetiko, and can be considered to be wetiko’s emanation or projection of itself into the third dimension. Due to the primal fear which ultimately drives it and which it is driven to cultivate, wetiko’s body politic has an intrinsic and insistent need for centralizing power and control so as to create imagined safety for itself. Fueled by the bottom line of corporate-driven profits, people motivated by the greed of the wetiko virus have little meta-awareness of the long-term implications of their rapacious actions. All that the wetiko bug wants is to satisfy its narcissistic cravings, experience orgasmic release, and glory in the seeming victory of short-term profits. The Cree musician Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote a song about wetiko (using the term windego ) called “The Priests of the Golden Bull,” which evokes both the greed of Wall Street and the golden calf that the Israelites worshipped as a false idol while Moses was encountering God on Mount Sinai. The monster of ever-expanding imperialism, exploitation, plundering, and profiteering is the most diabolically evil form of wetiko’s cannibalism. A “front” for the underlying wetiko virus, the military-industrial-criminal complex, with its ultimately self-destructive, intrinsic need for endless wars to feed greed-driven expansion, is like a systematic runaway in cybernetic theory. The Frankenstein monster of ever-enlarging empire, under the deceptive banner of “progress,” is like a runaway locomotive gaining speed, approaching the event horizon of its inevitable “crash.” Meanwhile, this progress destroys people, families, communities, and potentially, our entire species. “Wetikos,” Forbes writes, “have taken their Satan to the four-corners of the world, and they have made him their God.” 10 Evil is the number one export of a wetiko culture.

Wetiko disease is a self-devouring operating system that leaves nothing unmolested. It is a living death sentence that, if left unchecked, destroys everything within its dominion, including itself. Wetiko psychosis ensures that everything is sacrificed on its altar of death and destruction. Full-blown wetikos are “necrophiles”; their impulses are perversely directed against life—whose spontaneity they fear—and toward death and destruction, to which they are secretly attracted. From a galactic perspective, our planetary so-called civilization is a living, virulent, and metastasizing outbreak of wetiko psychosis that is threatening to destroy not only its human host but also the entire biosphere which makes life on earth possible as well. Wetiko’s ravenous, voracious, rapacious hunger will cause it to literally eat everything, including, finally, itself. Forbes writes, “The rape of a woman, the rape of a land, and the rape of a people, they are all the same.… Brutality knows no boundaries. Greed knows no limits. Perversion knows no borders. Arrogance knows no frontiers. Desire knows no edges. These characteristics all tend to push toward an extreme, always moving forward once the initial infection sets in.” 11 Untreated, this psychic infection gradually takes hold of the wetikos’ being, corrupting their heart, blurring their vision, poisoning their psychic body politic from within, as it fuses with their soul. When we follow and support someone afflicted by wetiko, we unwittingly take on and into ourselves wetiko-like qualities. Being highly suggestible, humans learn through imitation and mimicry, similar to the way in nature an insect adopts the color of the leaf whereon it sits. Like the virus of evil insinuating itself into the soul in incremental, unnoticed and insidious steps, at a certain point this leukemia of the soul becomes irreversible, inevitably leading to its host’s destruction. The wetiko virus’s pathogenic effects within an individual are a microcosmic fractal iteration of the collective, macrocosmic dynamics of the disease; how wetiko works within each of us is synchronistically mirrored with stunning perfection in how it plays out throughout the greater body politic.

Unchecked by a psychic vaccine, the disease, like an addiction running rampant, is progressive and is thus getting worse over time. Forbes writes, “The wetikos destroyed Egypt and Babylon and Athens and Rome and Tenochtitlan and perhaps now they will destroy the entire earth. But neither the ‘junkie’ looking for money for a shot of heroin nor the capitalists destroying Amazonian forests for big profits are able to stop their own destructive behavior.” 12 Wetikos can’t help themselves. Suffering from a compulsion to destroy, if left to themselves they are unable to stop their suicidal behavior. The Chinese Book of Changes , the I Ching , says of “evil” that it “inevitably destroys itself in the end.” Having lost their internal freedom, people taken over by wetiko are singularly lacking in options. Wetikos are as blinded to their own cure as they are oblivious to their own sickness. It is helpful to remember that the evil we see in those afflicted with wetiko is a reflection of ourselves.

As mentioned earlier, in my first book, as if “finding” a name, I gave myself creative license to make up the name malignant egophrenia, or ME disease, to signify what the Native American people call wetiko. I chose the name ME disease to refer to a misidentification of who we imagine we are, a misperception of our identity (our sense of “me”-ness), and a distortion of what we imagine to be real with reference to ourselves. In ME disease, our identification with an imaginary “me” separate from the rest of the universe is itself the root of the seeming problem. In this somnambulistic state, we fall into the trap of identifying with, grasping at, protecting, and defending a “me” that doesn’t exist in the way we imagine it does. Absorbed in this personalistic perspective, we personalize our experience, as well as ourselves, imagining we exist as a separate person isolated from other seemingly separate persons. We thus become entranced into a fixed and particularized point of view which develops a seemingly autonomous life of its own and becomes a self-generating feedback loop, a true “self”-fulfilling prophecy. It should be noted that this unconscious process is what the Buddha found to be the very cause of human suffering.

Ultimately, the evil in our world is a result of our misguided, wrong-headed, and futile attempts to maintain our constructed and seemingly solid identities, whose contingent and illusory nature is continually ignored. This most deeply entrenched of our afflictive dispositions is a narcissistic illusion that psychologist Henry Stack Sullivan calls “the mother of all illusions,” and what anthropologist Gregory Bateson referred to as “the epistemological error of Occidental civilization.” Our misapprehension of ourselves is a true inversion of the way things are, an attempt that Buddhists call “turning reality on its head.” To the extent we are unaware of our self-deception, this error of treating our identities as permanent and self-substantially existing is not only left uncorrected, but is continually re-invested in and reconstituted in a misguided attempt to secure what is not possible to secure, often at the expense of others. Our uncorrected error is an open door for the spirit of wetiko to lend its deviant force to what is already going off course, taking us with it in an ever-downward spiral. Our self-created and uncorrected illusory imagination of an independently existing self is truly a lethal mirage. This fragile, constructed, and yet functional illusion whose originating conditions remain obscure is the stuff of which madness is made.

ME disease/wetiko’s perspective on the world is “I, me, mine,” the unholy trinity of narcissism in which the world exists simply to serve this imagined I, rather than the other way around, that is, that we exist in order to serve the world. Not knowing our own true nature, we misapprehend the nature of outer reality, thinking that it exists separate from ourselves, which serves to confirm and further concretize the delusion of a “me” that we cling to, ad infinitum. Imagining we exist in a way in which we do not is simultaneously a cause and effect of a self-perpetuating, autohypnotic self-constriction in consciousness which, ultimately speaking, we are doing to ourselves. We are constantly hypnotizing ourselves and falling under a spell of our own making, an important feature of which is the very convincing sense that we are not under a spell, but rather, are seeing things clearly, as they “really are.” To become identified with the fixed reference point of the separate self limits our freedom, entraps our creative potency, and hinders our compassion. In another example of the macrocosm reflecting the microcosm: as if inter-nested iterations of the same fractal, nation-states have become sacralized by the same process through which individuals are reified into seemingly separate entities.

The ego isn’t a bad thing. If we didn’t develop a strong ego, a strong sense of self, we wouldn’t be able to relate to and engage with the extremely powerful and archetypal forces (both dark and light) of the unconscious. If we don’t have a strongly developed sense of self (even though it is not, ultimately speaking, the true self), we will get overwhelmed and taken over by the powers of the unconscious such that we will compulsively act them out. We have to develop a sense of an egoic self in order to be able, when the time is right, to offer it to something greater than ourselves. In order to surrender, we must have something to let go of. The development of the ego is part of the growth and evolution of the Self, as if the Self realized it needed and thereby created the instrument of the ego in order to actualize itself. The birth and formation of the ego, however contrary to our nature it seems, is not an aberration, but rather, is the very vehicle through which our nature evolves itself into ever-newly emerging and creative forms. This is to say that the ego plays a key function in the divine plan of awakening. It is incredibly important to develop a sense of self, even though in the ultimate sense, any reference point for who we are needs to be seen through for the relative illusion that it is. This is analogous to becoming lucid in a dream and realizing that we are not the “dream ego” with which we’ve been identifying, which we recognize as simply being an assumed model, an unreflected-upon “stand-in” for who we really are. Though the construct of ego has served us well, helping us to get to where we are, we needn’t hold onto it after it has outlived its usefulness. An arbitrary construction, the ego is a convenience that can serve us in many different circumstances, helping us to navigate situations in the world that require us to play different roles. When we understand the illusory nature of the ego, we can play whatever role the field is calling for us to step into, without overly identifying with and being caught by the role. We are then in the dream but not of the dream, bringing to mind Christ’s words “to be in the world, but not of the world.”

The name malignant egophrenia, however, points to the negative, toxic, and poisonous aspect of the phenomenon of the ego. The ego turns rancid whenever we overly identify with and get absorbed into and attached to it. This sense of mistaken identity is the shadow aspect of the ego. The ego, which could be our means of spiritual transport to a more integrated place within ourselves, then becomes an obstacle to our evolution. The danger is getting stuck in a phase of ego development such that we don’t transcend our image of ourselves. Having our development arrested by seemingly anti-evolutionary forces within the psyche is to be imprisoned back in time as if in a state of trauma. This is malignant egophrenia and wetiko in a nutshell, and depending upon the level of trauma, it can be a hard nut to crack.

Ultimately speaking, when we get right down to it, what we call evil is simply the result of our clinging and grasping. The real demon is our own ego-clinging, our own grasping onto our self-created imagination of who we think we are. Being that we have both dark and light aspects, our inner darkness is not evil, but rather, a vital part of our totality. It is our contracting against any part of ourselves, whether dark or light, which generates the seeming problem. The extent to which we are under the influence of the demon of wetiko is the extent to which we are clinging and grasping, trying to hold onto our concept of ourselves as a discrete and separate self, when in actuality there is nothing (no “thing”) to hold onto. Ultimately speaking, evil’s origin is our self-contraction against our own inner boundless radiance. To the extent we are clinging or grasping, we have fallen into the self-reinforcing, habitual pattern of contracting against ourselves, and in so doing we are blocking the brilliance of our own light. We can, in this very moment, and in each and every moment, step out of our own way and let our light shine.

The paradox is that, on the one hand, our clinging and grasping, our self-contraction, is the very act that appears to be blocking our true nature. And yet, from another point of view which is just as true, our self-contraction is itself a disguised expression of our true nature. From the “absolute” point of view, a state which includes the relative, and yet simultaneously embraces and transcends it in a higher synthesis, everything is spirit. Seemingly obscuring our true nature, our clinging is, in fact, its own revelation—for “who” is the me who is clinging? This realization releases us from the vicious circle of contracting against our self-contraction. We can then recognize in this moment that our very subjective experience of contracting against ourselves is the momentary and ephemeral display of our true nature, which we can simply allow to effortlessly self-liberate by itself. We have then embraced even the part of ourselves that is not embracing, which is to cultivate the lucid awareness of compassion. Might this be the inner meaning of Christ’s radical teaching “Resist not evil” ?

The evil of wetiko literally cultivates itself through our unreflected-upon unconscious reactions to it, in which we unwittingly support the very psychic disease against which we are reacting. If, when we see this virulent pathogen (whether in ourselves or the outside world), and we contract against it, having judgment, anger, hatred, revulsion, etc., we’re helping to perpetuate the diabolical polarization that is the signature of the disease. Our reacting in this way is an expression that we ourselves have the disease, or to say it more accurately, the disease has us. We are then acting out, however well intentioned, the same process of shadow projection that underlies wetiko disease in the first place—which is to dissociate from, project outside of ourselves, and react to our own evil. We are unconsciously reacting to the unconscious part of ourselves which the wetikos embody. This reaction is an unconscious ritualistic invocation and re-enactment of the initial impulse within ourselves of turning away from and contracting against a seemingly darker part of ourselves. This is the timeless, primal act which called forth and spawned the spirit of wetiko in the first place. To the extent we are unaware of what we are doing, we, as “reps” for wetiko, are compulsively re-enacting our trauma and participating in re-creating and propagating the wetiko virus in this very moment. We are then playing out our unresolved internal affairs in the outside world by, in, and through our reactions, unwittingly becoming a vector that is carrying the wetiko bug further out into the world. Instead of unconsciously reacting and projecting the shadow outside of ourselves, however, when we consciously relate to and take responsibility for the evil within ourselves, we are energetically withdrawing and disinvesting from our complicity in the continual re-animation of evil in the world.

There is a great danger when we see evil. We cannot bear witness to archetypal evil and remain a separate, detached witness who is unaffected, as if passively sitting in the audience, out of harm’s way, for every archetype has an infectious quality. Something inside of us becomes ignited and set aflame when we experience archetypal evil, as if everything evil produces a chain reaction. No one can see archetypal evil, which being nonlocal, has more breadth and depth than merely personal evil, and stay untouched. Jung emphasizes this very point when he writes, “The sight of evil kindles evil in the soul—there is no getting away from this fact.” 13 Plato observed millennia ago that the sight of ugliness produces something ugly in the soul. When we see evil “out there,” our own evil is activated by the experience. For example, when we see evil, if we react with moral indignation, cocksure of our own innocence and righteousness, this is an expression that we have become infected by the very evil to which we are reacting. Mapping wetiko’s nonlocal footprints, both out in the world and in the corresponding places within ourselves that are being touched, is to discover the nonlocal multidimensional “anatomy” of wetiko. It is impossible to encounter wetiko and not be activated, as wetiko’s nonlocal force field is activating by its very nature, in that it is co-extensive and interwoven with our own. Our unconscious, knee-jerk reactivity is the primary way that the wetiko psychosis regenerates and propagates itself in the field. Like a pathogen invading a body, this virulent psychic bug strikes and hooks us through the weakest point in our unconscious, the most tender and vulnerable spot within ourselves through which we are most likely to react.

Seeing evil triggers a resonant darkness within us, as if we have secretly recognized a part of ourselves. We could not look at the face of evil and truly see it unless we have that very same evil within ourselves; we wouldn’t be able to recognize it otherwise. It is then a question of whether we can integrate what has been triggered in us, or whether we inwardly dissociate from our own darkness, imagining it to be separate from ourselves, and project the evil “out there” onto some “other,” starting the cycle all over again.

The way to “responsibly” (which connotes the “ability to respond”) engage with wetiko disease is to (at)tend to what it triggers within us. One of the most beautiful teachings in Buddhism is called the “Lion’s Gaze.” 14 The following example is given as an illustration: If you throw a stick at a dog, the dog runs after the stick; but if you throw a stick at a lion, the lion will chase after you! The stick represents an uncomfortable negative emotion that gets triggered inside us. When we are triggered—when something “pushes our buttons”—it activates an unconscious, compulsive knee-jerk reflex. Running after the stick like a dog, indulging in and “acting out” the negative emotion, means that we put our attention outside of ourselves. This is to relate to what is triggering us in the outside world as “the problem” instead of looking inward at the source. If only what was triggering us in the outside world would stop, we tell ourselves, we would feel better and the problem would be solved. But if we have the “gaze of the lion,” we turn our gaze within when we are triggered and treat the moment as an opportunity to self-reflect, looking at whatever it is within us that has been activated. The lion is not afraid to go to the source of the trigger, which is never outside but always within ourselves. Assuming the fearless gaze of the lion, we relate to the triggering situation as a gift, as it has helped us access a part of ourselves that up until now has been unconscious, and hence hidden.

Could it be that our unconscious reaction against even the mere mention of the word “evil” is touching a deeper, hidden part of ourselves so as to potentially reveal it to us?

Just as the way to cut off the head of the mythic Medusa is to look at her reflections in the mirror-shield, the way to stalk the vampiric entity of wetiko is to track and sense its fingerprints within ourselves by looking into the mirror of our own mind. The evil of wetiko can be too much to stare at directly, however, just as looking at the snake-haired Medusa turns us to stone. Vampires are “petrifying,” which means both “terrifying,” as well as “paralyzing” and “turning to stone.” They petrify their victim, just as a mouse becomes immobilized by the transfixing gaze of the serpent. Vampires are not creatures to be messed with by the frivolous. Evil has its divine depths into which it is irreverent to look directly; its power needs to be respected. In indigenous cultures, objects that “reflect” are thought to magically drive away evil spirits, as if the object that mirrors evil throws the harmful rays back upon its source. This expresses in symbolic terms the archetypal idea that the act of reflection safeguards against the powers of evil. Another symbolic protection against evil in cultures that were still in touch with the magical level of reality were sacred art objects called “fear masks.” The faces of these masks were horrifyingly distorted and evil-looking, and were thought to reflect back upon the demon its own image, an image from which it flees in terror. This is to say that when we reflect upon the demon, it ceases to bother with us, as then it must deal with itself. Self-reflection is not only the most beneficial response to evil, it is in fact the only response where we have any real influence or control. The Big Wetikos have no real power or control over the sanctity and sovereignty of a truly self-reflective mind.